Welcome friends and thank you for joining me this
evening for our July presentation. I'm going to be spending the bulk of this evening talking with
you about China—partly because so much silly, wrong, and misleading information is being pumped
into the airwaves around us, partly because a kind of cold war is emerging, and partly because it's
a phenomena that the world needs to understand and to appreciate—and by that I mean the extraordinary
growth of the People's Republic of China. But before we begin I want to say a few very
brief announcements. Global Capitalism Live Economic Update (GCLEU) is brought to you—as
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you for your support, and we wish you all to stay safe and to stay healthy. In times like
these we need to help each other more than ever. I want to begin the substantive part of tonight's
program not with China, that's what's coming, but with a commentary on what is going on
in the United States and what it means. And to do that I want to make a comparison—a
comparison between the democratic regime of Joseph Biden (now in power) and the regime
of Franklin Roosevelt back in the 1930s which was the last time we had an economic crisis
comparable to what we are going through now. Joseph Biden and the Democratic
Party that controls both houses of the Congress as well as the presidency
are making compromise after compromise not only with the Republicans, who are obstructing
virtually everything they're trying to do, but with conservative Democrats who wobble about
most of the issues Mr. Biden is trying for. To Mr Biden's credit and to the credit of
the Democratic Party, they seem to have some understanding that the scope of the problems we
have now, particularly the economic problems, are beyond anything that any administration has
had to struggle with for many decades. Again the comparison really is with the Great Depression of
the 1930s. But we are even worse off, in a sense, here in the United States because we have two
things happening simultaneously: one of the worst crashes of capitalism in its history and
certainly in the history of the United States, but at the same time a public health catastrophe
partly that is of course the COVID-19 virus. But much more important is the failure of the United
States to have planned for it—to have prepared for it, to have managed, to avoid it spreading,
or now to properly vaccinate its people. I mean this level of dysfunction is responsible for
most of the suffering that we're going through including 600,000+ deaths. But we've never before
had a public health crisis and a capitalist crisis at the same time. That's why the deficit of the
government last year was three trillion dollars and this year is three trillion dollars again.
These are record amounts of money. The government is desperately holding on to and holding
up the private capitalist sector in a way very few of us foresaw. It is literally, and I
mean this, a private capitalism on life support. Money created by the Federal
Reserve—deficits in which the government by its spending makes up for the failure or
the lack of spending of our people and our businesses—which left to themselves would have
collapsed this economy already a long time ago. So it is extraordinary the situation we face, and
it's extraordinary the response of Mr. Biden. But given the blockage of the Republicans and given
the blockage of the conservative Democrats—and of course behind both of them is the opposition of
the corporate sector and the rich—we're not seeing anything like what we need. We need much more.
We need radical interventions. We've had some, but we need much more because the problem we
face has no precedent in American history. So what's the problem? Basically,
Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party are going it alone. They're struggling in the
houses of Congress [and] in the presidency using the bully pulpit in the media that
those positions give them access to, but it's not enough. They're playing
political games with their opponents: the Republicans and the wavering conservative
Democrats, and of course that hobbles them. Now the same faced Franklin Roosevelt in the
1930s, but he made fundamental structural changes that were much bolder for his time than
what Mr. Biden is able to accomplish now. And so I asked myself—and I'm going to offer
to you an answer—I've asked myself the question: What was Mr. Roosevelt able to do that
Mr. Biden either cannot or will not do? And here's my answer. First, let's be clear. Mr.
Roosevelt made fundamental structural changes to the American economy. Mr. Biden hasn't done that
yet and may never. What do I mean? Roosevelt created the Social Security System. We never had
a program like that. We never gave our people a pension program like that. A check
every month once you're 65 years of age in honor of a lifetime of work.
