change or corporations, especially the fossil fuel industry. we are brought to you from viewers like you. there is momentous news -- los angeles has become the nation's largest city to improve a significant increase in the minimum wage. a los angeles city council voted tuesday to raise the minimum wage from nine dollars to $15 an hour. it will impact almost 50% of the workforce. it is expected to spark wage hikes across california and similar efforts in, just as seattle did. we urge you folks to show support for the media that covers movements, whether we're talking about fast food workers walmart workers, the black line -- lives matter movement, men

and women -- we urge you to call in and become a supporter of link tv. today we will turn to economist richard wolf professor emeritus , he is the number of and off -- a number of books most recently "capitalism hits the fan -- the global economic meltdown, and what to do with it." in a moment, so i'd not drop the book, we will play you a portion of a speech richard wolf recently gave. we are making available to you this amazing book -- "capitalism hits the fan, the global economic meltdown, and what to do about it --" which step-by-step shows that deep economic structures and how they account for the crisis -- government a lot interventions that have thrown to little money, too late at a problem

that requires more than money to solve. we urge you to call in as this news comes out -- five big banks to pay billions and plead guilty in rate ringing. please make your call. if you would like to get a copy of the book, it is yours for $100. if you would like to get a copy of the full speech, it is yours for a contribution of $75. this is richard wolf, now at new school in new york. if you would like to get both the dvd and the speech, you can pledge 100 and two dollars. we are going for the whole pack, if you would like six cds of six different speeches on everything from a curse -- cure for capitalism to the problem he says his capitalism, the solution is democracy. he talks about economic crisis systems declined. he talks about many different

issues. we are giving you a wolff pack, a six-pack of cds. if you want to go for the gold, the six-dvd set, a dvd of the speech we are about to play and "capitalism hits the fan, the global economic meltdown, and what to do about it," on the that is yours for a contribution of $250. if you call in right now, the last wednesday we get to ask for your support, if you call him right now --866-359-4334 866-359-4334, we turn to a speech richard wolff gave a week ago here in new york. it is tired opened -- titled "as capitalism's crisis deepens, thoughts of socialism return again." richard: i will go through a bunch of short topics as we might do and then turn to the main topic of the evening which has to do with socialism, the varieties of socialism, and what

the term means. let's get going with the shorter ones. a very important venture capitalist, private equity fund leader named schwarzman -- for those of you that follow this, you will know he is a big player in this. he is a millionaire. over the last month he did something remarkable, or maybe not so remarkable, but i wanted to talk to you about it. he gave $150 million to universityyale --yale -- yale university, one of the big against the university of gotten, pocket change for mr. schwartzman, but for most of you, probably would not be. it is also very nice for ylae but -- yale, but to give $150 million to yale is to give a few

pennies to a gentleman like mr. schwartzman. what is going to be done with this? yale is converting a huge building. for reasons of objectivity, i should explain i went to school and taught at yale. this is the commons, a beautiful old construction. much of the buildings are beautiful and looks like cambridge and oxford, which it was meant to replicate. it was not, of course, built at the time of cambridge and oxford, if you know your history you can figure out why that was. it was ashley built in the 1930's, -- it was actually built in the 1930's, mostly by italian craftsman who were desperately unemployed and willing to work for nothing and this was an opportunity yale did not wish to let pass, so it built replicas

of what it wished it had of its own origin and this was a cheap way to replicate this event. they are going to convert this big hall into an fine arts space. i say extra because they already have lots of fine arts spaces. yale is the second richest university in the united states of my numbers are correct, in excess of $25 billion in their portfolio, more than you and i. so, mr. schwartzman -- let's all get this now, is a billionaire who wanted to give some money to a useful cause, and the best use he could think of for his $150 million was to give it to the second richest university in the world so we could have another fine arts department on top of

the half-dozen it no doubt already has. so, here is a way that our capitalist economic system allocates wealth and resources isn't it? that is how it works. a very rich man is making a very rich institution richer. as that all there is to this? no. no. i want to take the time although i would like to, to ask and explain to you where the wealth of mr. schwartzman comes from -- i think of his own hands, not so much, but i won't. but i will remind you that mr. schwartzman, who has aliens of dollars and that billions of dollars and earned interest and dividends -- who has billions of

