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 and it is my
pleasure to bring this kind of analysis
to you every week. Before jumping into
our topics for today, I want to make
clear to everybody that the initiative
taken last year by public school
teachers in half a dozen states, all of
which had been won by mr. Trump, but all
of which were showing that public
employees particularly teachers are not
going to accept the destruction of
public services, the damaging of a whole
generation of school kids, and the
disrespect to teachers by providing them
low salaries and inadequate money to be
a good teacher, which is what they want;
that this is spreading; that earlier in
the year the Los Angeles public school
teachers had a successful strike and
then the demo, excuse me the Denver
Colorado teachers took up the banner. It
is spreading all over the United States;
it's long overdue; and i want to tip my
hat to all of the creative and
powerfully courageous teachers that are
leading these kinds of improvements in
society, not waiting for political
leaderships that have failed once again
to do their job. The theme for today is a
little unusual, perhaps. It's a kind of
discussion of the glaring differences
between what's actually going on in the
economy, and what the media and the
public conversations have to say about
it. So let me start with what is in,
perhaps, one way the most glaring. In
recent, weeks there was one of the
greatest demonstrations in the history
of
the world, and if it's surprising you,
that's my point;
something isn't working. A million people,
that you heard me right, a million people
marched in Kolkata, used to be called
Calcutta, marched against the Modi
government there; marched against the
neoliberalism, that has been the dominant
policy for India; a policy worsening the
already extreme poverty and, and
inequality that that society suffers.
The movement was led also by the
following organization: the Communist
Party of India - Marxist. Maybe that's
why you couldn't get much coverage; maybe
it was too difficult to understand that
a communist party mobilized a million
people in a major city. But whatever the
reasons, it means that people around the
world, particularly people in the United
States, are simply unaware of the kinds
of conflict and what the issues are,
building in other societies. It's hard
not to come up then with the conclusion
that it will have to be some scandalous
event, some explosive moment that will
finally get the media's attention, and
then the media, the reporters, and the
editors, they won't know very well how to
evaluate any of this; and as if this
weren't the only example, there are so
many others. Venezuela, yes they have all
kinds of crises now, but we haven't been
told for a long time what is the meaning
of a economic system like Venezuela's
dependent on oil; a society, a monoculture
we used to call it in economics, whose
fortunes rise and fall with the price and
trading conditions of one item, rather than
having a diversified, balanced economy.
What is the result of a revolutionary
socialist government, Hugo Chavez,
trying to change a society that has for
200 years been polarized between a tiny
group of wealthy folks at the top, and a
small middle class, and a vast
poverty-stricken population, both rural
and urban? What happens when you try to
change directions? What kinds of
opposition, and then how does all of that
interact with the American foreign
policy since 1830's declaration of
Manifest Destiny, meaning the United
States is in control of the Western
Hemisphere?  How does that all play? None
of it! We're given just bits, maybe a
violence in the street. I could go on, not
understanding what led to the yellow
vest movement in France, what led to the
extreme right-wing government in Hungary,
what are the conflicts, what are they hit,
all of that's left out. So I want to
complain to all of you that we have a
press that does not deal with so much,
that when it finally deals with
something, it deals with it with a level
of ignorance about what's going on
that's painful. Next example: we've had
two grotesque examples in the last year
of corporations, big ones, playing us as
the citizens in a way that's really
unconscionable. The first was the Foxconn
deal.
Foxconn was going to build an immense
factory in Wisconsin, through a deal they
made with the then Governor Walker, who
should be famous Republican governor, and
with mr. Trump's blessing. It was to be
an example of foreign companies coming
here to establish manufacturing and get
manufacturing going again, lots of PR,
lots of hoopla. The second example was
Amazon's
search for a second headquarters; and
they finally ended up with one in Queens,
part of New York City, and another one in
Crystal City Virginia. In both cases, and
here's the big point, in both cases
lots of PR covered by the media about
how the jobs they were going to bring,
with a secondary focus on the billions,
with a B, the billions of dollars in
subsidies Foxconn was going to get from
Wisconsin, and Amazon was going to get
from the city and state of New York, and
from the state of Virginia, and from the
city, Crystal City there. Well,
they're all falling apart; they're all in
doubt. The Foxconn deal now looks much
smaller, it's not altogether clear how much
of the subsidy they already got, will get,
for what, what pair down version. What's going
on here is horrible! Billions and
billions of dollars of subsidy mean that
money is not available to provide the
public schools and to maintain the roads,
and do the things that Wisconsin needs,
and the same is true in New York and
Virginia.
