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- [00:21]
A
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 starts with a discussion of three enormous strikes. Nurses and teachers from the east coast to the west coast and in the middle. And then it goes on to talk about the Munich Security Conference that happened in the middle of February in that part of Germany. Very important lessons from both of those phenomena. And in the second half, we'll be interviewing a psychotherapist in New York City about the Epstein case and what she calls the Epstein class of people and the issues raised, in her judgment, about our country and our culture by what we are witnessing and experiencing, at least at one remove. Before we jump into this important set of topics, I want to remind you that we are in the Left Education Forum, the Left Education Project. We have a spring lineup of courses and classes that we're offering, and they begin on Monday, March 2nd, and this week. You can find a variety of special registration promotions and discounted tuition offers when you go to www. Leftforum.org LepForLeft education project. And if you click on special promotions there, that will be what you can choose among. Here's an opportunity to learn directly from seasoned professionals, mostly university professors. You will see that one of the courses I am a teacher in and I will be meeting together with my colleague from the university, Bucknell University, Shahram Azer. But there are other courses as well on class analysis, on all kinds of issues. We are building up this education project and we think it'll be a unique opportunity to interact with professors around these topics that are explained there@LeftForum.org F Excuse me, Lep of course. If you'd like to support us, please visit our substack community, our Patreon Community. Democracy at work is the universal way to get at those places. There's all kinds of special material there. And of course, please click on the like button and subscribe to our list. It's a way for partnering between you and us to extend our reach as a program and as a body of material. Okay, let me begin with the big strikes on the East Coast. The New York City nurses at major hospitals in New York city. How many? 15,000 nurses striking three major hospitals, Montefiore, the Mount Sinai and the New York Presbyterian. Two of those strikes have now ended with tentative agreements supported by the nurses. One has not. The nurses rejected the tentative agreement and demanding more from the Presbyterian Hospital. Then there is the San Francisco teachers strike that has 50,000 students affected by walkouts at 120 schools. And finally, also in California, Kaiser Permanente, which is a hospital, a chain, and insurance, very comprehensive there in California. And they have a strike that has involved 31,000 of their employees. Okay, what's going on? You put all this together, you're talking 50,000 or more people on strike. And these are not the only strikes in the United States, but they're big ones and they have something in common. I, I want to make sure everybody understands we are in for a crunch time. Inflation has eroded the purchasing power. That's why everybody is talking about affordability these days. Even the president of this country who tried to make it all go away as yet another one of those hoaxes that he Isthe word he uses when he has an inconvenient truth to confront. Well, we have a problem. And it's not just about nursing or just about teaching or any of the other striking professions and striking workplaces. It's because there's a decline going on. The American empire is in decline. American capitalism is in decline. We can't control the world the way we imagined we once could. We can't even do it the way we actually did for many of the last 75 years. And we have a serious economic competitor for the first time in a century. That's right, China and the brics alliance that China has built. And so the American economy is being squeezed. The capitalists who built the empire have lost it. The capitalists who built up American prosperity have also frittered it away as it is being eaten up by competitors who can produce what we want. Either better quality or a cheaper price or an increasing number of cases, both. But you know, when an empire loses, when it shrinks, as every empire has, it peaks and then it declines, pulling down the economic well being of the people who cashed in on the empire when it was strong. When that downturn happens, the people who are rich and powerful want to hold on, as we all do, to the wealth and power we may have accumulated in our lives. But the people at the top are in a good position to do it. Whereas those of us in the middle and the bottom, we're not as well positioned. We don't have the big cushion of the stock portfolio or the land or the, you know the story. And so the people at the top, facing a decline, whether they admit it or not, offload the costs of decline onto the middle and lower classes below them. So suddenly the rich people who sit on the board of the hospital don't want to pay the nurses to have their own decent health care. A major issue in the nurses strike both east and West. And the people who sit on the school board, the rich of the community, typically, they don't want to pay the teachers either. The people at the top are becoming hard nosed and bitter and they want everyone else to suffer, just not them. And that's why unions are fighting back. That's why teachers and nurses and everybody else are beginning to push and press because they understand, even if they don't get the reasons for it, that they're being squeezed. The price of coffee, the price of beef, the price of eggs, the rent you pay, you're being squeezed. And don't think it's casual or particular to this industry or that company. This is a social problem. And I remind you of what my father taught me. You don't solve social problems with individual actions. To solve a social problem, you need a social movement. Let me turn next to the Munich Security Conference. Well, every year since 