← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Resisting Trump's Restoration Project with Kali Akuno
00:32:03
This week on Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff examines a major labor strike unfolding in California, where 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health workers are fighting for better conditions. Next, we break down how tariffs function as an...
Loading summary
Transcript9 lines
- [00:20]
Richard Wolff
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to remind you before we jump into today's program again that Charlie Fabian is available. If you have suggestions for our programs. We are very grateful for the number of you that send those in to us. And we check each and every one. You can get it@charlie.in 4 3, 8. Also to remind you that Understanding Capitalism, the book we have produced, is a companion to this program. It's a way of looking more deeply into the whole question of how the capitalist system works that accompanies the particular analyses we stress in this particular program. And one more quick announcement. On April 30, we will have this month's Global Capitalism lecture. I will be doing it in partnership with our friendly organization, Women Building up, which is located at 401 State street in Brooklyn. It's in the early evening of April 30th. If you're interested, go to our website, democracyatwork.info where you can find information on the homepage about tickets and so forth. Today's program is going to be dealing with a huge strike, 2,400 workers at the Kaiser Permanente operations in California and an analysis one more time of how the tariffs of Mr. Trump are an attack on the working class and should be understood in that way. In the second half of the show, we will be interviewing Kali Akuno, a very well known activist across the United States and beyond, trying to do something that is both a resistance to what Trump is after and also a long term project of social change. So a good program and let's jump right in. 2,400 mental health workers in California have been on strike against the Kaiser Permanente health insurance and health provider operation in California. They've been on strike since October 21st of last year. It is the longest strike of mental health professionals in American history. And it's about something that should concern everybody, not just the workers on strike and, and the enormous suffering that they are going through, their families are going through, and the communities that they serve are going through. Why do I say that? Because the recent data all show that the level of stress in the United States having to do with insecure jobs, having to do with insecure income now being added to by the turmoil surrounding the Trump government, the firing of federal employees, the cutting of government programs, it's a little too much on a situation that was already serious. People are having mental health problems in a way that demands attention. Yet the private provision of mental health services has been lacking. And that's the most polite word I can use. Here are some statistics. Roughly 2/3 of Americans with a diagnosed mental health condition were unable to access treatment in the year 2021 even though they had health insurance. Only a third of insured people who visited an emergency department or hospital during a mental health crisis received follow up care within a month of being discharged. This is because profit making means you have long waits, you have insufficient attention, shortage of staff, overworked staff, all the usual signs of milking a business for profit instead of serving the community it was supposed to serve. Ironically, people on Medicaid, the poor get better service because they're not driven by the same profit motivation. In 2020, it was so bad that the state of California passed massive legislation. Things often happen first in California before the rest of the country catches on. California at least was trying, but they weren't able to sustain because of their reliance on private provision of these medical services. And so the workers finally did what the management can't or won't do. They struck to bring attention to this awful situation. It's bad enough you put the American people through the kind of suffering that our economic system has imposed on them, particularly in recent decades. But now, as it gets worse and worse and the mental health problems show up more and more, you'd expect a reaction. Profit is what the people who service the private sector mental health business are letting us all down. And it's dangerous for us as a community. It's dangerous for the people involved. And those are now huge proportions of of our fellow citizens. Now, to tariffs, I want to make a basic point because it is so often neglected in the mass media. I'm going to show you how tariffs are an attack on the working class of the United States, whatever else they are. Don't miss this. Here we go. A tariff is a tax. As I have said many times, it's just a particular name for a tax being used in the hopes that most Americans won't realize that the Republican president of the Republican Party is imposing a massive tax on America, something the GOP used to be against. Okay, here's how it works. The tax falls on the importer of anything good or service produced outside the United States. A piece of electronic equipment from Japan, a shirt made in Bangladesh, coffee grown in Latin America. I could go on. You all know more or less how much of what we produce, excuse me, what we consume in the United States is produced outside. A tariff puts a tax on those objects, once they come in, cross the border into the United States. And so then what happens? And I'm going to use one example, but it applies to all of them. I'm going to use the example of a French bottle of wine produced in France. They grow the grapes, they press them, they put them in oak barrels, they keep them for a while, then they put them in a bottle and they ship them to the United