← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Loading summary
Transcript45 lines
- [00:20]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, the and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. As I did last week, I want to begin with a special announcement. I want to thank all of you for the support you've shown us. The suggestions, the emails, the ideas for programs. They've been remarkable. Charlie Fabian and I talk about them and we're really pleased with the level of engagement and the substantive suggestions you've made this time. I want to talk to you, however, and thank you for the financial support that you have given us. We try very hard not to bother you with financial requests. We do not monetize the vast bulk of what we do. We prefer to rely on small contributions from people who care, who listen, and particularly who make use in one way or another of what we pour our souls into here. We're very proud. As we look back on the year of what we were done, we started a new substack and I urge you to take a look at it, democracyatwork.substack.com where you can see a growing list of contributors. Our team is expanding and expanding quickly, as is all of the kind of political analytical work on this end of the political spectrum that you've come to notice, I'm sure, as we have all around us. We have an enormous list of things we're doing and planning to grow. Our book publishing, with many book titles coming down in various stages beyond those we've already published, the classes we run, the events we host, and a whole bunch more of enormous, important expansions of our work. But we do require financial support to keep all of this going and to do the expansion that we've got scheduled. We estimate a shortfall for the rest of this year, about 27.
- [02:48]
And that's the immediate goal we have in asking you to think about it. Last week was so called Giving Week, so we're a week into that. But we want to make this appeal, tell you exactly what we're going to use it for the expansion of what we've been doing so that if you can afford it and if you like what we do and are happy to see us doing it, make use of it, then a financial contribution at this time. You can do it easily by going to our website, democracyatwork.info we will be eternally grateful and we will be able to do even more in the future than we have so far achieved. Thank you in advance for whatever you can donate. All right, let's jump right into Today's program, without any more preliminaries, a struggle is going on inside a major American union. And I want to tell you about it, even though I'll focus on this union, the Teamsters union, because these kinds of struggles are already happening in many other unions and they will be happening in even more unions, and they don't get the coverage they deserve. Unions rarely do in our capitalist system, and that should surprise no one. So it's up to us to make up for the failure of mainstream media to cover something so important. And the Teamsters, I chose them because they are a big union, because they are national in scope. Everybody knows something about them or has some connection to them. Okay, here's what's being fought out right now as we speak, and it will for the rest of this year and into 2026. The President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a man named Sean o', Brien, will be facing a challenge when he attempts to be re elected the president in 2026. A slate of candidates angered at Sean O' Brien's evolving relationship with with Donald Trump since 2024 has formed a coalition, a slate of their own, called Fearless 2026. They are opposing Sean O' Brien's entire slate of officers running for the reelection to top positions in the Brotherhood of Teamsters. The leader of this opposition, Richard Hooker Jr. Is the secretary, treasurer and principal officer of Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And here is the basic statement Mr. Hooker has made, and it summarizes pretty well what's going on here.
- [06:24]
Mr. Hooker said. You have your supposed leader, that's Mr. O' Brien flirting with someone, that's Mr. Trump, who does not care if you have a pension, someone who does not care if you have health care, who does not care if you have a National Labor Relations Board, if you have protection at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. You cannot align yourself with someone like Trump and be committed to working people and the labor movement.
- [07:09]
Okay? Whether or not you name Mr. Trump, he has come to stand for those forces in the labor movement that are.
- [07:24]
At best.
- [07:26]
Only secondarily interested in working people. If you watch Mr. Trump, if you see day after day, because he surely keeps himself in the news what it is, he champions tariffs.
- [07:46]
Peace in Ukraine.
- [07:49]
Attacking Venezuela, attacking Canada.
- [07:54]
Being unable to stop the inflation, denouncing the elected mayor of New York, you'll look long and hard for this man to taking major portions of his day to support the labor movement.
- [08:13]
Mr. Mamdani, who isn't even in office. Yet in New York took time out to support the Starbucks union strikers.
- [08:26]
Mr. Trump didn't.
