← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Today's program delves into the extraordinary strike activity and and labor solidarity in Los Angeles, a real marker for the development of labor militancy in the United States. We will also be talking about drug shortages, a serious problem here. We'll talk about a recent report indicating that wealthy legacy, so called students are given preferences in getting into higher education. And finally, we'll talk about four forced labor in the US Provision of its own food. In the second half of the show, we're going to have part two of an interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad. The part one a few weeks ago we talked about capitalism, destroying the nuclear family, the traditional family. And this time we're going to be talking about what the new forms of family are that are emerging as Americans struggle with the disappearance of the old. As usual, I want to start by reminding you that a good friend, Charlie by name, is now working with me to handle suggestions, reports, data that any of you might want us to look into in preparing segments for this show. I want to give again the email to use if you have any such thing or if you want to discuss the doing that. Charlie spelled C H A R l I e charlie.info438mail.com charlie.info438mail.Com let's jump right into today's story, which I want to credit to Charles Fabian because he put together a good bit of this material and the remarkable quotation that I'm going to end this segment with. Well, I'm assuming most of you know that there has been a well reported strike by the Writers Guild of America and by the actors union called SAG aftra. They've been working together, started by the Writers Guild, joined by SAG aftra, picketing the Hollywood scenario and elsewhere where the entertainment industry is located. It's been a remarkable powerful strike and not aimed simply at what is needed by those workers and they are in the many, many thousands, but also by what's needed to make the new technology, artificial intelligence, work for people and not just for profits, but the Los Angeles location where much of the WGA SAG AFTRA unionization strike activity is going on has now been joined by other unions. And let me tell you why I picked this story to go into because we have here a genuine from the bottom up movement in the direction of a general strike, a very important weapon in the class struggle between employees and, and employers. Let me give you an example. It turns out that there's another strike going on also affecting the entertainment industry. But at one remove. Unite Here, which is a union of hotel and restaurant workers. Union has a local in Los Angeles, Local 11, and they're on strike also affecting thousands of workers who make the hotels and the motels, without which the entertainment industry of that part of the world would not survive. And they've joined together, marching together, starting back in May when they all together marched at the annual conference of the state Democratic Party, talking to the politicians and making them sit up and take notice. The they've since had more demonstrations with more unions supporting them. The Teamsters union negotiating with UPS joined. The Los Angeles Teachers Union, joined Teamsters teachers, hotel workers, actors, actresses. And then there's another union I want to mention, the International alliance of of Theatrical Stage Employees. Iatsi, they've joined too. Unions together are stronger than unions fighting alone, just like workers are stronger in a union than fighting alone. And this is now being recognized and operationalized in Los Angeles in ways we have not seen fight for quite a while. Part of the rising militancy. This is moving towards a general strike and that is a powerful weapon. I want to read you in conclusion a statement made by one Nicole Miller, and she's the president of that iatsi, the Theatrical stage employees. Listen to what Nicole Miller tells us about the strikes happening in Los Angeles. What you're seeing out here is the result of a perfect storm. The cost of living is getting higher and higher, especially in Los Angeles. The wages aren't keeping up and people are becoming more conscious of their union power. We have the power to shut this city down. The tourism and entertainment industries don't exist without us. If workers realized the same about virtually every other industry in our society, the conditions of working people, the vast majority of Americans would change and change in the right way in a short amount of time. My second update today has to do with a growing shortage of drugs. Basic drugs, antibiotics, drugs about widespread diseases. What is going on? And the answer is, as happens so often, capitalism, profit drive. If you invent a new medicine, you can patent it. And for roughly eight to 12 years, allowing for all the times involved, you get to be the only one making that new medication. And you can charge the moon because people can't go anywhere else and get it, because no one is allowed to make it. After those years expire, the drug becomes what we call generic. Anyone can make it. And since the cost of making the drug is trivial, the prices Collapse. And therefore, of course, so do the hefty profits. And the drugs don't become profitable the way they once were. And many companies that once produced them don't want to produce low profit medication. They're going after the blockbuster drug. And so with low profit margins, more and more companies are looking elsewhere to make the profit. And so they don't produce these drugs. And we are suddenly faced with shortages. And so let me tell you what typically happens in capitalism with shortages. The few producers left making the little bit of profit decide to get together and maybe milk this shortage situation by jacking up the prices through an agreement. May not be legal, but guess what? It happens to jack up the price and nobody offers it at a lower price. And then they can overcome the shortage. May take a few years, during which God knows what suffering will happen among all the people who can't get the drugs. In some cases, this gain produces not only higher prices, but real resistance. That's why California now produces and sells insulin made in Utah, so that they can offer that important medication at a much lower price than private profit driven capitalists did or would under any circumstances. Wow. If you allow medication to be in the hands of capitalists, people whose number one objective is profit, not the health of the people, you're going to get maneuvers like this in which the health of people, millions of us, are sacrificed by drug shortages that are only responding to profit making, profit driving, because we've allowed profit to come between us and the medications we need to be healthy. My third update today is about a recent report released by several professors at elite universities, including Harvard. And they've studied who gets in and who doesn't. And they discovered what, of course, many of us have known. But it's important when the research is done carefully. And it confirms a widespread belief. Here's what the research people with the same high school grades, people with the same grades on scholastic aptitude tests, some of whom are rich and come from wealthy families, some of whom don't. Guess what? No contest. Those who come from rich families, families whose parents went to the elite schools of America, the