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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today by correcting an error from a program a few weeks ago when I incorrectly referred to Connecticut State Senator Alex Bernstein as though that were a man. That was a mistake. I misread the name. Alex. She is the Connecticut State Senator, Alex Bernstein. I want to turn first today to something else that happened a little while ago, a remarkable, even for this president, tweet by Donald Trump. Trump actually several tweets in which he essentially recommended to four women of color who now sit in the House of Representatives in Congress that they quote, unquote, go back to where they came from. Three of them were born in the United States. The other one is a naturalized citizen. The gross, insensitive, historically stunning backwardness of all of this should not distract us from what is going on. Mr. Trump is a mouthpiece. He's a mouthpiece for a process that is unfortunately not new. This is called distracting by throwing up something, preferably outrageous, preferably that will attract media attention so as to distract the public from what the real issues are. In this case, Mr. Trump's outrageous, reaching even further into the swamp of racism and nationalism and all the rest. The purpose of these distractions was twofold. First, to distract attention from the concentration camps for refugees that have been established by the United States along its southern border with the horrors of how children are treated and so on. That was getting more and more attention as even the Vice President was able to recognize that something very ugly is going on that had to be distracted from. And this unspeakable racism was one way to do that. But there's another one. We are in the throes of a reaction of the American people, delayed, but therefore stronger to the collapse of capitalism in 2008 and 9, and to the fact that the people who brought us the crisis were the ones bailed out and that the people who've suffered the last 10 years were the one who paid for the bailout of the people who brought it. That would make anybody angry, even if they only half understand it. And the risk for capitalism today, as it has always been, is that the people who are left out in the capitalist story, who are not sharing the wealth, who are sharing the suffering, may turn their anger on the system unless you distract them. If you can convey to at least a portion of an angry working class that it is the non whites among them or the foreigners or the immigrants or the trading partners, well, then you have done your job. And that's all Mr. Trump is doing the job of distracting at least a portion, and in the United States, perhaps a white portion of the working class from the source of its misery and scapegoating others. The fact that he has to do it to such extreme lengths tells you how serious the problem here is, which is something we emphasize on this program all the time. I want to turn next to an update which I call how Gross can Capitalism get? This time it's in France. And here's what happened. A scandal a couple of weeks ago in which it was discovered by the press that one of the ministers in Mr. Macron's government and which minister, the Minister for the environment, had been spending huge amounts of money, first to make his office more comfortable, nearly $100,000, and then to entertain friends, dinners featuring lobster and $500 bottles of wine. Why am I bringing this to your attention as the French discuss it? Because Mr. Macron and his environment minister were the ones who put a tax on on fuel to help pay for improving the environment, which is what stimulated the Yellow Vest movement. They simply said you can find other ways for the money needed to improve the environment. We now know that one of those other ways would be to, oh, maybe move the dinners from $500 bottles of wine, you know, to a couple of bucks for soda pop. And maybe instead of lobsters, some cheapoh, maybe not so cheap hot dogs that would lave money that you wouldn't have to burden the people with. But of course, seriously, what is this? This is a sign that this government, like most French governments, like most capitalist governments, spend money on the people at the top while burdening the rest of us to pay for whatever the social problems are. That needs some addressing. Capitalism is a system that gives a tiny number of people at the top in every business, in every store, office, and factory, a disproportionate amount of wealth. So it isn't surprising that when these folks get to be government officials, they behave in exactly the same way. The problem is the system. And then there was another update that caught my eye. One of the reasons why we have immigrants on our border to the south. I hadn't understood it so well before, and I want to share it with you. Over the last three years, the price of coffee per pound at the farm, the beans, the coffee beans, has gone from over $1.20 per pound to $0.55 per pound. That's a drop of more than 50%. It destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands of small coffee farmers all through Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica. You get the picture. Those people could not survive. Literally. There's one statistic that says over 60% of small coffee farmers reported in surveys that they were food insecure over the last two years. Food insecure is the polite technical term for going hungry. So they did what people hurt by economic change have done for 300 come to the borders of the United States seeking entry so that they don't starve to death. The past of the United States welcomed these people, found a place for them. Not always, but in general, but not now. Now we condemn these people to concentration camps, cages for their children. And why? Because the price of coffee. And who's a major player in the price of coffee? Yeah. The United States. Yeah. And big American corporations. Little footnote. Screwing those farmers was one step. If you haven't