...wanted to tell you, as i always do at the beginning, that these monthly talks are presented by three groups. one of them is the judson memorial church in which you are currently sitting, a church that is in the process of becominga sanctuary, as are churches and cities around the country, in preparation for what is expectedto be - i don't know what the right word is - a forced exodus of undocumented immigrants.so this is a church that i'm doubly proud to be part of, and i think you all can takea certain pride in that, as well. the second sponsor is the left forum. that'san annual gathering of people whose political position is hinted at by the name of the organization.academics and activists who are left-of-center. it's hard to see where the center is; it'sfallen off the right end, but we're the left
of the spectrum. and, for those of you interested,we can now give you the date and the place where there will be the left forum this year- that is, in the coming year 2017 - june 2nd to june 4th at the john jay school ofthe city university of new york. that's where it will be hosted. that's where it's beenthe last couple of years. and, on or about january 1, you will be able to go to the websiteand register for panels and make panels up. and, if you have any questions about that,let me know and i'll be glad to provide you with further information.and the third sponsor is democracy at work. that's the organization that i work with andwhose folks are sitting at the table outside. and we're the group that actually produces- excuse me - these events and organizes around
this kind of work.i wanted to make a special announcement tonight, and that has to do with the person who haskindly sponsored tonight's monthly economic update. we encourage people who would liketo sponsor; it's a way of supporting what we do. and i'm particularly pleased that tonight'ssponsor is - and i hope i pronounce it correctly - franz pohl of dã¼sseldorf, germany. thisprogram gets around. franz in dã¼sseldorf: i want to thank you for making tonight's showpossible. i also understand that this is his birthday. this month is also his birthday.so all of us at democracy at work want to wish him a happy birthday. and, not only dowe want to do that in english, but i'm about to do the same thing in german. and, in german,it goes:
wir wã¼nschen ihn ein wunderschã¶nen geburtstag.for those of you who [applause]how many people here speak a little german? or get it?good. it's my first language. you can tell frommy heavy accent that english is my third language. german was my first. german was my first,so there's a special pleasure in wishing him a happy birthday and thanking him for beinga sponsor, which we welcome, for those of you in the viewing audience. i want to againremind all of you that - those that are watching, and we get from between 70 -100,000 people aroundthe world watch the video of this evening's event. so you are a small part of what actuallysees this. we do ask all of you - and i want
the viewing audience to know - that all ofyou have contributed the $10 that we ask when you come here, so that those of you who areviewing it, if you would like to join in helping, please go to the "donate" page on our website,democracyatwork.info, and that will be your way to help support and sustain.are we needing chairs? there's still some here in the front, if you - you know, youdon't have to stand. could people raise their hands if they are near a chair or have one about?yeah, and those folks can find a place to sit. and there are a couple over here, aswell, if you want. you're happy in the corner there? all right. okay.i also wanted to tell you i will be ending tonight at 9:00 sharp in order to sign booksthat we have. some of you brought books;
i'll be glad to sign them in the back when we're done. if not, there are books back there you can get. and again: if you want to geta book - a signed book, or otherwise, you can always go to our website democracyatwork.infoand all of those arrangements can be made through the website, okay? good.all right. as usual, what we're going to do, is a few short items that i think are important:economic events to update you about since we met last in november. and then we're goingto jump into trying to do an analysis - not so easy - of mr. trump and his economic plansand where he's taking us in his own mind and possibly in reality, too. we will have tosee. i want to begin tonight with answering a questiona number of you have asked. you have wondered
why i don't do more analysis of the defensespending of the united states, of the role of the military and so on. perfectly reasonablethings for you to know about. and the reason i don't is because that others do that a goodbit and i don't think it's all that useful to reproduce what, i'm assuming, you can findelsewhere. but, in the event that you haven't had the time or interest, i thought i wouldgive you the over all information that most of you seem to want. and the numbers i'm aboutto summarize for you come from a perfectly good source, bloomberg news. so we don't haveto worry that any effort is being made here to shade it in the direction. and he, bloomberg,takes it from "jane's defence". that's the best source of information about militaryarmaments, basically in the world, that everybody
makes use of. and i'm going to give you thenumbers for 2016, the year that is now coming to an end. so here are the numbers: in 2016,the top 10 countries, in terms of how much money, dollars' worth, they spent on all defense - air force, army, navy, everything - the top 10 - you're going to be very proud - among the top 10, the united states is number one. spending in 2016: $622 billion, okay? thatis more money than the combined spending of the next nine. you understand? number two is the people's republic of china. remember the number for the united states? $622 billion. people's republic of china: $191 billion. not even close. next one - i'm reading insize - united kingdom: $53 billion. russia: $50 billion. saudi arabia - you have to stop. we're talking about countries with hundreds
of millions of people and then there's saudiarabia, which doesn't have anybody. i mean, there are people, but not a lot. but they're right up there - number one, two, three, four, five. next is india, france, japan, germany and south korea. but the key number for you to keep in your mind is this year, the united stateswill spend - has spent - $622 billion, number one of the top 10. and that, if you add itup, is significantly more than the total spent by numbers two through ten. we are in a universeall by ourselves. we spend more on the military than anybody has ever imagined in the world. and this, at a time, at a time, when we have no adversary. we don't. we once had the soviet union as the other superpower. it's a superpower. again, to remind you: russia's spending $48.4 billion to the united states' $622 billion.