Harvards and Yales and Princetons and Stanfords, they get in much more than the rest of us. The favoritism for the rich, the affirmative action for the rich. And these are overwhelmingly white, Christian, male, you get the picture. Yeah, you knew it, but now they've proven it. And why am I talking about it? Well, the injustice is grotesque. It means that the elite schools are full of people who are no better than the people that were rejected. But here comes the real nasty part of it, in the rejection. The Harvards and the Yales talk about merit. They talk about meritocracy. They want the world to believe that they choose students who can enter based on their merit. They don't and they never did. They give all kinds of preferences to what they call legacy students, people who come from families where the parents and the grandparents went there and those have been and are the richest people in the culture. And by telling them a lie that they accept students based on merit. Here's the real nasty It's a message to those who were turned down that you were turned down because of something insufficient, inside, inadequate in you, that those who got in are better in mathematics, in literature, in writing, in any of the skills that high school students develop and present when they try to get into college. Terrible. Blaming the victim of discrimination of affirmative action for the white rich elite of the United States. Don't be fooled. Meritocracy is something the people at the top of this society want the rest of us to believe. They don't want any of us to understand we were discriminated against in order to let the children of rich traditional families get a head start. A recent study My fourth update for today. A recent study by professors at the University of Nottingham in England and at Tufts University here in the United States show that for the 60% of our food in America that is produced in the United States, forced labor, workers, underpaid, living in unbelievable conditions, many of them immigrants, are treated horribly. We don't have to go far afield in foreign countries to find labor abuses built into the food chain. We have that in this country. We have had it. The proof is now clear. And like with the affirmative action for the rich, it is something that American capitalism would be far better off without. Thank you. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Please stay with us for part two of the important discussion with Dr. Harriet Fraad. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic I am once again very pleased and proud to bring to our microphones and our cameras Dr. Harriet Fraad. She was with us a few weeks ago and she's been on this program quite often. But I wanted to continue the conversation from a few weeks ago about the family. There's a very important institution shaping the economy in more ways than we can count and being shaped by that economy as well. And I want that conversation to continue to remind everyone. Harriet Fraad is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in practice in New York City. She hosts the podcast Capitalism Hits Home and co hosts the podcast it's not just in your head. Her radio show on New York's WBAI is called Interpersonal Update and it airs Tuesdays at 6:30pm her latest written work appears in the book Class Struggle on the Home Front. So, first of all, Dr. Farad, thank you very much for joining us to continue the conversation.
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I'm very glad to do that.
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Okay, just to recapitulate back in part one of this conversation, we mostly focused on how the capitalist economic system we live in has been both supportive of the traditional nuclear family and deeply disruptive of it. It supports it in words, it supports it in the celebration of the family, at least rhetorically, and so on. But it undermines the family by not paying wages high enough to sustain the cost of living for millions of families who suffer as a result, by not producing a quality, affordable child care system that would help the millions of families with children and so on. And we even ended up talking about the fact that in the United States of today, one sees more of the disruption and disintegration of traditional family than in the continuation, let alone the growth. And so in other words, while the system celebrates it, it also destroys it. And that led to the following question for what are the American people who struggle with this situation, who got benefits out of the traditional family, which is no longer affordable for so many, and who don't know yet where to quite go if they can't rely on that traditional family? So I want to begin by asking you, what are some of the new forms of people getting together in a family or if you want a household that emerge out of what we discussed the last time you were on the program?
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Well, one of them is called co abode, and that's where single mothers can find other single mothers to live with so that they can save on rent. And they also can help one another with their children and with their housework. Anyone can find out about it by going on Google or, you know, on the Internet. And they can find it because now a third, 33% of American are in, in their households are headed by single women. So a third of the households in the United States are headed by single women. That's a huge portion. And so they're trying to do something for themselves since our government, unlike the Scandinavians or even the other European wealthy countries, are doing us is doing nothing, you know, in child care. Among the wealthiest countries, the United States is at the bottom. The only countries that are with us. There are two poorer countries, Cyprus and Slovakia. All the other countries have some form of free childcare to help people out, which we don't. Also, it would help Americans if we had free childcare, but we're at the bottom of the wealthy countries there too. And so we really give nothing to parents but lip service about their holy mission while doing nothing to sustain them. But people are doing things and one of them is cobode. Another is co housing, which is an amazing thing. It's a movement for sharing housing, cooking, childcare, socializing. And these co housing units have small apartments and big collective spaces. They have industrial kitchens where people make a couple of big meals a week for dinner together and where they look out for one another in terms of housework, child care, elder care, and so on. And a good example which you can find on the net of co housing is called Temescal Commons, and that has 23 people in it ranging from the age of one year old to 83. And they share a communal courtyard and a big kitchen where people make dinner together. And they also share all the housework and the cooking and the cleaning and maintenance. And it's worked very well. It's a long term co housing unit in Oakland, California. Common is a real estate corporation with 25 housing communities, sort of like Temescal, like the Commons. And there's another group called Kin, and that's for parents with young children who want to live with other parents who have children so that they can help one another in child care, in babysitting at night, in housework, and all the aspects of family which are so hard to do when you have to deal with children by yourself.
