Taya Graham and Stephen Janis examine the recent election through the lens of wealth inequality and how it affects our democracy in ways both extreme and unseen. Joining them is noted economist Dr. Richard Wolff, who will help them unpack the ubiquitous tendrils of rapacious wealth and how it allows billionaires to manipulate us in ways that are often unacknowledged.

Studio: Adam Coley, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham
Written by: Stephen Janis

---

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Real News Network, livestream special inequality watch edition. Today, me and my reporting partner Stephen Janis and I will review the recent election results through a particular lens, the evolving business interests and the resulting political economy surrounding billionaires. We’ll examine how this small group of people have impacted the perceptions and vibes of voters, and ultimately how it influenced the outcome of our recent presidential election. It’s a particularly important discussion because there are many theories floating around at the moment about why Donald Trump won and how progressives can address this. That means that first, though, we must understand what determined how people voted. In other words, we have to go beyond finger pointing and posturing and examine the underlying influences that created the atmosphere that made this election so confounding. Let’s remember up until election day, the race between Harrison Trump was considered too close to call, and yet as it stands now, Donald Trump will be the first Republican to win the popular vote since George Bush in 2004.

And what’s even more intriguing is that since his victory, the old debate that has consumed the Democratic Party since 2016 has reemerged specifically, do Democrats need a kowtow to the more moderate wing or embraced the progressive movement? Each is claiming they have what this party needs to win. But what if, and I’m asking what if that debate is wrong at its core? What if it’s not just incomplete, but rather Mrs, the whole point entirely? What if the election was decided before it happened? What if unseen unacknowledged forces set the terms of the debate in such a way that even a billion dollars in campaign spending, which is incidentally what Harris raised, doesn’t really matter? Well, that’s exactly the idea we’re going to explore today. We are going to give you our audience a different way of thinking about what just happened. Hopefully a fresh insight into how to define and perhaps examine the politics of the present.

It’s a little cultural primer that we hope will give you an analytic foundation to build upon, to talk about how we can fight back, not with rhetoric, but with reason. It’s a way of thinking about the politics of the present, which seems unable to address ongoing threats like climate change, lack of affordable housing, or fair wages for working people. And to help me unpack all of this, I will be joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janice, who normally hosts a police accountability report with me. But we have also in the past produced a show called The Inequality Watch, which is what we will be doing today. Stephen, how are you? And can you talk a little bit about why we also focus on inequality?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, as many people have pointed out, well, first of all, I’m very happy just to be on YouTube.

How can I complain? But as we pointed out before in the past in our inequality reporting, inequality defines the world in which we play out these ideas. Inequality defines how we vote. Inequality defines so many aspects of our life, and it touched on so many things, including our main topic of policing that we really just can’t avoid it. So that’s why today we’re going to be breaking it down and looking at it not just as a phenomena, but the mechanics that make it work, right, the things that make it happen, how it produces the results, how it produces the sort of literal media mechanisms that define the debate. So we’re going to be unpacking and pulling apart this system and trying to examine it in a way that will maybe bring fresh insight as said to our viewers.

Taya Graham:

And I want you to remember, we will also be talking to you, the people who are watching us live right now, like Lacy r and Rosie Rocks and Noli D. Hi guys, good to see you. So please make sure to like the stream and post a question or a comment in the live chat, and we will try to answer as we go along and you might even be able to ask our guests, the economist, Dr. Richard Wolff, a question two now to start this conversation about what we’re going to do today. I want to begin with a few thoughts on what we will not do. This show is not about discussing or blaming a specific constituency or political strategy. We are not going to point fingers and definitely not at voters. We are not going to discuss what the Harris campaign could have should have done differently. No. Instead, we’re going to focus on the aspects of this past election that are quite different. So Stephen, can you talk about how this angle is a little different than your typical mainstream media coverage?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, it’s kind of looking at the field as it were in terms of how, like we said, the media political economy is constructed around us, how we are immersed and how we’re like fish swimming in water. We don’t recognize the water, but the water actually defines how we think, feel, perceive ourselves. So we’re going to go a little bit beyond saying maybe if the Democrats said this, or maybe if the Republicans had done this or that, we’re going to go into the pretty much the epistemological, for lack of a better word, or the foundations that create a media kind of circus that we’re all immersed in sometimes not totally aware because it’s become so ingrained into our personal lives and who we are, how we think about ourselves. So we’re going to go into that and look in depth in detail and come up with some ways of thinking about some tools to analyze it and some ways to think about that maybe people haven’t considered yet. So that’s kind of the point of this whole thing.

Taya Graham:

Well, I think you make a good point and it’s going to raise a few questions which we can break down in the moment. But first I would like to give those of you who are watching us a little bit of a preview of the format of the show. So we’re going to make what I hope is an interesting argument about the election we just witnessed, and we’ll do so by examining the uber rich or billionaires in a way that I hope will help us understand the role in all of this better. And then after we do this breakdown of the topic, we will be joined by an exceptional guest, Dr. Richard Wolf. He really needs no introduction. Other than that, he is one of the four most thinkers on economics, social justice, and equitable society. And he will have the opportunity at his thoughts. He’s also a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he’s the author of several books such as Capitalism Hits the Fan, the Global Economic Meltdown, and What to Do about It. I also feel pretty that he will have something to say about our breakdown topic, which is billionaires.

Now, I think we can’t talk about electoral politics and economic inequity without starting with the phenomena that represent both. Of course, again, I’m referring to billionaires, the class of people who live amid unimaginable abundance with super yachts and private jets and guarded bunkers and personal islands while the world crumbles around them. They’re the type of people whose power makes ’em pathological to the point where the amount of wealth they possess and how they obtain it literally turns our social and economic system into toys for their amusement. Let me review some of the mind boggling statistics and facts about billionaires wealth inequality and its outsized impact on electoral politics. Let’s just consider some of the relevant facts. So since 2020, almost two thirds of all new wealth went to the top 1%, according to Oxfam, the richest people in the world make six times more than the bottom 90% of humanity.

Collectively, that’s 2.7 billion a day. America’s 806 billionaires are now richer than half of the population combined a lot richer according to Mother Jones. Billionaire wealth in the US has collectively doubled since 2017. The rest of us, not so much, and the rest of us that’s over 65 million households. Billionaires emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average person does in a lifetime according to a 2024 Oxfam report. It really does make you feel a little bit annoyed when you take your time to actually sort your recycling. And a billionaire is casually riding a private jet, undoing your efforts to conserve your planet. I mean, you’re trying to make sure to keep your local river clean, taking items to the dump. You donate old electronics, you’re trying to save a tree by recycling your cardboard. I even cut the plastic rings of my six pack so I don’t kill dolphins, but one private jet full of Kardashian undoes the whole work of my entire neighborhood. So, so much for our recycling program.

Now, this is a statistic I like attacks of up to 5% on the world’s multimillionaires. And billionaires could raise 1.7 trillion a year enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty. And so that’s why I have trouble understanding why many people don’t agree with me that this would be a worthwhile thing. And instead they take the time to defend billionaires who exploit our tax code instead of giving back anything to the country and the people that made their wealth possible. But perhaps some of you folks can comment in the section and help me understand there might be some Elon Musk supporters out there who can help educate me. Yeah, of course. But the pathology of this unimaginable wealth is of course not the only issue here. It’s how they extract extreme wealth and how that process has evolved. That’s critical to our discussion. I mean, perhaps we should be thinking about their role in our electoral politics beyond the more obvious consequences of a wealth imbalance, political donations and dark money alone, a way of classifying them that will shed new light on exactly how their power shapes us and by extension and how we vote.

And so Stephen, I think you’ve developed a way to make a point about billionaires.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, because I think we’re living in what I would call the conflict industrial complex, and I was kind of curious as to why, because it’s not just a matter of Facebook, it’s a matter of how people have profited off it and thus created a political economy around it. We came above the way of thinking about billionaires, and we have three classifications for sort of a new form of billionaire thinking. The first one would be we have the carbon billionaires who are the Koch brothers, for example, for top or people who make their money off petrochemicals oil or whatever they are the first classification of billionaires. The Koch brothers, for example, have spent $145 million trying to convince people that climate change is a hoax. So that’s the first class of the new form of billionaires who are informing how we think about ourselves. The second one who be conflict billionaires, and those are the people who have made their money by sowing conflict, by destroying democracy, by using social media to make us all hate each other and not really think about that we’re being treated unjustly.

And that would be like a Mark Zuckerberg who’s worth like $140 million or even now Elon Musk, who has stepped into the conflict arena and feels like to a certain extent, he wants to be part of this massive project to undermine us with conflict driven social media. They literally make money off our anger towards each other, and that’s pretty extraordinary. And then the last would be capture billionaires who are like hedge fund managers or private equity who do use extractive processes to take wealth out of the community and hoard it for themselves. And those processes themselves of extraction create anger and resentment because they leave communities, companies hollowed out by extracting the wealth, not building something, but rather just taking money that would otherwise go to the community or resources. I think it’s important all these processes create psychologies around them that are really important to think about because if you’re working at a store, you’re working at a company and suddenly it’s totally in debt and a bunch of private equity investors have taken the money out of it, it creates resentment and anger, it creates inequity and the same thing.