something for you, i think, to think about.next item: a country that you may not be paying attention to - but you ought to - it is notgetting the kind of attention that it ought to, but it is in the process of dissolvingand along with a whole host of countries. mexico is one, which if the immigration i mentionedbefore were to continue, will be a country that goes from disaster to whatever the next word is that we don't really have readily available. what you talk about, a failed society,a collapsed government and impossible economic catastrophe, those are the language wordsthat we will be using for our neighbor to the south. because they can't function. theycan not survive. they had been living, in large part, off of oil - whose price collapsed,as you know, over the last few years - they
have been living on the second largest sourceof income from abroad is remittances - that's money sent home by mexicans who come mostlyto the united states and work. those people don't have work any more, and many of themhave to go home. for a mexican immigrant working in the united states over the last few years,sending home half or more of his or her salary - try to imagine to a poor country whose oilrevenues have collapsed what it means that no only is the money from the immigrant notcoming back to mexico from america - which they needed - not only has that stopped, buteven worse, the immigrant's coming. the money stopped, but the immigrant's coming. to dowhat? there's no work. there's no place to go in mexico. there's no job. nothing's left.and these are people coming back who can't
go anywhere else at the same time that themoney that might have helped them has stopped coming. no one knows where this is going togo, other than catastrophe. but that's not the country that i want you to think about.i don't want you to think about another country you might think i'm talking about, india,whose extraordinary leadership made the effort over the last few weeks of abolishing money, which is a difficult task under the best circumstances and india is not in the best circumstance, and hasn't been for a thousand years. it is a very, very poor country withextraordinary inequality that just took the means of payment from the mass of people awayfrom them so that they have to stand in line at a cash machine to get the equivalent of20 or 30 bucks, which they can do every two
or three days - try to figure out how to live.it's a disaster for the mass of people who depend on cash, causing riots in the streetand all kinds of things that india can't afford. but that's not the country that i want youto think about with me. and, indeed, i could mention quite a few, since the world economyis in very, very bad shape. the country i want you to pay attention to, because it'sa sign about what we're going to talk about in america, is brazil. brazil is important,because of what they did yesterday. the congress in brazil added to the constitution of thecountry a 20-year spending cap. the government - i'm not going to give you all the details- can't spend any more money in any of the next 20 years than it did before. this isa country that has now seen its gdp - its
total output of goods and services over thelast three years drop by 10%. folks, that's a staggering situation. massive unemployment.a higher rate of bankruptcies than brazil can remember. it's a catastrophe country thathas now said it will not allow the government to come in there and do anything to help thesituation. it is called in the brazilian portuguese - it's a a combination of austerity and nationalsuicide - and it's called "austericide". [laughter]i didn't make this up. it's austericide is the language that it's called. the formergovernment, for a while under which brazil did really quite well, is the government oflula, which some of you know is the workers' party in brazil - a left wing. and when hefinished his term, dilma rousseff - the woman
who took over that government and who wascaught up in a corruption scandal and was, basically, thrown out. and the governmentthat stepped in that has not been elected to this day, run by a man named temer - t-e-m-e-r- he's the one who is ramming all of this stuff through. and the conditions of brazilalready horrific are blowing up. brazil is the largest country in latin america. forbrazil to blow up and for mexico - i mean there's very little left here of wiggle room.and once i explain to you what trump is doing, these problems in this part of the world,as elsewhere, will get worse. next item: there was release of informationthrough the chronicle of higher education that, i said to myself, speaks volumes aboutthe united states economy, even though it's
a very particular statistic. it's about publiccolleges and private colleges in the united states. and what it does is it compares theamount of money paid to the president of a college, on the one hand, to the average earningsof students who've graduated from that college. i believe it's 10 years after they're out.ten years after entering the schools, excuse me. the salary - average salary - of a student10 years after entering related to the president. let me start with the public college presidents,because i learned from this statistic that, if you're going to be - any of you planningon it - if you're going to be the president of a college or university, don't choose apublic college. don't do that.okay.
the highest paid president of a public collegein the united states is michael gottfredson of the university of oregon, who gets paidthe following sum for his annual salary: $1,215,000 is what he gets paid as president of the university- excuse me. for those of you who - i've spent my lifein the university - if you do not know what the president does of a university, you'reokay, because nobody else does, either. as best as we can tell, as best we can tell,the job of the president is to raise money for the institution. this sounds like he'sworking. but it actually means going to rich people and foundations and big corporationsand reminding them that a gift to the university is a tax-deductible expense, and arrangingto make that as profitable as possible.
this is the "work" that they do. it requires manyglasses of champagne, lots of expensive food, sinking ever lower into a leather-bound chair,that sort of thing. michael gottfredson, university of oregon.then quickly, number two - no, they didn't do the arithmetic right - making even more,$1.3 million, is the university of houston - a public school - then georgia state, texasa&m, university of texas, iowa state, michigan state - you get the picture. these are allpeople making about, just a little over a million dollars.well, what's the average salary of a student 10 years after he or she entered? in the caseof oregon, $41,700. in other words, what the ratio of what the president gets to the averageincome of a student going through that university,
is 29:1. i could make a lot of comments, butin the interest of polite language, i won't. now i'm going to move to the private schools.we're going to start with a very famous school and therefore it's, of course, appropriate that theypay the sum that i'm about to describe to you. i'm referring, of course, to wilmingtonuniversity. [laughter]anyone here from wilmington? [laughter]i thought so. i never heard of it. i spent my entire life - part of my time at the universityof massachusetts was helping our graduates find jobs, and i had to talk to people atuniversities all across america. i know a lot about where they are. never heard of wilmington.but jack p. varsalona clearly heard of it,
found his way there, and his sal... it's a private school... his salary in 2014-15, $5,449,000. and theaverage income of a student, 10 years after entering wilmington, if the student was awareat the moment that they were entering wilmington, that average was $42,000. so you go to wilmington,you get $42,000, but the president - in the fancy office with 12 secretaries - he gets$5.4 million. now, reading quickly, the top private schools. for those of you planning,again, to be the president of a private school, these are the ones you want to work for.next one: washington university in st. louis $4.2 million. southern methodist - it's goodto be a methodist - $3.4 million. here's one: belmont university. must be rightnear wilmington university. in fact, maybe
they're both the same university; they justfigured out that, by having one building... i shouldn't do this. okay. next, universityof pennsylvania, which i believe is the only female, yes, the only female of the 20 - the10 public and the 10 private, one female - amy gutmann at the university of pennsylvaniais pulling in $3 million a year. then northwestern, columbia, university ofchicago, trinity college in connecticut and cornell university. these are the places youwant to go, if you're going to be the pre... what in the world is going on? what is itthat makes it necessary for the president of a college, whose job it is to raise money,to turn out to be a person who is raising money - above all - for themselves? wheredoes it come from? what - excuse me - what
mentality of the notion of the educationalactivity of a university requires... and the answer is: it has nothing to do witheducation. nothing. not even the most remote. this is a replication of corporate governance.this is giving to the head of the university the same kind of crazy money you give to thehead of a large corporation, which suggests that there might be other similarities, ifyou let yourself think about it. because you want to get those kinds of people - the onesthat want and expect that, who are going to run this school like a business. that's whatit means. it's running just like a business. next item: i'm going to say something niceabout a corporation. i look for those opportunities - there aren't many - but i look for them,so i can share them with you. and i'm going
to talk to you about ikea, the company thatsome of you buy furniture - the kind of furniture that you buy and then try to make it looklike it does in the picture. [laughter]which some of you can do. and the rest of us can not do. and say things about ikea which i will not repeat. why is ikea in the news over the last month? and here's the reason:they have come up with a new plan, ikea has, and under the plan, ikea's - how do you sayit? am i pronouncing it... [attendees] ai - kee -uh[wolff] ee - kay-uh? [attendees] ai - kee - uh[wolff] ai - kee -uh. my mistake. sorry. ikea. they have 13,000 workers here in the unitedstates. most of their workers are elsewhere.
they're a swedish company, by origin. the 13,000 workers in the united states are going to get up to four months of paid parental leave for their workers. that is, mothers and fathers both. that's the first interesting thing.whether they are the birth parents, so physically the parents, or adoptive parents, or fosterparents - will all qualify. now, that's really interesting that ikea has done this. but iwant now, of course, to drop the other shoe. four months - roughly 18 weeks - so they'regoing to be offered 18 weeks, mother/father, paid leave. in sweden, ikea's employees arealso offered paid leave. the difference is, they have been for many, many years. and there's another slight difference. they don't get 18 weeks, they get 68 weeks. let me let that sink in.
