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’s.
I’m your host, Richard Wolff.
Before starting today’s program, I wanted
to let you know that our normal location for
producing and broadcasting this program has
been closed as have several of the backup
locations we keep ready in the event of just
this situation.
Of course, I’m speaking about the consequences
to the coronavirus and the programs now finally
being put into place to cope with it.
Those arrangements, those conditions, those
responses in the United States were grotesquely
too little and too late.
But everyone is making do as best they can
with the incompetence of a government and
medical industrial apparatus that we have.
We know you’re suffering as well as we.
We’re committed to producing this program.
We ask your understanding as we do it under
these ad hoc conditions.
Okay.
Today’s program is divided into two parts:
one—analyzing the Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo
movement situation, and the other one—the
response to the coronavirus, which is on everyone’s
mind.
So here let’s do the first half devoted
to the Weinstein case and all that it brings
up.
I want to begin with the key point.
We have a systemic problem.
Weinstein is just one example, one case.
Dramatic?
Yes.
Headline-grabbing?
For sure.
But it is important to understand the underlying
systemic problem that was exposed by the Weinstein
case by the #MeToo movement surrounding that
case.
And it’s that I want to talk to you about.
Sexism, a kind of systemic rendering of the
female part of our population in a subordinate
secondary position, is very old.
And the sexual harassment of women that follows
from that subordination is also very old.
It is rooted in long lasting cultures, in
long lasting religion.
You all know that somewhere.
But let me review briefly.
In slavery, masters didn’t just oppress
slaves.
They also sexually abused them.
In feudalism, lords not only oppressed serfs,
they also sexually abused them.
If you’re not familiar with it in European
feudalism, for centuries, there existed and
was widely respected something called “the
law of the first night”.
Here’s what it meant.
When a serf got married, the husband and the
wife had to give to the lord of the manor
or the village where they lived the right
to sleep with the wife for the first night
after they were married.
Then husband and wife could sleep together
without the lord.
Think about that.
This was done in many parts of Europe.
It was done over centuries.
It was sanctioned by the church.
You get the picture.
That’s a deep-seated system of subordination
and sexual harassment.
Kings were notable for their oppression of
and their sexual harassment of their subjects.
Even into modern times, institutions that
are left over from the earlier, particularly
religious institutions, have demonstrated
to us in the last dozen or more years that
if you have a kinglike position for a cleric
that he can very well end up abusing, including
sexually, all kinds of people within that
religious institution.
So now we come to capitalism.
Now capitalism came into the world promising
liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy.
That’s what the American and French Revolutions
claimed they were for.
Yes, they wanted to get rid of feudalism,
which they did, and replace it with capitalism,
which they did.
But they said that along with that would come
liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy.
The problem is it didn’t.
What capitalism did is replace the top–down
hierarchical inequalities of slavery, and
feudalism, and monarchy with a new one, namely
the hierarchy of employer and employee.
That’s the crucial systemic problem.
Now let’s turn to how it affects Weinstein
and the #MeToo movement.
Harvey Weinstein and people like him—Bill
Cosby, you know them, as well as I do—they
clearly had severe personal psychological
sexual problems.
They needed professional help—no question.
And they were horrible practices waiting to
happen as they went about acting out their
issues, their problems.
But it was capitalism that put them in a position
to enable a vast oppression and a vast sexual
harassment story up, into, and including rape.
We know that now from the trials and from
the attention Cosby, Weinstein, and the entire
#MeToo movement has brought to the fore.
What do I mean?
An employer has extraordinary power over an
employee.
First and foremost, and perhaps most fundamental,
the employer can deprive the employee of the
job, of the work, of the income you get—the
wage, the salary—when you work.
And just as important the self-esteem of having
a job, making a contribution, being a part
of the community that can afford a home, a
car, an education for the children, the employers—a
small minority—have the power of the employees—a
huge majority.
This situation is a made-to-order circumstance,
really remarkably like master-over-slave,
landlord-, feudal lord-over-surf, king-over-subject,
and so on.
If you think about it, the employer has a
second extraordinary power—the power to
determine not only whether or not you have
the job, but whether you are promoted; are
you rewarded for the work, the quality of
the work you do, the intensity with which
you do it, the commitment which you show or
not?