And then you have, you go home and you get on Facebook and the conflict billionaires are selling you ads and pushing content that makes you paranoid in some sense or makes you mistrustful and I think take the empirical side out of our lives. So all these three kind of different billionaires I think create a different class or a different political economy that you’re going to talk about that make us sort of unable to have discussions about or unable excuse, have discussions about some of the more important issues, more of the complex problems. It’s very hard to do collective complex problem solving when your entire reality is conscripted by conflict entrepreneurs or conflict billionaires or carbon bill use who are literally intentionally getting rich off distortion. And so we are in this distortion media complex, this social media conflict media complex, and these billionaires are the ones who are profiting off it, and I think they have an outsized influence on how our electoral process goes. So that’s why I wanted to kind of outline that for people.

Taya Graham:

I thought that was a great outline. And just so you know, there’s been a really, what I think an interesting conversation about it in the chat.

Stephen Janis:

Oh, really,

Taya Graham:

Life under the microscope said, let’s not forget UPS, newer CEO Carol Tom gave Amazon $1 every and any package deal robbed UPS enforced layoffs that haven’t happened in over 30 years, built a Frankenstein’s monster, a dollar a package at a time by selling out union later. And I want you to know life under a microscope that hits my heart right here I am a union steward myself. And blue Unicorn gave, I thought a really interesting response when everyone’s businesses have to close, but the government gives monopolies to Amazon, et cetera. That’s called fascism and not capitalism, just saying.

So let’s get back to you, Stephen, and your breakdown. So let’s review. For those who are watching, you’re saying that these billionaires, the carbon, the capture and the conflict are critical to how we think about the election. In other words, how they make their money actually affects our how we think. So maybe I can try to break this down a little bit here. So one way I thought about this is in every massive wealth extraction business, we use a term to describe and analyze how it influences governance, and that’s what we call a political economy. So in other words, economic power translates into political power causing a feedback loop that perpetuates all the worst aspects of it. As a billionaire makes more money in a specific industry, then they use it to gain more political power and influence, which in turn enables them to extract even more wealth. And then the resulting system becomes captured to the point where the political and financial system sort of fuse into a perpetual moneymaking machine that needs and

Stephen Janis:

A misery

Taya Graham:

Machine

Stephen Janis:

Too.

Taya Graham:

That’s a really good point. It’s a misery making machine too, but the worst part is that it leads to ineffective regulation and it puts working folks into dire straits. So if this political economy is based upon the industries we’re discussing, and if it’s particularly pernicious, well, you can see the results. A fractured democracy soon to be staffed by people best known for generating means. I mean, I think our hometown, Baltimore is a good example of this.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, and you’re right. Oh, go ahead with that.

Taya Graham:

Well, because I would just say, I mean for decades, our city, for those of you who don’t know in Baltimore city, Maryland, we’ve struggled with poverty and doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to developers to build luxury housing. And all that generosity has been funneled back into the campaign coffers of certain local officials to the extent that the city council actually voted down a $30,000 study just to see if it’s effective. And that’s not the end of it. Stephen and I actually testified in our state capitol to urge leader there to approve a transparency bill that would’ve been paneled a group of experts to study their effectiveness throughout Maryland. And guess how much this work group would’ve cost taxpayers $0. But that bill failed because for some reason it never came up for a vote in our house of delegates. Isn’t that interesting?

Stephen Janis:

That’s very true.

Taya Graham:

So I think that’s a really good example of the power of money. I mean the power would

Stephen Janis:

Of political economy. Yeah, the power of political economy and how it changes the entire landscape of a city, a city that’s poor, that gives tax breaks to the rich and then won’t even study them. It makes for a totally ineffective policy. What happens in these conflict economies with these conflict billionaires is that the ability to effectuate good policy becomes absolutely impossible because the inequity becomes ingrained into our media, into our discourse, to a point where we can’t really even begin to continence complex policies and come up with collective solutions, whatever they are. And I think that is really one of the biggest problems that we’ve kind of identified because we talked to voters. You and I were in Milwaukee, we were covering the election. We talked to voters who were young, who weren’t aware of student loan, some of the student loan things that the Biden administration had done, a plethora of programs trying to reduce the student loan debt.

They didn’t seem cognizant, a young woman who didn’t seem cognizant of the problems with not having a national right to abortion and a lot of things, it really struck me and I’m saying, how is it possible that they’re voting in this way? They seem totally, in some ways, not informed in a way that is beneficial to them. They’re informed in a way that is beneficial to billionaires. To me, that was like, wow, how did they achieve that? Now, I don’t want to sound naive or pollyannaish, but that really was an amazing revelation to see a lot of voters who really had been somehow convinced to vote, in my estimation against this is not criticizing the voters.

Taya Graham:

No, not all.

Stephen Janis:

I’m saying some media ecology that they’ve been immersed in, like I said, like fish and water.

Taya Graham:

Michael Willis liked that comment, by the way. Hi, Michael Willis, and I’ll say also hi to friends and code out there. Now, before I get too involved in the live chat, I think this might be the perfect moment to have our guests weigh in on the topic of billionaires and their role in our current state of both our political and economic affairs. His name is Dr. Richard Wolff and he’s one of the most popular thinkers on YouTube and beyond, and he has been a singular voice in the debate over economic policy, workers’ rights, rampant inequality, and of course our topic today, the vast wealth of billionaires. Professor Wolff, thank you so much for joining us.

Richard Wolff:

Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I’m honored by it and I’m very glad to participate.

Taya Graham:

Thank you so much.

Richard Wolff:

If I may, I think you’ve been bringing up a point that I would like to take even further.

Speaker 4:

Please do that.

Richard Wolff:

The existence of the billionaires in shaping to take your analogy, the water that we as fish swim in

And that shapes us even though we’re not aware with each little moment where that happens, I want to review with people what it means that we even have billionaires. It means that those 800 odd folks, and I mean the word odd in all of its senses, that those 800 odd people dispose of purchasing power. That’s what it means to have a lot of wealth. They can buy, they can buy the way none of us can. They can buy a television station or a dozen, they can buy an advertising agency or a dozen. They can do things that shape the discourse that we all engaged in and nothing exemplifies it so beautifully as Elon Musk buying Twitter. Absolutely, there you have as naked, but it wasn’t. It is Mr. Bezos buying the Washington Post years earlier, and we could all go on what would be necessary in the United States and what those billionaires make sure we don’t have would be a proper accounting of what portion of the airwaves that are all around us like water around fish. One portion of all of that movement, electronic and otherwise of ideas and thoughts and positions is under the control of a handful of people in the way that they operate their wealth.

How many economists, or a couple more statistics, the 10% richest people in the United States own 85% of the stocks and bonds. What does that tell you? It’s a very small community within our population that holds all the strings. It’s not just the billionaires, it’s them too. We might call them aspiring billionaires. They just haven’t got there yet, but they are already behaving in a way that will make them fit in to be as polite about this as I can. Let me give you a couple of examples that might not have yet occurred to folks. I would argue, and I mean this very literally, that the three most important economic realities crashing in onto the lives of the American people in the years leading up to this latest election and continuing as I speak, were not part of the debate. Were not part of the election.

If I can quote famous philosopher, here was the powerful presence of an absence. One are the three topics. Well, let me give you the one in order as I see it, of importance. The United States came out of World War II in 1945. King of the Hill, every other conceivable competitor of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan. I’m not pretty much exhausted if you want put Russia in there, but Russia was never an economic competitor of the United States. They were all decimated in and by the war, their finances were gone. Their railroads had been bombed. Their people had suffered in a way that the United States simply did not. One group of bombs fell in Pearl Harbor and then never again throughout the rest of the war, et cetera. That meant that in the 70 years afterwards, roughly 1945 to the early part of this century, the United States prevailed in the world.

It dominated its products, went everywhere, the one currency that could be used on any corner of the globe, the US dollar. Where did you go if you were a poor country to borrow money? You went to Washington or New York? On and on and on. Why am I telling you this? Because I have to be the bearer of the bad news. So please remember, you do not shoot the messenger even if you don’t like the message. Our empire was profound, was as global, if not more so than the British empire that preceded it. But like every empire it’s born, it evolves and then it passes away. We are in the passing phase. It’s all around us. The dollar is not the reserve currency of every central bank across the world as it was. The dollar is not the agreed international currency the way it was. The role of America’s exports is much smaller in world trade than it was. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Stephen Janis:

Well, professor Wilson, I wanted to ask you a quick question. How much did inequality have to do with this diminishment of the empire? Just to generalize

Richard Wolff:

Question. I’m getting to that. I would

Stephen Janis:

Argue. Alright, my fault.

Richard Wolff:

No, no, not understandable. I’m getting to that.

Speaker 5:

Go

Stephen Janis:

Ahead.

