Prof. Wolff: Election at the Edge of Forever

[Music] and we are back on the zero hour i as always am your host richard rjskow before we continue another reminder that we pre-record this show on thursdays so the entire political universe may have changed by the time you hear these words well i think it's likely that joe biden will be a declared president or well on his way in the senate will either be unresolved or most likely leaning republican but of course if that's changed between now and then consider this show a time capsule from your immediate past joining us now is uh we always look forward to talking with him professor richard wolff is an economist he is the host of economic update uh every tuesday evening on free speech tv where the show also appears and his latest book is the sickness is the system when capitalism fails to protect us from pandemics or itself without any further ado uh richard wolff thank you for coming back on the program thank you richard i'm glad to be here uh well as always of course we're glad to have you and uh you know it's impossible to for me anyway i'm sure other people have different takes is it possible for me to look at this election as anything else but the augury of uh of a failing if not failed system um it seems to me that this is an ex explosion of intense voter emotion uh what was the old groucho song whatever it is i'm against it um and to me seems to suggest that the future will hold very little in the way of real relief for american people who are dying or american people who are struggling uh to resist or overcome disease but am i being too negative no i think that uh while there are some signs of things that could be getting better uh in general i think you'd have to say that this is a depressing uh election result uh no matter who finally ends up where this is an election that means that uh half roughly of the american people uh do not find in donald trump and the republicans a reason to vote against them on the contrary seem to like and to be enthusiastic about voting for them that's an amazing achievement for a president presiding over the second worst collapse of capitalism in the history of the system uh presiding over the worst failure of maintenance of public health that we've probably had in the history of the united states uh a person who behaves the way he does given all of that that you can retain half the votes indicates a population that is really disconnected from what used to be the notion of politics the notion that you're choosing a direction for the nation to go into and i haven't the faintest idea what the direction is in any real sense of mr trump uh i don't think he does uh i know that he's on the right wing edge of things but beyond that which is really not a lot there isn't a clear direction and there isn't with mr biden either uh other than the fact that he's not trump which seems to have been the the core of his campaign uh there's very little there to get anyone excited they had an exciting candidate in mr sanders they got rid of him um and indeed biden congratulated himself a few times during the campaign that he had defeated bernie sanders um the democrats strike me as a party that is rooted in a fundamental contradiction that they don't face up to that they pretend often isn't there but which cobbles them and hobbled them in 2016. it's hobbled them again now it is hobbling them over the long run uh but they they insist that it's okay to remain oblivious and let me be clear what it is the economic system of this country divides us into two groups a very small one which are called employers and a very large one which are called employees the republican party has always been and is today a party of the employers it serves their interests it promotes their interest and it fights against the improvement of the conditions of employees they're against raising the minimum wage they're against uh providing worker uh worker protections in the law and on and on and on and on with all of which is well known so when they go hand in hand to corporate donors they get a lot of money because the corporations understand that they are a good party for them they then mobilize as many employees as they can and that's the major job of the republican party is to mobilize enough employees to get the seats in the congress and the state houses to do for the corporations and the rich what the republican party is there to do and so they become the advocates of uh having guns in your home or against abortion or all of the issues that can mobilize portions and bits and pieces of the employee class so now let's contrast the democrats the democrats like the republicans go to corporations and rich people and ask for donations which they get because the corporations and the rich people want to cover their bets they want to make sure that if the democrats get in there they will have some say some influence and not be frozen out so they give money now what does the democratic party do well traditionally it's the party of the employees it is the party that represents the worker and the republicans are representing the employer but you can't if you're a democrat wear these two hats you can't get money from the corporations and then go champion what the employees want because most of what they want will come out of the pockets of the employers they want better wages they want better working conditions they want to pay a lower share of the government's taxes they want more tax funded public services everything they want is either a burden or a cost or a tax on the employer who doesn't want it in other words you've got the fundamental conflict of capitalism and the democrats have resolved that problem in a in two different ways during the collapse of capitalism in the 1930s the democratic party forced its own leader franklin roosevelt to become indeed a champion of the employee class that's why we got social security unemployment compensation minimum wage law uh government hiring about millions of people all were firsts in american history the working class the employees got something and they got the corporations to be paying a large part of that bill with higher taxes and ditto for rich people once the war was over in 1945 and the depression was over and franklin roosevelt the president had died the business community went to work to undo to reverse to kill the new deal all those achievements and they've done a pretty good job over the last 70 years doing exactly that but it plunges the democrats