RICHARD WOLFF: Welcome, friends, to another
edition of Economic Update, a weekly program
devoted to the economic dimensions of our
lives: debts, incomes, our jobs, those of
our children, those looming down the road.
I'm your host Richard Wolff.
I want to begin today by noting a very old
blame game that is circulating around the
major capitalist economies.
It's not a new thing, but it's important to
realize that it's an old thing being recycled
yet again.
So let's start with the United States, with
Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.
Who are they blaming for the difficulties
of the United States?
Here we go: immigrants, the Chinese, our trading
partners, and now also African Americans – because
they are responsible for the decline of, say,
Baltimore – and also, of course, his political
opponents.
Notice what's missing: the capitalist economic
system, no blame at all.
Let's shift then to England.
They have a new leader, Boris Johnson.
What does he do?
Hmm, it'll come as a surprise.
He blames immigrants and other foreigners,
in his case Europeans, with a little China
bashing thrown in for good, and his political
opponents.
Same story, same blame game, same exemption
– nothing wrong with the economic system.
And in the European Union, you basically get
the same thing.
Depending on which of the many countries in
the European Union you look at, they either
blame the United States-China trade war, or
immigrants, or their political opponents,
left or right.
In France, the leader, Macron, blames the
yellow-vest movement that has shaken France
for the last several months.
In Germany, Angela Merkel, on her way out,
blames the far right, the resurgence of a
fascism in Germany that is truly scary.
In all of these kinds of things, there's always
a grain of truth.
There are problems for these societies that
come from immigrants, and from the Chinese
trade wars, and so on, but the really interesting
thing is they're not facing the problems of
an economic system in decline.
Capitalism in Western Europe, North America,
and Japan is having more and more troubles
as an economic system as it serves a smaller
and smaller, rich minority at the expense
of everybody else.
But it's a job of all of these politicians
to point the finger everywhere else but there.
It's a blame game; you shouldn't be fooled.
Then my eyes and ears were caught by a remarkable
piece of reporting done by The Wall Street
Journal, to give them credit, and based on
the work of a professor of law at the Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C., by the name
of Adam Levitin.
Here's what he did: A simple exercise, but
boy does it tell a lot.
He asked how much has the median income of
an American family changed over the last 30
years, counting from 1987 to 2017 – a nice
period of 30 years we can look at.
And he said, I want to see how much income
the 50 percent middle of the American distribution
of income, how has it changed over those 30
years?
And here's what he found: When you adjust
for inflation, in other words you adjust for
the fact that prices went up, the median income
of an American family went up 14 percent in
30 years.
That's less than one half of one percent of
a real increase, on average, for an American
family.
In other words, very little at all.
And then he said, I'm going to look at three
specific other things that American families
have to pay for, to see what happened to them,
because it'll give us an insight.
And here's what he found – and I'm going
to give you the exact numbers: Housing prices,
one of the most important things anybody spends
money on, over the same 30 years, 1987 to
2017, went up – ready?
– adjusted for inflation, that taking account
of rising general prices, it went up – ready?
– not 14 percent, that's what people's income
went up.
Two hundred and ninety percent.
That's right, triple.
So the cost of housing has taken a bigger
and bigger chunk out of Americans' income.
They're still living in the same place – they're
sleeping there and eating there – but the
amount of their income they have to spend
to be able to do those things has dramatically
increased.
Then he looked at public – public – four-year
colleges.
They're cheaper, in general, than private.
How far did they go up, over the same 30-year
period, adjusting for inflation?
And here's what he found: that those kinds
of costs went up 311 percent.
They went up even faster than housing.
So if you want to live somewhere, and you
want your kids to go to college, oh boy have
you had to cut back on other things to pay
for those things.
And finally, he looked at per-person healthcare
expenditures, and they went up 51 percent,
compared to the income that went up 14 percent.
In other words, those three things – housing,
college education, and personal health care
– really took more and more out of people,
leaving less and less for everything else.
And that's the reality people have lived in
the United States.
And why?
Because our economic system doesn't produce
housing at a rate that will allow people to
live in a home without being gouged this way.
And what about college?
Because our system doesn't provide the funding
for four-year public colleges that it used
to provide, more and more of the payment for
that education has to come out of the family
sending their children to school.
And in health care, well, we talk about that
all the time: the medical industrial complex
jacking up the prices of your drug, of your
hospital stay, of your doctor, of your medical
insurance.