Richard Wolff:

In every empire of which we have a record, and it’s quite a few ours, the British, the Dutch, the French, the Persian, I mean we do know a good bit about it. It’s been part of human history to say the least. One of the things that happens when empires begin to decline is that those people at the top, the 10% to 5%, if you like, the 1% who occupy the positions of the CEOs and of the political leadership and so on, they are in the best position to hold on to what they have, which means that the costs of the declining empire are offloaded onto the middle and the bottom. We are living through that offloading, and again, the examples are all around us. Once you’re willing to see, we have in the United States as a struggle won by the working class, a minimum wage begun in the depths of the depression back in the 1930s. The current minimum wage federal level is $7 and 25 cents an hour

Upon which you cannot live. It was last raised to that lofty level in the year 2009. It is that today. That means that for the last 15 years, every year prices went up sometimes just by a little 1%, sometimes by a lot last few years by six, seven, 8%. But for every one of the last 15 years without changing or raising the $7 and 25 cents an hour, which remained the same, you were salvaging the livelihoods of millions of people whose minimum wage was never raised, not by Republicans and not by Democrats. What kind of a society would do that to the poorest people of among you who are working. That’s why they get the minimum wage. It’s extraordinary. The social security distributions have not kept pace with inflation. The cost of our groceries have not kept pace with what are we doing? We are whacking the middle and the bottom, the vast majority of people, and one big explanation is the change in the world economy. Let me give you a second statistic. In economics, we have a statistic called the GDP, the Gross domestic Product. It’s a very crude measure, but it’s what we have to give you roughly the size of the footprint of an economy.

The United States used to be the biggest GDP in the world. It still is. It still is, but it has now a new reality. If you put together the GDP of the United States right now and those of its major allies called the G seven, that’s the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. If you put it together that total GDP is less, a lot less than the GDP of the People’s Republic of China and its allies in something called the bricks. This is a world changing reality. This is a new world economy that has in it two big blocks, the US and its allies and China and its allies. One of them is falling in relative wealth and the other one is rising. And the American people have to understand they’re in the one that’s falling and you’ve got to come to terms with that. And we just went through an election that pretended none of this is going on.

Stephen Janis:

That’s a really good point. And Dr. Wolff, I want to ask you a question because you were, as I was listening to you, I kind of had a question.

Richard Wolff:

Please.

Stephen Janis:

Are you saying to a certain extent that inequality is bad for growth? In other words, the furthermore inequality gets its roots in an economy, the less economy is productive and growing, it’s actually antithetical. Even though the elites will get more wealth for themselves, they’re actually hurting themselves in this process by creating a more unequal economy. Is that what you’re saying or am I understanding that?

Richard Wolff:

Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. What I would say is inequality,

Speaker 6:

Which

Richard Wolff:

Has often been used as a justification, it’s a necessary thing to allow if you’re going to have economic growth. Well, if that was the strategy we lost,

Speaker 5:

Okay, interesting.

Richard Wolff:

I would argue that the link there is a very dubious

Speaker 5:

Understood

Richard Wolff:

Link.

Speaker 5:

Understood.

Richard Wolff:

And it’s more scary for the American people because the difference between the United States and China is not the difference that Americans keep talking to each other about the difference between a so-called private enterprise economy, US Britain, so forth, and a fill in the blank state run economy. China has a hybrid by intent. They are 50%. A private capitalist economy equally run partly by Chinese businesses and partly by foreigners that have set up there including a big chunk of American business. And the other half is the government. So they’re not like the Soviet Union where everything was government or almost, and they’re not like the United States where everything’s mostly private. They are a new thing in the history of the world, a hybrid. Now why is that important? Because over the last 30 years, that system that they operate has grown faster than the United States or Britain or the G seven or anybody else. Every time I have to explain this to the American people, I have to stop and say, I am not endorsing Xi Jingping. I’m not celebrating China. They have a host of problems.

Speaker 5:

I’m stating

Richard Wolff:

A reality of fact. I’m arguing only that the United States is behaving like a three-year-old child confronted with a barking dog who puts his or her little hands in front of their eyes in the hope that if you can’t see the dog, it won’t be there and you know that a mature child will grow older and a year or two later we’ll have understood you can put your hand there, you can not see it, but the dog will probably be there just so much. We are not doing that. We conducted an election in which the two candidates acted like none of this was happening, whereas those of us who are by profession spend our time studying this. We’re looking at each other and I’m talking about my conversations with right wing economists, folks in the center, not just my leftwing colleagues, and we all look at each other. What is going on here? There’s a level of what psychologists call denial that is frightening.

Taya Graham:

I would have to agree and Professor Wolff, someone in our comment section once upon a time, I think summarized our conversation really well so far. They wrote, billionaires are dragons hoarding their gold for themselves and no one else, and they rip through working class people to keep it. Thank you so much for that comment Once upon a time, I think they made an excellent summation. Professor Wolff though I do want to ask you what influence you see on how billionaires impacted our most recent election? I mean, I think there’s a pretty obvious example of Elon Musk, but I know this topic has a lot more facets just than him. Maybe you could describe for us some of the ways that you saw billionaires influence our election.

Richard Wolff:

Well, for me, it was all about the subtle ways in which you do or do not pay attention to candidates. I mean, the choice is made in a little moment of a reporter’s behavior or a little moment later when the editor works over what the reporter submits. I mean, we all know that if you have anything to do with journalism, how that works and the mood is created and in our country we find it very worthwhile to enjoy the latest antics of Elon Musk. What is this about? What is this heroism that is applied to this fellow? I mean a mature, and I don’t want to insult anyone, but a mature look at our economy, especially aware that the automobile, the gas powered automobile is the single largest cause of air pollution in the world. This fact that we all have this automobile whose major function is to sit on the street or in the garage most of the hours of every day, a level of inefficient use of resources that dwarfs all the other ones. We typically talk about, and we have known for decades that we could do a major job on improving our health and saving this planet. If we went from the private automobile to a system of high quality, rapid well done mass, transportation,

Buses, trains, trolleys, all of that well known, the engineering has been done, the economics have been done. So what we needed in the world was a transition from the private oil driven car to mass transit, but we didn’t get that. We got something else and Elon Musk gets the credit or if you allow me the blame, what did he do? He figured out how he could make the kind of money a production of a private vehicle can get you to earn

If he could just get rid of the bad pollution from the gas. So he gave us the electric private vehicle which will sit in the garage and on the street for eternity being wasted in terms, it’s unbelievable. We should have had a social response to this saying, that’s not what we need, Mr. Musk, and we’re sure as hell not going to reward you by being, which he currently is. Let me remind you all, I keep track of these things. His current estimated wealth is 350 billion, an amount of money that you ought to wonder given to him because he replaced one efficient, inefficient system of transportation with another one and has made sure that we don’t have mass transportation and we could remove from him 300 of his 350 billion. He would then have 50 billion. He’d still be among the 800 billionaires of this country, Richard and everybody else, but we would have $300 billion with which we could attack half of the problems that are now judged to be beyond the reach of our solutions. It’s level of self delusion that we are going through as a nation that historians will look back on, shake their heads with wonder.

Taya Graham:

That’s such an excellent point. And so I just have to follow up because Elam Musk, along with Vivek Ram Swami, who’s a multimillionaire, who on multiple levels has defrauded his investors, his shareholders in the American public with the accident Alzheimer’s drug that fell through, and then of course he practically ran Rovan, his company into the ground, lost $926 million for that company and he’s going to be helping Elon Musk run the Department of government efficiency. So I’m just curious from your point of view, as an economist, what might your concerns be and what would you expect to happen when these two folks get a hand off the federal government and they’re controlling another facet of our lives,

Richard Wolff:

It’s part of the creation of the notion of the hero as the person who has a lot of money. I mean, it’s just an amazing mental leap, which smart people as most Americans are, wouldn’t do that. They know better than that. It’s bizarre. But look, we have a president who ran around becoming an important politician by telling everybody he was rich and telling everybody they ought to equate the fact that he’s rich, not with the fact that he inherited a ton of money from a father who had buildings in Brooklyn, but no, no, he was some kind of smarty, even though he’s got a dozen bankruptcies. It’s extraordinary. And you see it now with Ron Swami and with Elon Musk so far, by the way, they have announced only the following that I’ve been able to glean. They are going to make the government efficient and their initial plan is to lay off all the workers that are working from home, alright, just between you and me and the lamppost, that is the dumbest idea I have ever heard. Cruel. What kind of rational? You’re not going to investigate what each of these workers does, how it could be done in some other way. What would be No, no, no. They have a quick and dirty rule. That’s how they lost all that money making decisions like that. The opposite of what we teach people in university don’t ever make a sweeping decision like that unless of course what you’re doing is posing for the camera rather than solving a social problem.

