Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff presents updates on the Australian dockworkers’ union's fight against A.I., the German auto workers’ fight against VW layoffs, Private Suites running private terminals for rich U.S. flyers, and Bayer/Monsanto profiting by manipulating U.S. farmers’ organizations. The second half of the show features an interview with Donald H Whitehead, Jr., the director of the National Coalition of the Homeless. We hope you enjoy this discussion and look forward to joining you next week for another all-new episode of Economic Update. Economic Update with...

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff presents an analysis of how markets work, which parts of society they favor and serve, and which they discriminate against. He also unpacks why markets are NOT the same as capitalism, and where markets are NOT allowed to exist in the world today, including in the U.S. He wraps up today’s show with an analysis of why market idolatry now functions as a kind of secular religion, especially in the U.S. but also globally.

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on rising wages for app-based NYC food delivery workers, a wave of U.S. firms being sold to their workers, McDonald's disaster with an AI experiment, and how Canada's leader Carney is also a major campaigner for capital and against labor inside Canada. The second part of today’s show features an interview with psychotherapist Tess Fraad-Wolff on the psychological crisis faced by men in US capitalism today. 

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

The central concept of Marx's contribution to a critical understanding of the capitalist economic system - the entry point into his distinctive analysis - is "the surplus." Today's show is devoted to making clear (1) what the surplus is, (2) how and why the surplus is central to understanding capitalism's key features, and (3) how the surplus explains such flaws in capitalism, such as the endless class struggles it provokes and the extreme inequalities of wealth and income it generates.

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

This week on Economic Update, Professor delivers updates on the so-called Social Security Crisis, the gross inequality of stock ownership in the U.S. today, the exploited and underpaid non-tenure track faculty ("adjuncts," etc.) who are joining unions, especially the UAW, which won a union election on June 3 at the University of Southern California, which includes 2,700 members. The second half of the show features an interview with Ann Larson, author of the new book, Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View Behind the Supermarket Register. You can find here book...

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor devotes the entire program to the why and how of China's passage from abject poverty and colonial humiliation to become, in unprecedented, record historical time, a superpower economy challenging the US today.

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

This week on Economic Update, Professor delivers updates on the big union wins for 40,000 workers in the UC system, the ongoing strike of graduate student workers at Harvard, and basic statistics on the extent of hunger in US households (between 1 in 7 and 1 in 5 households). In the second half, Professor Wolff interviews Professor Ida Susser, author of the new book, “The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy: Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century.”

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor delivers updates on why and how worker co-ops are a strategic direction for socialism, and Europe's deindustrialization. The second half features an interview with Anne McGrew and Will Chaney about the Center for Popular Economics and its work since 1978, teaching economics in ways that neither college and university departments nor labor unions do.

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff briefly discusses two current large strikes by workers fighting back: the British Columbia nurses in Canada and the commuter rail workers in New York (LIRR). The rest of today’s episode is an analysis of the 7.4 million Americans who are unemployed today, the causes and effects of that unemployment, the irrationality of that unemployment, and the current failed "policies" to deal with it.

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on the tentative agreement reached by the unionized portion (85%) of the staff at the Los Angeles Unified School District (400,000 students, 83,300 workers), the three separate labor unions that unified to win major improvements in wages and working conditions,  how capitalist versus socialist enterprises would install AI, and how progressive mayors like Mamdani of New York could counter billionaires' threats to evade taxes by moving their businesses if any political leader taxed the rich (or moved to make the rich pay their...