- [08:29]
Mr. Hooker and Mr. Trump, excuse me, Mr. O', Brien. Are engaged in a struggle for the hearts and the minds and the votes of the Teamsters union. And that struggle is either going on or about to go on everywhere else in the labor movement. It's worth our paying attention to because as the labor movement goes, so will a large part of those efforts underway across this country.
- [09:08]
To make America great again. But in a sense, utterly different from that of Mr. Trump.
- [09:17]
I want to turn next to an example of what I just said. Mr. Trump and his education secretary, Linda McMahon, a woman who made her money, she and her husband, by engaging in the industry known as professional wrestling. And I won't say more about it. You all know, pretty much they did a remarkable thing in recent days.
- [09:50]
She's the head of the Education Department, which both she and the president have said they wish to abolish and are in the process of. I'm using those words that are most often used, dismantling the Education Department. And along the way, they decided to declare, by the way, I just want to remind you all, I don't make any of this up. I'm just reporting it. They decided that that nursing will no longer be considered by them to be a profession. A nursing degree will not any longer be a, quote, unquote, professional degree.
- [10:40]
Now, why in the world, in the midst of all we have going on as a society, all the problems we face, would you demean and diminish the nursing profession? Well, it turns out that by doing this, they can cut the amount of money the government makes available as an educational loan to people who want to study nursing and get a nursing degree from 200,000 max to 100,000. So they're going to save money. And by the way, when you add all this up, it's a trivial, tiny share of what the government spends. Why would they do this? Everyone knows we need more nurses, not fewer. But this is going to make nursing much too expensive for many of the people who now borrow to get a nursing degree. They won't be able to get what they used to borrow, so they won't go to nursing school. We'll have fewer nurses. That'll be bad for all the hospitals already suffering from the cutbacks in Medicaid. And this is a dismantling yet again of another health care support for the mass of people.
- [12:02]
And it saves money. Actually, it doesn't, because remember, remember.
- [12:09]
That he wants to give everybody a $2,000 check that'll overwhelm by a great number any savings you come from screwing the nursing profession. What are you doing here? The symbolism of cutting education that some people want for God knows what reasons, you're going to do that by savaging nursing schools who won't have the enrollments and will have to cut the program. This is. You know what this is? This is the self destruction of American capitalism. Brick by brick, little program by little program in order not to tax the corporations and the rich so that the government can do with those taxes what it needs to do for a modern, civilized society. No, we're cutting here and we're cutting there.
- [13:13]
The irony is it won't solve the problem, but it will destroy the patient.
- [13:21]
And now the last kind of an illustration, if you like. Again, the Congressional Budget Office, that's a group of Experts in the U.S. congress.
- [13:34]
Overseen by both Republicans and Democrats, so it isn't partisan. Keeps track of how much money the government is raising, how much it's spending, so that senators and congresspersons can keep on top of all of that.
- [13:52]
Okay, what do they tell us? They tell us that Mr. Trump's tariffs now are bringing in much less money than they were anticipated when he first announced them. This should come as no surprise because Mr. Trump deals with the tariffs like they were chips in some poker game. He goes and talks with the Europeans or the Chinese or the Brazilians or anyone else saying, I'll lower the tariff if you invest money in the United States or if you buy our natural gas or maybe what happened recently. His advisors told him people are very upset about the price of groceries. So he lowered the tariff on Brazil because that's where we get coffee, that's where we get bananas, and that's where we get beef in huge quantities. And he wants those prices to go down. This is Mr. Flim Flam. A little here, a little cosmetic over there. You got to deal with the basic problem, Jack, or else you're not going to deal with. He doesn't do that. He's in favor of theatrical. And so we have that. And then he picked up on the term affordability. My last comment for today's first half, affordability was a slogan that Zoran Mamdani used in New York. So the Republicans have decided we're concerned about affordability, too. And so he's going to cut the tariffs, which of course means that the government isn't getting the money, which is what the CBO tells us. But here's an added Affordability is not something politicians have all that much to do with. That's why they can promise the way they do, because they can't do much about it. Affordability is how much money do you earn and what are the prices you have to pay? With the money you earn, either it's affordable or it isn't. Corporations, executives, employers decide how much to pay you. That's your income. The same employers decide what prices to put on the goods they sell. That's what you have to pay the employers. 3% of our people decide how much income you get and what prices you pay. They're in charge of affordability. If you want to deal with it, you, you got to deal with the employer and the capitalist class that they are members of. Asking the politicians to do it is asking the people who don't have the inclination and who don't have the power. We've come to the end of the first half of today's program. Please stay with us. We are going to be honored by having an interview with Abbey Martin when we come back.
