Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted
to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, debts, income, our own, those of our
children. I'm your host Richard Wolff. I've been a
professor of economics all my adult life, and I hope that that has prepared me to
offer you these economic updates about what's been happening over the last week,
and sometimes a bit longer. Well in the very recent past many of us were
affected by two notable suicides in the news: one was Kate Spade, a fashion
designer famous for the bags that she developed, and the industry that grew up
around them, and the other one was the celebrity chef for lack of a better term,
Anthony Bourdain, who was also a an author and a travel writer of
extraordinary depth and excitement for many many of us. These were tragic
suicides of course but they forced us all to wonder about our own lives, to
wonder about what might have brought these two highly successful, much-beloved
in their ways, people to make that decision to take their own lives. It
prompted me as I thought about it, to look into what's happening in the way of
suicide in this country. Were these isolated events, or do they have maybe
some more general message for us and in particular given this program? Where's
the economics in all of this? Well I went to the Center for Disease Control, a very
important branch of the United States government that keeps track of our
illnesses, our deaths our health in short; and there I found some results I want to
bring to your attention and then offer a brief economic interpretation. The rate
of suicide in the United States between 1999 and 2016, that's roughly over the
last twenty years, has increased by thirty percent. That is an astonishing
situation. Basically a one-third increase in the rate at which people take their
own lives. Here are some more information that is relevant one half of the
suicides occurring now occur by the use of firearms. To give you a sense of how
many people we're talking about in the year 2016, which is the last year for
which data are available, the number of suicides in the United States, forty five
thousand. That makes suicide the tenth leading killer of Americans, when you
take every source of death. Only 1/2 of those people had any known quote-unquote
mental health problems. Half had no such problems that were known, and a good
number of those who had known health problems had what most of us would
consider to be occasional depression and a variety of other activities and moods
that most of us have. So what's going on? The decisions of Kate Spade and Anthony
Bourdain are obviously not unique and not restricted to them as individuals. I
would argue the following: we are living in a time when American capitalism, our
system, is in deep trouble. Many of the leading industries have moved out of the
country many of their production facilities continue to move out of the
country the new center of economic growth is in China and India and Brazil
and places like that as a result the quantity and the quality of jobs in this
country are less and less important to American businesses because they're more
and more invested somewhere else as they develop the
technology what jobs they don't move abroad they replace people with machines
and artificial intelligence promises to take that further people see you all of
that their sense of economic opportunity is being constricted the pressures on
them of jobs that are not as secure as they once were of benefits that have
shrunk from what they were once were the fact that they're children to get a
college education now have to go into enormous debts or put drains on family
finances it's too much and you're putting the burden on too many people
with no way out and suicide is one way people respond you know I've talked on
this program about the opioid crisis in a way that's another kind of death you
don't stop breathing your brain doesn't stop but it almost does we're in a
society that is showing us in these symptoms something is terribly wrong. My
next update has to do with the building, the housing system in this country. You
know last week I had Bob Hennelly here and we talked about housing and I did some
work inspired by what he had to tell us and here's what I discovered the vacancy
rate at the highest level most expensive apartments most expensive houses 13% the
vacancy rate at the bottom end six percent we are building houses for the
richest of our people way ahead of what they can afford and we're under building
everywhere else which is one of the reasons why rents are going up and going
up quickly because there isn't enough housing being built because we don't
build housing in a capitalist system to meet people's needs we build housing
where and when it profitable and you know up building a
house especially a multi-unit house takes years between the planning and the
permits and the excavation and the building and the zoning and all the rest
of it so there's always a lag so when the economy looks good too many people
start the process by the time the housing comes ready to be sold or rented
it's two three four years later when the economic situation will go you might
think that this awareness of this pattern would lead there to be some
coordinated planning when it comes to housing but there isn't because we don't
have the government doing public housing the way we once did it's all a private
gamble for private speculators to decide when and how to build housing and they
build it for the top where the money is and we live with the results is it a
critique of this system you bet here's some good news and yet one that
carries a lesson a federal judge has granted class-action status to nurses
and nurse practitioners working at the Veterans Administration hospitals across
the country why the nurses and their lawyers argued that for years the VA
administration was requiring many of them to do extra work on their own time
for no pay sometimes it was the innocuous little oh I hope you can stay
available on your cell phone for an hour or so after this evenings end of workday
or maybe you need to be accessible by email
the reason this caught my eye is that this tool is a sign a symptom of a
declining capitalism when the employer feels entitled fields in neighbor
to squeeze in this little way in that little way more time more work more
effort more energy more attention from workers without paying them counting on
those workers being under the pressure of economic difficulty so they're not in
a good position to say no or to protest so they go along first with this little
thing and then that little thing and pretty soon it adds up and when you sit
down with a pad and paper they're being deprived of thousands of dollars of
income that the law actually says they ought to have been paid for the work
that they did and so my hats off to the nurses and nurse practitioners at the VA
for getting together and saying enough is enough I'm not gonna do this anymore
and I'm gonna get together with others similarly squeezed in ways that they
should never have been to do something together later in today's program you'll
learn about how college students burdened with debts are coming to the
