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- [00:10]
A
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 with a very important event that got much less attention than it ought to have. The Federal Reserve, that is the central bank of the United States, made an announcement over the last week indicating that it plans to keep interest rates in the United States at or close to zero and to do so for several years. The most frequently mentioned number, five years into the future. Now, the only way the Federal Reserve can do that is by pumping vast amounts of money into, into the economy, which is what it has been doing already. So basically what they were telling us was two one, that they will continue to pump more and more money into this economy because things are so desperate that they dare not stop doing that, despite the fact that this mountain of money is an overhanging problem for our society that everyone who knows about these issues understands. But the second important thing, just as important, is a little detail. They said our goal remains 2% inflation a year. But since for several years we've had well below 2%, we're now going to have, yes, you guessed it, several years of more than 2%. So we get in a few years to the average of 2%. Okay, let's then look at what it means to have an inflation of 3, 4, 5%. And I won't even go in to the difficulty of managing inflations, this glib idea. Oh, we can go in and manage it to be 3 and 4. Most of human history indicates people who tried to control inflations having a very difficult time doing it and failing as often as they succeeded. But let's look at the effects of the Federal Reserve basically saying we're going to keep pumping money in even if it causes an inflation of goods and services. Here's what the point by pumping in money, the only one thing we know of is that the stock market will keep going up because that's the only thing that has happened positively in this economy since the crash that began in February and got worse with the virus. We have had massive unemployment. We continue. We have had massive losses of industry and enterprise. We continue. The stock market has gone up, the rich have gotten richer, and the announcement by the Federal Reserve makes all those rich people smile because they're going to get richer still. Why? Because the money being pumped in goes mostly into the stock market, where it raises the prices of stocks which those who have significant amounts of them are happy to see. Is that a Bubble? Yes. Will it burst? Well, every other one has. I'll leave it to your guess as to what the happy or not so happy ending here will likely be. But here's the most important. If they're successful, the Federal Reserve in making at least some of that money, go into the economy, goods and services producing economy, not the stock market. And it drives up the prices which they seem to want. Here's what we're going to have in the next few a job situation that is gruesome. With massive unemployment. There are currently, as I speak to you, 28 million Americans getting unemployment compensation. And that's not all the unemployed. We're going to have a gruesome job situation which is going to put pressure on wages to go down because every employer knows that they can cut your wages, they can increase your hours, they can do pretty much whatever they want. Because if you quit, there are unemployed people who will take your position. So they know that wages aren't going anywhere. Meanwhile, pumping money in will push up prices. You get the message, folks. On top of everything that has been done by this capitalist economy to the working class majority of stay at home, wear a mask, lose your job, lower your income, lose your benefits, be unable to have your children educated, all of that, we're now going to have stable wages if they don't go down and rising prices. The savaging of the American working class continues. Only the Federal Reserve has come up with yet another way to make it happen. My next update is a bit of a shout out, a celebration almost, you might say, of the courage of the professional athletes of this country. Having stood up in a way that, frankly, I didn't expect. Shame on me. And I want to offset my little bit of shame that I didn't see it by celebrating and congratulating them, standing up for the justice this country so badly needs, and saying, and this is the important thing, we don't find these athletes, tell us in the political realm, anybody or anything that expresses our commitment to our determination to have social justice. And we don't find it in the labor movement either. So we're going to do it on our own. We are going to do what no political party or politician dares to do and what no union, even our own union, has so far dared to do, which is the classic act of, of people who have really one thing to withhold to make their point. And that's their work, that's their labor. In the case of the professional athletes, their extraordinary skills in the sports they have devoted their lives to, they are Making a clear no business as usual. None of this. We run around so you can be a spectator and have a nice beer while you watch. No, no, no, no, no. These issues have to be dealt with. Finally. And when working people act like this, take this step. Nonviolent, non confrontational, but crystal clear. What's happening is, and this is so important, something which a great political leader of the past once called dual power. It's when the old systems of power are so collapsed, so weak, so irrelevant, that human beings have to find new and different ways to express their political goals. The parties in this country, Republican and Democrat, don't deal with our real problems. They give us fantasies to watch on tv. And our labor unions have lost their militancy and their commitment to real action. And so people are finding their own. Not only have the athletes done this, making this issue clear to everybody, but they've already spawned copycats. And the first one that I encountered was an email to me, since I'm a professor, by something that has a Twitter presence called ScholarStrike. ScholarStrike, all one word. This is a movement of thousands of