States. And you can buy it in your local liquor store. Okay, let's follow it. Now, the American wine importer who brings in caseloads, boatloads of French wine, having purchased it, pays the French people. Let's take an example. $20 for this bottle of wine. Now, with the tariff he's not done. In addition to the $20 paid to the French farmers who make the wine, he has to pay a tariff, a tax to Uncle Sam for each bottle. Let's assume it's 20%, which is more or less what is being threatened and talked about or already in effect. So he has to pay $20, that's for the French, plus another $4. That's 20% of $20 goes to Uncle Sam. And the liquor store now has to charge us $20 plus $4 because the importer is not going to absorb that himself. That takes away his profit. So he's going to do. We know this. We know that this is normally how it's done. The wholesaler who brings the wine in pays Uncle Sam the $4, the 20% on the $20 bottle, and then tells the retailer, you've got to give me $24 for a bottle of wine that before you could get from me for $20. And the retailer says, why? And he's told, that's a tariff. Now the retailer has had to pay an extra $4. He's no more willing than the importer to absorb that. So he's going to up the price of the bottle of wine to you and me. We're going to be told, not that this is a $20 bottle. We're going to be told it's a $24 bottle. We can take it or leave it. If we want the bottle, we're going to have to shell out 20% more money. Unless our importer or our retailer are greedy and use the opportunity, blaming Uncle Sam to jack the price up a little more, which they often do being employers in the business of making profit. Everything is an opportunity. But we're not done. Now let's take a look at the argument. Gee, this will be great for the Winemakers of California, because they can produce a wine and they can get it delivered to your liquor store. And, and they don't have to pay a tariff because the whole thing is internal to the United States. And so this is the argument that defenders make that this tariff will be good for American business. Well, I got news for you. It's not how it works. And I'm going to stay with my wine example. It turns out that wine producers in California are, are all bent out of shape. They don't want the tariffs. They are petitioning their representatives to press on the Trump administration. Stop, get rid of these tariffs, reverse it. Why would that be? Well, let me tell you. Here's how it works. It turns out that California wine, when it goes into the bottle, turns out, you know where those bottles come from, that you buy California wine in from China. And they have an enormous tariff. The price of the wine bottle to the people who make California wine is going through the roof because they now have to pay not just the price of the bottle from China, but the tariff to Uncle Sam. Turns out the cork that goes into the bottle, that comes from cork trees that grow and get harvested in Portugal, Spain and France. That's another import. But we're not done. Turns out for wine to really emerge from grape juice, which is what it is, it has to be stored in oak barrels, a lot of it. And you know where they come from? France, which produces the oak barrels. Okay, so the cost of wine in France may be the same, but when you hit it with a tariff, it jacks up the cost of producing wine in the United States, too. So the wine producers are saying we're going to have to raise our price a lot because we have the extra tariffs to pay on the cork, on the bottle, on the barrel. And then they too, like every other employer, sees also here an opportunity to maybe raise the price even more. Since the French competitor wine has gone up, you know what happens? All wine goes up. French and American. All of us will have to pay more. Our wages aren't going up. No one is adjusting our salaries. We're all going to pay more. And that's an order from Uncle Sam to get more money. Why? Because they won't tax corporations and the rich to raise the money. They rather tax you and me. Tariffs are an attack on the working class. We've come to the end of the first half, but I want to let you know that in our fundraising efforts, we now have expanded the kinds of goods we offer on our shop. You can go and you can Find out about it at our website. Just go there, take a look@DemocracyAtWork.infoStore and you will find all of that material available for you and we hope you find it as interesting as possible. Stay with us. We'll be right back with our special guest, Kali Akuno. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition, linen covered home hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send on email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your copy signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I am very proud and pleased to bring back to our microphones and our cameras a frequent or at least an occasional visitor. With us, Kali Akuno. He's the co founder and co director of Cooperation Jackson, a network of worker cooperatives and community led programs that sustain and grow a democratic, just and sustainable economy in Jackson, Mississippi. Among these groups is the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust, which enables community members to collectively steward the land and creates opportunities for affordable property ownership. So first of all, Kali, welcome to the program.
- [17:11]
Kali Akuno
Always good to be here, Rick.
- [17:13]
Richard Wolff
Okay, what I want and what I asked Khali to be ready to do with us is I want to have him tell us how he, as a longtime activist, how he sees what the whole Trump presidency, now that we've had a few months of it, how does he see it? What does he see it as? What kind of a project is it for the United States and now for the world? And then I'm gonna ask him after he does that, some questions about what the reactions are and what he thinks the reactions ought to be. So let's start off. How do you assess what's going on around all of us?