And then you can see the squeezing of the
American family, as these three messed-up
parts of our economy eat up more of the real
income Americans have.
It is something to understand how this system
gets down low into the individual lives we
all lead, to cause us the pain and the difficulty
that's showing up in such anger in our culture
these days.
I want to turn next to an idea coming from
a number of the Democratic folks looking to
be the Democratic candidate for president
in 2020.
And they're talking about co-determination.
This comes from Germany.
In German it's called mitbestimmung, and here's
what it means.
That the idea in Germany – and this has
been true in Germany for decades – is that
because workers, employees, are affected in
every business where they're employed, they
ought to have a say – it's a notion of democracy
– in the decisions made in that business.
So the way the Germans worked that out, with
their commitment to democracy, was to say
that a certain number of seats on the board
of directors of every company have to be filled
by workers who are elected to those positions
by other workers.
So that in most large German corporations
for sure, a little under 50 percent, less
than 50 percent, of board-of-directors seats
are filled by workers who are elected by other
workers.
And it's a notion of stakeholders.
The workers should be represented because
they have to live with the decisions the board
of directors in any company makes, so they
should be there.
In the United States, of course, we have none
of that.
The vast majority of boards of directors have
never had a worker on them, and those that
have had any of it have had one, or maybe
sometimes two.
So you see that it's absent in the United
States, which is why the idea is coming.
But lest anyone get too carried away with
the novelty of this idea – now that you
know it isn't a novelty at all; it exists
in Germany, which has been a very successful
capitalist economy – let's remember, this
is a minor reform.
Sure, it's better than having no workers,
but it reminds me of the history of when we
got rid of monarchy and kings.
When kings used to rule us, particularly here
in the Western world, there were no parliaments.
The king did whatever he wanted, and nobody
could do anything about it.
People got angry and upset because they had
to live with the king's decisions, but had
no power over them, so they pressed to have
a parliament.
The king refused, and when he couldn't refuse
anymore, he allowed a parliament, but he wouldn't
be bound by anything the parliament decided.
So then the parliament pushed for more, and
eventually, you know what happened?
The parliament took all the power and eliminated
the king.
There are no more kings, except in a few countries
that haven't made it that far yet.
It's the same story here.
The workers, and the community, and the customers
of a business are the ones who care most about
it and who depend on it, and they ought to
be the ones making the decisions, not simply
the people who bought shares in the company.
The idea that they alone should make all the
decisions – which is how it is in the United
States and in so many other parts of the world
– is the weird idea.
Like kingdom, that ought not to exist in the
larger society, why do we have little kingdoms
inside our workplaces?
And that issue is being broached, at least
a little bit, by talking about co-determination,
the workers participating in shaping what
corporations do.
It's long overdue.
My last update, that we'll have time for today,
has to do with what I think is a lesson given
to the whole of the American population, and
maybe even the world, by the courageous and
politically active people of Puerto Rico,
who don't get anywhere near the attention
and the credit they deserve.
The people of Puerto Rico have been suffering
from decades of the problem of being a kind
of colony of the United States, even though
we don't call it that.
Of putting into power there people who are
often very, very corrupt.
They suffered terribly and disproportionately
in Puerto Rico from the capitalist collapse
of 2008.
They suffered disproportionately the austerity
afterward.
The Trump administration, particularly, has
been very hesitant to provide the support,
to this day, that this society needs.
They got very badly hurt by Hurricane Maria
– many of you will remember that – afterwards.
And then they finally have this leader, recently,
Rossello, Governor Rossello, who was caught,
by good reporters, being misogynistic, homophobic,
and corrupt.
The FBI arrested people in the cabinet, and
so on.
And the people of Puerto Rico had too much:
too many decades of corruption, too many decades
of American domination and control without
the benefits that were supposed to come with
that, disaster from the collapse of capitalism,
from the hurricane, and very little help of
the sort that was needed, and of the help
they got, many of it sidelined into the corruption
that has been endemic there.
So they went into the streets.
For a week or two.
First 50,000, then 100,000, then 500,000.
And guess what.
After everyone said this would make no difference,
going into the streets, it made all the difference
in the world.
Governor Rossello is gone.
His term wasn't over, but the people said
yeah, it is over, bye-bye, you're gone.
And they're now keeping their activity going;
they want to make a fundamental change.