[laughter]ikea gives its swedish workers 68 weeks - that's more than a year - of paid leave for a parent,male, female, adoptive, birth or foster. amazing. and the article, which is from the centuryfoundation here in new york that does this kind of research, does some other kind ofresearch. it did a study of the top 60 us employers. biggest 60 employers and foundthat, out of those 60, 31 had no paid leave what-so-ever for their employees. so the majorityof the top 60 firms in the united states offer their employees nothing in the way of paidleave. that leaves 29 who have them. okay? of the 29, 22 demonstrated unequal leave forfathers, adoptive parents and lower wage employees. now, folks, i want that to sink in. all right?the majority of america's biggest corporations
offer nothing. the minority that offer - thevast majority of them give fathers less than mothers of paid leave, give adoptive parentsless paid leave than birth parents and if you have a lower wage, well then, that's toobad. your kids don't have parents at home because you have a lower wage. doesn't thatmake obvious sense? you have a low... you live in a society that works like this.and so you get a lot of attention if you're ikea if you give people 18 weeks of paid leavebecause you're in a society that doesn't understand any of that. but there is another differencethat's relevant here, between the united states and most other countries. you know that weare the only country that does not have a mandate - in other countries there's a law- you have to give people paid leave. we have
no such law. this is entirely up to a corporationto do it or not do it as it sees fit. and, clearly, the majority has seen fit not to.but the other difference between us and the other countries - in that in this country,we are deeply proud of our "family values". i didn't make this stuff up, folks. you do,you do. here. this is another important one beforewe get to mr. trump. bloomberg, december 8th. lovely story, really caught my attention.for those of you who like steak - beef steak. now you have to like beef steak for this,but you also have to have a second thing going for you, which is: you must have money. lotsof money. there is a new industry in america of producing high quality - now take it easy- really high quality steaks. i'm going to list
for you a few of them. chapel. by the way, thesesteaks are so good that they have names. like you might be used to getting beef... or asteak... ugh! low class! ready? here we go. chapel hill farm randall lineback steaks,two chops, $98. they come from chapel hill farm in virginia, which has 700 cattle on22... this is the information you need, if you'regoing to get a really good steak. otherwise, it just comes from something running aroundsomewhere. and that suggests something about you, if you would eat something that's justrunning around somewhere. you would like to know - if you care - that's why. blackmorewagyu, $180/pound. you can only get it from curtis stone's butcher shop and restaurant in los angeles. but they will send it to you, if you would
like.next item - oh, yes. another variation, ready? olive-fed japanese wagyu. you have to pay not only for the beef - i'm not making this up; i showed it to you - you have to pay forthe plane ticket from japan that brings it. [laughter]and you also have to pay for a loving young man who holds the thing for the whole flight.i made that stuff up. but the plane ticket is correct, okay? the cattle rancher involvedis masaki ishii. because, of course, it matters. $80 a pound. belcampo custom-aged steaksfrom a california pasture. i wouldn't buy this because california is a large place.they should have had the good taste of telling us where in california it was. then the doublerl. $200 for a 44-ounce, bone-in rib eye.
$200 you get a lot of bone, but it's verygood bone. all right, last one. oh yes, this... the snake river tomahawk steak from the snakeriver in idaho. raised - cows raised along the picturesque snake river. see? the picturethat the cow is looking at does something... you scoff, because you buy it at gristedesand you're not even sure that - what that is, are you? you know what it says on the label, butwhatever it is, et cetera. so the snake river tomahawk - $119 for a 2.5-poundsteak. you get it directly from the ranch. there is no other way to get it. when thissociety collapses and divides itself into a tiny number of people with a lot of moneyand the rest of you? this becomes exciting financial news. and this comes out of bloomberg.bloomberg news, because they know who they're
serving and they just want you to know: whenyou eat that hamburger, somebody else is eating another kind of animal that has the same nameas yours, but - oh my goodness - is it different! you shouldn't feel bad about it, althoughi can't imagine what other feeling you could have about all of this.okay. for now, let me turn to why you all came here,i hope, and that is to do some serious work about mr. trump and what he's planning todo and what all of this is about. i have to begin, of course - and please keepthis in mind - by telling you that it is difficult to be sure of what mr. trump is going to do.he says different things at different times, there's a difference between what he saidon the campaign trail and what he's saying
now. i assume there will be more differencesonce he's sworn in in january and is the actual president and not just a president elect.on the other hand, enough has happened now since - well, in a month, roughly, a littleover a month - that we can say a few things. okay. so first: he's different from otherrepublicans. and he's different from most democrats in the way he wants to be, whichwas epitomized by the intervention around the carrier corporation in indiana, that i'msure many of you read about or saw on television. what is that? on the one hand, yes of course,it was a photo op; it was a stunt. he got called out by the local union leader therefor having wildly inflated the number of jobs he saved. all of that's true. he's a showman;he's always been a showman. he likes to do that.