dollars and earns interest and dividends on those billions, when he gives a hundred $15 million to a chair double, which is a charitable name for yale -- charitable institution, which is a charitable name for yale, he is able to deduct his taxable income by $150 million, so he will reduce his taxes for roughly 40% of that, which means the united states government thanks to mr. schwartzman's gift to yale will get something on the order of 50 or $70 million last from mr. schwartzman then they would've gotten if he did not give it to yale. so, the federal government will have less money to use for the people of the united states because a very rich billionaire made a alien dollar institution

-- billion-dollar institution richer still. as i often say i guess if i had more time, i would stop now and we would just play the national anthem. [laughter] the second item -- many of you buy berries from the streets of new york, little carts on the street, and also in stores, and you might've noticed there is a monopoly on these by a firm by the name of driscoll. are you all with me? driscoll is part of a huge conglomerate, and most of these berries are grown in mexico, and the buyer california and other regions of mexico, and the workers, the farmworkers who plant, fertilize, pesticide, and

take these -- pick these berries, very arduous work, are on strike because they are not satisfied anymore with their eight dollars a day pay, which if you think about it, is not very much. it is a lot less, for example then mr. schwartzman has and they are on strike because they wish to have their wages raised to $13 an hour. this is not acceptable to the driscoll berry company. so, the next time you reach for a berry, think about it. third item. third item. i want to read to you from today's "new york times." i always like to read from "the new york times." this is about a petition filed in court, i believe yesterday by the american petroleum

institute. there are empty seats if you want, scattered around, or you could take a chair, whichever you prefer. the american petroleum institute is the oil industry's main trade group. they petitioned the united states court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit -- here we go ready, to block key provisions of new rules unveiled by anthony foxx, the transportation secretary in the obama cabinet. the petition seeks to -- really go now block the requirement that older tank cars, railcars the retrofitted with new safety features designed to prevent them from spilling oil or rupturing in a derailment. we are carrying more and more oil, that shale business that has to be distributed all over the united states.

trains are carrying huge amounts of oil, and if the trains were to derail and if the oil cars are not safe, oh, boy you're going to have burning oil lakes cascading through. the american petroleum institute says we do not want this and they give -- i am meeting from "the times" -- provisions including the new electronic breaks, according to the rules would be, too costly, and would yield to few safety benefits. yesterday, a train in philadelphia derailed. it killed seven people and caused millions of dollars worth of damage. the american petroleum industry does not want to adopt new, greater safety rules in the event of a derailment. i could not make this stuff up

last thing -- also in today's "new york times," a little graph. the graph shows the united states is spending less on infrastructure and maintaining roads and rail as a percentage of gdp than at any other time in the last generation, 25 years. even "the new york times" points out in this article that it was not the excessive speed. it was also the fact that we do not maintain our tracks, and therefore we are having these accidents, and therefore it is doubly moving that the american petroleum institute is fighting the government so that they do not have to make the cars more

safe in the event of a derailment that just happened. ok, next item -- many have argued since the crisis of 2008 that the banks really did not break the law in all of the crooked -- excuse me, in all of the other things that they did. that was practice, i should tell you. they did not break the law, but they may have been a little rash on occasion. i was struck when on monday of this week a federal judge came down with it -- a different opinion. she is of the federal district court in manhattan. she issued a 361-page division. -- decision. she writes a lot. against the japanese bank nomura

holdings, and the royal bank of scotland, two very large global banking institutions. there are seats scattered through, folks, so just, onion. they were the only -- so just come on in. they were the only one of the 18 banking giants called on the carpet for what they did -- they are the only two of the 18 the decided not to make a plea agreement with the government, to actually go to trial, which is weather is a judgment on theirs and no judgment on the others. the others like citibank, jpmorgan bank of america, so on, they worked out a deal and gave the government a few billion dollars. a japanese and a scottish bank thought they could beat the government. they lost this. on the other hand, where they have to pay is not much. i wanted to -- what they have to