professors across the United Statesteachers at colleges and universities who have set the date of September 8 and 9 for actions across America's colleges and universities in the same quest for social justice that was pioneered by the professional athletes. Wonderful. Long overdue. And I'm at least one voice that wants to support and strengthen what these courageous political pioneers are doing. My next update has to do with a phenomena that's going on, and I'm just reporting yet another milestone. What's the phenomenon? Well, to be blunt, it's the merging of the government and big business in this country whose collaboration and coordination, which was always there, is now becoming, what shall I say, intimate. Here's the examples you already the president of the United States slapping tariffs left and right, interfering in the pricing of goods and services in international trade, in, in doing all the kinds of government intervention that Republicans used to say they didn't want. Then we have Mr. Trump again punishing, persecuting, a Chinese owned company, Huawei, telling us we should not allow them to buy things, sell things, function in the country because, you know, they have a close relationship with the Chinese government. What an interesting idea. The American companies that you've heard of, you know, let's see, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they all have relationships with the United States government, but nobody around the world has said, oh, we can't do business with them because they talk to the government. This is fakery, friends. This is the government picking Winners and losers among companies becoming an active player. And so here's another milestone. First, President Trump, in his usual bloviating way, announces that he's going to ban the TikTok Corporation from functioning. He didn't know at the time that TikTok has an arrangement with the Chinese government which forbids these companies from selling to foreigners because they were built up with all kinds of investments from the Chinese government through tax money and so on. So he can't do what he wants them to do, but he tried. And there's the milestone. Trump got together with Microsoft and Walmart, I kid you not. So that a deal could be made in which Microsoft and Walmart together, you might have thought of them as separate corporations together, would buy at, of course, a cheap price, the TikTok Corporation, because it was about to lose its business in the United States, under threat from the government. What a convenient arrangement between Trump and Microsoft and Walmart. The closer and closer coordination of government and big private capitalism has a name in the history of the Western world. It's called fascism. Not the symbols you see with the jackboots in the street. Those are important, heaven knows. But the quiet arrangement that there is no more separation between the government and big business, it's just one big hustle. My last update that we'll have time for is a very quick but very devastating. Denmark and the United States. How did they react to the coronavirus? Was it the same or was it different? Well, I'll use the following. Is an elephant the same as a flea or is it different? Here we go. Denmark is a small country. It has 10 active political parties. Just a footnote. On the right wing end are monarchists. They support the Queen of Denmark. Denmark is a kingdom. On the left, there is the Communist Party. Ten political parties. You know why? Because people in Denmark want freedom of choice. And they have a big choice among parties. We, of course, don't. All 10 of them endorsed a lockdown of the country two weeks after the first CORONA case was identified. That happened on February 27th. Two weeks later, they shut down. They closed all their schools. By the end of the spring, they opened all their schools. And today? What's the story? Per capita, Denmark has one sixth the amount of COVID cases the United States does. We have six times more people with CORONA per thousand than they do in Denmark. What a failure. And they're a socialist country. So remember, the next time someone tries to scare you in a socialist country, remember the comparison. It might help you. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Please remember, as always, to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Please visit our democracyatwork.info website to learn more about our other shows, about our union co op store and our two books and and we're about to release a new one soon. And lastly, a special thanks to our Patreon community, whose invaluable support helps make this show possible. Stay with us. We'll be right back with today's guest, Bob Hennelly. Welcome back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. It really is with great pleasure that I welcome back to our microphones and our cameras someone who has been on this program repeatedly and each time with, I think, a greater insight and more success. His name is Bob Henley. He is a print and broadcast labor journalist who reports for the Chief Leader, a newspaper covering public unions since 1897. And recently it broadened its coverage to include the entire labor movement. And that's indeed what I'm going to ask Bob to talk with us about. Bob's writing regularly appears in Salon, raw Story, Insider, New Jersey and AlterNet. You have seen him on Democracy now, the PBS NewsHour, and heard him on NPR, as well as appearing repeatedly here on Economic Update. So, Bob, thank you very much for joining us.
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B
Thanks for having me.
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A
All right. I'm going to jump right in. You have been following as part of your journalistic work the struggles of public employees and their unions in an increasingly difficult governmental labor situation for decades. But now we see that all government employees, schoolteachers, firefighters, you name it, under enormous pressure because they're on the front lines with this pandemic and its accompanying economic crash. Tell us a little bit about what that struggle is meaning for public employees, and then I want to ask you questions about how they're reacting.