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Is it then reasonable to infer or to conclude that human beings who cannot in this society afford the money, the time, the energy given, the pressure to have a job and to work and to succeed, Are we seeing human beings put aside the old kinship rules? The idea that you only cohabit with people that you are either married to or the children of, et cetera, et cetera, and are looking for new collective arrangements to grow, to live their lives, to raise their children. Is that something that is, one can say, is underway here in the United States?
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It certainly is. Because single parents get, on average, single mothers get $24,000 a year for themselves and their children. They are the poorest group of adults. Children are the poorest people in the United States because of their single parents, who are a third of the parents in the United States. It's a lot. So they are getting into new arrangements. Now, some of them, the new arrangements are actually reversions to old arrangements. 52% of young adults live with their parents because they can't afford apartments. This is the most that live with their parents since the great capitalist failure of the depression in the 1930s. And they're doing that because of financial necessity. Now, those are not necessarily the best arrangements, because the same kind of power struggles and hierarchies that exist between parents and children can exist and be fraught and tense with their adult children. But adult children stay home because they can't afford to have an apartment, Even an apartment with some shared roommates. It's too expensive. No one is curbing the housing profiteers in the United States. No one is insisting that a certain percentage of apartments are rent controlled and inexpensive, like they do, let's say, in Vienna, Austria. And so things are unaffordable and people have to do something about it. You know, another thing that was done about it, well, it was thought of, it wasn't done, was your own father's proposal of educational parks so that rich and poor children could be cared for. Well, and that was instead of every little school district having separate schools with separate facilities for everyone, Saving the money on all these little facilities and having an educational park which looks like a beautiful college campus, where all the kids are bused and where they have the highest quality science, social science, literature, everything physical fitness. And they also have in their after school program the things that only rich kids have, like music lessons and orchestra participation and dance lessons and special science lessons and tutoring. That wasn't implemented, but it's a very smart thing to implement. And it also saves money.
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You know, this notion of collective education is the parallel to collective housing. I mean, it's crystal clear the little independent school was quickly corrupted by being an enclave for the rich in their neighborhoods, and then a disaster in the poor neighborhoods with the politicians carefully funding the rich schools that didn't need it at the expense of the poor schools who needed more of it. I mean, it is the disaster of public education in the United States. And the whole idea of educational parks was to overcome that, to accomplish integration, to accomplish better quality education by saving the multiple school notion and being able to really offer quality education to the mass of people. Is there anything comparable, even in the way of thinking, to now accommodate the traumatic, the dramatic and traumatic transformation of the family, a fundamental institution that is being squeezed and undermined to death and is provoking the kinds of new experiments you've been talking about? Is there yet an awareness and any kind of social movement to deal with this problem.
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No, there isn't. What there are is all of these little things like commons kin co abode, co housing, which are people's attempts to individually compensate. And for the public school thing, if the public school is in a wealthier neighborhood in addition, or even a middle class neighborhood in addition to what's offered, parents give money. So those schools have about $10,000 extra to spend on the chess club after school, on the school orchestra after school and so on. But schools in neighborhoods where people are poor don't have that, so they're additionally deprived. And there is no educational park movement which would really compensate. The most compelling co living arrangements in the United States happen during Occupy movements. The Occupy movement across the country. Occupy Wall street, for example, in New York at Zuccotti park, people lived together, they prepared and ate meals together, they talked together, they organized safety together, and they had a collective community that protected them. But of course, when Obama was responsible for canceling all the occupiers across the United States on the same day and having the police disperse them and disperse their little libraries where they could all get books and their cooking facilities, those ended. But they were very successful, as was the occupational community around the Dakota Pipeline where tens of people, even up to hundreds, gathered together and lived together to oppose the Dakota pipeline. But then when that was successful, that community dispersed. Those aren't official, those are protest groups. But they are examples of what can be done. But they're not official examples.
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I would like to offer a comment as well that responds to all you have been telling us. There's a particular cruelty in a society that is undermining the traditional nuclear family and provoking in people the need to find the alternatives you've told us about. But it's cruel to teach the people that not having the old traditional nuclear family is some sort of personal failure of yours, rather than admitting it's the consequence of what is and isn't done in our society. I wish we had more time. Thank you again for your insights and for your work. And I want to continue this conversation of the interaction between family and economy because I think it's of the greatest importance. But first of all, thank you again.
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Thank you again and again and for.
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All of my listeners and viewers. I look forward as always to speaking with you again next week.