We didn't do that before. He did that, and he did it at a time when the government had
no money. When millions of people immediately became eligible and had to be funded, it
transformed every elderly person's life and therefore every person's life because
the children of the elderly who would have struggled in a depression to take care of those
parents now got some help from the government. Changed everybody's life. They passed
unemployment compensation at the federal level. We still have Social Security. That was
a structural change no one has been able to undo although many conservatives have
tried. Ditto with unemployment compensation. Ditto also with the first minimum wage ever passed
in American history right in the Depression. And finally, dramatically,
a government jobs program; millions and millions of unemployed Americans
got a job not in the private sector (which wouldn't hire them and couldn't make
money by doing so and so it didn't). But the government didn't have to
make money. The government's job under Roosevelt was to help these people, and so
roughly 15 million got jobs between 1934 and 1941. Fundamental changes. The inequality in the United
States took a nosedive in the early 1930s. We went from a very unequal to a much less unequal. It's
taken most of the time since the 1930s to get back to the level of inequality we had before
that time. Mr. Roosevelt made big changes, and he taxed corporations and the
rich to pay for a lot of it. Wow. Mr. Biden is not making the
spending programs that he needs to that are comparable to what Roosevelt did
adjusted for today's unprecedented crisis. And Mr. Biden is afraid to tax anybody which is
why it's all deficits in the trillions—borrowing of course from the rich. Who else lends
to the government? He won't tax them. Instead he borrows from them, and for
them that's very good news indeed. So now let's answer the question: What was
going on in the 30s with President Roosevelt that is not going on now, and that is therefore
blocking Mr. Biden from doing what he might want to do—certainly what the progressive
Democrats would want him to do—and say so? What is it? Here's the answer. Roosevelt had an
ally. Roosevelt wasn't just a career democratic politician. He was that but not just that. He was
working as a president and he was working with the Congress just like Biden, but Mr. Roosevelt had
an ally. Who was the ally? The answer is called the New Deal Coalition. First of all, it was the
CIO (the Congress of Industrial Organizations—the most powerful unionization drive in American
history) organizing millions of workers who had never been in a union before, whose parents had
never been in the union, who worked in America's basic industries. Together with the CIO, the
unions were two socialist parties with record memberships at that time and one communist
party with record membership at that time, and they all worked together: the unions, the
socialists, and the communists. And here's what the unions, socialists, and communists did for
Mr. Roosevelt. They were everywhere demonstrating in city streets, teaching in the schools,
producing magazines and newspaper articles, running classes, and handing out leaflets.
They were everywhere across America: West Coast, East Coast, north, and south. And
they were working hard to change the way people on the ground think by interacting with them and by
bringing them another way of looking at what was happening on the radio (there was no TV yet then)
and what they were reading in the newspapers. They created the consciousness across the
United States that gave Mr. Roosevelt the extra power and the extra influence that
allowed him to achieve what they did. Mr. Biden has no such ally.
The labor movement is very weak now. Socialist parties barely exist. The Communist
Party has barely existed for quite a while. What happened? Well there's an irony
here. The Democratic Party after 1945 seconded the Republican Party in destroying the
New Deal Coalition. Together they went on an anti-communist binge that we're still living
with. Communists were fired from their jobs, deported where possible, and imprisoned—ditto
for the socialists. And the labor movement has been shrunken almost in a straight line for the
last half century. So there aren't strong unions, and there aren't socialists, and there aren't
communists like there were. There is a small, modest resurgence of socialists but they're
having to start from scratch because they were destroyed. Here's the irony folks. The
Democratic Party is now unable to rise to the challenge of the crisis we face because
of its own complicity in destroying the ally that a president needs. Obama could have done
much more if he went to the people. He didn't. He destroyed Occupy Wall Street in
the tradition of the Democratic Party destroying what could be the most
important ally they could ever have. Let's be clear. If Mr Biden fails, it'll
be because he had no mass ally working everywhere to develop the consciousness
that would give him the power to override and overrule the Republicans and wavering
conservative Democrats. And it will be the fault of his own party that he's in this dilemma.