noticed a drop in the price of coffee, that might be because the company delivering your coffee drink is keeping the extra money they get by not having to pay as much for coffee as they used to and using it for their profits. It's the system that works that way. Now let me turn to a recent argument by conservatives. They are really having to reach these days. We should have a moment of compassion for their hard situation. They have to fight the demand of Bernie Sanders and other candidates for free college tuition. And in their stretch, here's an argument they came up with that is so remarkable I wanted to share it with you. They said we shouldn't do it because we've learned the lesson. Hear me now. You may not believe this, but I didn't make it up. You can't make up this sort of stuff. We shouldn't have free tuition because we've already made the mistake by helping people with loans to go to college. Oh, I see. We shouldn't have given them loans. No, say the conservatives. And here's why. When we gave students loans, colleges raised the tuitions because they said the students can now get loans and we can raise the tuitions. And the second thing that happened was by giving them loans, we enabled more students to go to school than might otherwise. And that made more of them look for jobs, which is why employers aren't raising wages, because there's all these people looking for jobs. So you see, we shouldn't give them loans and we certainly shouldn't forget free the tuition because colleges will raise their tuition and employers will stop raising wages. Oh, my goodness. This is why we shouldn't help people. Because others in this crazy system would take advantage of helping people. That's Right. That's their argument. A system that allows schools and colleges to negate. The whole point of helping people get a loan to go to school by raising the price for that's a problem that we should solve. And ditto employers who don't pay people a living wage is a problem of a capitalist system that we should address. The conservative solution is to screw young people out of a loan and out of free tuition because the rest of the system behaves so badly. That's the logic of conservatism. The alternative is to change a system and that works this way and frustrates the attempts to help people that loans and free tuition represent. My final update today has to do with the whole process of companies moving abroad. A process that continues, a process that all the theatrics of Mr. Trump have not stopped and have hardly interfered with because what he does is theater. He doesn't have the power and he has no desire to interfere actually in the process. It's too costly to him politically and he gets wrapped across the knuckles by big corporations when he even looks in that direction. So we have nafta. That's the deal by which the United States has access to to Mexico and Canada. In that three country arrangement, Mr. Trump got rid of NAFTA because it isn't fair and substituted the usmca, which is NAFTA rewritten, as everybody who reads the documents knows. And what's its effect? Virtually nothing. And let me give you an example. General Motors is producing its Chevy Blazer SUV and also the new version of the Chevy Cruze, no longer in Lordstown, Ohio. Four and a half thousand workers lost their jobs at the General Motors factory there. Savaging the community, destroying the economics of all those families, interrupting their educations, interrupting their lives, leading to depressions and suicide. This extraordinary story of corporate irresponsibility. And they moved to Mexico. Nor is there the slightest mystery as to why they did that. Hourly wages at the GM plants in Mexico that are producing these cars, $3 an hour wages for the seasoned workers in Lordstown, $30 an hour. Do you get the picture? This is what General Motors saved. They're now going to have workers they pay $3 an hour to and they're going to pocket the profit. All the money saved because of the difference between $30 paid to an American worker in Ohio and $3 paid to the Mexican. What this does is destroy the economy here in the United States and do very little for Mexico, because paying someone $3 an hour means they are condemned to, to poverty there too. Capitalism spreads the poverty here in the United States and also in Mexico. An extraordinary example of how capitalism works and how the leadership of folks like Trump does nothing to stop it. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. I want to remind you please to subscribe to us on our YouTube channel to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which you can do by going to our two websites, rdwolff with two Fs.com and most important, democracyatwork.info and a special thanks as always to the Patreon community. You can follow us there and you can help us in ways that we are grateful for and want to thank you for for as well. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. As we have done before, I am very pleased to welcome back to the microphone and to the camera Dr. Harriet Fraad. She is a mental health counselor and a hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City. She's been on the program many times. Her work explores the intersections of American personal, economic and political life. She writes in a variety of places, and her work can be found at her website, Harriet Fraud. That's spelled H A R R I E T F R A A D. But most importantly, I want to direct your attention to her latest project. It's a bimonthly podcast that explores what is happening in the economic and political realms, as well as the impact of those things on our personal life. It's called Capitalism Hits Home. It answers questions about how capitalism impacts personal life, intimate relationships, those kinds of issues. You can find the podcast Capitalism Hits Home on itunes, Google Play, and our own website, democracyatwork.info and if you would like to support this project, yet another way to engage it is to go to patreon.com capitalismhitshome welcome to the program.