These are boondoggles, and the public
relations flurry and the politicians
trotted out to say how wonderful it is
that jobs are coming. When you sit down
and you do the arithmetic, the jobs are
few, the number of new jobs fewer still,
and when you calculate the amount of
billions given to them, this is the most
expensive program for jobs ever seen, and
no reasonable person would be in support
of it. Real estate interests like it;
politicians love the attention;
it looks real good for Cuomo, for Trump,
and even for De Blasio; but, this is a bad
deal, worked out in the back rooms,
costing the people of our country
enormous amounts of money, that could
much better be used
elsewhere. Here's another one: SunTrust
and BBT, two huge regional banks are
merging to become, if I remember, the
seventh or eighth largest bank in the
United States. What are they doing? Well,
here's the joke, if you think it's funny:
after the crash of 2008, one of the
biggest slogans of the time was "our
banks are too big to fail." What did that
mean? Well that was a ploy of the banks.
They went to the government to bail them
out, since all of them were bankrupt; all
of them could not meet their demands,
their liabilities exceeded their assets;
they were bankrupt in fact; so they went
to the government to bail them out. The
government hesitated; it was public
money they would have to use; and the
banks came back and said "we're too big
to fail," which is a polite way of saying:
if you don't help us, and we go down,
we'll take the whole economy with us, a
threat no politician was willing to risk;
so they got the trillions from the
Federal Reserve, from the US Treasury
that we all remember in 2008, 9 and 10.
Well, as this merger of the SunTrust and
the BBT banks shows it's a continuing
story. The banks that were too big to
fail have become bigger still. They'll be
in a better position than they were
next time the downturn comes, many
expect it this year or next, to be able to
blackmail the people of the United
States, through its government, to bail
them out again. And just to remind you to
take a look, JPMorgan is now the biggest
bank in the United States, two and a half
trillion dollars in assets, significantly
bigger than it was in 2008; number two in
America, the Bank of America, 2.3 trillion
dollars. That's an amount of money that's
half the budget of the United States in
assets.
They're bigger than they were. Citigroup
1.8 trillion; Wells Fargo 1.8 trillion.
There's the big four. They are the big
monsters. All of them are bigger than
they were when they threatened us with
their bigness last time, something we
ought to think about more than we do. And
my last update for today, president
Trump's State of the Union speech, where
he boasted about 500,000 jobs added in
manufacturing. I'm not gonna quarrel with
his numbers, others have done that, it's
easy to do.
He's very loosey-goosey when he uses
numbers in ways everybody who pays
attention knows. But here are some of the
facts he didn't tell you about: just to
be clear, in 1950 the United States had
15 million manufacturing jobs; today it
has eight and a half. That's right, over
the last 60, 70 years we have lost
roughly half the manufacturing jobs we
once had. The line is a straight line
down, but worse, in 1950 manufacturing was
30% of the labor force, today it's eight
and a half percent of the labor force.
Come on folks! This is a country whose
capitalist employers have decided what
to do with manufacturing. Here's what
they've done:
one, they moved the jobs out of the
United States in order to pay lower
wages; number two, they automated the jobs,
they substituted machines, computers,
robots, whatever, to get rid of those
workers. Manufacturing output is up,
manufacturing employment goes into the
toilet; and nothing mr. Trump promises
has happened, and nothing mr. Obama, who
made the same promise about
manufacturing, that didn't work out
either. If you don't want manufacturing
to disappear, you have
to face that you can't let capitalists
driven by profit make those decisions,
because they've been making them for 60
years, and I just gave you the result; and
the rest of mr. Trump's speech was just
so much warm air. Well we've come to the
end of the first half of our show, I want
to remind you at this point, as I often
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part of what keeps us going. Stay with us
we'll be right back with an
extraordinary interview. welcome back
friends to the second half of today's
Economic Update. It with, it is with pride
and pleasure that I welcome today Lee
Camp. He's the host and head writer of
the hit comedy news show Redacted
Tonight on Rt America. It's a program
I've watched many times, to enjoy not
just the news, which is real and serious,
but the delivery, the way in which the
ironies of all of it are brought forward.
It's a way of presenting the news that
is part of why I asked Lee to join us
today. He's also the creator of the
popular YouTube
program called Moment of Clarity, and
he's author of the book by the same name.
I learned recently that he's a former
contributor to the Onion newspaper that
has brought humor to so much of America
and to the news that so badly needs it;
uh and he's also a former humor writer
for the Huffington Post.
