Weekly Roundup: August 31, 2022

Check out the latest content from Democracy at Work.

New this week: Economic Update, All Things Co-op & Ask Prof Wolff

Check out the latest content from Democracy at Work!

Economic Update: Loneliness - Capitalism's Collateral Damage

Prof. Wolff presents updates on record homelessness in New York City, rapidly rising US household debt as recession looms, Washington retreats from globalization to economic nationalism, and 2.2 million in the US lacking running water. In the second half of the show, Wolff Interviews Dr. Harriet Fraad, mental health counselor, on capitalism's loneliness crisis.

Wolff: “The danger in substituting nationalism and government controls and government partnerships with private enterprise is that it has in the past often led to war, and we see it all around us again like a slow motion train wreck about to happen.”

All Things Co-op: Our Ecological Imperative

Cinar and Kevin discuss the issue of the environment, its destruction, the cause (spoiler alert: it’s capitalism) and the only true way we can address this looming crisis. They discuss the underlying reason why we have global climate change, its reverberating effects, the potential for revolutionary responses, the danger of eco-fascism, and how a cooperative response could save us.

Kevin: “This is not an issue in which you can hope that ideas will kind of change the material reality. It's the material reality that's going to change people's minds and, unfortunately, it's going to be the material conditions of crop failures, major storms, heat waves, massive fires, and the kind of things that will lead to want and to great suffering.”

Cities After… Animated on YouTube!

We're bringing our podcast Cities After... to YouTube! With new, animated graphics to accompany your podcast listening, you can enjoy the work of Miguel Robles-Durán as he dives into the future of cities and allows us to imagine both the dystopian and utopian possibilities for our urban environments.

Watch Season 1 & 2 on YouTube today!

Ask Prof Wolff: Free Markets & Monopolies

A Patron of Economic Update asks: "In college many years ago I took a couple introductory courses in economics. There I learned that a free market was a market with perfect competition where buyers and sellers could freely enter the competition. From this definition, it followed that a free market would set the price on a good so that supply equaled demand. And there was enough of a discussion on this definition to conclude that a monopoly or oligopoly could not exist in a free market; moreover it was generally understood that government oversight and regulation was needed to maintain a free market. Today, however a free market has been re-defined as a market without government interference of any sort. My question then is how economics is taught today; it would seem that with this new definition of a free market, just as with perfect competition, any significance of the supply and demand curve intersection would be irrelevant." This is Professor Richard Wolff's video response.

Wolff: “Celebratory statements about capitalism rest on the notion that there are many buyers on one side, many sellers on the other and competition between them. However, here's the problem: competition has consequences.”