- [18:00]
Kali Akuno
Well, let me just say off the top, it's a restoration project, right? That is what this fundamentally is. And what do I mean by that? Trump has in his mind and The MAGA movement have in their minds collectively that there was some bygone glory days of US Empire wherein white men were able to rule the roost not only within the United States but the world and could dictate all the shots. And that that was the ordained God given right to do so. And what he is trying to do is restore this mythical past. That's fundamentally what he's trying to do. It's. It's based upon I think a set of notions one about the kind of material wealth that the United States was. It was in, in general, not everybody, of course, but in general there was a level of material well being, let's call it that, that was attained in the United states in the 1950s or at least a portion of the 1950s based upon the very unique position of the United States coming after World War II of being the, the industrial powerhouse of the world where something like, I think half of the industrial capacity output of the world for a period of time was produced here in the United States. And that provided all these industrial jobs, all these quote unquote blue collar and white collar jobs that increased the standard of living, increased consumerism. That is part of what he has in mind. Then there's another thing of what he has in mind which is kind of the Gilded age, the so called Gilded age wherein the captains of industry, the captains of finance were able to do whatever they want. And it somehow led to the prosperity of the, the United States. And with this there was a bunch of protectionism and tariffs that were employed during kind of the McKinley era to kind of enhance the productive capacity and the industrialization, the rapid kind of industrialization of the United States. Then there's another component that he has in mind. And these in. We need to understand that these represent not only different distorted visions of, of kind of history and reality, but these kind of idyllic moments, you know, within the United States that he wants everybody to be kind of returned to whether they like it or not. And I'll come back to what I mean by that. But then there's another period, an antebellum period that he's also aspiring to. And this speaks to if you look at the, the folks that he himself particularly praises. One is Andrew Jackson, right? One is McKinley to speak around these different ages. And they all represent different aspects of this kind of restoration of the bygone glory days of U. S Empire, you know, which are fully about supporting white supremacy, fully about supporting patriarchy and all of his kind of core forms. And he's trying to impose this on the rest of the world so that the United States and its collapsing empire can. Can kind of hold on for as long as possible to the kind of the pole position of running the global economy, but also keeping a domestic order where there's like this, the city on the hill that a small group of people can kind of rule the roost over, but bestow all these material gifts upon to ensure their rule. And if you look at almost, you know, some people think this is chaotic, and to a degree, I think we all experience it. But I would argue, and I've argued here in the past, there is a program, there is a design. It is not as random and it's not as chaotic as it appears to be. Because part of what he's really trying to do is to, you know, there is an element of trying to return industrialization back to the United States that I do think is a genuine concern of his right. If only for a military purpose. If only for a military purpose. But we need to be very mindful. He's using the rhetoric of bringing back American jobs and American workers. But understand this. If all these manufacturing jobs came back under the. The control of the tech lords, there will be very few jobs that they produce because most of that will be computerized, automated and run by AI. So these are just false promises, something that he is just setting up to put Elon Musk and Peter Till and, and the likes in the firm kind of control position to not only run the US Economy, but to try to give them a leg up in the grand game, which is, you know, bringing on kind of AI to basically run society, but put the United States in control over as opposed to China. And where a lot of this is leading, you know, we need to be. Be very mindful of where most of this is leading is towards a direct confrontation with China. Because that, I think, as you rightly point out, Rick, in a lot of your interviews over the last, you know, couple of years, China is on the rise. The United States is on the decline. We all know this in our bones at this, those of us who live in the United States, one way or another, you know, this empire is on the decline. If it's just, you know, the roads can't be fixed, won't be fixed, right? We don't have universal health care, but we have all these tremendous ailments within this society around health, be due to age or be it due to all these different things, which is why you get this weirdo in, in the form of Robert RFK Jr. Running now conspiracy theory, you know, as official government policy around health. And we can go on down the line. Of all the people that he's, he's chosen, you know, but also gets that to the, the, the, the, the element of why he's trying to destroy higher education. Right. It's, it's a. To amass as much power in his hands as possible, but it's also to erase any opposition of independent thought, be it liberal, be it conservative. Everything is done through him. As he has stated. He fundamentally is the state like harkening back to some old emperors that the French Revolution and many others deposed of. He's reviving that logic, not accidentally look as he did with that tweet like he who saves his country betrays no law. He knows exactly where that comes from and he knows exactly why it was intended. The people like oh, he's just. These are just analogies or, or that was some phony Nazi salute that Elon Musk. No, these people know exactly what they're doing and who, you know, they're trying to appease and what interests they're trying to serve. We need to take the kind of the blinders off and see this really for what it is and then build a broad based unity around that where our common interest is and not for the preservation of empire. Right. That is not the aim and objectives and I'm stating that to, to kind of push back on some of this notion of why we need to align with the, with the liberals are falling under their leadership, particularly under the Democratic Party. We cannot and we should do that. I would make to the, to the audience because we cannot be and should not be genocide enablers. We should not be supporting policies. Was called for the evisceration of the state, I. E. The neoliberal orientation that really brought us to this place over the last 50 years. We should not be supporting that. There is a broader, more transformative vision that we can and should step into that all of this kind of chaos that we are witnessing is in many respects if we put I think the right perspective in play, a tremendous opportunity to reshape this society.