you really oughtn't to be surprised thathe makes - he hypes what he does. he always has. a man who spends money, which i assumeyou all know, not to build buildings but to pay the owners of the buildings that he canput the name "trump" on the building, so that the masses of people going by think it's hisbuilding - when what it is, is his sign. there's a man that's concerned about image and hypeand all of the rest. on the other hand, i believe it would be a mistake not to see whatis seriously going on here. and there's a lot of economics to be learned. let's assumehe carries this out. let's just assume he is going to be shaming companies - he's donethat now, not just with carrier; he did a little bit with boeing, he did it a littlebit with two or three other companies that
you've noticed - he is going to threaten them.that's what he's done. that, if you move jobs out of the united states to mexico as theexample that he's given, but jobs anywhere, at least hypothetically, there are going tobe consequences. he's having meetings almost every day in washington with businesses, businessmen and women, who represent all kinds of businesses that are worried. during the campaign,he did this to the ford motor company. it was a bit of a scandal there, that he assertedthat ford motor was about to move a lot of production to mexico and that he had a conversation with the head of the ford family and that the plan was dropped. what is going on? well, there's a number ofways to understand that. first, the political way. for most of the last 50 years, it hasbeen the democratic party that positioned
itself, promoted itself, as the friend ofworking men and women. the party that would protect you, as a working person, from whatmight otherwise happen to you if the democrats didn't protect you and the republicans - whoare seen as the business / employer party - did with you what they might otherwise havedone. the democratic party positioned itself that way. and, even when the democratic partydidn't do all that much, it could pretty safely point to the republicans and say to workingpeople "that would be worse. so vote for us, the democrats, because that would be worse."and the democrats did it. and, as the country moved to the right over the last 30-40 years,the democrats kept saying that they would protect working people, but they didn't domuch of it. they let most of it go. they still
did enough - they thought - that they couldmake the old claim, better us than those republicans. and working people would support them. andthen they looked at the demographics, and they saw that the number of non-white peoplewas growing and they would tend to vote for democrats, who promised to protect them. and the number of women entering the labor force was growing and they also tendedto look more toward the democratic party. they looked at the demographics, they lookedat the growing non-white part of the united states, they looked at all of that and theythought they had it made. they would protect the working people, the immigrants, the women,the non-whites - and they'd win the election, because that's the majority. and it was runningthat way. and that worked even as late as
obama. and it left the republicans with avery dark future for themselves. they might have tried to go after the immigrants. therewere some republicans who thought you ought to try and do that. that didn't go anywhere.maybe they ought to do something with african americans. that was a real long shot; thatdidn't go anywhere. try to do something with women. that didn't work, either. but therewas a group that they could do something about, and they did. and mr. trump did it more thananybody else. he fooled them and said the very people you always thought were in your corner- because you always presented yourself as the protector of working people - i'm goingto surprise you. like a sneak attack. i am going to shake up the world by saying "no,no no. i - a republican - am going to actually do
something for working people that the democrats havebeen notably failures at doing." over the last 40 years, whether the democrats or republicanswere in, american jobs were moving to mexico and china and everywhere else - in a vast flow. the democrats didn't do anything to stop that. neither did the republicans, to be sure, butthe democrats didn't. so mr. trump decided "i'm going to get a significant number ofthose working class votes by actually doing something - or at least appearing to be doingsomething. which is all i have to do, because i can say 'even if i'm only appearing, andeven if it's hyped, it's better than them,' because they're not doing anything." pointingat the democrats. this is not stupid and this is not hype only. this is a serious maneuver- which worked. got him the election. oh,
so now the next question: will it continue?will he continue? well, partly, it has to. because what he gained, he can lose in a flash.if it appears - as it already, in some ways, does - that these are just photo ops, it'snot really going to do anything. people are going to turn on him as fast as they turnedtoward him. they'll turn away. if the democrats learn - and i recognize this is a long shot- but if the democrats learn from this, maybe...maybe he will lose it as fast as he got it. but inorder for him to stay in power - and i don't just mean in the next election, but to stay in power in terms of anything he can get done - he is going to have to intervene in a kind of dramaticway, either through legislation or through public shaming of these companies. he's goingto have to stop them from moving. which he
is clearly - this is the way he's talking- about to do. what could happen here? two things: one, he could fail. the traditionalrepublicans who never do that, who don't believe in that, who have an ideological fundamentalismthat controls them, that says "government should never intervene in what the privatesector does, because private capitalism is, as we know, governed by the invisible handof god." you all know the invisible hand theorem of adam smith. adam smith is the patron saintof capitalist rationalism. adam smith wrote if every man - he didn't recognize the multiplicityof gender in those days - if every man pursues his own - remember? - if every man pursues his own self-interest,it'll work out the best for everybody, because it's as if the self-interest of all men wasguided by the invisible hand of god.
translate this into english - i mean american english- "do whatever you want; it'll all work out." you don't have to worry about anybody else.go get it for yourself, and it'll all work out the best for everybody. this grotesquenonsense is a rationale for doing whatever you want, because you don't have to worryabout the negative consequences, because there aren't any. it'll all work out. god himselfis making sure. this is wonderful. so it governs a fundamentalist economics. the governmentshould never interfere, because what each of us is doing - every business, every worker,every employer - it will work out the best for everybody. the republicans who believethat can't have mr. trump directly interfering and telling a company that it may be best foryou to go to mexico, but you're not going.
that's not adam smith. that's not even close.wow. let's follow this a bit. you're going to intervene the way you did with the carriercompany. the carrier company explained - by the way, carrier isn't an independent company.that kind of got lost in the stories. carrier is a division of united technologies, whichis a major defense producer. obviously, the government can tell carrier to stop makingair conditioners and to start making hot dogs. and they'll do it, because they depend onthe defense contracts for united technologies, which is a parent, of course, of the sikorskyhelicopter and a bunch of other defense producers. the government can tell them what to do. buthe didn't go that route, the quiet route. he went the very public "i'm going to tellyou what to do. you are not going to go where
the market dictates, you're not going to makemore profits in mexico, you're not going to go where the wages are low, you're not goingto do what capitalists are supposed to do. i'm not going to let you. i'm going to directlyinterfere." that tells workers "oh. there's somebody who's doing something." that's whathe needs to do and maybe he'll get away with it. maybe the republicans will fold. but thereare already signs that they don't want to. several of them have said it already. althoughit took a democratic liberal to blow everyone's mind by attacking - you're going to love this- attacking trump for "threatening capitalism" (his phrase) by interfering in the market.was this a republican? no. it was a liberal democrat whose name you've probably heard:larry summers. an advisor to obama. an earlier
advisor to clinton. once president of harvard,now a professor at harvard. a liberal economist saying that trump - says the liberal - isviolating what? capitalism - which, as we know, works best if government doesn't direct...wow! talk about the bankruptcy of the democrats. so maybe he'll get it. maybe he'll do it.maybe the republicans will stop and maybe the liberal democrats, other than larry summers,will wake up and stop it. but maybe they won't maybe he'll get it done. and maybe he'll doit. and then, let's think about that. what would happen? you can see it already withthe union at carrier. that's a union shop. the head of that union attacked trump, buthe also had to thank trump for saving 800 jobs or whatever the actual number was. that'snot good for the democrats. to split those