- [16:07]
B
So let's start first with the federal government. What people don't really understand is that Donald Trump, our current president, is the employer, the big Boss of you, 2 million civil servants spread throughout all 50 states and territories. In that position, he's responsible, like any employer would be, for the health and safety of all those workers. They have been represented since 1962, based on an executive order signed by John F. Kennedy by labor unions and have collective bargaining agreements. There are some 700,000 of them that are unionized. They're represented by the American Federation of Government Employees and several other unions. These are the men and women that are on the front lines of the Veterans Administration, the Aviation Security, tsa, the Bureau of Prisons, any governmental function, indeed even our meat processing facilities. And so when Donald Trump decided not to test and to basically ignore the reports he was getting from these frontline workers as they were getting sick, he in essence, really proliferated. The disease put these families and these workers and their communities at risk. So that's just on the federal level. On the local level, what you have is EMTs and first responders dying at a record number. We know that at least 1,000 health care professionals have perished in the process exposing their families. The tragedy here, Rick, is that they warned this country and the media as early as March that the CDC's efforts to, how shall we say, manage, to inventory. It's important for people to understand that on March 11, the New York Nurses association issued a press statement that warned that the CDC had changed the guidance that covers how we use N95 masks. And prior to this time, one would have been written up as a nurse or healthcare professional. If you didn't get rid of the mask after each clinical encounter, the way the CDC, under the pressure from Mr. Trump, wrote the new regulation, you were to adopt Sedent 95 in your lunch pail and carry with you all week long. The public health professionals and nurses, doctors warned that this would result in a loss of life among the health care sector and perhaps most provocatively, turn hospitals into a vector of the disease they were fighting. I submit to you at this sad point, that's exactly what happened.
- [18:30]
A
Wow. In other words, if I could be blunt, the policies of this government are responsible for the deaths of federal employees in sizable numbers and essential workers.
- [18:42]
B
In fact, it might be said that what's required now, I must say there are some progressive voices, Kyle Maloney, Congressman Nadler, and even a bipartisan Congressman King, talking about creating a way of having something like the Victims compensation fund after 911 to at least provide some support for what is maybe thousands of essential workers who have perished in this pandemic and in the process infected their families.
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A
How has the US labor movement reacted to all of this since it's an assault not only on the working people who are public employees, but as you keep reminding us, their families, their communities, et cetera?
- [19:21]
B
It has been mixed. One could say that early on, we have the example of the TWU International under leadership of John Samuelson, which represent transit workers and people in the airline industry. Early on, there was a situation where they had a customer who was flying out of New York to Miami Beach. The gentleman knew he had a pending COVID test, and he found out while they were taxiing, that he came back positive. So he informed the flight crew of this. They immediately removed him appropriately from the despair. The crew and the population on the plane, the other passengers, and then management told this flight crew that they were to return back to service and turn around another revenue flight and told them that they had to take it because there was no problem. The man was asymptomatic when they got him to leave the plane. Of course, these flight attendants, as so often as the case with working people, were better informed than management. And they disabused management that indeed this was still an exposure. And at that point, the union backed them up. Major politicians called JetBlue, and these individuals were able not to get on a revenue flight and got the two weeks they needed. That was one example. On the other hand, we've had what happened with the meat processors where the president used the Defense Production act to force the meat plants to be open, despite the fact that there was growing concerns by both law enforcement and local public health officials in these primarily rural areas that the plants were just blowing up with COVID And so, rather than side with local law enforcement first responders, the Blue Lives Matter people, the president decided to let the go with the companies. And so they didn't have to do anything that was required. And so, as a result, close to 200 folks who work in that industry, primarily people of color and immigrants, died, and four USDA inspectors died as well. So that's how it's gone now. One would have thought that in an America with a more robust and militant labor movement, no meat would have moved in the country at that point. Unfortunately, I'm sad to report that Aside from an op ed for Mr. Trumka, everything else was very lacking, of course, except for the United Food and Commercial Workers, who did all they could but were sadly in isolation.
- [21:39]
A
Okay, my next question follows. Tell me how you react as so many Americans are now reacting to the decision of professional athletes, some of the finest athletes this country has or has produced, making a decision that the political parties of these countries do not represent, what needs to be done politically or their view of it, and that the labor movement doesn't either, and that they're now going to make sure there's no business as usual. How do you see this in the context of everything you've just said about what public employees are confronting?