into a contradiction are you going to defend what was it achieved in the 30s and 40s or are you gonna let it die and the democratic party made a decision and that's why the old progressive types are not heard of anymore and the new center of the democratic party the clintons the obamas they took over because the decision was made we're going to go for the donations from the corporations and we're going to soft pedal the championing of the working class which is why year after year and this started back in the 80s and 90s year after year group after group of working class employee families feel betrayed by the democratic party feel as though its promises and its commitments uh aren't being honored weren't being honored aren't being achieved and so they lose interest in the democratic party they lose loyalty and they become open to the blandishments of the republicans uh or they lose interest in voting all together and the democratic party ends up with the clinton race in 2016 now with the biden race scratching its head but there is no mystery you would be able to win if you were the champion of the employees because that's the largest single group in this society it dwarfs in size every other and if you were the champion if that was your goal if that was your priority if that's what you focused on you would be able to mobilize big electoral victories and let me conclude richard by giving you an example even from this election i'm just going to pick two in florida which went for trump they also voted to raise the minimum wage in other words when you put before the people the notion should you pay workers 15 an hour rather than the miserable pay you give them now the kind of majority of people looked at each other and voted for that let me give you a second example in portland maine a coalition that included the democratic socialists of america a southern maine branch together with a progressive alliance of local groups in portland maine and portland maine is one of the biggest cities in maine they decided to put forward uh half a dozen a ballot initiatives which were on the ballot and they included a number of radical sorts of things rent control to help tenants relative to landlords a requirement that during an emergency such as the pandemic all workers are paid time and a half because they have extraordinary needs oh how interesting an idea uh rent control i may have mentioned uh all kinds of interesting progressive things okay here's what happened the business community mobilized and spent 650 000 roughly to defeat these initiatives the socialists and the progressive alliance they raised 46 000 much much less and obviously i wouldn't be telling you this story if the following didn't happen the socialists and progressives won five out of the six propositions they put forward um they defeated the business community and they defeated people who spent 15 times more money than they did to defeat them this suggests something to me that namely you would do better if you had the courage uh to fight for the people who are what you claim your constituency is you once did that and i want to remind everyone of a little history lesson roosevelt who's the president who pushed through social security unemployment compensation the first minimum wage bill in the history of america and hired 15 million unemployed people that president was re-elected three times he was and remains by far the most popular president this country has ever had that was the one who went furthest in the direction of the democratic party being the champion of the employee class the lesson is clear there really is an option for the democratic party but they've chosen a route that does bring them a good bit of money from the corporations no question i cannot deny it but it brings them econo electoral results of the sort we're watching now i think that's right and again we're talking with economist richard well i certainly agree with you richard wolff i um and i'm just bracing myself for the commentary that says because whatever happens in election in an election in this country the commentary is well we live in a center-right country and you know i keep using this analogy but there are two foods i hate liver and beets if all you're going to offer me is liver and beets i guess i'll take the liver because it's got a little more nutrition but i'm not a liver eating person i'm just eating in the wrong restaurant if that's all they got so um you know that commentary is going to come up but what it seems to me and i really love your thoughts about this richard well what it seems to me is that in the absence of a coherent program from the democrats on behalf of the employees as you put it that what we're left with is an insincere sounding and complex agenda that largely appeals to the professional managerial class on the democratic side and as for the republicans you know this astonishing number of people communities especially hard hit by covid going more for trump this time than last time for example what it's uh what i keep thinking about is the marxist educator paolo frere the brazilian educator uh who talked about internalizing the oppression oppressor consciousness that if there's no coherent world view or frame of reference being offered to you on one side then the other side may represent your own oppression perhaps even your own death but it's a coherent world view people can absorb and it's like well that's something and and obviously i'm all struggling i'm struggling with the results of this election like everyone else but um do you think that sort of uh fairy pedagogy of the oppressed interpretation applies it all here as i do yes i i would phrase it i think a little bit differently but yeah i think that's going on here i don't think that mr trump for example has a coherent policy on almost anything uh that's not who he is that's what not what he's ever done you know he's a real estate hustler and he wants to sell the building or sell the apartment or rent the house and the name of the game is to figure out uh when you're dealing with a prospective buyer what can you say in the next few minutes or hours to that buyer to get him or her to buy the piece of real estate you will say anything they don't have the time or the resources to question or investigate three quarters of what you say so you will try to psych out who they are what matters to them and then say what you think they want to hear in terms of doing what you want them to do and so that's what he's taking that