1963, that's a long time, there's been an annual conference around this time in the southern German city of Munich. This is the 62nd, if I have my numbers right, could be the 63rd annual conference. And it brings together the leaders of Europe and North America and some others to talk about security. And most of the time it's been a celebration of the long solid alliance between Europe and the United States, at least Western Europe and the United States, mutual assurance of security. America protects Europe, Europe protects America, and thereby each of them protects both of them. But not this time, and that's why I'm talking to you. This time we had almost the exact opposite. Even the name of the conference, the title used the word the Deconstruction of Mutual Security. Not the construction, not the building up, not the strengthening, not the endorsement, no, no, the opposite. We had Americans this time, Mr. Rubio, but in previous years, Mr. Vance, or presidents have also done it. But now we had Mr. Rubio explaining why the United States doesn't need or doesn't want security from Europe. It wants them to go on their own, to pay for their own security rather than relying on the United States to give them protection. You know, at the end of World War II, with NATO and all of that, the United States cut a deal with Europe. And here was the the United States, which came out of World War II, the most powerful country in the world, the most powerful economically, politically, militarily, you name it, we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. No one else did anything like that. We were the Kings. So we said to the Europeans, we need to have protection. You're in trouble. First of all, you're right near the Soviet Union, and who knows what they might do? But more important, although not discussed quite the same way, European countries were afraid of the socialist, communist and labor unions in their own countries. For those of you whose history isn't so strong, in the first government after the war was over by the great president of France, General Charles de Gaulle, several members of his cabinet had to be members and leaders of. Of the French Communist Party. That's how strong Communist parties were. And not just in France, all over Europe, particularly in places like Italy and Spain and Greece. And I could go on. And the United States was very worried because they were allied with the Soviet Union and the European Union. Capitalists were terrified. They had the Russia next door, and they had their own Communist parties, stronger than those parties had ever been in European history. So the United States said, we'll send in our CIA, we'll send in our military. We'll put military bases in your countries so that we can help you keep down the communists and the socialists. It worked pretty well. And Europe was so grateful that the capitalists there could build up after World War II, a war blamed on them and could save their politics and their society and their position from their own socialists and communists that they gave the United States lots of benefits. Your currency, the dollar, can rule the world, not ours. You can be the great dictator. We will rely on you. We will be loyal supporters of yours because you've really helped us. Well, not in this conference. The Europeans got up and they did an interesting number. They blame Mr. Trump. You're blowing up the alliance. You're betraying us. We got the terrible Russia. Well, Russia isn't communist anymore, isn't the threat it ever was, and there are no powerful communist parties in your country. The situation's completely different. Mr. Rubio is quite right. But the thieves have fallen out. The United States and Europe are now headed in different directions. Their alliance is over, and much is going to change in the months and years ahead because of it. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Stay with us. The interview about the Epstein class is coming right up. 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 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 an 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 glad to bring back to our microphones and our cameras, Tess Fraad Wolf. She's a New York City psychotherapist in private practice. She's been working with individuals and couples for the last 15 years. And yes, she also happens to be my daughter. And I am a very proud father. So let's begin. I want to ask you right off the bat what, and I know you've been thinking about it and we've been talking about it. What for you is the kind of key significance for our time of the whole Epstein scandal that has been unfolding for years now, but is obviously at a kind of crescendo as we're talking.
- [17:42]
B
I think we're in the moment of this great reveal of not just moral decrepitude, but the heart of a high addiction by an elite class, by what a politician recently coined, which I thought was a really excellent and important coining, the Epstein class, which is really about a ruling class and the pollution of such a class, the pollution of such permission. But without boundaries, without regulations and rules, without limits, people become monstrous. Everybody knows this when we talk about kids, is raising a child without saying no. We know that this creates a tyrant out of a child. And we've all seen, or most of us, some little kid that's too young to be blamed for this, but nonetheless exposing tyrannical behaviors in the face of not being given boundaries or limits. Enough. Enough to prevent a sort of plunderous dimension. And what we're watching in this is plundering of the most vile and expansive varieties, stealing from little children's bodies, alleged serial murdering, raping, assaulting of every kind. And we're watching the most destructive pieces of humanity be emboldened and encouraged by a class that sometimes claims to have a lockdown on morality. So the hypocrisy is stifling. It is rather titillating in the way that watching a gruesome Train wreck is titillating and it is spiritually assaultive, I think, for a population.
