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Program on "Link" TV---"Capitalism Hits the Fan"

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Honeycombe8 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 10:10 AM
Original message
Program on "Link" TV---"Capitalism Hits the Fan"
This program is on Link right now (CST), but I'm sure will be re-run. It's a lecture type program on capitalism and how we got to where we are. The man covers our country's history, wages, manufacturing....he's making all those complex things understandable. It's a fascinating, informative program, if you get a chance to watch even part of.

For example, he talked about from early 1800's to 1975, the U.S. working people had rising wages during that whole time. That stopped in the 1970's. Wages have been flat ever since. He explains why (4 main reasons). Then he goes on to state...wait...this is good...how workers coped with that was: WORK MORE HOURS. From the 1970's to now, American workers have INCREASED the hours they work by 20%, while EVERY OTHER INDUSTRIAL COUNTRY's workers have DECREASED the hours they work during that same time period. Quite simply, we're working our asses off.

He's talking about credit cards now. That's how banks coped with the flat wages. They had to find a way to get money out of the workers that the workers did not have. Before credit cards, you had to give collateral for a loan. But with credit cards, no collateral is necessary. Ba-da-bing. Now they can loan massive amounts of money to working people who don't have anything, for extremely high rates of interest.

Very interesting show.

Oh, and the 4 main reasons the man listed for wages going flat (they weren't what I thought they'd be):
1. Computers. Computers put hundreds of people out of work for every computer used.
2. Women. For the first time, large numbers of women entered the work force.
3. Immigrants. Beginning in the 1970's, huge numbers of immigrants flowed into the U.S., mainly from South and Central America, but also from other countries.
4. Outsourcing jobs to other countries began, when Europe and Japan recovered after WWII and started competing successfully against America in manufacturing. Instead of upping their game, American businesses decided to join them, since they couldn't beat them. They started outsourcing to them, and shutting down businesses and jobs here.

These four things, he said, combined to stop wages from rising. As he said previously, workers, feeling the pinch, responded by working more hours to get more money.

He also talked about the things our leaders are trying now to help the country, and spoke about how most of them are identical to things tried before, either here or in other countries. And none of them solved the problems. I'm interested to see if he points to an example of something that worked in some country. I hope.
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izquierdista Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 10:30 AM
Response to Original message
1. Richard Wolff?
Sounds like the ideas he tries to get across.
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Honeycombe8 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 01:03 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. I missed the beginning. I never caught his name.
I didn't agree with everything he said. But it was a great history lesson, and he sounded balanced and plausible. He's an economist, I know that.
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jwirr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 12:03 PM
Response to Original message
2. Interesting 4 main reasons. I am 70 years old and I remember all the
discussion about machines replacing people in the late 50s. My aunt used the first computer in her office. The line went that people would be hired to make those computers - they forgot to tell us that it would not be American workers.

As to women - many went to work while the men were at war but quit to let the men have the jobs back when it was over. However, he may be talking about the women's liberation movement when women went to work because they wanted to. I have often thought about that - it comes down to our right to work. As a woman I want to ask - why does a man have any more right to the jobs than a woman? In an overpopulated world this is always going to be an issue - not enough jobs to go around.

Immigrants is another touchy issue. I think it depends on what type of jobs we are talking about. We can see that in rural areas crops are failing because of lack of laborers. In other types of work (packing plants, construction etc.) there are plenty of American workers who would work at these jobs. I think he would have been more accurate if he had said illegal immigrants - they bring the wages down because they are hired undercover. The immigrant who comes here legally at least is covered under the minimum wage laws.

And outsourcing needs no discussion. It is to blame for much of what we are facing today and should never have been allowed to happen in the first place. We need to get rid of the trade bills that do not allow us to use tariffs and other mechanisms to level the playing field.

Does anyone know if they will replay this program?

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Honeycombe8 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 01:13 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. I don't know if it'll replay. But link is like PBS, viewer sponsored, so it re-runs a lot of
its programs. It doesn't have an endless supply of programs, but what's there are interesting and different, and often global in perspective.

