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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, incomes, debts, our own and our children's. And I'm your host, Richard Wolf. Well, I want to start today by talking about the recent estimates of how many people either are already or, or are facing imminent eviction. It's a global problem and the estimates run as high as 150 million people around the world, including millions in the United States, facing eviction now or by year's end. I want to talk about that. Under the influence of the pandemic, we tell people, as a way to cope with the pandemic, to shelter indoors away from others and to wash your hands frequently. In order to do that, you need a place to live. Otherwise you can't do either of those things anywhere near as often and as regularly as we are told to. Eviction amounts to a death sentence for people. This is not a time to do evictions. You know, the virus doesn't kill as many as the capitalist system does when it is plagued by a virus. You know what eviction is? It's when the owner of an apartment decides that the profit isn't there if the tenant doesn't pay the rent. Makes sense to me. And so the person who's the landlord is evicts the tenant because he wants to find someone else. It's the prophet dictating the eviction. And that's a comment on how we handle our society. It's not a comment on the virus. We could do a lot better against the virus. Prevent it from getting us sick, prevent it from killing us if we didn't have a profit driven system of housing. So here's a short term and a long term solution. Short term solution, the government comes in and pays the rent, or a large portion of it to the landlord. That keeps the landlord from going belly up in bankruptcy and it keeps the tenant in the house, which is the best way to go and a way to respond to the economic downturn. But here's a better long term we ought to have public housing. You know why? If the government owned and operated the housing, here's what it could. Whenever an emergency arises that makes it difficult for large numbers of tenants to pay their rent. A public ownership which doesn't have to make profit because that's not how the public works could say to people, okay, you don't pay for six months or a year, you'll make it up later. And if you're unemployed, here's something else we'll do. We'll give you a job here in this public housing project to use your unemployment as a time to make this an even nicer place to live than it was before. The public could do that. The public has done that. And why aren't we doing it now? We rather than evictions, which, as I said, will amount to a death sentence for large numbers of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong. My next update is a response to many of you asking me what exactly is the unemployment problem in the United States? The government has cleverly come up with half a dozen, some old, some new definitions, and you don't quite know where they all are. So I wanted to help out. So I'm going to use the how many people are collecting unemployment compensation? And the reason I use it is those are people who have to prove either to a state government agency or to a federal government agency that they are not working and getting money and therefore they qualify for unemployment. So you get a bit more care taken to validate that. Okay? The number right now people getting unemployment, state or federal, is about little over 25 million of our fellow citizens in the United States. For all of them, this is a horrible experience. They don't know whether they'll ever get that old job back. They don't know under what conditions they'll get it back. If even they do. They don't know how long they'll be unemployed. They don't know what the size of their unemployment compensation was. It was higher before July 31, when the 600 kicked in by the federal government was cut to 300. They're full of uncertainty. On top of fearing the disease and on top of being unemployed. It's particularly a cost for taxpayers. Unemployment is. Let me be clear that we all understand the you're unemployed. The vast majority of usif our private employer fires us. That's how you get to be unemployed, for the vast majority. Why does the employer do that? Because it's profitable. He's going to lose less money firing you than if he keeps you on. That's why he fires you. He didn't have to fire you. He could have used the profits from last year. He could have used the capital invested in his business to hold on to you. By the way, some businesses do that because they say to themselves, I'd rather keep him on three or four months than have to go find another one to replace him or her. It's a better bet, but it's always a bet. In any case, you're unemployed because the private employer finds it the most profitable option In a situation like the one we have now. And then what happens is really bizarre. You go on unemployment, the government now takes care of you because the private capitalist thought it was more profitable that you be fired. The private capitalist made the choice to the taxpayer, now has a new burden, namely the unemployed persons. Even that bad as it is, doesn't go to the real nub of it. Because of course the public, the government that pays unemployed people the money that they're entitled to, could do something that those workers would much prefer. Hire them, pay them, have them do something useful. An unemployed person sits there feeling bad all day about himself or herself, losing self esteem, losing their skills, perhaps losing their work contacts, their friendships. They would rather be working and earning an income. And that would be better for all of us because then the money we pay these unemployed people is offset by what they produce for the society in which the government hires them, which is what the United States did in the 1930s. And there is no excuse except the Republican government for why we're not doing that now. Think about it. It's infinitely more rational and you know why the government doesn't hire the unemployed people who were fired by the private sector