The lesson here?
Political action in the street made the difference
nothing else has.
They made a statement, the people of Puerto
Rico, that others around the world – including
on the mainland – might want to think about.
And in that final thought about Puerto Rico,
Jeff Stein of The Washington Post pointed
out a wonderful statistic.
You know, a lot has been said about Venezuela
and how bad the conditions are there, that
something like 13 percent, the U.N. says,
of people from Venezuela left Venezuela because
the conditions are so poor.
And the enemies of Venezuela have liked to
use that number.
Mr. Stein quotes the U.N., saying the percentage
of people that have left Puerto Rico, just
since 2008, isn't the 13 percent that Venezuelans
are leaving; it's 15 percent.
The people of Puerto Rico are in worse shape
than the people of Venezuela.
Puerto Rico is protected by the United States,
and Venezuela is attacked by the United States.
Think about it.
We've come to the end of the first half.
Please stay with us for a remarkable interview
that will follow shortly.
Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube
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which is crucial for everything we do.
Stay with us; we'll be right back.
WOLFF: Welcome back, friends, to the second
half of Economic Update.
It is my pleasure to welcome back to our cameras
and microphones a friend of mine, Rob Robinson.
He is a very active citizen here in the city
of New York.
He works particularly on all kinds of rights
organizations – social rights, economic
rights – but with a particular emphasis
on homelessness, on the right to the land,
the right to housing.
He's been doing that here in the New York
area, but he also does it all over the United
States.
He's worked with the City of New York, he's
worked with the United Nations, has been active
in Brazil, in Spain.
He really is a kind of expert who even has
his own personal experience to build on, on
working on this question.
So I've asked him to come today and talk with
us about homelessness in the United States.
Rob, welcome very much.
ROBINSON: Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
WOLFF: All right, start by giving us a thumbnail,
your overview of the homelessness problem
in the United States, right now, 2019.
ROBINSON: I think it's a huge problem.
During the Obama administration, it was a
focus; they identified it as a huge problem
in this country.
We had, nationwide, when Obama first took
office, about two million homeless people,
and a considerable chunk of that was veterans.
And it was a focus on veterans' homelessness,
as they created what is called the Interagency
Council on Homelessness – 30 U.S. agencies
coming together to combat this issue and hopefully
end it in 10 years, by 2020.
I think in some aspects, they've attempted
to do a good job, but this is government having
to meet each other at different levels – local,
federal, and state – and that's been somewhat
of a problem.
WOLFF: Is it getting better?
Getting worse?
What's your sense?
ROBINSON: My sense is it's getting worse,
Rick, and there are a number of factors that
feed into it.
Wages don't rise as fast as rents.
That's a fundamental issue in this country.
There was just a study released that said
wages, including inflation, haven't grown
over the last 20 years.
As a matter of fact, rents have grown at five
times the rate of wages over the last 20 years.
That's problematic; people can't keep up.
And it pulls the working class or the middle
class into homelessness, the working class
into homelessness.
So it's a big problem in this country.
WOLFF: Yeah, it's always struck me as very
fundamental economics here.
I mean, people become homeless because the
relationship between the income they have
and what it costs to have a home isn't working.
So it's like a direct barometer of a dysfunctioning
economy that isn't creating jobs and incomes
adequate to what people need.
ROBINSON: Absolutely.
And there's the underlying problem of poverty
never being addressed in this country.
There are folks that were born in poverty,
lived through poverty, continue to live through
poverty, and will need some type of a subsidy
to maintain a certain level of living, a certain
standard of living here.
And they just can't make it on its own, for
some of the reasons that you just labeled.
There are no good jobs out there.
You know, in this country the job base has
been eroded by manufacturing moving outside
of the U.S. and to other countries around
the world, where those companies are exploiting
labor in those other countries.
WOLFF: Would you say there is or there isn't
a government program, at any level – local,
state or federal – to deal with this?
I mean you hear this, that and the other thing,
but is there anything – particularly under
the Trump administration – any kind of dealing
with this?
ROBINSON: Well, I think under the Trump administration,
there's no focus on it, but, you know, prior
administrations have to take some of that
blame also.
You hear the Democrats – there are 24, 25
running now, you know – and none of them
are speaking about this issue, right?
So it's going to take a ground-up effort to
bring this into the forefront.
