DESVARIEUX: So, Rick, the labor market is getting better--at least that's what the numbers are telling us. But is that the whole story?

WOLFF: No, and it's not only that, the whole story. It's not even the most important part of the story of unemployment. And let me explain. First of all, sure, that we've added almost 300,000 jobs is a lot better than adding 100,000 or cutting thousands of jobs, which is what has happened for much of the last five or six years. So it's better than where we have been. But it is very, very far short of what a functioning economy ought to do.

And let me explain. The minute you break down these numbers--which, by the way, newspapers that do this properly have been able to do. And I've actually mentioned the Wall Street Journal for having given a list of charts to help people understand what these numbers means. One of those charts shows that the increase in jobs that they're talking about has overwhelmingly been part-time jobs, not full-time jobs. And when you look at full-time jobs, we're not even back to where we were seven or eight years ago, because that is how bad this depression or recession, whatever you want to call it, has been.

Second most important reality: wages have gone nowhere. There's been no increase in wages. That means if you put together that the wage averages have been the same, but in effect what you're doing is giving people part-time jobs, not full-time jobs, then you begin to see that this is not an economic recovery. What has actually happened is over the last eight years of this economic crash since 2008, millions of Americans have suffered unemployment, often for one, two, and three years. Little footnote: unemployment is lasting longer now than at any other downturn since the Great Depression. What you've done is put people through long, painful unemployment, using up their savings, using up the resources of their family, using up all unemployment compensation that they're eligible for, so that now they are forced to go back to work part-time instead of full-time, and at lower-wage jobs that they had before.

You put all this together, and what you're seeing is an economic slump that continues. It's not as bad as it was in late 2008, 2009, and 2010, but to compare that, where we are now, with what the worst was is not the right way to go. It's to compare us now with what we could have and should have been all along and what we should have now made up for. What happened in the last seven years, nothing like that has is shown by these numbers.

DESVARIEUX: But, Rick, I'm going to challenge you a bit, because at the end of the day there has been real growth. In the construction industry, they've added 29,000 jobs, the restaurant industry added 59,000 jobs, both of them in the service industry. And the Bureau of Labor found that unemployment decreased in every state, all 50 states, including D.C., during the year 2014. That sounds, at least on the surface, as good news. I mean, that hasn't happened since 1984. So, for you, I want to ask you: what do you think is at the root of this growth? Are we actually seeing the private sector deciding to reinvest in the economy? And can you at least say that this is a minor victory?

WOLFF: Again, it depends in comparison to what. Is it better than losing jobs? Yes. Is it better than a growth of jobs that's slower? Yes, no question. I'm glad these people have been getting jobs. But I know as an economist that if you put people mostly into part-time jobs, and if you put them mostly into low-paying jobs, and if you look at where the growth in jobs has been, not just in the month of February, but for the last several years, it's very clear that we're moving from a high-wage, high-benefit, secure-job economy to a low-wage, low-benefit, precarious economic situation for the majority of our workers. That is not a recovery. That is going to a new place in this economy far inferior to what we had both before this crisis and during it. It's basically saying to the American working class, we have put you through a proverbial economic hell in the last seven years of unemployment. At the end of that title, what awaits you is a poorer job with fewer benefits that is less secure than you had before we put you through this economic disaster. That's why focusing on the fact that over a few month period the numbers go up instead of down distracts the attention of the people from the larger, broader reality, which is one that they ought to be very, very concerned about rather than having themselves on the back for this number.

DESVARIEUX: So, Rick, for you, then, what would be a economic indicator that would represent a healthy economy?

WOLFF: For me it would be using the term full employment for what it means in simple, honest English, and that would be one percent, one and a half percent of our people out of work, because basically they're moving from one job to another. There's always a certain amount of friction like that. But that's it. The rest is what we're not solving as a problem. And that is in fact getting worse.

And let me explain really simply what I mean. We currently have, depending on how you count, between 10 and 20 million Americans who are not able to work in a proper full-time job that they want to have and that they want to do. At the same time, the Federal Reserve teaches a statistic called capacity utilization: what portion of the tools, equipment, machines, floor space, factory space, office space, what part is being left idle, not used? And the answer is: about 20 percent these days, which means we have more than enough tools, equipment, and raw material for those 10 to 20 unemployed millions of Americans to work with. If we put those people to work with the equipment and tools and raw materials available, we could produce a wealth of output that could do a major job in rebuilding the destroyed cities of the United States, providing for the elderly that we are increasingly a part of our population, providing the daycare that we ought to have and that finds us far behind other countries like us, and make a real contribution to overcoming poverty in around the world, which would be a lot more successful a foreign policy than the one we pursue. We have the capacity to do it. But we have an economic system that can't, that fails to put together the people who want to work with the tools and equipment they need to produce the wealth we all know would make this a better society. That's the catastrophe that these numbers distract attention from, which is why I'm so concerned to put them back in the context they deserve so that they can be understood in terms of the real crisis we still are living in.

DESVARIEUX: Alright. Let's go back and talk about the Federal Reserve that you mentioned. So if the economy is deemed to be at full employment, which some headlines are even saying after these unemployment figures came out, or at the very least it's on its way back to a pre-recession sort of labor market, could this news potentially affect interest rates? And more importantly, what would this mean for everyday people?

