Updates on poverty in California, childhood obesity in US, economic fallout from (real meaning of) Trump steel tariff. Prof Wolff responds to questions by explaining how US politics has sustained US capitalism and what the politics of change will require. 

Updates on LA vote on public bank; contradictions of Trump's "nationalism;" big business criticism of tariffs; corporations like 7-Eleven use immigration crisis for profits. Major discussion: the urgent social issues that elections ignore or hide.

This week’s updates include: massive international study of profit-driven food production, the huge costs of contemporary loneliness, police raid Deutsche Bank, Falling house prices, Belgium follows France in mass street demonstrations, and US economy hurt by poor incomes of Millennials. Interview with Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, the Mississippi development project focused on worker coops.

The program begins by explaining the economics behind the great US  anti-leftist purge (“McCarthyism”) after 1945. It then shows the economic impacts of that purge over the last half century. Finally, it explains how that history produced a very different political response to the crash of 2008 compared to FDR’s response to 1929.