We thank you very very much for joining
us. I should add that George Carlin,
another comedian I've admired all my
life,
his daughter Kelly called him one of the
few comics these days keeping her
father's style and delivery going in
American culture, and if nothing else,
that alone would recommend him. So thanks
for joining us. Thank you so much I'm
looking forward to explaining economics
to you good
you mix comedy and news redacted tonight
is is famous for that tell me why you do
that and whether that mixture works and
if so how tell me about this magical mix
of humor and news well it turns out that
describing the the slow down fall of our
environment and the exploitation of the
working class can get dry at times it
can be a little boring so I spice it up
with comedy and I I think you know it is
in certain ways these are dark times
these could also be exciting times if we
succeed in changing things but I think
that people are willing to listen longer
if they're getting both the enjoyment
with the facts at the same time I think
you can talk to people that maybe would
turn it off quickly because it doesn't
agree with everything they've lined up
and that side their little bubble there
so I think comedy has a lot of dynamics
that allow for a communication in a
different way and then I think just art
in general whether it's comedy music
painting it's if you look at dissidents
throughout history those willing to
speak dark truths art has been a pivotal
and crucial way that gets past a lot of
the gatekeepers that are design
to keep the status quo in place yeah I
notice I get criticism sometimes and I
think they're well taken that it becomes
difficult to listen to me if there are
too many sequences of bad things
happening people like to know
but it becomes depressing right after a
while well you can and you do a great
job of this I think I love your show by
the way is talking about those who are
making efforts to change this I think is
another way so of breaking up just like
these many workers were laid off this is
going on this is going on with these
people stood up and these people did
this and and detailing the the around
the edges where people are fighting to
to create a sustainable world well let
me ask you a question I think of every
time I see a comedian these days using
or reacting to Donald Trump I'm
particularly thinking of Stephen Colbert
who seems to build his entire program
around this
so how has mr. Trump and his
administration how does that shaped your
activity or your approach to what you do
well it's a it's a good that comes with
the bed so the good thing is Donald
Trump has through his outright you know
fraud and lying and he is a
front-and-center snake oil salesman he
has revealed our system for what it is
he is he is the epitome of a gilded
billionaire he is a brand name he shows
the inverted totalitarian structure for
all its all its glory you know the rule
by the corporate state is up there with
like as if it's been drawn by a
caricature artist and so in that way
he's revealed our system which makes I
think explaining it to a lot of people
much easier you you don't have the slick
talk you have a liar you have you know
someone who has just called out and his
administration too and have kind of laid
bare the system so in that way I think
it makes my job easier in a sense the
other side the bad side is that he is a
shiny object where if you're just
pointing at him and laughing at him then
you're not seeing the system for what it
really is you're just putting it on one
man which i think is where a lot of the
comedy news but also
talking heads in general are failing
some intentionally I think our
mainstream media wants to use that to
cover up the the deeper flaws in our
structure so if you just pointed Trump
and say look out dummy is look how
orange he is look at this look at that
you're you're not looking at the 90% of
the system that basically our two
corporate parties agree on you're not
looking at Wall Street you're not
looking at climate change you're just
talking about the latest tweet so he can
be a shine both ways
cuts both ways and it can be a jingling
of the keys then look over here and a
lot of America will do it and also he
really is a key jingler the endless
tweets are kind of you can't even get
into the critique of the first thing he
says he's already on to six more and
you've lost it and it's it's a kind of a
yeah it's almost hypnotic in a kind of
way that and he knows how to do those
tweets when there's something he wants
to cover up or when something's going
bad for him or the system as a whole you
know hey look at this crazy tweet I just
posted and the media will you know do
exactly that you know it keeps reminding
me of that famous real estate agent who
takes you to look at an apartment and
you're looking around and you notice
behind the couch a whole row of
mousetraps which lets you know and he
sees your face he registered and he
immediately starts talking about the
view out the window so that you don't
proceed by asking why are there you know
this is an endless hustle for one goal
sell the apartment or rent the apartment
yeah I mean Trump is serving for the
mainstream media as to look out the
window in a lot of ways because yeah you
know 51% of Millennials I think now say
capitalism isn't the best system and
what they can't talk about that surely
not he was desperate with that State of
the Union speech to to dismiss socialism
but in the way giving of vent to the
fact he's alarmed they used the word
alarmed by my at all all right you often
in your humor and in your news program
talk about the economy
you're already unusual one of the
reasons I started watching was I was
drawn that here is someone who's
actually taking seriously that the
economy is a problem not this or that
detail but the system as a whole with
how do you sense where the American
economy is well when you when you make
your humor you write it because you
write all your stuff yourself what is it
where do you think that economy is going
so that you shape your humor to deal
with that well I just wake up in the
morning and I just listen to your show
and that's that's it no I I think I mean