- [16:49]
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 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 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 honored to have before our microphones and cameras Abby Martin, someone that I have worked with over the years and admired and benefited, as so many of you have, from the work that she has done as a reporter, as a journalist, and then more recently, and we'll see today, as a filmmaker. She started her career as an independent journalist. In 2006, she founded both the Media Roots and the Empire Files. These were combining documentary investigations and reportage with special attention to US Imperialism. Over her career, she has interviewed countless heads of state, celebrities, politicians, academics, and so on. In 2019, she released her first film, a feature film that many of you may have seen called Fights for Freedom, which has been called the definitive crash course on Palestine and the struggles there. She has a new film that I want to talk to her about called Earth's Greatest Enemy, about the environmental impact of the United States military. She's on a director's tour about that film now. And she is, in short, one of today's standard bearers of advocacy journalism producing first rate alternative media. And what could better suit her to be with us today? So, first of all, Abby, thank you very much for your time to answer a few questions.
- [20:12]
B
Oh, I've never been more happy to be on, Richard. And for your audience, please check out my interview with you. It's one of the best breakdowns ever on Marxism. Incredible interview that we did together. I still reference it constantly.
- [20:25]
A
Very, very kind, very kind. And you know, like the fashion short tie of 20 years ago when we did that, now things have come full circle.
- [20:35]
B
Oh my God, have they ever.
- [20:36]
A
After Mr. Mumdani's victory in New York, it's extraordinary how many people want to do it. All right, tell us, first of all, why did you make this film now that you are an accomplished filmmaker? Earth's Greatest Enemy, what motivated it?
- [20:54]
B
Well, for people who've seen it and will see it, it's kind of counterintuitive to how films are made under capitalism. The model is totally opposite to what you're used to. It's very broad.
- [21:08]
In the totality and enormity of a very existential crisis that no one really wants to face head on. And it's not just climate change, it's US Imperialism's role in maintaining and enforcing this kind of fossil fuel infrastructure. You know, we've had, we've seen these kind of academic studies going for about a decade now saying the US military is the largest institutional polluter in the world, bigger than 140 countries. But I never really understood what that meant. And so we wanted to unpack that. Me and my husband, Mike Preizner, who's an Iraq War veteran and co director of the film, we just wanted to tackle what that actually meant. And Richard, that's just the oil purchases on paper, that's just 270,000 barrels of oil they purchase every day. Then when you extrapolate out, what does that mean? The life cycle, the supply chain, the actual maintenance and enforcement of a global military empire and the arsenal alone, the military pollution that they're using just to maintain that. And then of course, the application of the weaponry. So. So it's super unquantifiable. And what we realized is that every stone unturned is the subject of another documentary. But we wanted a one stop shop with million different entry points that anyone across the political spectra could really invest and say this speaks to me. And we're building the biggest tent possible of people who just care about the environment and the future habitability of the planet.
- [22:35]
A
Tell me a little bit more about the military, in other words. You're right. I think about myself and I think about ecology and I didn't put it together with the military. I really do think of those as occupying separate categories of existence. And you're telling me that central to the whole ecological question is the American military. It's an outsized player in that situation. Give us a little more of a feeling of that.