- [22:16]
B
I think it's a transformative moment, and I think that it's no accident that this is a primarily younger workforce. Primarily, but not exclusively, young men of color. And I Think that the fact that they have such agency and are willing to put at risk that agency to help rekindle the militancy that is required. I mean, the reality here is that while the drumbeat of the corporate media is that we are to stay tuned and participate in the election to get in our ballot for many and thousands of essential workers, that will be entirely too late. And those are the lucky ones. There will be individuals who will pass as a result of this, who have died, whose families will be infected. Moreover, as we speak right now, 1.5 million public workers have been laid off. And it looks like because of the lack of intervention by the Republican Congress and Mitch McConnell, that there's going to be no backstopping like there was corporations for the very entities, our municipalities and our counties. Right. That provide us the backstop against the expansion of this awful disease.
- [23:17]
A
It does overwhelm you every now and then. I was just talking before with a worker here with us that it's very hard to get up in the morning confronting all of this. All right. How do you react to the politicians, I won't mention names, who say that what needs to be done now is to get back to the pre. Covid. Normal. In other words, we just have to get back to where we were, I don't know, let's say January of this year before everything fell apart. How do you react to that as a stated political goal of the major political institutions of this country?
- [23:55]
B
I think that it is the result of a lack of understanding the trajectory of our current crisis. I think that we did not get into this place of being so vulnerable to a pandemic. And I can only use my own health as an example. I had a health crisis a while back. It was not the consequence of one bad choice on one day. It was a consequence of inattention for decades. And so similarly, we can apply this same basic, simple analysis to the country. And so for a long time, we've seen the United States disinvest in its public health system all the lessons that were learned after, ironically, the great Spanish influenza outbreak, which brought a revolution in health care. It brought about things like school, nursing. We had a basic insight. The disease was not in the hospital, but in the community. And over the last 30 or 40 years, as we fought our never ending war on terrorism in the last 20, we lost sight of those fundamental lessons from that great loss of life. And so we're relearning it. So I'd submit to you that if we wanted to get back to the pre Normal would be we'd just be waiting for the next more deadly virus.
- [24:59]
A
Okay, here's the big one. You know what they used to call a $64,000 question is your reporting and your investigation as an investigative reporter, is it leading you to the conclusion or anything like the following conclusion that the public sector in this society is at such a stage of dysfunction, of neglect, of lack of investment, as you put it, lack of attention, lack even of learning the lessons. Many people think I'm one of them, that there is a kind of general social collapse underway. What does your work with the public sector, what does it give you to contribute to that conversation?
- [25:43]
B
Well, I think that what I am seeing has been an unprecedented, historic response to a once in a century crisis. And what I do see is that within unions, a kind of grassroots movement that gives me hope. And I would say that one of the problems in terms of what's been happening in the lack of aggressive response and militancy has been the unions themselves, historically, to be honest, have been subject to corruption. You can't fake that. And then also they've had a problem with succession planning. Men our age and our circumstance are the people that have been leading these organizations. And there's been resistance historically to providing updraft for the young people of all different backgrounds and circumstance who are ready and able. And I did see in the Black Lives Matter moment in the response of aggressive unions like the CWA and AFSCME and other unions to finally opening the door and letting these young people take the seats that they so have long been entitled to.
- [26:43]
A
Last question that we have time for. I noticed because I'm a professor, I got word of it over the weekend. I notice that there's now a movement among professors, thousands of them in this country, to follow the lead of the professional athletes. Their Twitter handle, by the way, is ScholarsStrike. ScholarsStrike. And they've designated September 8th and 9th for action by professors who are concerned about social justice and all of the issues that have been raised by the professional athletes. Is it conceivable that we will see other parts of this society, particularly public employees, also following suit and beginning to act to build dual power, a political movement that will do what the political institutions are failing to do?
- [27:37]
B
I think so. And I'll tell you that it is not. It's kind of coincidental but poetic that this leads up to, of course, September 11th, which is the 19th anniversary when we had the attack in New York and Washington and Shanksville, where we lost, you know, close to 3,000 individuals in that attack. What most people don't know is that we have lost more people to date from the occupational hazards that came as a result of the EPA under George Bush lying about the nature of air quality in lower Manhattan and telling all the first responders that I spent the last four years writing on about for the chief that the air was safe to breathe. And so as a consequence in good faith and patriotic to the to the man and woman, we now find that close to 50,000 of them are sick. This is very analogous to what Covid is doing and so I do see a kind of flashpoint that we an opportunity that could be historic.
- [28:31]
A
I wish we had more time, Bob, but we don't. Thank you very much for all of your insights and your work and we will be talking to you again in the near future. To all my viewers and my listeners, thank you for your attention and I look forward to being with you again next week.