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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today's show taking account of the fact that President Biden and his team are now wrestling with ways to deal with the major problems inherited from the previous administration. And though I thought it might be useful to give them some advice, and rather than speculate, I thought I would borrow from what people in other countries are doing to give a sense of the context and also to give a way to evaluate what Mr. Biden's team is coming up with. So I chose an example of one of the largest cities in the world, Berlin, Germany, the center of the most important economy in all of Europe. A major player in the world economy today. In Berlin, there is a government because they have multiple parties. They're not like the United States. They don't think two parties is enough. They actually want competition from multiple political parties. So they have a good half dozen major parties and even more small ones. The government in the city of Berlin is a coalition of three parties because no party came even close to to 50% of the vote. Okay, here are the three parties, and if you didn't know this, well, that's something to do with what the media in the United States do and do not cover. The three parties that together govern the city of Berlin, a city of millions of people, is, number one, the German Socialist Party. Number two, the. The German Left Party, which is what I'm going to come back to. And it is to the left of the Socialist Party and the third party that make up the three party coalition that governs Berlin is the German Green Party. Socialists, Leftists and Greens. Why is this important? Because they've come up with a number of policies, three in particular, that I want to mention to all of you. So you can imagine what that might mean in terms of what Mr. Biden's team is and is not doing. So, let's begin. Two years ago, the government of Berlin passed a law, and that law said there could be no increase in rents in Berlin for five years. That law is now in effect. Landlords are fighting it in the courts, but they have so far failed to change it. The law has a number of other qualities. For example, new renters to an apartment cannot be charged more than was being paid by the previous renters of an apartment. Interesting idea. Does not exist in the United States, and to my knowledge, not never has. Here's the second. This is an initiative. It's not yet the law, but the Linka, this left wing party which is the second largest component of the coalition, they're pushing for a referendum in this September's election. They've already gotten 77,000 signatures. They're going for the 170,000 you need to get on the ballot. Here is what their ballot initiative will have happen. Every real estate company in Berlin that owns over 3,000 homes will have to give them up, sell them to the city, which will make sure to keep them in equality and keep the rents low because it won't have to make extortionate profits from doing so. The largest affected by this is something called Deutsche Wohnen, which means German apartments or German homes. It owns ready 110,000 homes in Berlin. But I thought you'd be interested in the two other enterprises that together own 10% of all the homes in Berlin. One is the American capital company Blackstone, and the other one is the Boston Capital company MFS investment managers. American companies owning and ripping off tenants in Berlin. They would suffer sadly if this becomes a law. And here's the third initiative also of the Linke Party in the Berlin government. They have proposed a law that requires, this is interesting, all city jobs, from kindergarten teacher to garbage collector to courtroom staff, to meet a quota of 35% of employees who are either first or second generation immigrants. And the argument of the Linka Party is that the population of Berlin is 35% immigrants and that therefore the employment should be roughly the same. Currently immigrants are 12%. This is an attempt by the Linke to do something about the ghettoization, the discrimination, the second class citizenship that immigrants who are citizens still suffer in Germany. Interesting for Mr. Biden's team perhaps to consider and for all of us to know our possibilities, not out of someone's head, but out of a practical political project in one of the world's major capitals. I want to turn next to another Biden program raising the minimum wage. There is a new bill before the United States Congress called Raise the wage act of 2021. And it would raise the minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour to $15 per hour by 2025. I want to look at that. Does it reduce poverty? Yes, of course it does. The United States, at $7 quarter, has one of the lowest minimum wages in the world, friends. Extraordinary for a government to do that. It was last raised in 2009, which means that over the last 1112 years there's been no raise in the minimum wage, even though every one of Those years, prices rose by 1, 2, 3%, thereby eroding what the minimum wage would allow you to buy. And speaking of minimum wage being eroded, we expect roughly 2% a year between now and 2025. That would mean, if you look at it, that the $15 in 2025 would only buy you what $13.80 buys for you now. So we're not even raising it. And by the way, $15,000 at $15 an hour get gets you roughly $30,000 a year. And that's just a couple of thousand bucks above what the poverty level will be in 2025. So we're not doing anything to fundamentally alter the grotesque increase in inequality done over the last 30 or 40 years. It's that which is upsetting the American people. It's that which is driving huge divisions in our society between the handful of super rich, the anxiety of the middle that it's losing its middle, and the desperation of the poor. Going from seven and a quarter, which is abnormally