And when you have billionaires, that’s what they do. We are going to watch Elon Musk standing next to the rocket ship over and over and over for the next five years and half of them won’t get off the ground, the other half will crash and he’ll have a good excuse for each one and he’ll be on the evening news. And this goes back to the question you asked earlier, that decision by the TV company to put Elon Musk standing next to the X rocket that he is going to send into the moon. That’s a choice. And you’re not going to show what’s happening to the average diet of the American people, what’s happening to the housing crisis. You’re not going to see that every now and then you’ll get a report, but you know what we’re going to hit the people with. Here’s the billionaire, and you’ll see ’em doing something sexy and dramatic and maybe driving off in his expensive car. And you don’t have to be a genius to understand that at the very best. That’s a mixed message that’s not helping us solve our social problems. It’s escapism.

Stephen Janis:

That brings up an interesting question, professor Wolffe, because I was thinking about that. I mean, it seems like during this past election that healthcare never came up, that climate changed, never came up. The student loan programs how we finance higher education never came up. Why do you think that is? Is that part of this billionaire? I was noticing today when I was watching CNN, they were talking about social security. They had an expert on, he never mentioned the fact that they could pretty much cure social security’s financial ills by just raising the cap on salaries and what people have to pay at what level they don’t pay anymore. But why was healthcare and these really important issues that affect every American not part of debate in the last election? I don’t really remember hearing it and people didn’t seem to be aware of it. What’s driving this sort of avoidance of real policy?

Richard Wolff:

Here’s the way it works. The politicians take an enormous amount of money which they can raise, and they hire professional pollsters. They set up groups all around the country, composed carefully of people from different walks of life, people with different religions, different jobs, all of that. And then they ask them, what question are you excited about? And they advise the candidate what to speak about based on where the, but you know what this is. You are now taking the pulse of the people to whom the billionaires direct all of their opinion. So you’re not

Testing people’s opinions, you’re testing how well the billionaires have done their job and they do their job perfectly well, and you can’t do that because what’s going to happen then is that the subterranean issues, the ones that are really affecting people, the sinking feeling when you can’t have eggs in the morning because the price of the eggs went crazy, or you can’t stay in your apartment because the landlord is upping the rent next month. And all of those moments, those are kind of gone. Those are somehow put without anyone saying it into the realm of your personal life, your personal dilemma, your personal failings.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely.

Richard Wolff:

And you know what happens? People are bitter. They feel it, but it’s not the allowable conversation. You can’t talk about sex and you can’t talk about other topics that are taboo in our culture. Those become taboo as well. And so there’s a bitterness and when it shows up when people who know they’re being screwed vote for Donald Trump because they’re voting for that other thing that they think is socially acceptable, a rich man living in a penthouse in New York and the bitterness doesn’t go away. It’s like learning that you can go to the mall 50 times. The bitterness that drives you there doesn’t go away no matter how many packages are in your garage.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I mean it’s almost like a spiritual crisis, but somehow fused with policy and it’s just odd. I think you made some great points about that because I just feel like there’s been a growing and growing disconnect between actual policies that affect people’s lives and the ability to discuss them. And I think, I mean, it is kind of metaphysical. The billionaires come out and they set the tone of the bait and they distract you and force you to consider issues that really don’t impact your life. And that was how people were making decisions this election tell you,

Richard Wolff:

And you’re teaching them the last point. You’re teaching them, you really are without meaning to and without having the title of teacher, you’re teaching them, these are the important issues that you really should be thinking about. There’s something wrong with you if you’re dwelling on the price of the eggs in the supermarket, you should be really excited pro or allowing trans people into certain bathrooms. Our society is falling apart and I have no disrespect. I want the trans folks to have all the rights. Everybody else does. However, the sense of proportion here is craziness. There were, I think 80 bills introduced in state legislatures as well as in the federal one about trans people’s rights to access public toilets. What are you teaching people? I could give you many, many other examples there. What are you telling people? It’s extraordinary. The billionaires are very crucial in that decision making.

Stephen Janis:

I think. So what’s anything in the chat state?

Taya Graham:

Oh my gosh, the chat is great, and I just want to mention one thing dark Earth said must took over Tesla to make money not to help humanity. He exploited our desire to improve environmental issues. We have to line his pocket. He’s a conman, not a philanthropist. I love our viewers. Those an let’s

Stephen Janis:

Remember, he got four $56 million from the Obama administration too. Oh,

Taya Graham:

That’s right. Democrats helped make

Stephen Janis:

Him a coordinator. I think. I mean, professor Wolf corporate socialism is actually thriving right? In America.

Richard Wolff:

Absolutely. They all, and the beauty of it is each one of them when they go to the Congress, because I’ve been involved in this because go to the Congress, the argument that usually clinches it, they refer to another billionaire who came last year or two years ago and got a big chunk of subsidy. Why not me? And everybody nods poor me. Why not him?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Wow. It sounds like badly when billionaires out.

Taya Graham:

It sounds like tips and Baltimore tax

Stephen Janis:

Increment financing. Any comments in the chat or

Taya Graham:

Anything? Oh, we’ve got great comments in the chat,

Stephen Janis:

But Oh, you want to ask a question? Go ahead.

Taya Graham:

But let me just ask sometimes I just want to point out something. So the Biden administration saved Teamsters pensions. They released roughly 36 billion to preserve roughly 360,000 retirement payees. But the Teamsters didn’t endorse Vice President Harris. And the reason why I think of it’s because you mentioned those cultural war issues. So I’m just wondering, even when Democrats do something that ostensibly seems good, saving teamsters pensions and they still don’t earn an endorsement, does that mean the culture war issues are transcending self-interest or is maybe there’s something else going on here?

Speaker 5:

Good question.

Richard Wolff:

I would argue very strongly with you that this is not a problem of culture issues. This is a problem that what’s ailing the teamster, the truck driver or whoever you’re talking about, they organize lots of people beyond truck drivers.

Speaker 5:

Yes, true.

Richard Wolff:

If they are facing existential crises over the last 40 years as the American economy ran out of its empire gas, you had enormous social changes. One of the most important was the end of rising wages. By that I mean what we economists call real wages. That is the money you get adjusted for the prices you have to pay. Our working class has a real wage now about where it was in the 1970s. Let me give you an example just to shock you. Over the same period the last 40, 50 years, the real wage of the average Chinese worker has quadrupled.

This is again, nothing to do with celebrating China. China has lots of problems. I’m aware of them, but that’s a fact you have to deal with, it explains something about politics in China versus politics Here you have denied those workers the rise that the previous a hundred years had given them in this country. It’s one of the things made United States special. It gave workers rising real wages every decade for over a century. No other capitalist country did that. That’s why Americans feel that they live in an exceptional, they did for a long time, but that stopped in the 1970s and suddenly the advertising to the American working class family didn’t stop. You were still given the notion of what the American dream should be for you. You should have your own home. You should have one or two cars. You should send your kid to college.

How in the world are you going to do that if your real wage is stagnant? Well, we found the answer and the answer is, and people have to try to get their heads around this. The answer transformed the lives above all of women. Because the women, particularly the white women, but to some degree the non-whites as well, they left the home. They weren’t anymore the housewife, the homemaker, the mother, the care. They had to, they did all those things, but on top of it, they went out and got a job. They had to because the men’s wages were not going anywhere, but they kept the social network alive. They kept the emotional nexus going in the family. It’s mom who did that? Not bop. Very rare. And when you put the women under that stress, you blew up the family. We have a level of divorce in our country that’s among the highest in the world.

Our women no longer have children. They’re not going to go back to what they had before. All of these things are creating anxieties in the men that is extreme tensions between men and women, which you could see exploding. I mean, we have a vice president we’re about to have, who wants the women to go back inside the house, have babies and shut up and says so that that’s a sign of something. Those are the issues that have to be addressed. And the drivers in the teamsters who support Trump, I want to take my hat off to them. They have half of what they need, a recognition that the conventional politicians and my humble opinion on both parties are not there for them. They haven’t solved their problem, haven’t changed any of this. They’re interchangeable. They want something different. And Mr. Trump, by his very crudeness, offer them something different. I don’t think they believe in him, it’s just that they don’t believe in the conventional bushes or Clintons or bidens or unfortunately what came after.

Stephen Janis:

How much do you think Trump’s appeal is a product of the conflict media industrial complex? We talked about not just responding to the anxieties of people, but actually fueling or playing off the anxieties created by a conflict media system that makes everything seem dysfunctional. I mean, I would think if I were a teamster and a Biden administration saved my pension, I would be very supportive. But it seems like this is a psychological thing, like there’s a ops that makes us actually think even when things are good that they’re really bad. I, and I feel that frustration as a reporter when I interview people because I really feel like they are not being communicated with effectively in any way to understand what maybe their self-interest, I don’t want to be arrogant about it, but how much is Trump really a product of the conflict media industrial complex, not just the anxiety, these anxiety of voters?

Richard Wolff:

Well, I think it is not either or my understanding, really. My understanding is that all of these things are going on.

Speaker 5:

They are.

Richard Wolff:

I would caution you though, even when the teamster, and we can pick the W worker or teacher or anybody else,

Speaker 5:

Absolutely.