Will you rise up and have more responsibility
and a higher income, and be able to expand,
and enhance your living over time by dint
of hard work?
Or will that be taken away from you?
And the employer has yet another extraordinary
power over the employee.
If the employer abuses the employee, if the
employer sexually assaults, rapes or terrorizes
an employee, and gets caught, the employer
can—and normally does—use the profits
gotten from those workers labor to offer them
a bribe called a nondisclosure agreement,
an NDA, to buy off their suffering.
So that they aren’t exposed, so that they
can go on to the next person and do it all
again.
Why?
Well, you know the answer.
It’s part of our culture.
In the film industry it’s called “the
casting couch”.
What’s the idea of film person’s actor
and actress or even others, hoping to make
a career in that business, has to service
sexually the employer to get the job, to get
the part, to get the promotion.
And if they’re caught and if you’re exposed,
which is rare, then they can use the money
they make from this business to shut up the
person with the courage to go public with
it all.
It’s an extraordinary situation.
What enabled Cosby and Weinstein to achieve
the dubious distinction that they oppressed
a hundred or more people that have come forward—and
we won’t even think about all those who
chose not to come forward, because of all
the humiliation, and embarrassment, and consequences
that flow from it—what enabled them to,
literally, sexually harass huge numbers of
people wasn’t their problem, but a structure,
a system that allowed their problem to become
the devastating problem for so many.
What’s the bottom line here?
It’s how we organize something as fundamental
as the job, the workplace.
We allow a tiny number of people to have extraordinary
power and wealth at their best, under their
control.
Can they use it against their employees?
Of course, they can.
We know that.
Can they do it in a sexually humiliating and
rapists kind of way?
Yes.
We know that.
And the problem is if we don’t do something
about that inequality, we haven’t really
dealt with problem.
We may have gotten rid of the worst offenders
who got caught.
But we know that the system, enabling countless
other people to do countlessly equivalent
acts, going on as I speak, hasn’t been dealt
with.
So imagine with me a different organization
of the workplace and how it might work.
Suppose at the workplace all basic decisions
including hiring and firing, including promotion,
and including the use of the profits—that
everybody helped to produce—suppose those
decisions were all made democratically, by
everybody in the workplace having one vote
equal to everybody else.
Then you wouldn’t see some people whose
lives, incomes, jobs are in the hands of other
people.
There wouldn’t be the employer–employee
division allowing, and enabling, and inviting
employers with severe psychological and sexual
problems to use their situation to do the
damage Weinstein and Cosby did.
You would have changed the system.
Everybody would have to agree who gets hired
and fired.
Everybody would have to vote on the promotions.
And everybody could look at how the profits
are being used and could raise the alarm if
some of it was going to individuals in non-disclosure
agreements and would it be able to ask questions.
Would this solve every aspect of the problem
that the #MeToo movement raises of sexual
harassment?
No.
It wouldn’t solve them all.
But it would be a giant step in getting beyond
this condition.
But let me put it even more bluntly.
If we don’t change the system, we will have
failed to use the opportunity that the #MeToo
movement has produced in our society, that
the exposure of Cosby and Weinstein and all
the others that have gotten caught, gives
us to change the system that is the problem,
and not just the symptom of that system’s
problems, which is what Weinstein and Cosby
represent.
We’ve come to the end of the first half
of today’s program.
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We’ll be right back with today’s second
half.
Welcome back, friends, to the second half
of today’s Economic Update.
I want to talk about the coronavirus story.
But I want particularly to ask and answer
the following question.
Why was the United States so remarkably late
to address this problem in a systematic way?
Why does it represent such a failure that
we knew as a nation and our leading authority
Center for Disease Control knew already early
in January what the results of the spread
of this virus were in China, knew about it,
publicly released press releases about it
early in January?
But it wasn’t until the middle of March
that anything remotely like a mobilization—and
it’s only partial in the middle of March
itself—to deal with this problem.
And then, by that time, we had already seen
not only in China, and South Korea, and Japan,
but in Europe, particularly in Italy, in the
Middle East, particularly in Iran, the devastation
that this virus was capable of wreaking, including
deaths of thousands of people.