Regarding the women and immigrants, the point I think was not that they took jobs from non-immigrant men. He was talking about beginning in the 1970's. He was discussing flat wages. So his point was that women and immigrants get paid less, or will work for less. So because businesses had these new workers to choose from, they could hire others for less wages, OR non-immigrant men would have to accept lower wages to compete. And for those jobs that these people did that were different from non-immmigrant men (let's face it, women and men did NOT work at the same jobs back then, usually), it generally depressed the wages paid for everyone.

The farm work you're discussing....of course, before illegal immigrants, Americans and legal immigrants did that work. Most likely, it was blacks, and some poor whites, with a spattering of Chinese or other legal immigrants. People who had to do that or starve. If you saw the movie Places of the Heart with Sally Field (a white farmer widow who tries to keep her farm going after her husband dies), you saw that she couldn't hire much of anyone, but the ones she did hire were a black indigent man, and she picked cotton herself. She also hired a blind man. I think the events in that movie were supposed to have taken place in the 1940's? Not sure.

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jwirr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 01:17 PM
Response to Reply #4
5. Thank you. Good points about the wages. That is why it has taken
them so long to deal with the fair wage bill.
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zalinda Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 01:22 PM
Response to Reply #2
6. I remember the 70's
I also remember how more women went into the workforce because they had to, not because they wanted to. In the 70's, most women on the lower end of the economy still wanted to stay home and raise their children, but their husband's pay wasn't keeping up with inflation. I mean, really, how fulfilling is it to work at K-Mart? Women in upper incomes went to college and followed their interests, women in the lower income worked shit jobs. One was freedom, the other necessity.

zalinda
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jwirr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 01:35 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. Of course, as a very low income family - single mother with 3 children -
I understand that but there were also many women who went into careers because they wanted to.
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izquierdista Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 01:54 PM
Response to Reply #2
8. Try this link
Capitalism Hits the Fan - Richard Wolff http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZU3wfjtIJY
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jwirr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 05:18 PM
Response to Reply #8
9. Thank you. I watched it and had mixed feelings. Has this man been
out to talk with the protesters? He should - many may not know his viewpoint. A lot to think about there. I wish I could get my family to set down and watch it - but as he says they are too busy.

One issue that he talks about at the end is giving up our lifestyle to save the planet. At the age of 70 that is one thing I am not so afraid of. When I read Kunstler's book "World Made by Hand" I got a really good feeling about the after oil lifestyle he portrays. Much of it was the life I lived as a child in the 40s. Don't get me wrong - I do not want to give up all the medical knowledge we have now. I want to retain the knowledge we have of how things work but as to the actual living it was good after the depression ended. We had enough to eat, homes, heat, doctors (even specialists at the Universities), etc.

It was also a time of cooperatives such as the REA which still exists in rural areas.
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SoCalDem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 05:28 PM
Response to Reply #9
10. We will have to re-discover "the commons", or we will live pretty awful lives
There was once a time when , if someone wanted to open a business, they tried to find a need that was not being met..NOT to open a business 40 feet from one identical to the one they were opening.,,and doing so to wage commercial war against the existing merchant.

Macho/gladiator/cannibal commercialism is killing us all.

Even the smallest of communities used to manage quite well.

My husband just returned from his 50th class reunion in Fredonia KS. When he was there as a child/teen, there were 4K people there..the town had FOUR theatres..6 grocery stores, a coupl of small department-ish stores, it had several gas stations, a few banks, and even a small hospital.

There was farming, grain mills (ADM owned one), there were doctors , a big rail-yard, there were teachers, there was a library..

It was "Mayberry"

It's almost dead now.

There's one grocery store, no theatres..no library anymore.

The railroad even pulled up all the tracks, ..no grain mills, no jobs..

He was too depressed to even take many pictures:(

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jwirr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 06:32 PM
Response to Reply #10
12. Yes, I have to go home to NE IA to visit my brother - it is depressing
what we have done to our rural communities.
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izquierdista Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 06:11 PM
Response to Reply #9
11. He retired a couple years ago
He is also 70, and says he is busier in retirement than he ever was as a faculty member. If people don't know his viewpoint, it's not for him not trying. He only gets picked up by shows like RealNews, Keiser Report, LinkTV, you know, Commies.
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jwirr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Oct-08-11 06:33 PM
Response to Reply #11
13. In that case hopefully the protesters do know him and his ideas. They
appear to be a very smart bunch of people.
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