Richard Wolff:

When they’re aware that the Biden administration voted to do something good for union pensions,

If you talk to them for more than five minutes, you’ll discover they know that. But they have no confidence. They don’t have any confidence anymore. That won’t be taken away either by a Republican or a Democrat next week because they’ve become an interchangeable group. They want, look, Mr. Trump, in all due respect had two big ideas. He said to the American people, you’ve been screwed for 40 years, which is true, and you are upset about it, which is true, and I am going to protect you from any more of this, and I’m going to take us back to before this bad stuff happened, mago, we’re going to go back and I’m going to protect you from the two dangers. The first protection is I’m going to put up a steel wall against all of those immigrants and the second protection is I’m going to put up a tariff wall against all those Chinese products. And look, these are very dramatic images. I can tell you as an economist that he can’t do any of that. Or to put it another way, if he does any of that, he’ll come to regret it and fast because it will loose economic chaos in this country that will then be blamed on him.

Stephen Janis:

Well, can you drill down that in the tariff part? Because Howard tariffs, that is such an axiomatic thing, and just give us a little bit about tariffs because a lot of us don’t know how they work, but a lot of economists say that’s a disaster waiting happen. Can you talk a little bit about that for us?

Richard Wolff:

Sure, sure. First of all, what is a tariff? Tariff is just a given to a particular kind of tax. It’s a tax that is applied when an object is produced outside the United States, but brought inside to be sold. So a bottle of French wine that is sold in your local liquor store, that’s an import. And the duty used to be called import duty, is a tax on that import. So first of all, enjoy with me that a Republican leader, that’s the party that has been anti-tax all its life, is now proposing an enormous facts, but hopes that you won’t notice it by calling it a tariff. So here’s how it goes. Mr. Trump has variously suggested he’s going to throw a tariff against everybody. He has mentioned rates that go from 10% to 60% and possibly more in the case of China because he wants to punish them.

Then he says things, which by the way, if an undergraduate said this in any economics professor’s class, he would immediately flunk. But the president calls around and he says, I’m going to hit the Chinese with a tariff. Well, that shows he’s either a hustler or an ignoramus and I don’t know, I’ll let him choose which one he wants. Why? When I’m going to use the example, a real example. 15 years ago, the world began to compete every car company to compete to produce an electric car. And we’ve all heard about Mr. Musk and Tesla. They did it, but the best car, the best electric car and truck in the world today, best quality and also the lowest price is a electric vehicle produced in China and by a corporation whose name you will learn even though you’ve never heard of it. It’s called the BYD corporation, B as in boy, Y as in yellow, D as in dog.

The BYD corporation makes the best cheapest electric car. Let’s suppose you can get one of those for $30,000, which you can. Alright, if there’s a tariff and you are an American and you want to buy one, you would have to come up with first 30,000 bucks that go to China to pay for the car. Then you’d have to pay a 100% tariff that was imposed on these cars by Mr. Biden, a hundred percent means another 30,000. So you would have to pay $60,000, 30,000 go to China. They get their money with or without a tariff. It’s Uncle Sam who gets the tariff. You are an American, you pay it and it goes to Uncle Sam. But because of that, you’re not going to buy a Chinese car because it’s 60 grand for you. You’re going to buy a less good car made by Ford or Tesla or GM or whoever you buy it from. They’re going to charge you say 50 grand, not what you ought to pay, but at least it’s less than the 60, which you would have to, that’s how it works. Here’s the irony. It’ll make the inflation in this country go crazy, which is why he can’t do it, because the price of everything will go up. I mean, in the morning you have cup of coffee that comes from abroad. We don’t grow coffee in quantities in this country that has to be imported. You put sugar in it, that has to be imported also. Okay, get ready for $25 lattes in the morning. That’s going to hurt.

Speaker 5:

Wow.

Richard Wolff:

Talking about that. Who’s going to get to blame Mr. Trump and his nutty way of thinking? You can’t do it. But it is a wonderful, and here I come, the media again, they take all this seriously. President elect Trump is going to whack the Chinese with a tart. It’s all nutty that this is Madison Avenue advertising gone crazy, distracting people from all the real issues that are changing and threatening their lives, and they go into this zone of make-believe. It’s like in an amusement park when you’re in the dark tunnel and the world isn’t the way it really is.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. See, I think you want

Taya Graham:

A professor Wolff, I think as reporters, although we are local independent reporters, I think it’s only fair to note the role that wealth plays in influencing and perhaps in some cases even controlling what our mainstream media teaches us about our electoral politics or even the politics surrounding capital wealth. So there was this post I found from existential comics that I found it online and it seems like it summarizes it perfectly. And it says, the billionaires who own the news have the millionaires who report it, sit there and tell you with a straight face that you don’t deserve $15 an hour. Professor Wolff, could you share some of your thoughts on the role that the media plays in influencing us? For example, like policies like advocating for a $15 per hour minimum wage, which you cited earlier, it hasn’t changed in decades.

Stephen Janis:

Well, yeah,

Taya Graham:

The federal minimum

Stephen Janis:

Wage. The federal minimum. Minimum. Some states have said like Marilyn has said, higher $20 an hour minimum wage,

Richard Wolff:

By the way, right? There is a wonderful story. In other words, you don’t need a leftist economist like me to point out that $7 and 25 cents is an outrageous to a working person.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. We

Richard Wolff:

Have more than half the states in this country have found it so odious that they have raised the state minimum wage way above that. The last time I looked, the state of Washington on the west coast had the highest state minimum wage at about $19 an hour. Okay? That’s almost three times what the federal government, what in the world is going on. That is a chaotic reality. It means that a worker in a state enterprise in Washington has as a minimum three times what a worker governed by the federal law has anywhere else in the same country. So yeah, I mean, it is outrageous, but it is only one of many, many, many outrageous, how many folks know really in their gut how much money has been spent on the war in Ukraine. Put aside what you think about the issues of the war itself, but just are you as an American ready to forego what those hundreds of billions could have done for the problems of this country in order to fight that war in that country?

And remember, more than half of Americans polled, could not tell you where Ukraine was on the map. Couldn’t find it. So what exactly are we doing? We have a media that is full, not so much of what it does, but what it omits from doing. Why are we not told about the housing crisis? Let me be an economist with you. That’s the worst thing about the inflation. The cost of housing has gone crazy in this country. True. You probably know that just from your own friends and family. But if not, let me assure you, the numbers are incredible because the top 10% decided in the pandemic that it’s important to have a house in the country. And so that’s what we have produced houses in the country that are second homes for people and we have concentrated the rest of what we build in high rise luxury housing in a dozen cities that have become enclaves.

Let me give you a dystopian vision of what the United States is becoming. We are becoming what we used to call a third world country. We have pockets of wealth, certain cities and the suburbs around them, and they exist in a sea of misery of people who cannot access health. If half of what is a promise to be done to Obamacare is going to be done by Mr. Trump, they will not access healthcare. They are already being priced out of the education system. They can’t afford that. They can’t carry those loans. I mean, what are we doing in Germany and France? My background is French and German. I speak those languages I have since I’ve been a child in Germany. Higher education is free. Let me just explain. It’s free. No tuition, no fees. You cover your food and your room and board that you have to take care of, but you do not pay. And not only is that available to all German citizens, it’s available to anyone. There are 25,000 Americans getting their college degrees in Germany. They don’t have to go into debt. And the same is true in half a dozen other European. What’s going on here? Americans in tone to themselves. We live in the greatest country. We live in the grid. We aren’t doing that anymore. That’s over. That’s with the empire. Bye-Bye.

Ought to be discussed.

Stephen Janis:

It’s interesting because I was an adjunct for like 12 years and I never made more than three or $4,000 to teach a 16 week class with 22

Taya Graham:

Students. If I remember, you were being paid $2,500 to teach a class.

Stephen Janis:

So even in our higher o’clock

Taya Graham:

Class,

Stephen Janis:

Even in our higher education system, we have this kind of caste system and it seems to just, but Professor Wolff, I’m just curious because you’re bringing all these things up historically. Is there any historic perspective? I mean, how egregious is our economic inequality right now? What level are we in terms of from historical standards? Are we unequal in our basic economic system here? I mean, how bad is inequality here? Historically speaking,

Richard Wolff:

It’s very bad. But the picture of our history, and I’m glad you brought it up. The picture of our history is remarkable. In the 18th century and in the 19th century, we were stable for a good while and then we began when we were an independent starting in the 19th century, when we were independent, we began to have a trajectory in which real wages, as I mentioned earlier, went up every decade. It was extraordinary from around 1820 to around 1970s, 150, really

Speaker 5:

That long,

Richard Wolff:

150 years of a steadily rising standard of living.

Stephen Janis:

So I clearly missed the boat.

Richard Wolff:

What

Stephen Janis:

I said, I clearly missed the boat.

Richard Wolff:

No, so to speak. Wait a

Stephen Janis:

Minute,

Richard Wolff:

Profits rose even faster. So you had a slow steady inequality, but it was very bearable because you were giving the working class a rising standard of, so they were willing, the working class, I mean I’m generalizing obviously, of course, but they were willing to tolerate the inequality which wasn’t growing quickly because their situation was improved. They could have better housing, better diets, better clothing do for their children, all of that. Then the first world war comes the 1920s and the 1920s are a period of rapid inequality without a rising standard of living.