WOLFF: Yes. The conservatives in both parties, who are, unfortunately, the majority in both parties, the conservatives have been pushing for raising interest rates. I won't go into the disputable theory and science that this is the basis for, but that's what they want. And they need public signs that can allow them to increase the pressure on Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve and on the whole Federal Reserve board to begin to raise interest rates.

This kind of statistic, especially when it's hyped in the way you have quite correctly characterized, will give them a bit more ammunition to put pressure on the Federal Reserve even to raise interest rates or to raise them sooner, etc. And if the Federal Reserve does it, then that will increase the cost of homes because your mortgage rates will go up, of automobiles because your car payments will go up, of the cost of our education because student loans will likely go up, and credit card debt.

This is a very dangerous in an over-indebted economy. It means production and demand for goods and services will be cut back. That's not good for production. And so it's quite understandable that the chief at the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, is very nervous about these kinds of statistics pushing her and the board to raise interest rates.

And here's what it reveals. They know better than the headlines we're discussing now how very weak the current recovery is, how the majority of Americans have not been allowed to participate in it, and therefore how dangerous it would be to raise interest rates above the near-zero level that they're at now, because anything that could disturb as weak and uneven a recovery as we have is too scary to contemplate. Therein lies the real recognition that this hoopla over 5.5 percent is meant to distract people from.

The cost of open defiance, which, Ali pointed out, is our only escape route from corporate tyranny, will at least at first be painful. Our corporate masters do not intend to release their death grip without a brutal fight.

Ali recalled that even his late friend Hugo Chavez, the firebrand socialist president of Venezuela, was not untouched by intimidation from Establishment forces. “I remember talking to Chavez many times and saying, ‘Comandante, why do you stop there?’ ” Ali said. “He said it is not realistic to do it at the present time. We can regulate them, make life difficult for capitalism, use oil money for the poor, but we can’t topple the system.”

Ali added, “The Greeks and the Spanish are saying the same.”

“I don’t know what Syriza thought,” he said. “If it thought we can divide the European elite, we can make a big propaganda campaign in Europe and they will be forced to make concessions, that was foolish. This European elite, led by the Germans, doesn’t crack easily. They have walked all over the Greeks. The Greek leaders should have said to their own people, ‘We are going to try and get the best possible conditions—if not we will report to you what has happened and what we need to do.’ Instead, they fell into the European trap. The Europeans made virtually no concessions that mattered.”

The clash between the Greeks and the corporate elites that dominate Europe, Ali said, is “not economic.”

The European Union is “prepared to pour billions into fighting Russians in the Ukraine,” he said. “It’s not a question of the money. They can throw away the bloody money, as they are preparing to do and are doing in the Ukraine. With the Greeks they pretend it is economic, but it’s political. They are fearful that if the Greeks pull it off, the disease will spread. There are elections in December in Spain. If Podemos [Spain’s left-wing party] wins with Greece already having won and proceeding, however modestly, on a different path, the Spanish will say the Greeks have done it. And then there is the Irish waiting patiently with their progressive parties, saying, ‘Why can’t we do what Syriza has done? Why can’t we unite and take on our extreme center?’ ”

Ali said he was “shocked and angry about all the hopes that were invested in Obama by the left.” He lambasted what he called the American “obsession with identity.” Barack Obama, he said, “is an imperial president and behaves like one, regardless of the color of his skin.” Ali despaired of the gender politics that are fueling a possible run for the White House by Hillary Clinton, who would be the first woman president.

“My reply is, ‘So bloody what?’ ” he said. “If she is going to bomb countries and put drones over whole continents, what difference does her gender make if her politics are the same? That is the key. The political has been devalued and debased under neoliberalism. People retreat into religion or identity. It’s disastrous. I wonder if it is even possible to create something on a national scale in the United States. I wonder if it would be better to concentrate on big cities and states to develop some movements where they can have an influence in Los Angeles, New York or in states such as Vermont. It may be wiser to concentrate on three or four things to show that it can be done. I can’t see the old way of reproducing a political party of the left, modeled on the Republican and Democratic structures, as working. These people only work with money. They do not even speak with very many ordinary people. It is credit-card democracy. The left cannot and should not emulate this. America is the hardest nut to crack, but unless it is cracked we are doomed.”

Ali said he fears that should Americans become politically conscious and resist, the corporate state will impose naked forms of militarized repression. Government’s reaction to the 2013 bombings at the Boston Marathon stunned him. Authorities “closed down an entire city with the support of the population.” He said that the virtual declaration of martial law in Boston was “a dress rehearsal.”

“If they can do it in Boston they can do it in other cities,” he said. “They needed to try it on in Boston to see if it would work. That frightened me.”

“The manufacturing of threats manufactures fear,” he said. “It creates sleepwalking citizens. They [officials] never tried to do this on this scale when they were fighting the Soviet Union and the communist enemy, which was supposed to be the worst, most dangerous threat ever. Now they do it over a handful of bloody terrorists.”

Groups such as Black Lives Matter, he said, offer some hope.

“Just as the traditional left parties have been wiped out all over the world, so has the radical segment of the African-American population and their organizations,” he said. “They were physically wiped out. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, some of the most gifted leaders, were assassinated. The Black Panthers were destroyed. Areas where blacks lived on the West Coast were flooded with drugs. It was a well-planned assault. But the young people who came out in Black Lives Matter have this older spirit. When Jesse Jackson went to Ferguson and engaged in demagogy he was heckled. They did the same on the East Coast with [Al] Sharpton. These black leaders, bought off, are being seen for what they are.”