and now go on government support. Because the private sector is afraid of government competition. That's all it ever was. They don't want the government to be producing things because people might say, gee, there's a better of doing it than having it rely on the private who only do it if there's a profit in it, rather than the government which does it because it's socially useful. To prevent that competition, the private sector does this bizarre thing. We, the private employer, want the freedom to fire you, but we don't want the government to hire you to make you productive in another area because we've denied you the right to be productive. And in our business, the arrogance and the inefficiency of this mind blowing. My third update has to do with a little decision far away but very meaningful. Denmark last week approved the passage of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that brings natural gas from Russia to Germany and through that to the rest of Europe. The Danish parliament gave the Russians the right to pass the pipeline across their part of the continental shelf off the Danish coast. Why is this interesting? Well, let me tell you. The United States government has been pressing Angela Merkel in Germany to cancel the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, arguing that it makes Germany and Europe too dependent on Russian gas and the United States doesn't like to see Russia have that kind of power. Angela Merkel has made it crystal clear. And she has mobilized the other Europeans. We will not do what the United States is pressing us to do. And she's been clear about why we in Europe demand the right and we are pursuing the right to deal with Russia and China on our own terms, in our own national interest. And Denmark has clearly now lined up with Germany and Europe. Notice the German's decision is, yes, of course, that makes us dependent on Russia, but dependency is a two way street. We depend on Russian gas, they depend on us to buy it for their whole economic well being. And in that kind of mutual dependency is greater security than the option offered to us by the United States. It's a further sign that the Trump administration has broken an alliance and that the different parts of that alliance, basically the United States and Europe are going their own way and that deals between Russia and China, on the one hand with Europe are growing. And in part, that's to offset the impact on China of the United States aggressive use of tariffs and trade wars. And speaking of China, here's my next update. We are now in the middle of China's national holiday celebrating the revolution in 1949 that brought the Communist Party to power in China ever since. And in that holiday, the biggest one In China, roughly 500 million people used to move around the country on buses and trains and automobiles. People in the city visiting their families in the country and so forth. It was thought that the COVID would make it impossible. But conditions have improved so much in China that they're having their regular holiday, 500 million people on trains and buses because they haven't had a coronavirus case in many weeks. Let me remind everyone the Chinese death count from COVID 5,000 people. They have four times the population of the United States. They have 5,000 dead Chinese people. We have 215,000 with one quarter of the population. Where's the failure and where's the success? This year? This Covid year, the Chinese economy is growing a little under 2%, very low for China. We are shrinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 10%. What's a failure? What's a success? Who prepared and contained the virus better? Whose public health is better protected? Who's growing faster? That's why China went from one of the poorest countries in the world to the global economic superpower it is today because it's able to grow economically faster than the United States. And it's not even close. The next time someone equates socialism with Venezuela, think a little bit about China. Last point on that. Unemployment in the United States. You hear words about recovery unemployment. Covered unemployment in the United states peaked at 30 million over the last six months, two or three times. It's currently over 25 million. That's an improvement, but a recovery? Not even close. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we move on, I want to remind you that we've just released my third book with democracy at work. It's called the Sickness Is the System When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or itself. It is a compilation of essays that tries to explain the problems of our time around this pandemic. Get your copy today@democracyatwork.info Books. And I want to, of course, thank our Patreon community for their continuing support and their enthusiasm. It helps make this show a possible. If you're interested, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate and you can learn more. Please stay with us. We'll be right back with Today's guest, Lance, one member of the YouTube lefty comedy duo the Surfs. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. I am very pleased to present for both our radio audience and our TV audience, an interview with one of the two young men who produce something called the Serfs. And my apologies to those of you that already know all about this. The Serfs is a Canadian podcast conceived and run for a few years now by Lance and Dave. And we have Lance with us today. They began their podcast while university students developed it and then because of the attack of trolls, they were taken off YouTube for an entire year, or roughly thereabouts, before pressure from like minded folks and sympathizers got YouTube to reverse itself, put them back on the air and as they say, everything since then is a remarkable story of growth to become one of the most, if not the most, popular Canadian political stream on Twitch. And they also have two YouTube channels and a podcast on Patreon. So let me begin by welcoming Lance. Thank you very much for joining us to give us a little insight about what you've achieved.