And that blew up in the Great Depression and the anger, and this is so important for Americans to understand the working class revolted in the 1930s against not just the unemployment and all the horrors of the crash after 1929, but in a delayed reaction, they reacted against the inequality that had become so stark in the 1920s. And then we had, and this goes to your question, a compression, we went the 1930s were a period where inequality not only didn’t get worse, it got much better. Interesting. The gap between rich and poor narrowed. Now partly this was because the rich really got wiped out by the stock market collapsed and all of that. But meanwhile, the gap and that developed after World War ii and that’s when I grew up, and I assume you did too when we developed this idea that the United States is a magical place where everybody is in the middle class. Sure, we have a few rich ones and we have a few desperados, but we are the great example of a classless middle class. We all have our home, we have our car Saturday, we wash it in the driveway, blah, blah, all of that. And it was true.

Stephen Janis:

It

Richard Wolff:

Was true. We had compressed it. United States was exceptional in all of that.

Stephen Janis:

And we even had like a 92% market

Richard Wolff:

Starting,

Stephen Janis:

Starting

Richard Wolff:

In the seventies. The good jobs were moved to China and elsewhere and the immigrants came in and the real wages stopped going up. And we have now become wildly, we are now more unequal than we were way back when. But it’s been an up and down ride. And the importance of that is when people say, well, there’s nothing you can do that’s not correct. Let me remind you not to make a hero out of Franklin Roosevelt, but here’s the facts. Here comes a guy who comes from the elite of the United States whose family had had a president earlier, Thedo Roosevelt and so on. What did he do under the pressure of the unions and of two socialists and a communist party? He created the social security system in the middle of the Great Depression when the government had no money, we passed the law that says if you reach the age of 65, the government will give you a check every month for however long you live, an extraordinary act. Then we pass the unemployment compensation. We had never done that before

Speaker 6:

Because

Richard Wolff:

Your job through a layoff, we’ll give you a check every week for a year or two. And where did the money come from? He taxed corporations and the rich, I enjoy that so much. I have to repeat it. He taxed corporations and the rich to pay for a program for the middle class and the poor. So no one should listen to people who say, you can’t do that. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, didn’t we in the fifties have a 92% marginal tax rate?

Richard Wolff:

That’s right.

Stephen Janis:

And I heard recently that some of this was because Roosevelt and then subsequently even Eisenhower felt that if we didn’t provide a higher standard of living if comparatively to the Cold War countries we were fighting, then it would seem like we were a failure. That’s right. So there’s people like economists like Thomas pti who say inequality is not a natural outgrowth of economic growth. And also said, it’s been a symbolic what in the seventies? How do we come to this change where suddenly we don’t care about the middle class collectively and we get on this ever-rising inequality, what changes? Is it political, cultural? I mean what really gives us, is it Ronald Reagan? I mean, what really starts this change on this armored trajectory towards where we are now?

Richard Wolff:

I would argue, to answer your question, I would argue that the experience of the 1930s that I just summarized

In which corporations and the rich were taxed in order to provide social security benefits, unemployment compensation, the first minimum wage, it was passed in the 1938 and a government hiring program, the biggest program of all 15 million people put on the government payroll paid that. Where did all that money come from in a depression when nobody was paying taxes anymore? It came from corporations in the rich. And I would argue it traumatized that class in the American political system. And they said in 1945 when that war was over and when that president died, they were going to roll back the new deal. And that’s been your lifetime and my lifetime. We are going through what I believe is the final stages of literally getting back to what it was that blew us up the 1930s. And it is a nice round number a hundred years ago. And here we are about to go right back into the same scenario unless this time we got other people giving us the leadership to go in a different direction.

Taya Graham:

It’s really interesting that you started speaking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt because I actually have a clip that I picked out from Senator Sanders that I would love for you to react to Professor Wolff if we could just roll that for him.

Speaker 7:

Thanks, KA. It’s not just Kamala Harris, it’s the demo. In other words, let me read you something if I might please. What I think is one of the most interesting speeches ever given Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural speech in 1936, middle of the depression. So he starts his speech. He says, look, these are the things we did. These are the obstacles that we had to overcome. And then he says, after being president for four years, he says that, I quote, I see millions of families trying to live on income. So Omega, that DePaul of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions of night education, recreation and the opportunity to better their lot and a lot of their children. I see one third of a nation ill housed, ill cloud, ill nourished. In other words, what Roosevelt did is said, look, we are making progress, but I look out all over this country and I see tens of millions of people who are hurting. Instead of doing that, when the Democrats said, well, we passed the inflation adjustment act, and I understand the economy is pretty good and Donald Trump’s a bad guy, and we all defend the woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. There was no appreciation, no appreciation of the struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working class people. And unless you recognize that reality and have a vision of how you get out of that, I think you’re not going to be going very far as a political party.

Taya Graham:

So professor, building off what Senator Sanders said, how does a party communicate that they understand the struggles of working class people? Now I know the Republican party seems to understand how to amplify their anger and understandable outrage, but is there another way to do this? And beyond just rhetoric, what sort of policies could Democrats offer to prove they really do understand what people need? Or are there any recent policies that they could expand on or try to improve?

Richard Wolff:

Good question. Well, I think the answer is easy and readily at hand. They have chosen not to pay attention, not to try, not even in part, and instead of speculating, let me give you an example of what other capitalist countries, our allies in Western Europe, what they do for the working class and they don’t have a Trump and they’re not about to get a Trump either. Even the people that they think over there are like Trump are light years away from what Trump is or what Trump is about to do. Okay, so let me start. Part of my family is French. When I visit them in France, we talk, they have a health insurance that covers them from the day they are born to the day that they die. If they are injured, if they get sick, they have a health program to go to that does not cost them anything.

You don’t meet people carrying around a load of medical debt. I already gave you the example of higher education. They don’t have student debt either. They have a vast array of subsidies in France, if you have more than one child, you get a subsidy from the government to help you pay for the cost of that child for 18 years. And they’ve been doing that for decades. Bernie likes to give examples of Denmark. Oh, that’s one place. But there are a lot of programs. Lemme give you another one to shake you up because my guess is your audience hasn’t heard it. In 1985, a legislator in Italy named Marcora got a law passed by the Italian parliament. Here’s how the law works. If you become unemployed in Italy, you have a choice. You have a plan A and a plan B. A plan A is you go on what they call there the dole. That’s like going out unemployment here, you got to check every week, et cetera, et cetera. But you can choose plan B. What’s plan B? You got to get at least nine other unemployed people like yourself. Then the 10 or more of you go to the government and you get from the government by law the entirety of your unemployment compensation a year or so worth as a lump sum, each of the 10 of you get it on condition that you use it to start a worker co-op business.

Taya Graham:

That’s amazing.

Stephen Janis:

That is amazing.

Taya Graham:

I’m sorry, I’m just flabbergasted.

Stephen Janis:

No, we’re saying that’s an amazing policy. That’s incredible. Yeah, we were just where I can do it.

Richard Wolff:

By the way, the business community in Italy has tried more than once to get rid of it. They have failed. It’s on the books as I speak to you, it was passed in 1985. Incredible Americans don’t know it. Guess what? Italy has more worker, co-ops than most other countries in Europe for this reason. They have supported this. If you go to Bologna, if you go to that area of Italy known as Emelia, Romania, 40% of the economy, there is worker co-ops, they teach how to set ’em up in the university. The greatest worker co-op is in northern Spain in a place called gon the GON Corporation is a family of 200. It’s the seventh largest corporation in Spain. This is a new way to organize work, work and those people don’t pay a few people millions while everybody else can’t send their kid to college because the workers themselves decide on the pay scale.

And so inequality is way less than what we have. Okay, why aren’t we trying that? Why isn’t the Democratic party saying, and by the way, just a footnote, Bernie’s platform, when he ran in whatever it was 2016, had in it supporting co-ops, but it was a single line and most people didn’t know what to do. It looked like a throwaway line, but it isn’t. It’s a very serious, what would you say if you said to the American people, we’re going to get rid of this crazy quilt of medical insurance where every time you have a claim, there’s a fight between the doctor and the insurer. Are you covered all of it? Part of it stop. We’re going to give you a blanket that no one is going to have to pay. If you have a baby, no one is going to have to pay. If you get injured, you’re not going to go into debt. We’re not going to do that and we’re going to go, I don’t have to go to Europe, go to Canada as a perfectly functioning system. And by the way, the people fight very hard in all of those countries to keep that.

Even the conservatives in Canada did not dare come out against their single payer system.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, no, no, I know. So Professor Wolff, as we get to the end of our discussion, I wanted to ask you a question because I’m thinking it’s like we live in Thomas Friedman’s world or whatever his name was, Milton Friedman, excuse me, Milton Friedman. But how can we collectively fight inequality? I mean, it’s such an abstract concept yet seem so ubiquitous. Is there a way to actually fight it on a collective basis? I mean we see the products that unions have made in other organizations. Can you reverse inequality? It will take some sort of social calamity like the depression to actually reorganize our economic system. Is there literally a way you or I can actually battle against it besides speaking out about it? I mean is there anything concrete you can think of besides the neoliberal project, which seems to have failed at this point? Anything you think can think of?