At the very least we should learn that history to avoid making the mistake again. Do not doubt
that if Mr. Biden's economic program fails, the Republicans will run against him and against
the Democrats in 2022 and 2024—blaming them for the failure to solve an economic problem
that the Republicans are more responsible for than the Democrats. That's the
craziness of American politics. Well now to our main topic for the evening: the
challenge of China. Let me begin by putting down again a historical framework here. China is the
largest country by population in the world. The population of China is four times that of
the United States—maybe a bit more. It was until relatively recently one of the poorest
countries in the world. It had lost a good bit of its territory to European colonialism that carved
out enclaves along the coast, that humiliated the Chinese into all kinds of treaties, and that
introduced and made money off of opium on a scale that we still have never seen quite the
equivalent of. And despite all of that, the Chinese have come roaring back. They
are now the number two economy in the world after the United States, and
I'll have more to say about that. They have accomplished an overcoming of
poverty that is a model and will continue to be no matter what else happens. They went from
unspeakable poverty to being the second most important economy in the world—producing high
levels of technology able to compete and win with the highest levels of technology in the
United States or anywhere else in the world. They moved hundreds of millions of people
from the countryside into the city, something that took centuries in the West,
they've done in a matter of a few decades. They built those cities for those people to
live in because they weren't there before. They've enabled educational and medical institutions to service this spectacular
reorganization and relocation of an immense population. They have virtually eradicated their
own poverty. It is something which historically stands as a level of achievement that ought to
make us all take a deep breath to make sure we don't miss the historic significance.
And nothing illustrates it better than the difference between the Chinese management
of COVID-19 and that in most other countries but particularly the advanced so-called countries
of Western Europe, North America, and Japan. Let's be clear. A tiny fraction of the
people of China have died from COVID. Far far far less than have died in the United States
which has one quarter of their population. The Chinese have tested their people far
more extensively. The Chinese provided masks sooner and far more extensively. As I'm speaking
to you, China is vaccinating roughly 10 million people a day—far beyond what the United States
ever achieved. Yes I'm aware that their vaccines may not be the equivalent of other vaccines—I
get that and there may be other qualifications, but they don't change the basic story. They
rose to the challenge of this virus in a way that embarrasses the countries with much
more wealth and that embarrasses countries with much more longer developed medical
systems, and that's a sign of economic maturity. So now let's look in some detail how all of
this came to be and what the lessons are for us. The Communist Revolution that
brought the Communist Party of China to power achieved that goal in 1949.
So the second half of the 20th century and the last 20 years—that's the history of
the People's Republic of China. The economic development of China across these last roughly
70 years is easily divided into two parts. The first part depending on how you look
runs roughly from the revolution (1949) to around the 1960s into the early 70s. You
might, if you're an American, want to divide it between the early period up until 1971 when Henry
Kissinger, the Secretary of State in the United States at the time, in the Nixon administration
made his secret trip to Beijing to meet with the Chinese Communist Party leaders. Before that
time, the United States had refused to recognize the People's Republic of China. Its policy
was to pretend that the tiny number of Chinese who had lost the civil war to the Communist
Party and who escaped to the island of Taiwan with a tiny population that they were somehow
the legitimate government of China, whereas the party that had won the civil war and
that ruled over the vast population of China was somehow not the legitimate government. This
fiction was maintained—let's be clear—from 1949 for the next 20-25 years before it was finally
chucked. And during that time China was isolated. It was considered by the United States to be
some sort of secondary satellite of the Soviet Union at the time. And the Soviet Union (and
there was a Communist Party-led government) had an alliance with the People's Republic
of China and the Chinese Communist Party. Various efforts were made to recover from the
unspeakable poverty and wreckage in China. Remember, the Chinese had been invaded
by the Japanese back starting in 1931, had been ravaged by the Japanese military,
and then had been drawn into World War II, and then had a communist revolution, and then
fought a civil war that the communists won. A poor, poor country ravaged by all of that
military activity was in desperate shape. So the early 20 years were used up in efforts to recover
to establish a functioning economy and all of that with the enmity of the United States. Barely had
they gotten their government going in 1949 when we had what we call in this country the Korean War
right next door to China which borders Korea. And the Chinese had to get involved as the
Americans were pushing through Korea heading towards China. And there were open discussions
in the United States about invading China to overthrow its communist government—a
threat the Chinese had to take seriously diverting resources to their military that were
desperately needed to recover from the wars and the devastation of the Japanese invasions
and so on. But they had to take it seriously because the Chinese knew only too well that in the
immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Britain, France, Japan and the United States
invaded Russia to put down the new regime and that wasn't that many years ago. So that slowed them.
They became a bit desperate. The so-called Great Leap Forward or the so-called ‘commune movements’
where they tried to make drastic economic progress with drastic economic changes some of which were
quite successful and many of which were not. And so a great change happened during the 1970s
and 80s in China. A new direction was achieved. The United States recognized the People's
Republic of China and the Chinese in turn undertook a new way of developing their
economy. They would not go it alone. Russia had always gone it alone.