pay is not much. i wanted to read to you what the judge found in the exhaustive trial. it is no stretch to suggest that what she found about those two applies pretty close to the other 16 that got out of having a trial. i will quote you one line because it will save time and it gets the message across -- coding judged any -- the magnitude of falsity conservatively measured is enormous. well -- even for a polite judge that is pretty heavy. that is a nice way of saying you live right through your teeth and everybody knows a wonderful new song from mr. cohen "everybody knows." moving on, thousands of people die all the time trying to cross the mediterranean from africa

and east into your. thousands of people, they take these extremely rickety boats often organized by gangsters who squeeze the last little bit of money these desperados have, get them on these rickety boats, try to evade the military boats that prevent this from happening, and often in the process cap says, and people in the mediterranean -- cap size and people in the mediterranean drowned. each time this happens there is a great deal of mashing of teeth, wailing, and this is really terrible -- these dead bodies rolling up on the mediterranean. it is not good for tourism. you do want the person swimming next to you not to be dead. so, it is troubling, and it is clearly troubling because you can see that the leaders in

europe say they are troubled, so it must be. i wanted to offer some economic analysis -- that is what we do here. about this. if you have an economic system, capitalism, in our case, that systematically organizes extreme disparities between wealth in one part of the world than another part of the world, here comes a real shocker -- people are going to want to leave the part of the world that the system drowns in poverty and moved to the part that is not affected like that. this has been going on roughly 10,000 years. it should not be coming as a big shock. if you do not want migration and you do not want safe migration, deadly loss of life and do not organize and accept

an economic system that produces the disparities anyway, and if you're not going to deal with the disparities, do not play on our ignorance that having another boat in the water is a solution can desperate migrants find ways. they always have. if it kills them, they still find those ways. they die in large numbers, but an honest approach would begin to say let's ask why this happens -- why would people live of their lives leave their homes, communities, languages, and go to a whole other part of the world at enormous costs they have no money, at enormous risk to life and limb, their children, their spouses -- why would people do that if they were not desperate? if you would ask them, they

would tell you nine times out of 10 this has to do with economic disparity, and if you do a questionnaire and you find out a different answer, it is because in many parts of the world economic disparity is not accepted as a way to allow you to get in. you have to claim political prosecution. since migrants are just as smart as everyone else, they will claim whatever gets them in. ok, something that has to be said -- two elections happened since last we gathered here and i wanted to talk to you briefly about them in terms of their economic. do you want the good news or the bad news first? [laughter] bad news. we will start with the bad news. it is not really that bad, but it could be better. the bad news is great britain. there was an election in great written, and -- and great

britain, and i believe it is correct that virtually every pre-election poll indicated that neither of the two parties, the conservative party or the labour party would get enough votes to govern by itself, so it would have to be a working out of some sort of combination government for britain. all of the polls were wrong which, by the way, has led to a number of investigations that have just begun as to why that might be. i know, as an american, of course we understand what that is about. we're specialists at that. we know that the poll is one kind of commercial activity, the election is another kind, and they worked to different rules. one really has nothing much to do with the other. that might be going on in england. i do not know. here is what happened -- mr. cameron, the head of the conservative party took home -- keep this in mind when you read -- if i have my numbers

correctly -- 37% of the vote. two thirds of the people in great britain voted for somebody else. he got 37% of the vote should the british -- vote. the british concept of democracy and elections is even more malleable than ours, and we are good at this. with 37% of the vote he has the government all by himself. he has the absolute majority of seats in the parliament. the united kingdom independence party, a kind of right-wing, anti-immigration party did very well. got 13% of the vote. that is a lot. but, in the way the british government works, that got them one in the parliament. by contrast, the scottish people wanting the whole world to understand where they stood on the united kingdom, which is we want out of here, they voted overwhelmingly --

overwhelmingly, against the conservative party and the labor party and a vote for the scottish national party. it came to a total of 5% of the vote from scotland that got them 56 seats in the parliament. let's do that again. you heard me right. 5% got 56 seats and 13% got one seat. if we had time i would stop and we would play "god save the queen," but i don't, so we won't. the labour party that took a bad beating relative to what had been expected -- mr. miliband resigned. in other countries, it is different. if you do something really bad or you really lose, you resign. we do not do that, of course. we go on to higher offices. [laughter]