- [19:24]
A
I wanted to ask you to go a little further because you've been interested in, you've spoken about, written about the whole gender relationship. All the problems that it brings to us in our current life and gender is wrapped up in this horror in obvious ways. But there's something about male and female relationships, or in particular how men seem to look at sexuality and females that is exposed here, like bad, like a terrible bad smell that forces us to ask what's going on, to create it.
- [20:09]
B
I'm so glad you asked that, and I'm so glad to hear it being called out, because I do think this culture, as you and I have discussed before on this program and outside, has a severe problem with understanding masculinity. I think that now we have such a desperate shortage of healthy, laudable emblems of masculinity, which I would say could be evidenced in like a Mamdani or this, even Bernie Sanders. To me and other people, there are many people that can embody a healthy, loving, psychologically sound masculinity. And then there's a sort of tawdry, low hanging notion of masculinity that involves predation, that involves bullying, that involves some kind of power search that's actually in itself a compensation for feelings of fragility and internal frailty. But I think that we also are not asking the excellent question that you just did as a society in which we say what is happening with, with the way that we raise a fair amount of men, so that preying on, particularly pre adolescents, adolescents, in this case much younger children, as is being revealed, which is horrifying, but especially sexualizing in some instances adolescents, whether it's gay men or straight men, you know, queer men or CIS men doing this, preying on adolescents, which does not seem to be equally experienced by women, this degree of predation, whether the women are queer or cis, it doesn't seem to mirror. Women don't seem to be as fixated on adolescence or pre adolescence in terms of fetishizing children as much. They just don't. And that begs the excellent question that you're asking. I think that we have to look at the way that we treat a lot of boys as they're being raised is with more and more coldness physically, in terms of affection, in terms of endearments, whether they're verbal or physical, whether it's resting your hand atop a child's head, patting a shoulder, hugging, linking arms and then stroking or caressing and Obviously, just affectionate manners. This is not romantic at all. These are children. But little boys, when they're around 8, start being treated differently by everybody. The emotional and the physical affection lessens more and more. Their intimate friendships, this is documented less and more and more they become like little islands, perhaps because they're brought into more of a culture of individuation and competition as opposed to coming together. Now, of course, there are many men who are better at coming together than women. There are women who individuate more. But as a general rule, the very toys children are given, boys and girls do speak to these things, as well as the removal of affection, which can leave male psyche to want affection without connection. And then we also bring in a sort of disturbed sexuality, which is a way of getting affection, yet you have to somehow not connect to it emotionally. And that can leave men in such a confused reactivity that dominating a person and maybe assaulting them can be a way of somehow sneaking and stealing that affection under the guise of this toxically masculine and allegedly masculine domination. Hope that makes sense. Maybe ran away a little bit with that one.
- [23:58]
A
No, it does. And for me, it's like listening to you is helping me understand the richness of the concept toxic masculinity, because you're explaining why it becomes toxic. What are the factors in your upbringing that that would end up having you as a man think of yourself in certain ways that might otherwise not have happened that way. I also want to push you a little bit because there's a toxic masculinity and then there's a toxic, for lack of a better term, a toxic economy, because these are over. The Epstein class are overwhelmingly very, very rich men who are taking advantage of very economically deprived women in the overwhelming majority of cases, at least a little. I've read these were young girls whose job prospects were poor, whose career prospects were poor, whose background, education, all of the usual problems. And they were now kind of lured by the possibility of some economic advantage they might get if they submitted more or less to whatever it is they imagined they were going to get from Mr. Epstein and his. But clearly there's rich on poor horror interwoven with toxic masculinity and gender relation. Horror, in a way. Well, let me put it this way. It would be the worst tragedy if all of this ends up being a discussion of how bad Mr. Epstein was, or Mr. Black was, or Mr. Trump, for that matter, was, and not to see the enormous social reality that produced these examples who happened to be the ones that got caught. And we all know how many are out there, not caught in court, or at least not yet.