- [26:23]
Richard Wolff
All right.
- [26:24]
Kali Akuno
For the better.
- [26:25]
Richard Wolff
Kali. I want, because of our time constraints. That's wonderful for me now to ask you the big question and I'm gonna do it in two parts. One, is there in your mind the basis then now in the United States to mobilize a real opposition to this system and not just another wobble Republican Democrat. And how do you see the chances for us to achieve it? If it is Indeed, in your view, possible.
- [27:00]
Kali Akuno
Let me say that it is absolutely possible. And I'm not just, you know, blowing smoke. It is absolutely possible. If we look at the social movements that have. That have kind of emerged in. In this country over the last 20 years, right, from the. The. The movement for black lives in response to the. The extrajudicial killings that the United States government has been committing against black and brown people forever. But particularly the. The mass response of a generation that. That gave us, you know, what we saw in 2014-2016 in terms of mass protests. There was the Occupy movement, right, and what it brought out and the way it changed and articulated. Re. Articulated politics within the United States. So much so that we can now have real conversations, sometimes distorted, but there's a real conversation about inequality in class, which was largely absent most of my life in American politics and dialogue. And then we saw the kind of the uprising, if you will, of 2020, the George Floyd Rebellion, as I call it, right, which was one of the most profound kind of uprising of a multiracial, multi class nature that was really focused around not only black rights, but indigenous rights, Latino rights. And there were so many young white people who involved. It actually spoke to the broad kind of multiracial class component of a movement that many of us have been calling for basically since the 1930s. Well, we had an element of that. It's not as organized as I think we would like it to be, and there's a strength and a weakness to that, but it points to. There are masses, there are millions of people in this country who are clamoring for change and are willing to engage in constructing it. And how do we see this? This is a piece that you've heard me articulate, and I'll say it again. We have to get those of us who are radical progressives. We have to get away from a type of deficit thinking that we have that we do not have enough. Are we organized the way we want to be? Some of us know from earlier eras where there were strong political parties. No, it's a different era. It's a different way that people get mobilized. But if you look at what people are doing and have done, say, like since, particularly since the pandemic, we have millions of people who are engaged in mutual aid activities all throughout the United States, not only just in response to kind of immediate crisis like tornadoes and hurricanes or the pandemic, but people are doing this in their communities on a day to day basis. You got to deal with the ongoing crisis, you know, caused by Capitalism itself and its logic and it's in its, you know, distorted way of operations. We have millions of people who are engaged in full, you know, sovereignty projects, you know, be some of them small scale, some of them to mid scale people trying to find ways to circumvent having to go through middlemen's in the market, but doing community supported agriculture in a myriad of ways. We have massive degrees of workers developing new consciousness, struggling for better wages, working conditions, struggling to unionize. All throughout this country we have tons of young folks who are engaged in all what we call community production. Right. Be it in maker spaces or fab labs. Our challenge is putting all this together in a coherent program that can be kind of governed, I would also say through people's assemblies, in a broad democratic manner, that we can bring this all together in a coordinated fashion, work on creating a new mode of production from below, but also push back not only against the tariffs and this whole kind of revanches, punishing program that Trump is trying to execute, but put us in a new position to re articulate relations that are about economic democracy. That is possible. Elements of it are already being done. Your audience, I think in many respects is a reflection of that. Our task now under these new terms is to get us to coordinate along this broad program. We call this the build and fight formula. We're not interested in what the name, we're interested in what it does and how it coordinates. Coordinates. That is very possible. It is doing. We now need to re articulate this motion to do it in a systemic manner that helps us to deal with this kind of neo fascist onslaught that Trump is unleashing. Right to both defend our communities on the one hand, but put us in a position in the long term to redirect where the economy should go and there therefore our societies should go and, and need to go. It's possible, it is happening. We just need to give it more direction and articulation with programs and articulations like this.
- [31:39]
Richard Wolff
Will thank you enormously for all that you do and for sharing it with us. That's exactly what I was hoping for and as usual, you've delivered. Thank you very, very much. Thank you. And to my audience, I hope you got as much from this as I did and as always, I look forward forward to speaking with you again next week.