Permit me, our dear readers of this column, to present to you Part 1 of the following analysis which I find to be of utmost interest. The below was posted on YouTube by Democracy at Work on September 2022, and is entitled “Economic Update: The Deepening Fragility of U.S. Power”.
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. And I’m your host, Richard Wolff. Today we’re going to be talking about unionization at Trader Joe’s, about the lottery system and the economics of lotteries, about the extraordinary profits being raked in by the largest oil companies in the world, and an advertising campaign by Big Pharma that I want to alert you to. And in the second half we will have a wonderful interview, in my judgment, with Vijay Prashad about the fragility of global U.S. power and what is happening as we live—the decline of that power.
So, let me begin. Hadley, Massachusetts, is a small community. But one that I’ve known well, because it’s right next door to Amherst, Massachusetts, which is the location of the main campus of the University of Massachusetts, where I spent many years as a professor. So, my attention was grabbed when I learned that the Trader Joe’s located right there on the border between Hadley and Amherst was experiencing an effort by the 80 workers there to unionize. And on July 28th they voted, and it was officiated by the National Labor Relations Board, and the union won with a vote of 45 to 31—that is all but four workers voted. It’s an independent union they formulated, it’s not affiliated — at least not yet—with any of the national unions in the United States, and it’s called Trader Joe’s United. It is not the only Trader Joe to be unionized or to be engaged in a unionizing effort. There’s at least another one in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and another one in Boulder, Colorado. And when I did a little more research, I discovered that I should have been mentioning Canada, where there is a similar unionization effort going on. It may be going on with Trader Joe’s, I don’t know, but it is definitely going on with Starbucks, because they have organized several Starbucks in Alberta, British Columbia and beyond.
Why is this important beyond yet more evidence of the growing militancy of the efforts to unionize American workplaces? It’s important because places like Starbucks and Trader Joe’s spend a lot of time, energy and money projecting a notice of being progressive, being friendly to working people, having good working conditions and so on. And yet as these unionization efforts got off the ground, information came out that shouldn’t surprise us. That alongside whatever they do that’s positive, there’s a great deal that they do that’s negative. And one of the things most stark is the hiring of professional union-busting law firms trying to buy off workers by giving them benefits that they had taken away earlier. As if to bribe, you might even say, people not to be for the union. And, again, I’m not interested in criticizing the management of these companies (I really don’t care much about that.) I’m interested in understanding that the logic of capitalism makes even the nicest people do some of the ugliest things imaginable. And that’s why the system is the problem, not this or that particular employer.
My next update has to do with the lottery. And here’s what struck me: the amount of lottery tickets drawn for the July 29th drawing just a few weeks ago was four times the amount of lottery tickets normally sold. What’s going on? Well, the simple answer is people are desperate; caught between the inflation and the fact that wages are not going up anywhere near enough just to keep up with rising prices, let alone to advance your standard of living. Desperate people make desperate gambles. Buying a lottery ticket, as I’m about to explain to you, is a desperate gamble. Lotteries exist now in 45 states out of 50, and in the District of Columbia and in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Out of every two-dollar lottery ticket that you buy, here’s what happens to the money: 90 cents out of two bucks goes to the state government, 75 cents goes to the jackpot winner, 35 cents goes to the non-jackpot winners. What are the odds that you are a jackpot winner? 300 million to one. Folks, it means that your chances of winning the jackpot are not as good as your chances of being hit by lightning or being bitten by a shark.
What is the lottery? The answer is, it’s a tax. It’s a way of getting tax payments out of the poorest people in the state, the middle-income people in the state who would have revolted against another tax, because they came close to doing that in most states. So, here’s what the system did to get money out of them. Ninety cents out of every two-dollar ticket goes to the state government. You gave them a shot at a jackpot; only the odds were 300 million to one. In other words, 99.99% of the people who buy a lottery ticket are giving 90 cents to the local state government for every two-dollar ticket. As if that weren’t bad enough, kind of bribing people to pay a tax, here is what we know: the richer you are, the less likely you are to buy lottery tickets. Lottery tickets are a way of squeezing money out of the people who have the least amount of it. Other people, rich people, don’t buy lottery tickets. Extraordinary, not only that you’re taking money out of the pockets of millions of average citizens who would otherwise have used it to buy something that might have given other people a job but they don’t have that money, they buy the ticket and all of that money, 75 cents of it, is given to a person who’s now super rich. And here’s what we know about super rich people: they don’t spend most of their money. So, the money isn’t getting spent, it isn’t creating jobs. Because it isn’t capitalists who create jobs, it’s the demand for output that capitalists merely serve that creates jobs. And if you take money away from average people and make one person rich, you’re diminishing the demand and therefore the job creation. Lotteries are a crappy way and an unfair way to support state government. No wonder rich people make a joke: lotteries are a wonderful way, they say, to shift the burden of taxes off of us and on to the people who can afford it least. My next update is a simple report to you. There’s not much I can add; I just want to give you the numbers.
(To Be Continued)
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June 11, 2023
Finca Solana
Corozal Town