is a different solution. it is a different solution. what happened in great britain i think, can be handled this way , and you're going to see i'm going to do the same thing in terms of the united states. that is why it is worth spending a few minutes. the populations of western capitalist countries, whether it is western europe, north america, japan this is happening to -- more and more the people in these societies understand that they are in an economic situation that is declining disintegrating, breaking down -- that their children are being saddled with debt, that the prospects for their jobs are no good on and on. even in the most recalcitrant part of the population, deeply committed to see none of this even they are beginning to kind of get it year after year.

year after year the recovery does not happen, or it bypasses them, benefits are taken away, their job is less secure. one or another of these things hits them. in that mindset of that anxiety of decline the politicians have figured out -- because it is their job -- how do i get votes in whatever the situation is, and the conservatives have figured out pretty well how to play this, and there play is as follows -- appeal to the population in the following way. vote for me is what you say because in this storm, this economic storm that is descending on us, i will protect you, and i am going to take it out on them. vote for me. i will protect you. if you are in scotland, you are not going to be protected by the conservatives.

you have not been, you're not going to be, and you do not believe labor will do much different, so you will vote for your own. you will vote for the scottish national party. if you are a conservative or anybody worried about things, you might like a conservative who sounds like he is not so interested in helping immigrants and helping poor people, and you do not want to go with labor because you're going to help the poor people. we all have to worry now, and we want the politicians that protects us. in order for that to work there has to be a clearly defined them -- us and them. it has to be worked out so that you have an us that is big enough to have you win the election and you basically say to them over and over, i am you, you are me, we will take care of each other. the storm is coming, but we will get through it.

they are going to take it on the chin. this is the politics of mr. walker in wisconsin, only they're the "we they" is played differently -- it goes like this, i am the conservative, just like all of you folks in wisconsin, all of you hard-working, private sector workers, and i am going to protect you by sticking it to the public employees. kiss your pension goodbye. kiss your cushy public job -- you do not do any work anyway -- all of that. i will give you another example. as the excrement was flying into the cooling equipment in greece a few years ago -- that was a joke. as the excellent was flying into the cooling equipment in greece a few years ago, the greek solidarity was so tested as

greek separated between private sector workers and public sector workers. greece has one of the largest public sectors of any european country. a huge number of the greek people work for the government. that is been going on for a long time. the private sector was appealed to by the conservatives as a way to hold onto their power by denouncing the public sector workers for being lazy, all of that. it is everywhere. let's call it what it is. it is called scapegoat economics. it is a strategy for politicians to hold onto their votes to get enough to keep power by playing different parts of the collapsing economy against one another and that is what mr. cameron was doing, and he did it well. of course, he had to have the cooperation of a 37% that went for that, and now hope to be

protected if she can deliver on the promise that he made, just -- if he can deliver on the promise that he made, just like mr. walker has to deliver that to the private sector of wisconsin at the cost of savaging the school teachers the firefighters, the clerk's, the social workers, and everybody else that works for the state of wisconsin, which has a large public sector. second election -- the good news. alberta, canada -- and while, was that good news. alberta, canada, has been governed by the conservative party in canada. the conservative party in canada cannot call itself the conservative party. apparently that would be death. they have solved the party linguistically. it is called the progressive conservative party. if you were not confused by the election process before, this will help you. they governed alberta.

alberta is an interesting place. it is where a lot of the fracking problem starts because that is where the shale oil is concentrated in that part of canada, in the middle. it is also the youngest province in the country. it has the lowest average age of any part of canada. they had an election. canada is governed by the progressive conservative party. mr. harper is the chief executive there. in this election, the progressive conservatives went from 70 seats in the provincial parliament to 10. this is called a stupefying defeat. this is the end of the progressive conservative party in alberta probably, for decades, if it ever can come back. so, this is remarkable. it was the governing party for the last 44 years, and it is destroyed in one election. number one.

