Economic Update

Economic Update - ”Inequality’s Insidious Spread - COVID-19, India, Insurance”

In this week's show, Prof. Wolff presents updates on India's extreme inequality and its lesson, employers squeeze employees with "non-compete" job contracts, and how the profit motive distorts the concept of insurance. In the second half of the show, Wolff interviews Dr Stephen Bezruchka on how deeply and globally inequality endangers health with special attention to the US and Covid-19.

 

 

Economic Update - ”Unionization, Marxism and Education”

 In this week’s show, Prof. Wolff shares updates on Starbucks union growth; Texas journalists and Yale graduate students/employees unionize, strike, win; Western Mass Labor Federation denounces Biden's denial of railway workers' right to strike; two major kinds of US tax injustice: (1) exempting bonds and stocks from property tax when 10% richest own 80% of stocks and bonds, and (2) failing to levy excess profits tax on war profiteers as UK and Portugal have already done. In the second half of the show, Wolff interviews Notre Dame Professor Emeritus David F. Ruccio on Marxian economics, its absence from US universities, and its social insights.

 

 

Economic Update - 2023 World Economic Trends

 Identifying and examining the larger economic dimensions and trends of three key aspects of today's global economy: Russia/Ukraine war, Europe's quandary, and the decline of the US empire. Attention focuses on the immense direct and indirect costs of the war in Ukraine; on Europe's desperate position and choices caught between the US and China blocs in the world economy; and on how the US empire is responding to its decline in the world economy. Our approach is to stress what so many others deny or minimize. The risk of war and lessons of the past decline of empires figure prominently in the analysis.

Economic Update - ”A Corporatized America”

 In this week's show, Prof. Wolff explains why capitalism does not deserve credit for improved living conditions, Home Depot billionaire blames US capitalism's problems on US workers being "lazy, fat, and stupid," Southwest Airlines as example of failures by both corporations and their gov't "regulators," George Santos as creature of capitalist advertising. In the second half of the show, Wolff interviews Chris Hedges on the crisis of corporate America in 2023.

Economic Update - ”Economics for a New Year”

In this week's show, Prof. Wolff discusses US spending for war in Ukraine paid for by higher interest rates and inflation hurting middle and small businesses ; a rational transport system is NOT electric cars; an appreciation of the "degrowth" impulse with a critique of the degrowth movement's focus on individuals' consumerism and excess consumption.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Economic Update - ”American Midnight” Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis”

 In this week's Economic Update, Prof. Wolff presents updates on the French School of Economic Warfare and sanctions against Russia; how asset price declines threaten US pensions, electric replace fossil fuel private cars because of profit motive, instead of for a rational transportation policy; US police in elementary schools: bad for students, parents, teachers and even police; honoring Staughton Lynd, US radical academic and labor organizer who died on 11/18/22. In the second half of the show, Wolff interviews Adam Hochschild, author of "American Midnight" how 1917-1921 was a US rehearsal for a parallel right-wing surge of recent years.

 

 

Economic Update - What’s Wrong With Capitalism

The year 2022 produced a daunting, long list of serious problems associated with the economy (inflation, rising interest rates, stock market decline, deterioration of the environment, war, labor uprising, etc.). More than ever, the victims and critics of the problems of 2022 identified them as symptoms of a systemic problem, namely the capitalist system. On the one hand, capitalism is working as it always has, but that is now a problem. At its center capitalism prioritizes profit and profit maximization and we show how they are the core causes of the system's dysfunction now for all but a tiny minority at its top.

 

 

Economic Update - ”Surging US Labor Activism”

In this week's Economic Update, Prof. Wolff discusses explosive labor militancy across 2022 in US and UK, Wells Fargo bank again fined for illegal practices on 16 million bank customers, US-Russia economic warfare undercuts European economies whose response will likely shape Ukraine War's results. In the second half, Wolff interviews journalist Bob Hennelly on the rising US labor movement.

 

 

Economic Update - China and Inflation: Real Analyses, not BS

The program's first half focuses on the realities of China's rise and not the Cold War rhetoric. The second half analyzes the inflation now threatening the US economy. Its causes and consequences turn out to be quite different from the mainstream media treatments of the subject. 

Economic Update - What ’Capitalism’s Decline’ Means

This week's show is dedicated to a discussion of the signs of US capitalism's decline. US history as the passage of US capitalism from its birth, through its state-supported growth and expansion, to its global peaking from 1945 to 2000. Wolff presents the causes of its ongoing decline this 21st century, and then offers a conclusion on the right, center and left political responses to decline.