Richard Wolff:

Yes. I mean I do think that at this point, given everything else going on, and I agree with the way you’ve rendered it, the most important thing is what I would, and I mean this in all honesty, what you’re doing, the two of you, the kind of program you’re designing, the kind of conversation you’re organizing, the materials you gather, these are very, very important. You are changing some minds who will in turn change other. That’s how this works.

But I would say yes. And the example I gave you a minute ago, I think could stimulate the American people in ways little else could. Let’s talk about worker corp. An enterprise that is not run by a tiny group of people, a board of directors or the owner, whatever you want to call them who make all the decisions, what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the product and the revenue from the product. Why is that not a democratic decision? Why are we not all the janitor who cleans up at the end of the day, the machinist who works by the machine, the clerk who keeps the come on. We are all affected by what happens in that business. Why is it not run democratically? If we vote for a mayor because what the mayor may do affects us as residents, then why are we not voting for the people who run the enterprise since everything they decide affects us as employees?

I mean, I think a reconstruction is that bold. You bet. But you know something. I think we’ve run out of all those proposals that aren’t bold or if I may dare say so that aren’t radical. Yeah, we need radical because the reformist idea, look, we just had a demonstration. Kamala Harris said, let’s give $25,000 to a family buying a home for the first time. Good idea. Let’s not tax tip income. Good idea. Let’s improve the childcare tax credit. Good idea. But these are small. They’re very important. They’re good ideas, but you’re not dealing with what the people are upset about. Even if those things came to pass, the people know, yeah, it might help a bit, but it’s not dealing with what we have gone through for 30 to 40 years.

Speaker 4:

So

Richard Wolff:

Why are we not, why are we not? What are we afraid of? Bernie proved, I have my disagreements with him too, but I think we’re all in his debt. He went out into the public arena, did not get rid of the label. Socialist kept it, accepted it, and millions of people came to support him. I believe currently he’s listed as the most popular mainstream politician in the country. This is more than I thought we had to work with.

Stephen Janis:

And I think he also played into what not played, but actually he had the one sort of quantity that is essential when you’re going to go into the current social media battles, which is he had authenticity. And I think that resonates more than almost anything. And I think that’s some of the reason people like Trump because they think he’s authentic, because he’s willing to say anything. But Bernie Sanders was actually a counter that it’s just unfortunate that the Democratic party neoliberal him out of the

Taya Graham:

Absolutely

Stephen Janis:

With the neoliberal hip check. Got him out of there. So

Taya Graham:

Why

Stephen Janis:

Don’t you wrap this up?

Taya Graham:

Sure. And as a matter of fact, I’m just going to mention I saw a comment from one of our folks here. Kat Cleric said Democrats were more scared of Bernie than Trump. I trust none of them. Which I thought was an interesting comment, but before I let Professor Wolff go, I know we have five minutes left with him. So I just, I feel like if we didn’t address immigration that we really would be remiss in this conversation

Speaker 5:

Point. Absolutely.

Taya Graham:

Now I will say I personally believe that there will be an incredible humanitarian cost to deporting 11 million people, but I’m hoping that the cold, hard economic facts of enacting this policy might cause people to reconsider their support for mass deportation. So I was hoping maybe you could share some of your thoughts on the economic impact of this policy, what it would cost for the US government to try to do this, what the repercussions would be on the average American. I mean, if people are worried about the price of eggs and bacon deporting the people who work in agriculture and food production, doesn’t seem to me to be the way to lower those prices. But what would you say would be some of the economic consequences?

Richard Wolff:

Yes. Before I do, let me also say, and maybe I’m wrong here. I hope not for better or worse, and often it’s worse, but sometimes it’s better. America is a very religious place and all of the major religions here, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they all say that what Allah or God or whatever it is you believe in wants you to do is to welcome the refugee, to open your arms, to open your heart, to give him a meal, to do all the things that the Bible and other holy books tell us to do. I think you’re going to see maybe sooner than you imagine an immense reaction in this country, which will be driven by a well-deserved guilt on the part of this population for what they are doing. And I feel that as strongly as I feel the guilt that will descend on the Jewish people for what has happened in Gaza.

But putting that aside, here’s the economics that you’ve asked about. The Department of Homeland Security says there’s somewhere between 10 and 12 undocumented, a million undocumented immigrants in the United States. So as an economist, let me make one thing clear. We are a rich country of 330 million people. The economic problems we have, which are severe, could not ever have been caused by 10 to 12 of the poorest people on the planet. The notion that the immigrants are a cause of the problems we face is stone cold, ridiculous. It may be a clever scapegoating, it may work to get you votes, but it has nothing to do with reality. Number two, there are certain industries that concentrate undocumented immigrants. Agriculture is a big one. The restaurant business is a big one, construction is another big one, and then there’s a whole host of other industries, but those are the big ones in those industries.

Undocumented immigrants are a major part of the labor force. Not only that, they are a more important cause of the profitability in those industries than their mere numbers would tell you why. Because an undocumented immigrant can be and is regularly abused by the employer for the obvious reason, which if you have any contact with these folks, they’ll tell you 10 different stories. I’ve heard ’em all. It’s Friday afternoon. Everybody’s going to pick up their check at the front office before they go home. Jose arrives, he stands in line, waits for his check. The boss says, Jose, we’ve had a terrible week. We didn’t make the money. I can’t pay you this week, but if you come back next week, I can be sure to pay you. What is Jose going to do? Answer nothing. He dare not go to any government office

Because he is an undocumented, he can’t show a paper, he can’t show a residence allowance, nothing. He’s terrified of going anywhere near the labor office. There’s nothing he can do. And the employer knows it. The employers look for these people because of this, and I’m not going to here take your time and mine to talk about the abuse sexual and other that this situation invites in all the ways you don’t need me to tell you about. Okay, now let’s imagine you deport them. First of all, that costs billions because you’re talking about 10 to 12 million people. You have to house them, you have to move them, you have to feed them in the process. You have to deal with the mte million lawsuits that will immediately crop up around all of this. This is going to take time and it is going to cost personnel and it’s going to be an immense expense, but that’s the least of it.

Here comes the big one. Every one of those industries is a crucial player in the inflation level of the United States. Who’s going to pick the lettuce? Who’s going to pick the fruit? Who’s going to do all that work? Who’s going to clean the dishes in the back of the restaurant? Who’s going to clean up at the end of the evening when the patrons of the restaurant go home? Well, the answer is you close the restaurant and that has economic consequences or you close the farms and that’s really not an option. Or you’re going to have to hire Americans and Americans won’t be afraid to go to the labor office if you don’t pay them. So you’re going to actually have to pay them and you’re probably going to have to pay them a good bit more than the immigrant for all the reasons you normally pay immigrants less than native workers, which means the cost structure of these industries is going to take off.

And you know what? They’re all going to do. Those employers. They’re going to raise their prices, they’re going to want to do that to recapture the extra costs that will come. And the government has not proposed anything that will substitute here. I’ve heard one professor tell me, oh, we don’t have to worry. AI will take care of this. You know what AI does? It makes people like you and me superfluous, but are we ready to go and wash dishes at the back of the restaurant? Are we ready to pick apples? Really? You’re going to cause social upheaval going to cause inflation. Mr. Trump can’t do that. Inflation is half of why he got elected.

Speaker 5:

True.

Richard Wolff:

How can he turn around and then be the person who has to go on TV and try to explain why he promised to deal with inflation only? It’s gotten worse and he won’t be able to tell the truth. I’m deporting everybody because then the argument will be as clear as day for people. So you’re going to have to watch now as the various cabinet secretaries bizarre though. They have to undo what it was he’s promised.

Speaker 5:

Well,

Taya Graham:

Wow. What I’m just going to say is what someone in the comment said, it’s the hiking enthusiast, and they said, I wish Professor Wolff would get on the news and yell at all of us. We deserve it bit. So we’re going to have to make sure somehow you get on that mainstream media. I think it would be interesting to see you on CNN in between those prescription commercials you’d love to hit us with.

Stephen Janis:

It’s usually because listening to him, especially not talking like you’re not here, but this long expansive march of inequality, it feels like it’s created a drought in this country and then social media conflict media comes in and just lights it on fire. Oh gosh, it’s such a great service. But it feels good because it’s great to hear his historical perspective on how equality has had this slow march and just you can kind all the kind of social problems we’ve had kind of mirror that kind of growth and that sort of rise and fall and then rise of inequality. I think it’s really important that we understand historically where we are, which is really on the precipice I think as he says, or as you say Dr. Wolff. So

Taya Graham:

I just have to ask you, Dr. Wolff, before you leave us, I’ve been looking at our commenters and I would say that people here, they come from a variety of political affiliations and I think

Speaker 4:

Whether

Taya Graham:

You’re a Democrat or a Republican or a libertarian or a socialist, people care about the undue influence of billionaires and money in our government. And especially I think the new appointments by the President-elect have set off a new set of fears, but can we actually trust any politician to stand up to them? I mean, I saw Delaware Democrat, Senator Coons on Fox News saying that the department government of efficiency could be constructive and should be embraced. So if we take this as a sign that Democrats and Republicans won’t push back, what can we do to push back against billionaires? What can our friends in the comments that are watching you right now, what can they do to help fight this?