number 2 -- the party that basically blew it out of the water is called the new democratic party the ndp, which is the most left wing party in that province. their candidate, a woman, who is also interesting in canadian politics -- a woman politician, very, very good at what she does , is in favor of taxing oil and gas companies, which to do that in that province and to win the way she did, you have to be very good. she is in favor of hiring more public employees, spending more on public social welfare and taxing the rich. i did not make that up. the important thing is she got so many votes she does not need anyone else to govern. she is an absolute majority. her party runs the state. that is a major blow to the progressive conservative party

at the national level because this was seen as a bedrock core of their support in the countryside and every canadian citizen who pays attention is wondering where else this earthquake shift is going to hit. so, when someone tells you that the british election indicates an overwhelming support for conservatives, remember, please, 37% of the vote -- one-third of british voters gave it to mr. cameron. two thirds found somebody else that they voted for. also remember alberta, because in its way it is as important, in terms of which way the wind is blowing, as any other election. and i will try to speed this up. -- next item -- and i will try to speed this up -- the gallup poll, one of the oldest polling institutions in the united states, release some numbers about a week, 10 days ago, that i thought would be interesting.

they compared the movement of american a public -- public opinion -- they measure public opinion -- between 1984 in 2015 roughly 30 years -- and 2015 roughly 30 years -- they asked the american people, every five years in the process, the same question, so they are reporting on the latest answer but also in the historical frame, so i thought you would be interested. first question -- new you believe randomly selected american citizens -- do you believe that the distribution of wealth and income in the united states is fair or unfair? ok, and explain. the answer is -- and you can get all of this by going to the website of the gallup poll -- roughly 63% -- it has hovered around that for the whole 30 years. it is not changed much. 63% saying the distribution of

wealth and income in the united states is unfair and favors the rich. that is almost two thirds. almost a two to one 30-year, uninterrupted notion of the unfairness. the second question follows immediately from the first. would you favor "heavy taxation of the rich to correct for this unfairness?" in the latest poll, 52% of americans said they would favor have the taxation of the rich to fix this problem. now, that did not change over 30 years. 30 years ago, only 40% of americans polled favored heavy taxation of the rich, but that has gone steadily up, so it is now 52%. let me do it again.

63% said the distribution of wealth and income is unfair, and 52% want to fix the problem by taxing the rich. now, besides the numbers, here's what i want you to think about. for 30 years, a clear majority of americans have believed that the distribution of wealth and income in this country is unfair and tilts towards the rich. during those 30 years, the political representatives of the american people have done virtually everything to make the situation worse. if you ever needed a demonstration that the political world, the decision-making world, has lost all connection to the "beliefs of the people" they ostensibly represent, look at this. they took steps in these 30 years -- tax reform, entitlement reform -- government spending

adjustments -- all of which made the inequality worse at a time when a clear majority of the people thought it was already bad and should go the other way and the people we elect are the folks that literally spit in their faces when it comes to the connection between who they are, what they are supposed to do, and what the people who put them in power want. i thought it was amazing. next -- i am going as fast as i can. uber -- some of you have suggested that i have an animosity towards uber i do not. i feel about uber the way i do about many large businesses. uber has been under attack by a number of companies because of the way it works in one of its defenses was so delicious i

thought i would share it with you. uber -- one of its top executives said we are a market institution. respond to the market -- we respond to the market, and what could be -- i kid you not -- "more american than that?" let's unpack that. i think what they mean is that uber, in most of the cases i have studied, has an arrangement whereby when the demand for having a ride in a car -- when the demand goes up, they raise the price. that is the market. the demand goes up -- there are only so many people driving cars -- remember from college -- the demand goes up, the supply does not, the price goes up. that is how it works. that is what they do.

so what does that mean, you are letting the market determine -- that is right, the market -- supply and demand is determining when there is a demand the price goes up. let's see, what might make the demand for cars go up? cold snow, ice heat, a synonymy -- who the hell knows? people want to get out of here, or over there, or they are in a hurry. they want. uber responds by saying "oh good. you want, you're going to have to pay." ok. that is how the market works and that means the people that will get to ride are the people that have the money.