I think that's part of the problem, why people
just aren't talking about this, because basically
we've shamed you in this country if you run
into that problem.
And if you can't, you know, you can't pick
yourself up by your bootstraps in this country,
you're a failure; it's your fault.
But they don't look at the underlying causes
of it, and I think those are the problems
in this country – right?
– not being addressed from a fundamental
point of view.
WOLFF: Is anything happening among the homeless
themselves?
Are there movements developing?
Are there efforts?
Or is everybody just dealing with it as an
individual problem, living on the street,
or living in a shelter.
I'm always struck in America that people tend
to think that these problems can be solved
individually, each individual can somehow
escape or somehow get out of it without seeing
that there's a social problem when you're
talking about millions of people.
ROBINSON: Right.
Well, I think that's where it has to be addressed,
that there has to be popular and political
education, to make people understand the root
causes of this issue, right?
Again, we'll go back to the shaming issue.
People don't talk about it because they've
been shamed into it.
You've heard me say in the past, yeah, I lived
through this, and I understand the social
causes, and we try in this country as best
we can to paint this issue with a broad brush,
right?
You're homeless because you don't want to
work, you're homeless because you don't have
an education, you're homeless because you
have mental illness, you're homeless because
you have a chemical or an alcohol addiction.
So we paint everybody in a corner, and people
are shamed by that and won't talk about it,
don't want to discuss it even amongst close
family and friends.
They just don't talk about it.
I made it a point after I came out of homelessness
to say okay, you're not going to paint me
with that broad brush.
But I also have to find others that I can
encourage to share their stories, because
when you share those stories, trends start
to develop, and people understand that it's
not their fault and you're not going to be
able to realize the quote-unquote American
Dream in this country if you're never given
an opportunity from the time you come out
of the womb.
WOLFF: Is there a movement developing, would
you say, or is that an exaggeration?
Is there a movement to do something, in which
the homeless themselves are the players?
ROBINSON: Right here in New York, I started
my organizing with a group called Picture
the Homeless; that's where I got my foundations
for organizing.
So the quick answer is yes.
Is there enough?
I don't think so, but there are huge movements
that are developing.
I was in Brazil last year and found a homeless
group of street homeless folks organizing
in six states in Brazil.
You know, 2009 I got to go to Budapest, Hungary,
as a member of Picture the Homeless, and learned
about the homeless problem there.
There's an organization called A Város Mindenkié
that folks are saying is one of the strongest
social movements in Hungary at this particular
time.
I think on the West Coast, the west coast
of the U.S., there's the Western Regional
Advocacy Project, organizing homeless people
in Colorado, in California, in Oregon, and
up in Seattle.
There are huge problems out on the West Coast.
You look at a city like San Francisco, and
the city is just flooded with street homeless
folks.
And so our government is not getting at the
root cause of the problem, right?
And while you have a city like New York, who
has over 550 shelters, and some folks think
it's a great idea.
New York City has a right-to-shelter law,
which argues the point that if I go to the
city on any given night and say I need a bed,
the city must provide.
Well, that's good, in a way, but it creates
this infrastructure of shelters, right?
You have 550 in New York, right?
In other cities, you may have 10, right?
So I think it exacerbates an already ongoing
problem.
People get stuck in there.
It's serving as a home.
A shelter is not a home, right?
A home is more than a roof.
You know, it's a sense of community.
It's all these other things that surround
that, right?
And I think we have to think a little bit
differently, outside of the box, at getting
at the root cause.
WOLFF: What do you say to a person who says,
look a home is either an apartment or a house,
and we ought to be in a society which says
if there are, as you point out, millions of
people without a place, either houses and
apartments that are empty have to be made
available, or if they're not available, they
have to be built.
We seem to have a housing industry that can't
provide housing, even though there's lots
of vacant housing, and doesn't build enough.
What is this, in an economic system, that
it simply can't solve a fairly obvious problem?
ROBINSON: So, is it that we don't have enough,
Rick, or is it that there isn't the will to
do it to fit the needs of the people, right?
I would argue that we'll never build our way
out of this problem.
What we need to do is think a little differently,
and use vacant spaces, right?
And I always use the foreclosure crisis during
that time period, because it's a key indicator
on how we operate as a society, right?
During the financial crisis there were, in
2010, 14.4 million vacant homes, two million
homeless people.
So you just put the homeless people in the
people-less homes.