The Soviet Union had been isolated and could not for a whole host of reasons take
advantage of the world economy, find the place in the world economy, and find a way to interact
with the rest of the world economically to help China do its number one objective which was to
stop being one of the poorest countries on Earth and to become at least in the words of their
current leader moderately prosperous. Yes. That's what Xi Jinping refers to the
Chinese condition: “moderately prosperous.” And here's how they opened themselves in a way
different from the Soviet Union; They wanted to engage international trade. And to do so being a
so-called socialist country in a capitalist world they basically said to the rest of the world,
“We can offer you capitalists something you want but we have to get in return something we need.
Here's what we give you. We have a well-developed, well-disciplined, well-educated labor force
willing to work at wages way below what you pay in North America, Western Europe, or
Japan. Come here. We will welcome you. We will give you the space to operate
your private capitalist businesses. And we will give you a labor force that will make
it very profitable for you. You will of course be leaving behind the higher wage workers
in your respective countries. We of course cannot force you to do that but we can offer
you the lure of higher profits if you employ lower wage Chinese workers.” Corporations in
France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Japan, and the United States lept to the opportunity especially
once diplomatic relations with the United States had been established. Kissinger and Nixon did
that in part to enable and facilitate corporations to become more profitable. That was their
ideology. That was their political practice. As the companies came, as they employed lower
wage Chinese workers, and as their profits accordingly went up, all their competitors back
home began to realize, “Wow you better do the same or else they're going to out compete you. They're
going to be able to offer these products at lower prices because they pay so much lower wages and
if you don't want to be out competed, you better develop your branch and your operation in China
as well.” And so the movement went from a trickle to a flood. American enterprises (most of the big
corporations) became more and more active in China as they continue to do right now as I am speaking
to you, and as they employed millions and millions of Chinese workers paying them bigger wages
than they had gotten in China before but still way below what the American worker or the
British worker or the Japanese worker got. You began to develop a well-paid labor force
in China, and they began to use their wages to buy things which allowed China to offer to
the West not just low wages but a rapidly growing consumer market. General Motors now sells more
cars in China than it does in the United States. China by the 1990s and into this century was able to offer to capitalists in
the West not only cheaper labor—better educated and better disciplined industrial
workers—but the most rapidly growing consumer market in the world. Either one of those would
have brought capitalist companies to China. Having both of them is unmistakable. It
became and has remained a flood to make money. The Chinese Communist Party also gave private
capitalists inside China their opportunities. They too could emerge—run a business, hire Chinese
workers, and serve the expanding Chinese market. They allowed private capitalism both domestic,
Chinese, and foreign to function and become important partners in their economic development.
They retained many industries and many companies for the government in China. It is a very mixed
economy: state-owned and operated enterprises interacting side by side with privately owned
and operated capitalist enterprises both Chinese and foreign. That's been their growth story
over the last 30 years. It couldn't have happened without the development of basic
education and basic highways—infrastructure that was done before. It couldn't have been
done without developing a communist party organized across China. The change in
policy that happened after the 1970s was made possible by what happened before the
1970s. Any argument that the Chinese success is somehow peculiarly the responsibility of the
capitalist part as opposed to the leadership of the Communist Party, the remaining enormous
state-owned and operated enterprise sector, or all that happened before 1971 isn't historical
analysis. It is bald, ideological junk. The Chinese demanded something in exchange for
making low-wage workers available and an expanding market available. They demanded two things. One,
access to western industrial technology. “You want to come here and employ our people. You want to
come here and sell your goods in our market. Okay, but in exchange we want a sharing. We want
partnerships between Chinese and foreign companies, between Chinese government, companies,
and private foreign companies where we learn industrial technology from you. No one is forcing
anything from you and no one is stealing anything from you. This is a deal. Take it, leave
it.” The United States took it and was eager for it. It is only sour grapes now to talk all the
time about stealing intellectual property. There’s no “stealing” a deal. It's not very nice to
make a deal, get what you made the deal for, and then try to get back what you had to give to
get the deal by claiming it was stolen from you. We wouldn't admire it anywhere else. We
shouldn't admire it here either. It worked; China over the last 70 years got no
foreign aid from the United States because it was a Communist Party-led
country. They got wars. They had to deal with Korea and Vietnam—very close, very scary. It cost
them a lot. But they grew anyway without foreign aid relying mostly on themselves, because they
had lots of disagreements and fights with their former ally the Soviet Union, and of course after
1989 there was no Soviet Union to ally with. Remarkable. They've done better crawling their way
out of poverty than the vast majority of countries that did get foreign aid, and that's not
because those countries didn't use it properly (although most of them didn't).