into the political arena and he delivers a set of images assertions it doesn't matter the press likes to find that he's told a lie this isn't interesting first of all all the politicians do it a good bit of it yes he does it more yes he does it more egregiously but he does present a kind of endless political theater morning noon and night there's a new tweet coming out uh something outrageous something attention-grabbing look at me listen to me let me try to throw at you something that'll make you do what i want you to do it's not so much it's a coherent narrative but it is something that is engaging uh like a tv show or something like that that holds your attention for enough time that the advertiser can run their product by you let me put it a different way because this this is the issue again with the democratic party they're hesitant to be extreme as they would call it as champions of the working class or the employee class and so they're not they're moderate mr biden is a moderate kamala harris is a moderate you know on and on and on but mr trump is not a moderate he is an extremist you know the earlier republican candidates also cultivated evangelical christians talked about abortion and did a little bit about abortion but they weren't ready to go whole hog on this abortion issue but mr trump is even though in his earlier life he crystal clearly could care less about abortion or religion or any of it right he gives them what the he takes an extreme position to replace uh ruth bader ginsburg with amy coney barrett that's an extreme change of direction he does what he does in extreme and not only does it work is it not center-right it is extreme right with promise to become more extreme right and the republican party collapses all around him i don't believe there's any reason why the same thing would not have happened to the democratic party had they gone with bernie sanders were they to go with alexandria ocasio-cortez what they would suffer and there's no question is an atrophy a drying up of their corporate donations and of their donations from uh the wealth the people who are wealthy by virtue of their links to corporations but on the other hand they would then get mass support and that includes small donations from many many people bernie has proven that that's a viable strategy it may not get you enough money but as i mentioned in the case of portland maine and other cases as well you can offset the monetary advantage with the advantage of people of numbers and the employee champion is in a good position to accomplish that offset so here's and again we're talking with economist richard wolff obviously about the election but so here's what i struck well man one of the many things i i struggle with right now is this first of all um in terms of the arc of history going forward any belief that joe biden was going to come into office with a powerful congressional majority and be inspired to become the new fdr and uh you know inject massive amounts of spending into the economy create jobs uh healthcare i mean there was you know no indication of that but any thought that that might happen that he might be inspired to do that i think can be effectively considered null and void uh i mean obviously let me know if you disagree but so we're not going to get as far as i can tell any deep or meaningful stimulus action or address the healthcare problem the unemployment problem the many other problems plaguing americans i assume the economy is going to take it continue to take a tough hit even regular unemployment benefits are going to run out for a lot of people etc etc etc i imagine they'll do what it takes to rescue the stock market if they can but um here we are now uh with the trajectory of no major relief in sight i don't see an immediate scenario for this country and by inference for the world that is not pretty damn disastrous again am i being too pessimistic no but i think we have to confront folks like you and me of the disconnect between how we see what's going on and how the folks see it who run the two political parties for them there is no crisis of capitalism and the reason you know that is neither one of them said there was such a thing they didn't propose solutions because they don't see the problem for mr trump the economy was doing great before the virus hit that's crazy but that's what he believes and that's what the people he talks to believe there is a statistic out that 40 percent of the electorate uh voted over that voted overwhelmingly for mr trump believes that the economy is in a good or excellent condition i mean that is an amazing statement all i can tell you is nobody i know professional economist right-winger left-winger or in the sense center would use the words good or excellent to describe the american economy today my left-wing and right-wing colleagues and centrist colleagues we don't agree on on how we got into the current situation and we don't agree on how to get out of it but here's what we all agree on this is the worst condition of the american economy in our lifetimes but that's not what they think neither biden nor trump so they don't come up with a a solution for capitalism the stock market has gone crazy once it became clear starting tuesday that this was going to be a close race and with an end result of a likely divided government that the democrats were not in fact going to have a blue wave or anything like that um and why is the stock market going up because only had the democrats won everything was there even a chance and that's all it was that there would be some rollback of the tax cut given to corporations and and the rich in that legislation of december 2017 only with a blue dominated situation would there have been some progressive legislation a large stimulus program one that bailed out cities and states who are desperate now because of cutting their revenues due to the depression etc etc so the stock market says oh great we're not going to have to pay they were willing by the way wall street gave money to the democrats lots of it so they were willing to pay some taxes to have some of that tax cut reversed they know that's necessary they know it was absurd to have gotten such a large tax cut after 30 years in which they had gotten record profits and all the rest they knew all of that but nonetheless they are happy now that they're not going to have any kind of interference we're going to go back to where things were as mr biden said back to normal as if normal wasn't the road we were on