we are and we're in late stage
capitalism and I think that like you can
see it you can see that everything's
fraying around the edges you can see the
environment collapsing around us you're
50% of all wildlife killed in the past
40 years it we just can't sustain and
you know I said these these could be
these are dire times but they also could
be the times of great change and great
ability to get us to a more sustainable
future because it's like the the need
for change is being punched into our
face now it's you can't deny it you
can't look away you people can drive
down the road and no they never see a
mammal bigger than this they can look
around and see and and so to me that has
to I want that to be some at some piece
in in each episode of redactor tonight I
want to talk about you where this is
where are our fading Empire is and and
and where it's going because if I spend
all day on the soap opera of politics I
think you're we're missing out on what
we need to be caring about and the steps
we need to take to make that change
yeah I've been saying to myself and a
little bit publicly having been a critic
of capitalism for a pretty long time
this is really the first time in my life
that I have the sense it's falling apart
mm-hmm it's not a system that needs
criticism alone it's a system that needs
criticism in part because we are in that
delicate moment where if we don't do
something it's gonna take us down with
it yeah
and and you're seeing that even small
criticism is alarming to these the
gilded elite who are trying to entrench
this system trying to hang on to it
because when you have a rocky structure
all it takes is a little push to make it
fall over whereas if this was going
great if this was humming along and
workers were treated right and
everything it wouldn't be worried about
they wouldn't need to worry about a
little push big item in the news I want
just your gut reaction then is whele
mm-hmm we're being told everything from
the sky is falling to freedom is at
stake - here's another proof that
socialism doesn't work it core makes
your head spin a little country in a
corner of a part of the world getting
this kind of play what what are you
gonna do with this with your comedy well
let me ask you how many cia-backed coos
would it take for you to realize
socialism doesn't work all right that's
what I know I mean you can look at our
lists of times we've gotten involved in
countries and how often do we really
help the country how often do they end
up just great and our democracy bombs
just fix everything you know you can
look at recent recent examples of Libya
and Iraq and and Afghanistan and say how
much better off are these people because
we bomb them or we gave we sanctions
that you know cut medicine from people
so it's the same in Venezuela right now
and and really there are there are three
things that make us want to very much
topple a government one is socialists
you know throwing off the capitalists
change very much scares us we see that
with our endless hatred of Cuba and
everything and embargo of Cuba - is
dropping the dollar which Venezuela has
done and the third is oil and Venezuela
has the largest oil reserves of any
country right now and and so we're doing
it again and and if you look at it's
just so laughable like and as I said
earlier the the mask has come off with
Trump and the Trump administration john
bolton said on fox news that we want to
go into venezuela because we want the
oil he said this would be a great
opportunity for American companies to
get that oil and it's it's amazing that
they can't even sustain the the guise of
this is humanitarian somehow
it's not you know the people there are
shortages of certain foods in Venezuela
right now because of our sanctions
largely because of how the troubled
their economy is but people aren't
there's still food on the shelves people
aren't starving there are students foods
missing and and so it's it's ridiculous
and 80 percent of the country had never
heard of Juan Guido
until Trump announced him as the
president of Venezuela it's it's a
laughable attempt
it's amazing to me also that the debate
is really between the Republican Bolton
types who like almost the naughtiness of
saying it the way it is and goes back to
your earlier point it's all on display
by these guys whereas in the past we've
had the Polish of some harvard-trained
character babbling about freedom
democracy and everything else while
doing exactly the same right all right
final question we have time for given
your program given everything you see
what's your sense of the American
people's openness to thinking critically
about capitalism to thinking of
alternative economic systems to really
beginning to take seriously the notion
that there could be and there should be
pretty basic change what's your feel
your gut is what I'm looking for
yeah I think it's far more I think the
American people are far more open to it
then they used to be even in my short
life span I you know as I said earlier I
think some studies showed 51% of
Millennials are don't believe capitalism
is the is the best system I think that
we've seen what endless greed has
brought us and it's not happiness it's
not even people that have achieved the
success that are incredibly wealthy I
think there's a lot of depression on
that level as well so it's and I think
that younger the younger generations
really get that and really understand
that and and I you know I just put out a
new stand-up comedy special and in that
I talk about how the different groups
that are all fighting to change this
should be working together and realize
this is all under one umbrella it is
under this umbrella of like you know we
are fighting against endless consumerism
materialism that is all part of an
unfettered capitalist system we thank
you very very much for joining us thank
all of you also this is another way that
Lee has developed of getting these kinds
of ideas across I think of him as a
collaborator or colleague somebody who
really reflects the kinds of impulses
that we try to bring to the fore
thank you very much for joining us and I
look forward to speaking with you again
next week