It's also because it came with enormous strings that have kept the Third World
very much third right to this present moment. The Chinese went on their own.
They had to and they pulled it off. Here's some statistics: over the last 25 years
the average rate of growth of output of goods and services, what we call GDP (Gross Domestic
Product), has grown in China on average six to nine percent. In the United States it's grown over
the same period on average two to three percent. There is no comparison. The rate of growth in
China is precisely three times what it is in the United States. That's why they've caught up.
If for 25 years you have this kind of disparity, it's no longer “whether” it's just “when,'' and
most predictions are that the GDP of China will be larger than that of the United States at the
end of this decade we are now in. Over the last 20 years the real wage of an average Chinese
worker—and by real wage again we simply mean the amount of money you get in your paycheck
every week relative to the prices you have to pay when you spend that money—because obviously if
your wage goes up 10 and all the prices go up 10, you're not better off. You can't buy any more now
than you could before so we make that adjustment. The real wage takes into account the degree
to which your wage really allows you to buy more stuff to enjoy a higher standard of
living. Over the last 25 years the real wage in the United States has been basically
stagnant. If it's grown it's very small. Over the last 25 years the average real wage
in China has, get ready, quadrupled—gone up 400 or 300 depending on
how you count your percentage. But there's no comparison. You want to know why
the Chinese working class supports its government? Now you know. And I'm not being vulgar. It's
not only, of course, a matter of your income but it sure is important. The Chinese have
delivered to their own people an extraordinary situation especially for a very large country,
especially for a very poor country, and especially for one that is isolated politically and
militarily as the People's Republic of China has been. Is the China we know of a model?
Yeah. That record that I've just summarized makes it a model for the vast majority of countries
on the face of this planet. It went from poor to moderately prosperous. It went from “backward”
to being on the cutting edge of modern technology, as we can tell from how they
handled COVID and as we can tell from their space explorations that they're now
engaged in and so on. They are a model. They are a society that mixes state-owned and operated
enterprises with private capitalist enterprises all under the leadership, directorship, and
pretty tight control of a communist party. And they didn't just last five years or ten years.
They've now lasted 70 years with no end in sight. Do they have their problems? Of course they do.
Do they have issues where they can be criticized? Absolutely, and they should be. But
that's not the issue for tonight. We get plenty of information about Hong Kong
or the Uyghur minority or fill in the blank. That's because of the cold war. Because of the
fact that having made a ton of money in China, the political leadership of the United States
finds it convenient to have a scapegoat because United States capitalism is in deep doo doo and
has been ever since the debt explosion of 2008 and 9. It needs somebody to blame. Mr. Trump focused
on the poverty-stricken immigrants from Central and South America. A lot of courage there. And
then he discovered China after he had savaged Mexico, Canada, and everybody else the United
States trades with. China became the target. Mr. Biden can't decide between Russia and China
which one he would make his scapegoat. Maybe there should be a division of labor. The Democrats
can focus on Russia and the Republicans on China, but then again Mr. Biden I think is torn
and may end up blaming China for whatever it is they can think of—anything other
than the problems of American capitalism. What is China? Capitalist or socialist?
China calls itself socialist. It always has. Russia always calls itself socialists.