when we hit this disaster uh yes i think you're right we're not going to see any kind of behavior from neither the republicans nor the democrats that recognizes that the society is in a fundamental crisis it still believes that all of the problems it faces are somehow uh manageable can be solutions can be found or the problem can be postponed uh and let me give you just two examples of how that's going to come back and haunt us the chinese economy the economy of the people's republic of china is simply out maneuvering us and it has been doing that for 25 years and it's going to continue to do that and the united states ability to stop it is somewhere between nothing and zero and and that's what's been demonstrated the frustration of the united states will continue to build until one or another leader and believe me it could be equally from either party does something irrevocable and really bad and really stupid and then we're going to be in the soup but there's no solution that either of them has come up with when joe biden refers to the leader of china as a thug what does he think he's doing what kind of child this is i mean from trump we expect it but from mr bite that's it you're gonna call them names it's childish it's the sign of a society that in fact without knowing it has given up let me give you a second example in california the election was also about a proposition i believe it was proposition 22 in california and it was a proposition heavily promoted by uber lyft and other companies like that and it was designed to allow them as an act as a referendum to allow them to refer and deal with their employees and there are huge numbers of uber lyft drivers etc around the country allows these companies and by the way this past so the companies got what they want i know the report the reports are 200 million dollars was spent by them to win this referendum in california it allows them to deal with their workers as if they weren't workers as if they were gig contractors in other words people with whom they signed a business contract not people who may employed as employees why was 200 million dollars spent on this because the profits of uber and lyft have nothing excuse me have nothing to do with technology or any of the other hype that their pr dishes out they make money because they can get away doing things to their workers that nobody else can do why because everybody else who has employees is required to follow the law we have laws in this country built up over the last 200 years that are called worker protection laws you have to provide a bathroom for a worker you can't employ children you have to you cannot you know require sexual services as part of the job you must pay overtime if it's more than 40 hours you must make sure the air is clean etc etc etc these are requirements and they're expensive for employers employers fought against every single one of them those had to be fought for by the working class they won them what uber and lyft achieved is the eradication of 150 to 200 years of labor struggle and labor history they now can treat their workers without observing the law because the law was all about employees and they've gotten the word change you're not my employee you're my independent contractor i mean it's unbelievable it's like you can now commit murder by referring to the victim as not a person but as i don't know an alien or maybe a caterpillar or come up with some other word and then you've defeated the whole point of the legislation by playing this legal game they have now established this this is going to make the other 49 states targets for the same thing to be done there and it's going to make many many service workers find themselves soon reclassified as gig workers whereupon they can work 80 hours a week because no one is forcing them to you see it's their individual disorder i'm trying to mock the language that is right and i have to just say richard wolff that i grew up on labor history that uh for example highlighted the triangle shirtwaist factory is one of the horrors of life before workplace protections but now the women who worked in the that shirtwaist factory did piece work without proper safety or protection they're gear workers i mean i i feel as if we've gone back to the triangle sure ways factory days that we're just so well they're entrepreneurs they're you know it's and i and my only other comment that we can wrap up but well the other comment is that just as you pointed out that florida voted for donald trump but to raise the minimum wage california voted overwhelmingly for joe biden but also voted to strip these workers or make sure these workers never get their rights as workers so i guess we're a nation of con contradictions on both sides of the aisle yes we are but i would warn everyone that's i don't want to lose your important point from a few moments ago richard this is a ratcheting down of the wages and the standards of living of the american working class it's a much more important blow in that direction than any other outcome certainly any choice between candidate a and candidate b uh that was on the ballot this is a sign if you need it as is the rising competitive power of the people's republic of china these aren't problems that aren't going away these are issues that are going to confront this country and they were barely referenced in this election campaign with the exception of the desperate frustration revealed in a candidate like biden running for office who's going to have to deal with the problem of the peoples of republic uh people's republic of china thinking he was accomplishing something significant by calling him names it is a sign of a disconnect between the real problems of our system and a political uh apparatus two major parties that have monopolized our politics and take it light years away from what the issues are well and in closing uh all i can say is to repeat the words of joe hill don't mourn organize and uh richard wolff economist author his new news book is the sickness is the system his program is economic update uh as always richard wolff thanks for your thoughts and thanks so much for coming on the program my pleasure richard and my appreciation as so many others for the work you do in the program that you produce thank you and we'll be right back after this i am richard r.j escow and this is the zero [Music] you

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Length: 34min 51sec (2091 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020