low, to 15, may sound like a big jump, but if your goal is to do something about inequality eating at the United States on every level, economic, political, and cultural, then this is way too little and stretched out over way too long a time. There's no nice way to say this. On the other hand, hearing another pundit tell us about, gee, it's going from seven and a quarter to 15 as if the Red Sea is parting and in come all the Israelites is really a little much, given the scope of the problem. Which is also why I wanted you to know about what the government of Berlin is doing for tenants and for immigrants compared to what is barely even discussed here in this country. My next update is really just a report to you about some research that at least blew my mind, and I hope it shakes up yours. The research was conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research in cooperation with Duke University. So I assume you understand the credentials of these researchers are above reproach. Here's what they did. They asked themselves the question, if you evict a person from his or her apartment, or if you cut off their water or their utility, you know, their electric, their gas and so on, what impact will it have on Covid cases and on COVID deaths? And there's lots of statistics that they have to show what the experience was of people who did die from that disease. And here's what their research found. Had the federal government banned evictions and banned utility shutoffs From March of 2020 through the end of November, that's the period they studied it would have saved ready tens of thousands of COVID deaths. We could have avoided them and even more, hundreds of thousands of COVID cases. Instead, what we had was, was a kind of random collection of cities here, counties over there, whole states in some cases that had some ban on eviction for part of the time, some bad on some utility shutoffs for part of the time. And they took account of that. They asked only what would have been the improvement in battling Covid if there had been a decision by the federal government to ban evictions and and ban utility shutoffs from March to November. Look, there's no nice way to say this. The failure of the federal government to save the public health of the United States was a fatal failure not to do what has been done in many other countries and explains why many of them have much lower cases and deaths than the United States. That could have been avoided. It should have been avoided. And it will stand as a blot not only on the dominating Trump administration, which certainly deserves a big part of the blame, but on all the others who did little or nothing to make this happen. Last and perhaps the most important, the Biden administration is now reconsidering policy towards China. As you all know, Mr. Trump waged a trade war against China, imposed tariffs against China, went after corporations like Huawei that are owned and operated by the Chinese, punished in various ways, other corporations as well. This was supposed to change the Chinese government, make them behave in different ways. It is a 100% failure. I saw a new January 2021 report by the US China Business Council. That's basically big businesses in the United States and China that get together to coordinate their needs, explaining in their words the total failure of the Trump war on China. I want to drive it home. In 2020, China grew much faster than than the United States. In 2020, China handled the COVID disaster much better than the United States. In 2020, real wages went up in China. They didn't in the United States. I could go on. It didn't work. And the question is, are you gonna continue attacking, provoking a country with nuclear weapons, risking all that that means, or are you gonna be able to face the failure that that policy was and come up with a live and let live cooperation with the second biggest economic power, now scheduled to be a bigger economic unit by 2028, which is not very long from now. We need to see real change and we need to see a government that if it is blocked by Republicans, gets us out in the street to make the differences. We need to happen, whether it's China or minimum wage or a proper attack on Covid. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we get to the second half, I want to remind you our new book, the Sickness Is the When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, is available@democracyatwork.info books. I also want to thank our Patreon community, as always, thank you for their ongoing invaluable support. If you haven't already, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate to learn more about how you can get involved. Please stay with us. We have an extraordinary interview coming up. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update program. It is with exceptional pleasure and a really good feeling that I welcome to our microphones and to our cameras, an old friend of mine for more years than I want to remember, Professor Arlie Hochschild. She was for many years a professor of sociology at UCAL Berkeley, a position from which she is now retired. But as I knew would be the case, she's probably working harder now than she did when she was a professor. She is the author of nine books, including, and that's our topic for today, the most recent book, strangers in Their Own Anger and Mourning on the American Right. It was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Book Award. She's currently working on a documentary film underway in which respondents are being interviewed about the events of January 6th in Washington, D.C. and she's also continuing the research we're going to be talking about with interviews conducted, of course, through zoom, with people around the country today following up. So first of all, welcome, Arlie. I think our listeners and our viewers will be in for a treat to hear what you have to say.