And my answer to you, which you come as no
great surprise, to those of you familiar with
this program, is that it has to do very fundamentally
with our—yup—capitalist system.
It’s another lesson for those open-minded
enough to learn it that we are overdue for
system change in the United States.
So let me make the argument with you.
Viruses are as old as the human race—let
me correct that—much older.
Viruses are a part of life.
Viruses affect us, probably every year that
we live, one way or another.
In recent years we have been reminded, repeatedly,
about the damage that viruses can do.
Even though we’ve known it for a hundred
years.
Early in the 20th century, something called
the Spanish flu was a virus that killed over
600,000 people.
We know this story.
And I’m talking about the United States
as well as the rest of the world.
In recent years, we had the SARS virus, we
had the MERS virus, Ebola.
And I could make the list longer.
We know that viruses are there.
We know that they can be extremely dangerous.
And we knew in early January that we had one
of the most dangerous—the coronavirus COVID-19.
Many practices in countries teach in their
schools and in the general understanding of
their medical professions and beyond that
a society needs to be prepared for the virus.
Just like we understand we need to be prepared
for periods of drought, prepared for high
tides.
We do what we think is necessary to cope.
And what is necessary to cope with a virus
like the coronavirus, this new coronavirus,
is to take steps to be prepared to identify
viruses in your laboratory, to test your population
to see who has it and who doesn’t, to take
the necessary steps to prevent those who have
it from transmitting it to those who don’t,
and then to find a cure.
Those are the steps well known.
So the real question for me and for you and
me together today is what happened and why?
Well, we know what happened.
The United States as of the middle of March,
when the virus began racking up huge death
counts in the United States, was we hadn’t
tested hardly anybody, the mechanism of testing
hadn’t been developed, the tests themselves
were not generally available, they were in
short supply, even though they weren’t that
way in many other parts of the world, we didn’t
have the mechanisms to facilitate the end
of the spread of the disease.
Yes, in the middle of March we suddenly told
people to stay at home.
But nobody had worked out, “Wait a minute.
If you stay at home and you have a job, you
lose your income.
What happens then?”
If the schools get closed, which they have,
what happens to the single mothers and every
other kind of parent that doesn’t have child
care in effect during the day?
What’s going to happen if you require quarantine
of people?
Are they going to be denied their income,
because they have to stay in a quarantined
location?
These are the problems you have to work out.
You don’t have to work out when the virus
hits.
You have to work it out before.
And that’s what didn’t happen.
So why didn’t it happen?
This has to do with the medical businesses.
Our medical system in the United States is
a capitalist business.
People go into the business hoping to earn
a profit.
Doctors in their practices want to make more
money than it costs to operate the practice—that’s
profit.
Hospitals want to earn more money than it
costs to maintain their institution—profit.
The companies that make drugs or medical devices
like test kits—they want to make a profit.
And the insurance companies that give you
a policy to cover your medical needs want
to make a profit.
It’s a profit-making enterprise.
And for them, the government is a danger.
Why?
Because the mass of people with our right
to vote are likely to want to have a government
that does these things for us and charges
us less, because it doesn’t have to make
a profit.
That’s the difference.
The private enterprise is a profit-driven
business.
And the government is a public service-driven
business.
At least that was always the idea.
So the private sector, fearing government
competition—and you know why they fear government
competition?—because the government doesn’t
have to charge prices high enough to earn
a profit whereas private business does.
That’s the root of it.
Private business, however can’t say that,
it can’t go to the public and say, “Hey,
we don’t want the government to take care
of our medical needs to provide the drugs,
to ensure us in case we get sick or have an
injury.”
They can’t say, “We don’t want that
because they can do it at a lower price than
we do, because they don’t have to make a
profit.”
Because if the private enterprises said that,
we all would draw the conclusion they fear
most, “Well, then let’s have the government
do it.
Let’s have the government do it.”
So instead, the private medical sector demonizes
the government, “The government is inefficient.
The government is venal.
The government is full of political crooks.”
You know the story.
You grow up in it.
I grew up in it.