workers so that half of them are gratefuland uh-huh that's good for mr. trump. he doesn't have to get them all. he just has to get agood chunk of them. that's how he won those states that gave him the electoral college.that's all he needs. so maybe it'll work. and then we're going to have a really interestingthing. then we're going to have a realignment of american politics. then workers are goingto start looking at the democratic party as the unreliable advocate. and the republicansas - then the republicans will stay in power for a very long time. and then we'll havea really interesting political alliance, won't we? a traditional republican party that isthe party of big business, which was never able to be more than the party of big businessand, therefore, was always in great danger
in american history. because the party ofbusiness is the party of a minority. a tiny number of americans are employers. most americansare employees. you've probably noticed that. so, if you're the republican party that'sthe champion of the employer, you have got an enormous problem. or, in political science,you've got no mass base. you've got no masses of people. that's why the republican businesshave to go out and make alliances with some kind of mass like, for example, very religiouspeople - people who don't abortions ever, anywhere. no, not at all. people who get verywigged out if the flag is trampled on, burnt or otherwise defaced. people who want to have12 guns in the back of the truck that they drive. it has to find and it has to bringtogether those masses of people. it has to
make those issues enormously important, becausethen it can be the champion of something that will give them the mass base, without whichthey're the party of the employer, and they're going to lose. why are they going to lose?because we have "universal suffrage". everybody can vote. if everybody can vote, we can allgo to the polls and vote for somebody who undoes politically what those employers are trying to do economically. the mass... the power of the mass is the vote. it may notbe actualized, but it's always a threat. that's why capitalists don't want a strong government.because, if the government is strong and it's amenable to the mass of people putting theirrepresentatives in - oh, boy! - then we could have trouble if we're employers. big trouble. sothe mass base has to be the kind of mass base
that will support the notion that the governmentis small and can't bug the business community. and yet, feel loyal to that business communityat the same time. and that's why they need it always to be allied with religious folks,patriotic folks, all of that. gun-carriers. but, if they can add to that coalition withoutwhich they couldn't survive, a significant portion of working people - because they'reprepared to do something - wow! and that's trump's challenge to the republicans. he saysto them - that's what his primary race was - you are all fuddy-duddies: mr. bush, mr.rubio, mr. cruz, all of them. you don't get it. you keep babbling on with that republicanstuff. you're going to keep losing. you've got to come up with something new, and i'vegot it. i'm going to get you a cut of the
working class, and i'm going to do it in theonly way you can: by actually doing something for them. and, if you don't like it, go backto being - he loves this - "losers". you're going to be losers. you were even defeatedby an african american, which should tell them "you're losers". you shouldn't have had that. you didn't figure it out. i'm going to figure it out. that's his first step. he'sgoing to be what? and that frightens folks, because that sounds like a powerful, right-winggovernment. you got it, that's what that is. that's the whole point. of course it is. andwho's going to stop it? nobody. who? how? the democrats? they don't know which way togo. the democrats did have a chance to capture all of that. but that was bernie sanders.they killed that off. they killed that off;
and when they killed that off, they buriedthemselves. bernie was a way to take the rage of the working class and move it to the left.you cut that off, you left them only mr. trump. and that's where a good number - not all,of course - but a good number went. that was all that was necessary to do.number two: mr. trump is threatening to put a 35 or 45% tariff on goods coming from china.that's how it's sometimes put. sometimes it's put a different way: border adjustments inour tax structure. what that means - i don't have the time - but what it means is that,instead of taxing a company where the production happens, no matter where they sell it, youdon't do that. you tax a company according to where the consumption of its products occurs.in other words, a company that produced in
america and sold abroad wouldn't pay taxes.only a company - wherever it was located, abroad or here - that sold in the united states,it would have to pay taxes according to how much of its product was sold in the unitedstates. it's a different way of organizing taxation. but it has an enormously powerfuleffect. every company that sells in the united states is going to have to pay big taxes.and every company that sells everywhere else has no taxes at all. that's a radical supportof export industries at the expense of import industries. now what does that mean to allof you? it means, if you have a job in an industry that exports, you're in good shape.but if you have a job in an industry that imports, you're in tough, tough shape. yourindustry is going to have real serious problems.
over the last several days, the representativesof walmart, target, best buy - they're all in there, in washington - begging that thisnot happen, because that's their business. walmart is the outlet - i'm exaggerating,but not by much - walmart is the outlet for the people's republic of china. you couldnot have had the chinese development of their economy, their industrialization, their producingof all the clothes that you're wearing and the toaster that you make your morning breakfastwith, and all the rest. the only reason the chinese could develop, is because they couldarrange for the sale of all of that stuff. they could not have done that at the sametime that they built up their industry. they needed to have somebody else handle the selling."i'll do it," said walmart, thereby becoming
the biggest corporation in the united states.because it is the agent of the people's republic of china. absolutely. they had a big americanflag on every walmart. but it, too, was made in china.[laughter] it was. take a look. you'll see. made in china.so that's what we're going to do. we're going to... mr. trump says "i'm going to make theworking class in america see me boost exports from america." it'll be too expensive to bringgoods in from outside. we're going to rebuild the industry here, which is what he promised.and what he's going to do as the "working class republican party advocate". that's whathe's going to do, he says. now what's going to happen? again, we don't know. because theenemies of all of this - walmarts - they're
mobilizing all of their people. you know anotherbig company that brings in an enormous amount of stuff that would be hit with a terribletax? the koch brothers. they didn't like him anyway. now they don't like him more.and you don't want that if you're a republican. now you're beginning to see the contradictions.he has to go there, if the republicans are going to survive. but, if he doesn't, he'sattacking the republicans. or, at least, many of the people who support the republican party.how's he going to work that out? i have no idea, and i'm very sure he doesn't, either.[laughter] that's not even really a criticism. it's veryhard to know. that's going to be played out now with the industries that stand to gainsiding with trump for what he's doing, and
the industries that stand to lose pushingagainst it. and the question will be: how many industries spending how much money willdetermine that will determine which way this goes. for the mass of americans, they won'tbe told enough to understand what the hell is going on. which is partly why i'm tryingto explain it now. taxes - in another way. he's promised to cut the corporate tax rate.i've told you about this in previous sessions; let me do it again so you get it. it's reallynot complicated. in the united states, we have an official rate that corporations haveto pay on their profits. a corporate profits tax. it's the official rate is 35%. so here'show it works. a company sells whatever it makes, subtractsfrom that amount of money - whatever it gets
from selling - what it costs to produce it.the difference is the profits. and then it pays 35% of that to the federal government.that's what a corporate profits tax is. trump has said he's going to cut it from 35 - andthen there's different numbers, but it's been as low as 15, sometimes 20. so a major reduction.and what's the rationale for that? it's less of a reason for companies to go abroad wherethey can get away with paying lower taxes than they had to pay in the united states.now they won't want to go so much, because the united states is lowering the tax. that'sthe plan. okay. what's that about? it's creating jobs. right? the idea is, companies that wouldhave gone - maybe even companies that went - will now come back, since the rationale fortheir having gone is now removed. and they
can come back and be not taxed the way thatthey were not taxed in wherever the country is they went to. so you notice a pattern here.whether it's jaw-boning a company, whether it's changing the incidence of taxation, lowering...it's all about jobs being... mr. trump is positioning himself as the strong providerof jobs for american working people, particularly in those parts of the country that have beensavaged by the collapse of industry, which is what we call the rust belt or the old midwest,or - and that's all over the country - which is where the jobs disappeared. new jersey,new york, lots of places around. he's gon - -and let's be honest with ourselves: he's actively doing it. our previous presidents, obama included,didn't. they could have, but they didn't.