- [23:08]
B
Indeed. And that's exactly why it was started, I mean really as an extraction and protection force for resource pillaging. And you look at the protection force of the American military when its borders were drawn, obviously the first United States through genocide, the first extraterritorial bases were to protect the fur and mining industries, exploitation of the land and animals. And then you go to the first overseas bases and then you look at the actual coal extraction. It was just setting up coal reserves and extracting those to set up the global chain of extraction for supplying the military with resources. So of course the national security priority becomes oil when oil is discovered. And it's this self fulfilling, self feeding cycle. It's a self fulfilling prophecy because in order to get the bigger military, you need more oil. In order to maintain that military, you need to continue to extract oil. And so it's really just shocking when you look at how obvious it all is. And it's so absent from our, from our periphery of the environmental discussion. I mean, before this conversation started, Richard, we were talking about Inconvenient Truth. I remember when I saw that film in college, it was so mind blowing and I thought, okay, now we're all, we've built this consensus reality. We all realize the dire nature, the urgent state of the environmental crises that we face. But it was still so, it was still so abstracted. And now we see the cataclysmic crises, we see it right on our doorsteps. Fires, droughts, the global refugee crisis because of the environmental collapse. And we've never been more detached from this kind of consensus reality. And that's an intentional result of global capitalism's propaganda army, as your audience, well, well knows. So what I, what I've kind of realized is that we've all been pointing to fossil fuel entities, rightly so, as the main perpetrators of this disaster. Guess what? They have an army. And the army is the U.S. military.
- [25:11]
A
Yeah. You know, it leads me to this question that we were discussing before we went on the air. And I want to ask you again.
- [25:18]
A, am I right? And B, if I am, why am I right? That somehow the people who don't want us to confront the whole ecological crisis, you know, who don't want us to learn, as we seem to have for a while, Rachel Carson's original teaching of us of what a silent spring, what it meant.
- [25:46]
It seems to have been pushed to the margin so that in a way, yeah, the military role is also kind of marginalized, pushed out of the store. Is that going on? And if so, why is it going on? Why have they been successful in pushing that away?
- [26:04]
B
I mean, that's the biggest question that I asked. How is this the most obvious thing in the world right in front of our faces? It kind of begs the question of the whole glorification and militarization of our society, of the military industrial complex, the fact that soldiers are revered, the fact that Americans are largely ignorant of the fact that we're even in a global empire, that their government is subjugating tens of millions of people under its boot of imperialism around the world to enforce global capitalism against the will of the planet. So it is amazing. I mean, it makes sense that the propaganda works in such a way that it's just so insidiously manufactures consent that no one even questions, questions why we can't afford eggs. Oh, is it because the Pentagon is vampiristically sucking $1.5 trillion in real spending every year? I mean, it's just. It's just again, the propaganda matrix is so strong. And even though we have this oversaturation of media, we've never been more siloed. And so I think that that speaks volumes. But then you look at the bipartisan consensus of the foreign policy establishment, the media being an arm of the ruling class. So the Democrats and Republicans agree with this. I mean, look at Elizabeth Warren. This is a perfect example of someone who, you know, wants to tax the rich, is going out there with kind of FDR New Deal terms, but then on the other hand, looks to the military and says, we just need to green a global military empire. We're not. We're just talking about putting solar panels on bases and hybridizing Bradley fighter vehicles. It's like, oh my God, you cannot green a global military empire. So this has been an Intentional obfuscation away from the real perpetrators. Again, the atomization and the insulation. To think that the onus is on us if we just use paper straws and drive Teslas. That's what they want us to think, Richard. They don't want us to point to the real perpetrators of who has put us on this death path and who is destroying the planet. They have names. We know who they are.
- [28:05]
A
You know, it's remarkable. I have a very parallel experience. I go to a panel at a university I won't name and there are three people on the panel explaining the problem of our time is Chinese aggressiveness.
- [28:21]
B
Oh my God.
- [28:21]
A
And I look at them and I wait till they finish and I stand up and I look at the audience. The United states has over 700 military bases around the world. The Chinese have won. Who is aggressive to. Who has a navy in the South China Sea? Who does not have a navy anywhere around the United States? You know, what is this? The most obvious numbers accessible to anybody with a half an hour of Google? You know, somehow.