It’s the air we breathe.
And so the government can’t, the government
is hobbled.
The business community and the medical business
is right up there with them, support politicians
who mouths all that stuff, “Let’s keep
our private medical system.
Let’s not have socialized medicine.
If we had the government do it, it would be
socialism.”
I won’t bore you by reminding you that virtually
every other advanced industrial country has
chosen and kept their nationalized health
system both insurance and medical practices,
more or less.
We, the United States, are the odd one, not
the rest of the world.
And unless you believe that everybody else—in
Britain, in France, in Germany, in Italy,
in Scandinavia, in Japan, in South Korea,
in China, in Russia—all stupid compared
to us, who really know our works, unless you
believe that sort of nonsense, you’d have
to wonder.
And the power of the medical industrial complex
here…
Well, here’s the simplest statistic to understand
it.
We pay more for medical care—doctors, hospitals,
drugs, devices, and medical insurance—than
any other country on earth, a lot more, because
the prices are higher here than anywhere.
That’s why Americans go to Canada for their
drugs.
That’s why increasing number of Americans
go abroad for their surgeries.
They make a fortune by being a monopoly we
have to pay for for our health.
And that’s why they don’t want competition
from a government that could do it cheaper,
the way they do in all those other countries.
So we don’t have a government that is powerful.
And we don’t have one that’s powerful
over our medical conditions.
And that’s why we failed with the coronavirus.
Because what the coronavirus needed was the
mobilization of all of our resources—the
Army, the Navy, every working man and woman
in this country—could have been, should
have been, and might have been mobilized long
ago to deal with this.
The model, by the way, is what happened in
China.
And if you don’t like that example—South
Korea.
They mobilize their people in a massive program
of testing, of lockdown, of quarantine, of
limiting the spread.
And they succeeded.
That’s why their numbers already by mid-March
were much better than the numbers exploding
in the countries that didn’t do this.
You needed a mass mobilization.
We don’t allow our government to manipulate
and control private enterprise.
We make believe that’s efficient.
Really?
Let me tell you something.
If the government of the United States or,
for that matter, if the private medical complex—doctors,
hospitals, drug makers, and insurers—had
taken these steps necessary to prepare for
and manage the coronavirus, it would have
cost a lot less money than waiting until the
middle of March.
So that the stock market would collapse, that
the businesses of America would shut down,
that millions of people would lose their job.
This is capitalist inefficiency gone mad.
And I’m not even talking about the ultimate
inefficiency when a system’s incapacity
to prepare for and cope with a disaster like
this is killing large numbers of people.
Wow.
Wow.
Suppose we had an economic system that was
different.
That didn’t work like this.
That didn’t have as its goal—private profit.
Why did we ever let the private profit mentality,
the private profit economic system, which
has a name “capitalism”, get involved
in managing our health?
Private companies have no incentive to produce
test kits and store him in a warehouse for
years before there’s a crisis.
It’s not profitable.
It costs a lot and they don’t make any money.
So they’re not going to do it.
That’s how capitalism works.
A government could buy all them and store
it.
But a government that is infected by the profit
mentality, controlled by the profit citizens,
it doesn’t want the government to get involved
like that.
Wow.
How interesting.
So we didn’t.
And so we didn’t have the test kits.
And we didn’t have the ventilators.
And we didn’t have the extra hospital beds.
We didn’t do it.
And we didn’t set up the mechanisms to mobilize
doing it quickly when we needed it either.
Capitalism is stumbling all over itself.
It’s proving that it isn’t good for the
mass of people.
It’s made a mess of this.
And we can get as angry at Donald Trump as
we want—he’s just the system.
He’s the presider over a system that isn’t
working.
He’s not the only failure here.
In a way, it’s like in the first half of
the program: sure, get angry at Harvey Weinstein,
at Bill Cosby.
You have plenty of reason to get angry at
Mr. Trump.
But unless you change this system that puts
profit as the bottom line for the people in
charge of what keeps us healthy, you’re
not going to solve the exposed failure of
capitalism to prepare for or cope with a coronavirus.
Thanks all for your attention.
And even in these difficult times, I look
forward to speaking with you again next week.