the democrats didn't and the republicans didn't.he's doing it. and, therefore, you shouldn't be surprised that he's getting all kinds ofreaction because he's doing something. and we don't know how far it will go, but wow.now let's explore, let's explore where this is going to take us as a country. what's goingon here. well, number one i already told you. he's violating the rule of capitalism, whichis the government keeps out. that's the rule of right-wing people, of employer people,of conservative people, of republican people. to show you how chaotic his government is, he named as the secretary of education a multi-millionaire woman from the upper midwest - michigan orminnesota - who believes that - i quote you, now - the market should govern education.that we basically shouldn't have public schools.
private schools - because that's a privatething, the government's hands are out - will be better. this is an article of faith. shehas worked - she and her husband, i believe, it's the amway corporation that made thembillionaires. so they've been working on this as private citizens for a while, and now she'sgoing to be the head of education for the whole country. she's gon -so he names a person who believes that the way to go is to get the government out andlet the private sector - which is what he's exactly not doing. he is intervening to createjobs, to build jobs. his whole career - his chief position as a republican president isbased on what he just celebrated in giving the woman the job. and by the way, the texasgovernor, in an act that really will go down
among all of his extra -i assume you all saw that - mr. perry, a man of whom even his mother oncesaid "not the sharpest knife in the drawer." [laughter]and i don't mean to be mean - that's not true; i do - but you remember him from televisionwhen his campaign dissolved when he said he was going to get rid of three departmentsand he named the first, and he named the second, and he couldn't remember the third.the third one that he couldn't remember is what he's now the head of.[laughter] for a per -yeah, you have to laugh, because this is, this is woody allen-esque. or steve colbert.somebody. you need a good comedian to come
up with the...you name the person to run... it's unbelievable. what? yeah. groucho marx.not the other marx. both marxes would have comments about this, but...[laughter] ...in a different style.he, too, is a free market advocate, which means let the oil companies - he's from texas- let the oil companies do their thing. so we have free market advocacy at the same time,free market blown away by a big, powerful president who's going to tell corporationswhat to do. this is chaotic. this is incoherent. but it is a way of holding on to the politicalplan that he has, which did get him quite far, if you think about it, when nobody thoughthe could. so the last laugh is there.
let's follow it out. let's suppose it works.let's suppose he keeps the jobs from going to mexico. let's suppose he puts the tax onthe chinese - goods coming into the united states. when i say chinese goods again, please remember, half roughly, of the goods that come to the united states from china are produced by subsidiaries of american corporations. calling them chinese is accurate as to where they were produced, and as to the nationalityof the workers who made them. but the corporation that brings them here, that's an american- half of it - is an american corporation. so both the chinese corporations and the american... if they have to pay taxes of the sort that are being described - or tariffs - theyare going to lose their market here. and that's mr. trump's idea. because if we can't affordto bring in the chinese shirts and pants and
socks we're all wearing and iphones that we'recarrying, then we're going to have them - the idea is produce here. because we want them,but we won't pay the price to bring them in, so we'll have american production. well, let'sfollow it out. number one: if they're produced in the unitedstates, then they're going to have to pay american wages. the reason they went to chinawas to pay no wages - oh. excuse me. i mean chinese wages, which are very low. well, ifthey have to pay american wages - because they're produced here - they're going to raisethe price of these underpants you're wearing to the point where - i mean, you won't changethem but once every month - [laughter]so they last longer. and people will
stay far away from you because of it. you'regoing to have to... your cost of living, it's going to go nuts.and what are you all going to do? you're all going to struggle - that's what people do- to raise your wages and salaries so that you can afford what it now will cost you toget a toaster or to replace the carburetor in your car or to buy the suit you're wearing.and yet, in the private sector, less than 7% of americans have a union. you're not goingto get rising wages that are adequate. the price is going to go up, but your income isn't.this is an assault on you. and poor mr. trump will be successful, perhaps, in giving moreamericans jobs, even as the standard of living of all americans goes down. and then mr. trumpwill have to worry: which way is that going
to work? will people appreciate that theyhave more jobs? or be enraged that the american dream is slipping even further away from anyachievement at all. that is... you don't even see that discussed in the newspapers,but you ought to. because it's right there in the logic of this situation. no escape. no escape, but we're not done. let's suppose it happens. jobs are created in america. chinese goodsare frozen out. i believe i said this to you last month. if not, let me say it to you again.to do such a thing is a direct assault against the people's republic of china. and if youthink the last few weeks of the sudden discussion with taiwan and all the hoopla around the phonecall with the new leader in taiwan... that is nothing compared to what you're goingto see. the chinese economic "miracle" is
25 years of building up an industry in china.creating massive new industrial capability. creating i don't know how many cities, brandnew chinese cities that are spectacular to see, and rapid transportation. i mean chinais the new, emerging world economy. no question about it. but it is an entire economic miraclebuilt on exports. china made this strategic decision - very smart - back in the 1980sand '90s. that the only way to grow quickly, to industrialize, become a power in the world- instead of the plaything of western colonialism, which china had so long been - was to becomethe producer for everything in the capitalist world. that's why we're all wearing and etc.,chinese everything. they did it. they produced the quality at the price nobody could competewith. you close that off...
what are the 400 million people that,over the last 20 years, left the countryside in china and moved to the coastal areas where most of their industry is located - what are you going to do with these people? you send them back into the countryside? there's nothing for them there. leave them unemployed in thebig city and you'll have a revolution in china. and no one knows that better than the leadershipof the people's republic of china. you are leaving them no option. they might try - andnow you get the notion of economics - they might try to solve the problem of the unitedstates closing itself off by dumping all the stuff they can no longer sell here in latinamerica, asia, africa, europe. the european economies are in such trouble, they can'thandle this. what are they going to do?