- [28:55]
B
All right, I think that, I think that was the craziest part. And you hear that all the time. China is imperialist, Russia's imperialism. Like you can argue all day about, about what defines the encroachment of territories, imperialism in respect to those countries, but I wouldn't call China putting a ship in their own sea an imperialist maneuver. It is just absolutely cartoonish, this kind of inverted reality that we live in. I mean, look at copyright. Look at COP30. First of all, they bulldozed part of the Amazon to get the delegates there. Second of all, they didn't even mention fossil fuels as a term in the final draft text. We're talking about 30 years of this farce, Richard, where they don't even count military emissions. The Pentagon exempted military emissions in 1997 and they've been exempted ever since. And every country has followed suit. The Paris Accords were the first time that they were like, hey, maybe you can voluntarily exist if you want. I mean, all of these things are non binding, they're all voluntary. It's, it's ridiculous. There was more fossil fuel lobbyists at COP than there were any country's delegation. So this is the insidious nature of how fossil fuel with the intertwinement of, of the military and how it all just works in concert together essentially just to like have a global dictatorship. I mean, knowing that we're digging our own graves, knowing that this is unsustainable, knowing that we live on a finite planet, it's collective insanity. These people have children and I'm talking to these people. You see me chasing down Nancy Pelosi, Jay Inslee. Jay Inslee ran on climate change. He's sitting there not answering my questions about why won't you confront the military? I mean, you really see it revealed, Richard, the Democratic politicians not falling all over themselves trying to glorify the military instead of confront this elephant in the room. And I'm sick of it. I'm sick of it. We don't have time to waste, and I want a fighting chance. I brought two children in this world and I'm not giving up without a fight.
- [30:53]
A
Yeah, no, I have the same, I have the same wonderment. And I have to admit, I have a sense of being defeated, that they were able. And here I want your opinion.
- [31:08]
I see the fossil fuel companies and the whole apparatus around them as having mobilized their money and their influence and done a really powerful job of squelching all of this right up to Trump, supporting them and downplaying the electric car and the electric vehicle, even with all the problems that that has too. But is that a reasonable way to understand, is that, is that a point made in the film?
- [31:44]
B
Oh, 100%. I mean, the entire domination of US capitalism around the world to enforce and maintain a fossil fuel infrastructure, that is exactly the point. That is, that is what is imposed by US imperialism. So it really is all part of the same infrastructure. You cannot look at just one isolated factor of this. You have to look at the global entity. And to your point, the right wing's done it. They've, they've institutionally taken over, they've plotted for decades. It's an open conspiracy. We've been, we've had our struggles bought and sold back to us by neoliberalism. We're trying to catch up to the fact that capitalism's to blame. Good God, Richard. I mean, you've been crying from the rooftops, but I felt like until the last 10 years we were in such an anti communist society that it was just, you couldn't even talk about reality or why these things were happening because everything was just so identitarian. So for the first time, I do have revolutionary optimism. I truly do. I'm going around with this director's door. People are starving, starving for the truth, starving for facts, because they're sick of being gaslit, they're sick of being lied to by the ruling class. They know that the corporate media, especially in the wake of the Gaza genocide, is just an extension of that structure. And they're sick of it. And so I think the moment has never been more urgent for this kind of information. And I feel like we can do it. I know that that sounds crazy, but I've never seen a moment like this of an international solidarity, Americans in sustained action, caring about their brothers and sisters around the world and completely disbelieving and disqualifying the ruling class from both parties. It's an amazing moment to be alive. And I fight for life. You know, they. I'm sure you get this criticism a lot. We need to fight for a utopian vision instead of just being anti capitalist. Yeah, that is our vision, Richard. It's life. It's fighting for life, not death.
- [33:42]
A
And that's why you're here, and that's why we're trying to do what we do. And I agree with you. I am an optimist. I see opportunity in the moment we live in that I did not expect any ever to see. And I congratulate you on your filmmaking. And come back to us in a few months and we'll talk about it again.
- [34:02]
B
Thank you so much. There's so much more to say. There's so much other ways the military is polluting. So I can't wait to come back on Richard. Thank you so much, everyone. Check out earthsgreatesenemy.com, get involved in the movement. Bring me out there. Let's do this. Thanks, Richard.
- [34:15]
A
Okay. And to my audience, as always, when I conclude, I look forward to seeing you again next week.