same conclusions and beginning to move in similar kinds of directions the last
economic update I have time for in this portion of the program has to do with
that perennial issue money in u.s. politics and today I want to talk to you
about the uline family spelled so you get it right if you're interested in
pursuing this UI h l e aí n you line family well where does it come from and
why is it important the U line family is an extremely wealthy family here in the
United States which traces the origins of its wealth to the Schlitz beer
company Milwaukee the beer that well I won't bore you
shal it's was never known for its again I'll be polite quality if you wanted a
quality drink and you had a glass of water and Schlitz
it was a tough call okay but that didn't make any difference to making the money
so the uline's take their money and here's some of the things they've been
doing with it one they believe in the importance of making broad access
available to assault weapons they are deeply opposed to rights for
transgendered people they like to support right-wing newspapers and they
were enthusiastic supporters of Alabama candidate Roy Moore even after he was
accused of sexual misconduct with underage girls in the last in this
current election cycle I should say the you Lions have already committed twenty
six million dollars to sixty over sixty candidates in this election cycle so why
am I telling you this are they the only ones of course not are
they the biggest donors no but they are among the few hundred people who give in
the millions of dollars and that's what I want to talk to you about the notion
of democracy from its earliest articulations going back to ancient
Greece all the way through to the modern United States has always meant pretty
clearly that people are equal in terms of the say the role they are to have on
the decisions we live with for example the people who represent us in the city
or the state or the government of the country where we live we're supposed to
have one person one vote and that's not just a literal detail it's the notion
that each of us is equal when it comes to make
the political decisions because we all have to live with them and we all have
to cope with them then we should all participate equally allowing money in
politics and the men on the matter of the Uline family makes a joke and it's
not a good joke about this there is no democracy if one person can spend twenty
six million dollars making sure you hear about the candidates they like more than
you hear about others who can't raise that money you learn what the candidates
they want you to learn about say they can buy expensive advertising they can
pay people to knock on your door to tell you how wonderful this candidate is you
get the picture mr. Uline has one vote and I have one vote but are we equal in
shaping this democracy of course not money in politics is the enemy of
democracy and always has been and if you leave the money in there you're writing
the democracy out we've come to the end of the first half of the program I want
to invite you to stay with me I will be talking with Eli Campbell about student
debt and I think you'll find it very interesting
welcome back friends I'm sitting here with my guest for this part of the show
Eli Campbell and I want to tell you a little bit about him but first Eli
welcome to the show Eli is a recent graduate of the State University of New
York at New Paltz there he majored in fine arts as I recall digital design and
fabrication but he's really gotten a passion for the whole problem of student
debt of the burden being put on students on their families on the whole United
States as a society which knows it needs and relies on educated young people for
so much of the present and the future of this society so he's become an
impassioned self learning advocate of doing something and something severe and
serious about the student debt problem and that's why he's here he's the author
of a pamphlet which will mention later but he's someone passionately involved
in something that should concern us all I recently learned for example that more
than four out of ten students in this country now graduate with debt and the
number is growing and the burden of debt is enormous so Eli thanks for doing this
work and thanks for making it available by joining us let me begin by asking you
about something that caught my eye in the pamphlet that you wrote that you
refer to the student debt issue as a strange madness of the United States
what do you mean well in these times we're witnessing what seems to be the
collapse of the prevailing orders of the last century and in that you have these
people like Trump and Betsy DeVos who they've gone to such lengths to isolate
themselves from the rest of society to preserve their wealth that they're they
would rather sacrifice the future then you know let go of their their
power in the past and I think about the words of dr. King we are always on the
verge of being mesmerised by uncertainty but we must move on and I think it's so
easy to get lost in you know there's so much that's going on that is just
astounding right now it becomes counterproductive to even try and
catalogue all of it or you know so but the madness of these times is is that
willingness to sacrifice the future and I think student debt is the the perfect
example of that and especially because the idea of student debt is not really
known in other countries I mean when you're 17 years old and you're signing
up for student loans in America you don't know that most other countries in
the world don't have student loans you don't know that public education in
America only two generations ago was compared to what it is now
virtually free and you you just don't understand the fact that these loans
you're taking out they're not made because the government and and Wall
Street has our best interest in mind they're made because it's profitable and
and that to me is is the madness of these times
all right let's explore it a little bit yeah on the one hand student loan means
or tells us that the student and his or her family confront something they think
they must do educate their their family educate the young people but what they
must do they can't afford yeah and the solution is to talk to us about how do
we get into a situation like that well when you have a society in which profits
are more important than people it's the logical conclusion you can't
you you know where we're failing to plan for the future and in that there's
there's no reason for society to be run this way and and if you look at the
actual you know how we appropriate money how we appropriate resources it is
designed it is all part of a plan to collect profit off of students and one
one thing that I actually only realized relatively recently the federal
government and correct me if I'm wrong here the federal government has been
taken in about over a hundred billion dollars every financial quarter since
around 2010 which is more than it would cost by the estimates I'm familiar with
to fund all public universities and colleges in the United States for an
entire year just in one quarter and that since 2010 and and you know what why is