- [26:09]
B
Yeah, I agree completely. I think it's a very important thing. I do think that supremacy is a hell of a drug. And if you get people hopped up on being better because they're whiter or because they're male or because they're CIS or because they have more money, it's a great distraction from pain. I also think that it enables senses of being superior to other people. And the second we start thinking that some lives matter more than lives, again, because of wealth, because of gender, because of orientation, because, and this is the least often mentioned and the most important one too, mentioned class, then we start thinking we can do whatever we want to the person. You're adding to that a very important point, which is that our culture is a predatory culture. Our economic system is a predatory system. It's about, why did these banks look away? Because there was child blood and maybe infant blood and definitely girl's blood spattered all over their stacks of cash. They did look away. They will look away. There are such frenzied wealth hoarders, power hoarders, cruising another hit of a little bit of extra money to these people who have more money than they'll ever know what to do with anyway. They don't care how ill gotten. It's just about hoarding. It's just this addiction. And I think in a system that rewards addiction and pedestalizes hoarders of wealth and power, we are dangling kind of rancid fruits in front of people. And this does not, by the way, I want to say, take away the responsibility of these people for crimes against humanity that deserve the utmost of punishment, in my view.
- [27:53]
A
You know, I'm tempted to ask you this kind of a question. Trump tries to dismiss all of this by referring to the Epstein case as, quote, unquote, a democratic hoax. Set aside for the moment the obvious politicking. He's trying to make, you know, blame somebody else when his name is in there, apparently more than anybody else's. But again, how do you react to this? An attempt basically, to erase it. In other words, there's no big issue here. None of the questions you've just related this issue to are relevant for Mr. Trump. For him, this is an unrealistic political ploy by his enemies. It is an extraordinary effort to erase an event which has obviously captured the imagination and the concern of millions of people.
- [29:01]
B
I mean, there are many ways to regard that. For me, this is not an administration that deals in reality. This is an administration that subsists on and deals in non reality surreality and denial of reality. And I think that's quite clear with optics and makeup and shows and impersonations and conspiracy theories. Everything is here to blur reality. Everything is here to wither away lines between reality and non reality so that a public is deadened into just giving up on reality truth altogether. I also think that Trump and this administration, but especially him, have a history of using the hoax defense over and over again and it's wrong each time. So we were, we were told by Mr. Trump in countless documented frames that Covid was a hoax. We were told this, never mind that we were told after that that he had it and then that it wasn't so bad and all these other things. We were also told that it was a hoax. We were also told that foreign interference that's been proven to some extent was a hoax. We've heard about other hoaxes too, that they've all been real. So to me, I get that it's a go to line of defense for Trump and administration. I just, I think it's another way of batting away inconvenient blood spattered truths.
- [30:21]
A
Yeah. And then it goes right to the heart of what Mr. Epstein did. In the little bit of time we have left, what do you think we ought to be doing? Is there something around this case that you wish were going on that isn't, that would deal with it better than you think we are doing?
- [30:43]
B
Oh, gosh, so many, so many. I think you're asking crucial questions about economic shadowing here and what I would call as the Epstein class, which is the plunderous class, invited to assault and rake through human lives, children's lives, perhaps babies, lives with the most grotesque immunity imaginable. It goes past the imagination, at least the pieces I've looked at. But I think we have to look at that and we have to understand that pedestalizing greed creates monstrosity. And refusing to allow men to be full creatures with emotional needs also creates toxicity. There is incredible power in naming these things. And also looking at why this culture and so many others make a kind of quiet practice out of doubting women, doubting women's accounts. So whether it's Cosby or Epstein or the countless other people that have sometimes Hundreds, sometimes almost 100 of credible, documented survivors of assaults over decades, this still remains somehow dismissible to a lot of people. I think we have to commit to curiosity and being willing to sort of swallow hard and look at the ugliness behind class supremacy.
- [32:05]
A
Above all, Tess Fraud Wolf, thank you very, very much for your time. I know it's gone very quickly, but I think you've given our audience, and certainly me, much to think about as we go through the endless headlines of this case. Thank you really very, very much.
- [32:22]
B
Thank you.
- [32:24]
A
And to my audience, as always, I, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.