close themselves off? they can't do that the waywe do, because they're not organized and unified enough yet. and the irony is, if americanstry to export and compete with the chinese in asia, africa and latin america, they willbeat us because they pay those wages and we pay the ones here. can't win that way. sothat will undercut the... ugh...you get a sense of it all being blocked? good. too much is going on here. it cant - i mean,the odds that this is all going to work out? you've got to believe adam smith and god'sdirect intervention. i don't mean to be disrespectful, for those of you who think that's going on,but you'd have to rely on that. and that's an iffy proposition. you can't do that. youare declaring war on a world economy, because
the united states - and here i'm going toquote mr. bannon. you all know he's the guru behind all of this. mr. bannon was defendinghimself right after the election from the charge that he's a white supremacist, alt-right nationalist, and all of that. he said, "no, no, no. i'm not any of those things. i'm justin a - i'm an economic nationalist." his self-definition. but, in a sense, i hope i've given you enoughto understand that's it. that's what this is. it's a kind of economic nationalism. butit relies on the mass of the working class not understanding that, if they get the jobs, they're going to get the whacking of their standard of living they've never seen before. and italso means that you're not facing the risk that the trade wars that are coming if theunited states does this have a nasty habit
in human history of becoming military warsa few years later. and then we will pay in blood for this extraordinary shifting thatmr. trump's election has begun. so, those of you that are scared, that's exactly whatyou should be. people who aren't scared are not paying attention. that's okay. a lot ofhuman beings handle scary things by not paying attention. but the risks here...[laughter] there's always somebody who laughs at that.it's like that charles addams cartoons, you know? remember, they always had that. there's very profound dangers in what he's doing. and the dangers are there if he's stumped and blockedby republicans and democrats, because at that point, how does he survive? and how does aman like that function if his survival is
being threatened? anger, lashing out, havingnow surrounded himself with people who - lord knows what they're capable of doing in theway of slowing him down, or not - so if he can't get it done, there's one kind of danger.and he does get it done, there's a whole other set of dangers. and, as some of you said before,you're right: this is a sign of a system whose decline is running out of options. in mathematics,there's a theorem about degrees of freedom - how you can solve a dilemma. how many degreesof freedom have you got to work out of it? the degrees of freedom, like a trap, are shrinkingfor the united states. that's why we have this crazy election. that's why we have theseoptions facing us. that's why i have the job of making you aware of what you're gettingor what we are being drawn into. and the solution
here is not - i hate to tell you this, buti've got to - it's not get rid of mr. trump and bring in - lord help us - mr. pence. butneither is it mrs. clinton or, for that matter, the man who's popularity in american politicshas only gone up, mr. sanders. [applause]because he, too, offers a set of "solutions" that can't work. what is he doing? better, for sure,but you've got to deal with a profound dilemma here, that the economy has been allowed todevelop up to this point. you don't have all of the options you once did. you've got todeal with what you have. and that doesn't leave you with very much to be able to do.so what is - in my remaining 15 minutes. do i have that right? yes - what could we do?and here i'm going to tell you some things
that you've heard me talk about before, buti hope - having laid out this situation a little bit for you - that you can see why this becomes a direction out and, in my own humble opinion - that "humble" is just there fordressing - [laughter]the only solution that we have, it's not to, as i say, get rid of trump and get in one of the others.they've failed. that's why we have to have the extremity of mr. trump. the extremity,in its way, of mr. sanders. to the great discomfort of the middle. for those of you who can, readthe new york times. the upset of that newspaper, its rage, its frustration, its grasping atanything that might undo what is going on is really...reveals everything i've been trying to tell you,
including today's banner headline, inwhich it is trying to blame the russians for the outcome. this is so extraordinary effort.you know that most countries - most major countries in the world - have, for decades,been interfering in the elections of other countries. this is normal - especially theunited states. but not just... anybody who can, does. you might even sayit's the invisible hand. [laughter]i wouldn't say it, but anyone could say it. so what is the solution and what does it look like? i don't think it's this or that policy; idon't think it's this or that politician. i think we're beyond that. we've tried allthat. it's done. we have to make fundamental
changes and we have to be strong enough torecognize it and then to explore what the fundamental alternatives are and what theymight give us. so, for lack of a better term, the one i want to suggest to you is workerco-ops. why would i pick that? because it's a fundamentally different way of organizingproduction. whether it's a factory, an office or a store, it is a completely different wayof understanding what economics is about - what you do when you "go to work". it's different.if you are part of a collective, of a democratic community that is engaged in production asopposed to a hierarchical up/down capitalist enterprise with shareholders, a board of directorsand a mass of workers. so let's begin. how it might be different. suppose a worker co-oporganization of an enterprise and it confronts
a problem like people don't want to buy whatwe produce any more. we make yellow shirts. and people don't like yellow. or they don'tlike shirts. and they now want something else. what happens in a capitalistic enterprise?well, first of all, the decision is made by the board of directors and the major shareholders- that's a tiny number of people. the mass of people have nothing to do with this. themass of people, noticing that the shirts are not flying out of the factory, know that theyhave now one thing that's important to do, which is to start being very nervous about theirjobs. they worry. they get anxiety attacks and panic attacks. they discover zantacâ®and all the 47 other ways to cope with this sort of thing and then they worry. the decisionis made by a tiny number of people. and, if
they can't sell, let's say, 20% any more of thoseshirts, they lay off 20% of the people. they fire them. there's no point in hiring 20%of the people if the products that those 20% produce, you can't sell. so you tell thosepeople, "don't come back monday. this is the last friday. good luck to you" and then youforget about them, because you're busy working on your company. and then you all know howthis plays out. those 20% workers now have no income. if they have no income, they can'tbuy things. if they can't buy things, then the people who had jobs producing what theycan no longer buy - they lose their jobs. and as this percolates through the economy, we have what's called a recession. by the way, that's where recessions come from. that'sone of the ways they happen. it starts somewhere
and then it keeps going and then we have aself-reinforcing cycle. the irrationality of capitalism is to have not intervened atthe first step and said, "we can avoid the big problem by doing something about those20% of the people." what would you do if you were a different economic system? you wouldn'tfire them. you'd find something else for that company to do. you'd find a course that theycould learn to do something else for which the demand is rising, because you'd go findthat. what you would do is not fire 20%. everybody would do 20% less work. and they would enjoy a leisure - a good thing would come out of the bad thing, because that way you couldcontinue to pay them. you would continue to pay them and they would all work, but theywould do less and their purchasing power wouldn't
disappear. and you would prevent them...a rational society would never have done what we do. because, remember, the logic - themathematical logic - if people are buying 20% less shirts, then that money is likelybeing spent somewhere else. and that's where those workers need to go. to be moved to wherethe work and the demand exists when the... we don't do that.we handle it by a decision of an individual "entrepreneur" who's doing what's best forhim or her, which is to lay those pe... but what's best for him or her - i hate totell you this - isn't what's best for everybody. it's not the invisible hand. it's the invisiblesmack in the face. [laughter]and it hurts.