Problem solved, right?
I don't think we can build our way out of
this, and I say that because you only have
a finite amount of land, and how, you know,
you're going to start building New York Citys
all over the country?
Not everybody wants these towers in their
particular states or cities.
So there is an organized effort; Picture the
Homeless has started to push legislation within
the New York City Council where they would
have to do a vacant census count, which I
think is important.
And now they're pushing to find landlords
who keep those buildings vacant for a certain
amount of time.
I think you have to disincentivize people
from doing the wrong thing.
It sounds a little, you know, a little tricky
the way I just laid that out, but I really
think you have to penalize people, right?
Because it's what's our relationship to space?
We have to think differently, and then it's
a little bit difficult in a capitalist society,
and a society that bases itself on profit.
You know, there are some elected members of
Congress, and particularly four women, who
are being targeted now because they think
outside of the box, but I think that's the
direction we need to go.
We need to think about giving people who have
a certain income limit a certain subsidy so
that they can realize that right to housing
that everybody deserves.
WOLFF: Or we ought to have a proper jobs program
that gives everybody a meaningful function
in our society, helping one another, and pays
them a proper salary.
ROBINSON: Why not both?
WOLFF: Rather than giving some people – you
know, I like to pick on Jeffrey Bezos – some
people have, you know, hundreds of billions
of dollars . . .
ROBINSON: . . . and you give them a subsidy,
right?
WOLFF: It's unbelievable.
ROBINSON: And that's so – the thinking fundamentally
is wrong, right?
We have a mortgage tax deduction in this country
to the tune of about $150 billion a year,
for people making, with incomes of $250,000
or more.
If you took that away and put it into public
housing, you would start to re-create or regenerate
public housing the way it should be.
It used to be there for a social purpose,
right?
So what we're doing in this country is we're
subsidizing wealthier people more than we
are poor people.
WOLFF: That's been done for a long time.
ROBINSON: Absolutely.
WOLFF: And American history also gives us
lessons, because after World War II, for the
returning veterans who had fought a war, we
created a public education program, the G.I.
Bill, helping people pay for college, if you
were a soldier, we created a housing program
– public housing was built all over.
So the idea we don't know how to do it, or
we can't do it – we did it.
Now, you can't do it with the private-profit
system so well, but that's not what we relied
on back then.
No one said you have to have private profit.
We said the government is going to come in
and subsidize a college education.
ROBINSON: I would agree with you, Rick, but
we can't leave out the racial implications
of this, right?
So some of those same G.I.s didn't get access
to some of that housing, and that's a problem,
right?
You know, so we have that underlying current
that is always out there, that thing that
just exists, that we have to talk about, right?
WOLFF: Absolutely.
ROBINSON: It's something that we have to discuss.
We don't often want to do it, it's challenging,
but those conversations need to happen.
You know me, growing up on Long Island, I
saw it with the Levitt houses, when everybody
was moving from the city, moving out to Levittown,
the G.I.s that were people of color couldn't
get access to those houses.
They weren't allowed, right?
And some of that still is a current that presides
over banking, and how we racialized the housing
industry.
It's still problematic.
WOLFF: In the little bit of time we have left
– what would you want these Democratic – the
25 hopefuls – what should they be talking
about, in terms of homelessness, that they
aren't?
ROBINSON: I think we have to understand that
this is not the true democracy that we claim
it is, and we have to understand if the rest
of the world can live by international human
rights standards and law, which guarantees
the right to housing, we need to adopt those
standards here, right?
South Africa – when, you know, when apartheid
was taken down and a new constitution came
out in 1996, it guaranteed a right to a home.
Actualizing it is something else, they're
still struggling a little bit, but it's changing
there.
Brazil says land has to serve a social function,
right, so people are getting access to housing
because that's a social function.
You build housing, you grow food, right, so
these things are related.
And I think we have a constitution that was
constructed off of 400 years of good-old-boy
language, that just doesn't work for certain
people.
Our constitution probably needs to change
– big task, big ask, but it's something
we need to think about.
WOLFF: Thank you, Rob.
This is a topic that needs a lot more attention,
not just by Democratic candidates, but by
everybody else.
A society that leaves millions of people without
a home is a society that isn't working very
well.
It's an economy that isn't doing what an economy
is supposed to do.
I hope you found this of interest, and I hope
you will remember to talk with us again next
week.