Stephen Janis:

Don’t buy a Tesla.

Taya Graham:

Don’t buy a Tesla. Okay. Step one. Other

Stephen Janis:

Than that though, don’t

Taya Graham:

Waste $60,000 on a Tesla.

Richard Wolff:

Yeah,

Taya Graham:

Okay.

Richard Wolff:

I think the best advice I can give you, I wish I could say more, but the best advice I can give you is tune into programs like this.

Become somebody who pays attention to the Real News network and to the others that are trying, including me and the team I work with trying to get this out. I would give you this hope, if that’s the right word. Things are becoming clearer. All of us, myself included, are seeing more clearly than we have most of our lives, what is in fact happening to us. And we had to learn the slow and hard way to explore the other arguments to see that they didn’t do the job. But that, for example, the historical, which has been crucial for me to understand

How we got into the rut I think we’re in helps you understand, but also to navigate that rut because you have a sense of where it’s been. You have a sense that the working class in America went to the left the last time the system collapsed. It’s not impossible at all. That’s what happened. That’s why we have a social security system and it hasn’t been able to be gotten rid of, even though George Bush for sure made a major effort to do that, that you may remember. So I think there are parts of the society that are there are wondering with us. I think that the only way Mr. Trump won was because the promise of Mr. Biden that he would be somehow a big difference from Trump never materialized and that people held him accountable and went back to Trump. But I don’t think Mr. Trump’s first race nor Mr. Biden’s, nor is there any reason to believe the upcoming Trump has even an idea of the problems they have, let alone how to solve them. Which means my best guess is we will be running Mr. Trump out of town, figuratively in four years, at least as enthusiastically as he came in this time.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Speaker 5:

Well,

Stephen Janis:

Words of wisdom.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. Professor Wolff, we appreciate you so much and I know our viewers did as well. We just really appreciate your intellect and your insight and of course your vast knowledge of history, which really gives us some context and the idea that we are in the waning days of American Empire. Well, I might have to have an adult beverage tonight. That’s a lot to take in Professor.

Richard Wolff:

Yes. I think Glasss of wine is more or maybe even two.

Taya Graham:

Yes, maybe even two, maybe even three. Honestly, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you.

Richard Wolff:

My pleasure. I look forward to this and I’m glad that we were able to get together.

Taya Graham:

Yes, absolutely. Me as well. Thank you so much.

Richard Wolff:

Thanks.

Taya Graham:

And I just wanted to say thank you Moffitt Studio for your support. That’s really kind. We got a donation.

Speaker 5:

We got a donation. Nice.

Taya Graham:

Really appreciate it. So Stephen, if you don’t mind, I know that we have a little bit of limited time here, so is it okay if I, do you want to share some final thoughts? No, go

Stephen Janis:

Right into your

Taya Graham:

Thing. Are you sure?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, yeah.

Taya Graham:

Okay.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, I think we’ve all said enough

Taya Graham:

That’s true.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, I could talk about economic inequality all the time. There’s so many other facet ways of looking at it, but it was just fascinating to hear him lay it out historical, like I said. So we got to keep reminding ourselves,

Taya Graham:

Right. Well, that’s why we have to

Stephen Janis:

Present,

Taya Graham:

Start doing our inequality watch show on a more regular basis because there is a lot more to talk about. We’ll, that

Stephen Janis:

We are going to do more inequality reporting in the coming months and year, hopefully. So.

Taya Graham:

All right, I’ll hold you to that and I think they will too.

Stephen Janis:

Okay.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So again, I just have to thank our amazing guest, professor Wolff for all his insight and his very provocative thoughts about our topic today. And I really hope he’s going to be back on the Real News Network with us soon. And I also want to thank everyone who commented and asked questions. I wish I could have engaged with every single question and comment, but of course I couldn’t. But I’ll try again next live stream. And we really do appreciate you taking the time to contribute to our discussion. But I would just ask before you go, just hang in there with me for a few minutes longer. I understand that sometimes we just want to tune out that the challenges we face seem simply too overwhelming. These are historical existential problems that require collective action, but can seem almost impossible for us to address individually.

We are too divided and too distant from each other. And I understand that feeling. I really do. But this is not the time to disengage. I know it’s cliche, but this really could be the most important historical turning point in generations. I mean, 2024 might be hotter than the hottest year on record, which was 2023. If that doesn’t trouble you, then how about the fact we’re facing an expanding war in Ukraine and extremist pro Netanyahu administration that will only make the humanitarian crisis in Gaza even worse, and a new justice department that was going to be run by Mac kids, but not anymore. So no comment on that. But what makes this worse is after listening to Professor Wolff and my discussion with Stephen, we are hurdling towards these disasters at the behest of a few rich people Ill-equipped because of their ill-gotten wealth. We are literally forsaking our future and the future of generations.

So a few people can buy a bigger yacht, but it’s not just the extravagant and extreme wealth that disturbs me. There are other aspects of this discussion of inequality and the people who drive it that I find truly troubling now, namely how we rarely connect the inequality with the irrational assertions that pervade our debates over who should have power and how they should use it. And what bothers me even more is that instead of having a political discourse around accountability to power, much of our discussion simply amplifies cruelty. I mean, just think about it, whether it’s the anti-immigration rhetoric of people eating pets or calling into question the candidate’s racial identity or calling government programs that help working people handouts, almost all of that rhetoric seems to revolve around how cruel we can be, how we can admonish someone or dunk on them or discard them.

It’s like we’re becoming kind of a Roman circus where the most derisive statement or the least charitable characterization or most bad faith argument always wins to day. Where a person’s intellectual medals determined by how much you own someone, not by understanding them, and a general discourse that rewards and emphasizes mockery and ignorance and worst of all, the constant chaos and discord these platform engenders is making someone rich enough to literally own us. So it reminds me of a chapter of a book I read in high school called The Invisible Man, where rich white businessmen tossed small denomination coins at black men who fought viciously for these mere pennies. And then when they would reach to actually grab the coins, they would be electrocuted. And this was all for the delight and entertainment of the powerful who sat back and watched with glee. So fast forward to now, and I have a question.

Just set aside the racial aspect of the novel for a moment and consider this. How different are toxic platforms like X, meaning Twitter or Facebook from that scenario I just described? I mean, just remember, Facebook whistleblower told Congress that the executives at the conflict media firm were told that by simply making posts appear chronologically would make the platform less destructive, but they declined to do so. Choosing profits over people and commerce over community, which led to ethnic violence and civil war in Myanmar and Ethiopia, and some might argue is encouraging a civil war here in our own United States. And the reason I reiterate this question about media ecology, which the billionaires have used to enrich themselves is because as we discussed during the show, they have literally manipulated us to act against our own self-interest. They have genuinely pitted working people against each other to advance an agenda that not only harms us, but the entire world we all live in.

My point is, is that we have to disentangle ourselves from this conflict-ridden malice machine. We have to ignore its underlying message that nothing can be achieved and that people’s lives cannot be improved through concerted action. Now, the way we do this is not just to fight, but I would say fight for something specific, fight for Medicare for all, fight for climate action now. Fight to strengthen unions and to raise wages, fight for a policy that would improve life for everyone, even it’s just a local ordinance that might only impact a community where you live. The point is to fight for something specific, tangible, concrete, not imaginary, not to be the king of Twitter or the dunk master, be the instigator of change in the world we actually live in. Now, I know all of these ideas are complex problems with sometimes even more complex solutions, and they don’t always lend themselves to the simplistic kind of exchange that typifies Facebook or TikTok, but it is incumbent upon us to try and it’s our job as journalists to help you by investigating for people like Stephen does, or by holding discussions like these and listening to the expertise of brilliant thinkers like Dr. Wolff.

I think collectively we can all bring about real substantive change. And I know we can because we have before. So let’s put the billionaires of the world on notice that we’re not going to fight amongst ourselves anymore. We’re going to fight you. Well, that’s my little speech. I hope you enjoyed it.

Stephen Janis:

I did,

Taya Graham:

Because I certainly meant it and I hope it inspires you. I feel a little fired up right now.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I just canceled my Twitter account because of you. So thank you, Taya.

Taya Graham:

See you on Blue Sky.

Stephen Janis:

Right.

Taya Graham:

And of course, thank you all for being patient with us and joining us again, and we do have to thank our awesome friends in studio, David Cameron, Adam and Jocelyn, Kayla, James, and of course our Editor in Chief Max. And thank you out there for joining us. We appreciate you. This is Taya Graham. And Stephen Janis reporting for the Real News Network. Thank you so much.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.