it that the federal government is making a profit on loans that they're giving to
students that what what is the point of that if not to just make a profit it's
not for students it's not for education and it we really need to stop that you
know one of the logics that's given by people who defend this is the notion
that there's something inherently efficient or appropriate in having an
individual student worry about take responsibility for the payment for their
education and it's sort of remarkable partly because as you point out a few
decades ago nobody thought like that or very few people did it's also remarkable
because we teach in America as an economist I do that that the future of
the American economy in a world system depends above all on the quality and
quantity of its educated labor force and college and university is where we do a
great part of that and if you make it harder and more expensive for people to
do that you are shooting yourself in the foot
why would you do that or is your answer again and that will be fine that it's
this private profit ahead of the social welfare that is at the root of this well
it's it's about profit for corporations and and for the government but it is
ultimately about suppressing the the youth and suppressing any movement that
would challenge the capitalist system and from my conclusion from the research
I've done is that students actually have a lot to gain from not paying them and
if we were to organize collective defaults on our loans it could
potentially trigger the kind of economic and financial crisis on Wall Street that
we saw in 2007 now people might hear that and say well why would we want to
do that but there is a certain strategic advantage I think rather than letting
the house of cards fall on its own and and then we have the problem of the
banks saying well we we need to get bailed out again please taxpayers we
need we need what was it 14 trillion dollars or something like that we need
to move we need our money back and I think there's a certain strategic
advantage if students are to go out ahead of that and say well we're not
gonna pay our loans and if you want to take our education away from us good
luck because it's it you know we've got them and and you know it's it's
interesting because it's not like with um the the housing market crisis where
there is this asset that the banks can actually foreclose on and take they
can't take our education away from us they can't take our our knowledge and
our understanding and I think that is you know in all of this the education is
the important part the degree has become a product that students are forced to
buy in order to you know succeed in society when when so many of us are are
pursuing an education in something that we're interested in but the actual
are our actual labor and our participation in the workforce becomes
something totally unrelated because we have to pay off these extremely high
financial burdens I mean it's it's a crazy system and I think rather than
wait for the Republicans to die of the many diseases of the soul that they have
contracted or the Republic the Democrats to grow spines and finally care about
what's happening to students and and and everything else that's going wrong in
this country students should take matters into their own hands and
organize this a default so yeah the word default I've also heard the word boycott
that the students are going to and I understand that I would like to hear a
little bit about you that there are movements already there are activities
where students are organizing in order to do this to confront the country with
the absurdity of putting a burden on something that should be a public
benefit namely an educated population tell us a little bit about those and
then I want to ask you about some of the problems that kind of a movement has
well I I don't really think there is a significant movement to do this in the
time that have been working on this I've talked to a lot of people who are
sympathetic and I think they're probably a lot of people around the country who
are having similar ideas when they're looking at their their monthly bill but
I know that in the Occupy movement there was an organization called strike debt
which was you know in the financial crisis there were some of these student
loan asset backed securities that were that went bad that strike that would
then buy and then forgive the loans within these assets but I don't truly
think there is a movement as of yet that that's working on that but you are
advocating that there be one in other words you want there to be an organized
student refusal to honor that particular debt in order to confront the country
with solving the problems of and Finance in a different way yeah well
let me then ask you a question I'm sure you have been asked or will be asked
yeah that that means any young student who wants to follow your idea who agrees
with you would be taking a personal risk in terms of their credit rating and all
the rest if they stopped paying this debt how do you respond to that concern
well first of all it would have to be organized it couldn't just be
individuals deciding they weren't gonna pay because as individuals they will
absolutely throw everything they have you know wage garnishment there's a
number of ways they can really mess with your life if you if you don't pay your
loans but if if the the defaults were coordinated so that they occurred
simultaneously they're on theirs from what I've read a novel is the
corporation that I focused on a lot and in their financial documents they they
state themselves that their ability to
make revenue from student loan servicing is dependent on their infrastructure and
being able to actually collect the loans and I'm not sure if you're familiar with
the concept of a DDoS attack but it's when when a server online is is spammed
with information and it has to shut down because it just can't process all of the
the requests for information that's sort of what a debt boycott would do because
navien would suddenly say well we've got you know 200% increase of defaults this
month and you know we only have so many people in our office and you know what
are we gonna do and they're they're threatening you know they have a
political idea too they're not just poor debtors they're they've got they've got
an ideology that's behind them I mean that would really have an impact I think
I noticed a recent statistics suggest that something like 20 percent of
students are now in arrears in paying back their loans they're having such
trouble doing it that you already have a very high rate of the fall so that
you already have a mass movement towards default it doesn't call itself that but
the question is it's already happening can it be organized will be your next
kind of issue Eli we've come to the end of the time that we have for this but I
want to ask you to stay on I want to let folks know that we will continue this
conversation and that it will be available the continuation at
patreon.com slash economic update that's P a Treo n where we put economic update
extras like this continuing conversation and others and we encourage you to take
advantage of that opportunity
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