i didn't pay this fellow to laugh.[laughter] [attendee] no, i paid for the privilege.[wolff] he paid - he pays to come in here and laugh. okay.to say this in economic language: a worker co-op has a different set of priorities. it'snot driven by profit first. it's driven by work, by the relationships of work, by therelationships among people at the work, by the larger society's well-being, all of whichbecome part of what it is that the people who run the enterprise normally think aboutwhen they make decisions. you get a different outcome because you have different goals andyou have different people sitting in a different relationship to one another making the decisions.now i can't defend all of this in one step.
but you know this is what we ought to be discussing,because if i'm right and this is a way out, we are desperately in need of a way out. becauseeverything i told you before is we don't have a way out. let me give you another example.taxes. in our system, we have a fundamental contradiction in our tax structure, that youhave to appreciate. we have, really, employers on the one hand - who pay a tax, remember?the 35% profits tax i told you about a few minutes ago? - employers pay a tax. and you,as working people, you pay a tax - your income tax. right? every april you do your taxes.well, if you divide this society into two groups like that and taxes have to be raisedso that we have schools and hospitals and roads and all the other things that are paidfor by taxes, you immediately provoke the
society into an endless contest in which thebusinesses try to shift the tax burden onto the people and the people onto the businesses.the problem is, the businesses have the resources to win, which is why all of you are screwed.you pay the taxes. let me give you just a couple of examples. in 1946, at the end ofthe war, when the power of masses of people - because of the depression and the war reallymade the people powerful - for every dollar raised in taxes by individual income tax.for every dollar that washington got from individuals, it got $1.50 from corporations.in other words, corporations together paid 50% more in taxes to the government than individuals.today, the relationship is for every dollar that is paid by individuals - you - corporationspay $0.25. do you understand? from $1.50 to
$1 to $0.25 to $1. over the last 50 years,the burden of taxes has been shifted off of the business community, onto you. and thesociety is driven by that. we now have a president who says, "i'm going to cut the corporatetax massively again." again. and that's the logic of this. you've got two different groupsof people: employer / employee. they both want the government to do it. we want thegovernment to give us student loans and to have a public swimming pool and to make theroads work and to have the fire department come and corporations want the governmentto give them nice orders and to build the roads where the trucks are needed. businesshas its demands on the government, the masses do. business pays taxes, the masses do. thisis a set-up. what business is going to try
to do is pay the least, while the governmentdoes the most. what we as the masses are going to do is the same thing. we're at each other'sthroats, whether we're publicly aware of it or not - all the time. and we're losing. you'relosing. by the way, will it work? this cutting of the taxes? for american corporations? andthe answer is: don't be naive. and let me show you - let me show you with a concreteexample. yesterday's newspaper, the israeli times, why the israeli times? because theisraeli times carries a front page story that the knesset - the parliament in israel - isthinking of cutting their corporate tax from 25% to 6%. why? because, even if america cutsit to 15, they're still going to stay in israel, because it's six. you know what this is called?it's called a "race to the bottom".
what the united states is doing is provoking everyother country in order not to lose what it has acquired in this last 30 years to do thesame thing. and not only will that frustrate the united states - because it will not getthe jobs that he's hoping for - it has a much worse effect. it means that the israeli governmentalready - on a knife's edge struggle with its own arab population - is now going tohave much less in the way of resources from its corporations, and therefore, have to cutback the schools, the hospital, and that's going to blow up israeli society. the samething is happening everywhere else. the system isn't working. that's the message here. for the first time in my life, as an adult economics professor, the notion that we may be not ina society having problems, but we may be in
a society dying. a particular way of earningour income is no longer viable. and that the issue is becoming more and more, for all ofus. are we going to go down with this ship? or are we going to get off and go on a differentboat? in a different direction? last point. how do you do this? how would you go in adifferent direction? and here i'd like to make a strong plea, that we think a littlelocally. i want to thank steve over here for having pushed the point into my head recently,and he's quite right. we don't have to wait for the federal government, or for the state.we can do these things locally. we can build local worker co-op sectors of our economyto demonstrate how it's different if decisions are made democratically by workers. if thepriority is jobs, and security and relationships,
not profits. if we aren't going to be at eachother's throat about taxes, because in a worker co-op the employer and the employee are thesame people. so there's not going to be a fight who pays the taxes - it's all the same.now we really deal with the question how much taxes do we need to have the government dowhat we want it to do for us. these things are doable. and they're doable at a local level. imagine if we had a mayor, a city council, local politicians who were ableto say, "maybe capitalism is in such serious trouble, that we have to now - not later - beginto create the alternatives, so that we can see whether they work, so we can explore them, we could experience them. we can try them." we need to have worker co-ops working allover the place, so that people who want a
job in that kind of a situation will havea place to go. and to see - and the rest of us can watch - how it works and see if itgets better outcomes. you know, we spend a lot of time saying "there's global warmingand climate change; we'd better do something before it gets..." yeah, well, we have thesame problem with our economic system. only we can really do something here, too. if, on a local basis, we did it. last point. the british are already ahead of us. i've toldyou this before - some of you have heard me. i want to tell you again, because some ofyou haven't. the british labour party - the number two party in england, which may verywell win in the next election - in this last week, mrs. may the prime minister made a terriblemistake, appeared in a photograph with $1200
leather pants.[laughter] these are sorts of things you can not do,and she made a mistake. and now that's all the british people are talking about. her pants.if the labour party wins, here's what the labour party is committed to:number one. every business in england - this will be the law the labour party will pushthrough parliament - any business that decides to close, that decides to move, that decidesto sell itself to another company or decides to become public in the sense of selling shareswill have to give its own workers what is called the right of first refusal before they dothat. in other words, the company - before it can do any of those things - will haveto turn to its workers and say "you can buy
the company from us and run it as a workerco-op. you become the owners. you become the directors. you're the employer and the employee."and how will the workers get the money to buy the company? the british government willlend it to them. why? because the british labour party has decided that, to build aworker co-op sector of the british economy, is a necessary, protective step forward forbritain in the new world of a capitalism that doesn't work real well. they say all thosethings. so it's not just occurring in an extraordinary church basement. it's actually out there inthe open. all right, folks. we've come to the end. thankyou very much. [applause]
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