Let's remember USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only in
the West are these countries referred to as “communist” countries. They never refer to
themselves that way. They have communist parties, but they don't call themselves communist. Why
not? Because for them communism is at best a long in the future goal—something they're moving
toward, they hope, but the reality they have now isn't that. It is socialism. And in China it's
called ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ and there what they're referring to is
this mixture: this complicated mixture of state-owned and operated enterprises
together with privately owned and operated. Let's be clear, the state sector is still a
very large part of the Chinese economy—much larger than what you would have even in European
countries that call themselves socialist or social democratic. So yes, socialism with Chinese
characteristics is a precise and clear name for what they think they are. And by their
definition—if you mean by socialism a very large influence of the government—then they deserve
the title because that's what the words mean. But I would like to introduce another thought
not as a criticism and not as a disagreement, just another way to look at it. You can look at
the difference between socialism and capitalism not so much by focusing on the role of the
government; Is it large? Is it very invasive? Is it not? Is it laissez faire backing away? You
don't have to do it that way, there's another way. You can think about capitalism and socialism
as different ways of organizing the workplace, the enterprise, the factory, the office, or the
store. The capitalist way has a tiny group of people at the top—the owner of the business, the
board of directors if it's a corporation, a very small group—who decide what to produce, how to
produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits that everybody helps to produce. You
could go and call that capitalist as many of us do and you could contrast it with something
else—with a democratized workplace, a place where the decisions are made democratically, one
worker - one vote. Whether you're a supervisory worker or a line on the assembly line or you
are a clerk in the office, whatever you are, one person - one vote - majority rules. You decide
together what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits you all
helped to generate. You could call that socialism. If you did then you would disagree with those who
call China socialist because you have a different definition. It's not a question of right or
wrong. It's a question of different definitions. So if you define socialism in terms
of the organization of the workplace then the People's Republic of China hasn't
got there yet. Then the question is, will the People's Republic of China move in the direction
of democratizing their enterprises—state-owned, private, domestic, foreign, or not? Will they
hold on to socialism with Chinese characteristics in terms of what they have now or will they move
to a different definition? That's an open question for the People's Republic of China. But let me
be clear, it's an open question for everybody in all capitalist countries with all socialist,
political organizations. Which way are you going to go depends on what definition of capitalism
versus socialism you work with. And you may not be conscious about it but you're making that
choice whether you're aware of it or not. Let me conclude this discussion by facing
up to this cold war that's emerging. The cold war in which the United States’
media and its politicians talk endlessly about whatever they can find negative about
the People's Republic of China like Hong Kong, Uyghur minority, military maneuvers in the
south China sea—you can fill in the blank. It’s very dangerous as cold wars always are
as the one with the Soviet Union was. We don't seem to have learned that. And I
want to close with a historical analogy. Many years ago a small colony of the great
world empire at the time, the British empire, a small colony here in North America made a revolution and fought a war. We celebrated
in the first weekend of this month of July 2021. It became an independent United States
of America. A very small, rag-tag poor part of the British empire had the daring
nerve to go to war against the most developed military naval power the world had ever seen—the
British empire of the 18th century. It won and it became independent, and the British
empire scoffed. A few years later in 1812, we had another war with Britain again trying to undo the
revolution. Failed. The United States survived. Well over the next 200 years, roughly, the old
colony became the master and the old master became the poodle. Now Britain, when told what to
do by the United States, asks for directions on how best to do it. Role reversal historically.
Not very pleasant for Britain. Difficult. Many in Britain still pretend that it hasn't
quite happened. Does the United States want to be the Britain relative to China? Do we want that
future? Well it has to do with coming to terms. To the credit of the British, they didn't make any
more wars against the United States. They tried to work out a live-and-let-live relationship that has
its rocky moments, but it's an understanding that war isn't the way to go neither hot nor cold. The
United States has many problems—so do the Chinese. Maybe we can help one another solve them. In a
way, the last 40 years have been that. The United States maintained its capitalist economic system
in part out of cooperation with the Chinese. Let me drive that point home. Many of you are
wearing clothes made in China and are using appliances made in China. You know that. You know
that when you went to the discount stores—the Walmarts, the Targets, all of
them—you were buying from China because those stores became big and successful,
and because they became the outlet for what the Chinese could produce better and cheaper
than could be produced anywhere else. Walmart owes its success to China
just as China owes part of its success to being able to get into the American
market—which Walmart helped it to do. We helped each other, and that was good for
the United States and good for China. It is my hope that we do not let petty political
calculations of scapegoat artists—like Mr. Trump and like Mr. Biden sometimes threatens
to become—undo a cooperative mechanism. That's what we can hope for. That's one of the reasons
it was important to present this discussion of the People's Republic of China, and the challenge that
it represents and presents to the world today. Thank you as always for your attention and for
your support. Two months from now we will do the next GCLEU Global Capitalism Live Economic Update.
For Democracy At Work this is Richard Wolff.
