On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff discusses how major pharmaceutical companies (CVS, United Healthcare, Cigna) are complicit in the opioid crisis in the United States. We highlight a successful food co-op in Minneapolis and explain the inauthenticity of mainstream discourse on the US economy. Finally an interview with Richard "RJ" Eskow, Bernie Sanders' speechwriter, an expert on AI and the basic social issues its spread now raises.
Economic Update
Economic Update: The Dangers and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Support from the production of Economic Update comes in part from Democracy at Work. A non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and publisher of books by Richard Wolff, who is a professor of economics emeritus at UMass Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School University, has authored numerous books on the subject of social economics, including Greek thinking Marxism, Understanding Capitalism, and Democracy at Work, a cure for capitalism. Further information is available at democracy@work.info and rdwolf.com. Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin as usual by telling you briefly that we will be talking today about the opioid crisis. We'll have another update about a food co-op that very successfully operating in the Minneapolis St. Paul region. And then we'll talk in our first half about the strange story that keeps being told about how our economy is great, but the people you see don't seem to understand it. They apparently live in it, but they don't get it. They need the politicians and the paid economists to tell that fable to them. As usual, Charlie is awaiting any word from you, if you have it, about suggestions for future programs. You can reach him as always at charlie.info438@gmail.com. Okay, let's jump right in. Barron's magazine, a product of the Wall Street Journal, recently reported on three major companies, CBS, United Health and Signa by name, huge monster corporations. And they are pharmacy benefit managers. They're kind of the go-between between the companies that produce a drug and the retail public that buys the drug. And they got themselves into a lot of trouble because of the rebates they got from the companies for pumping OxyContin out into the population. That's the key drug in the synthetic opioid catastrophe that has killed up to 100,000 Americans per year for quite some time now. See, it turns out that these companies looked the other way when small pharmacies, small communities were ordering millions of these pills way beyond what any reasonable use of those pills for pain would have involved. They knew of course, as everyone on the street knew, that the people who got the prescriptions were turning around and selling them onto the street so that they would become readily available, readily affordable, but very, very dangerous drugs handled badly. They could and did kill large numbers of American people. Well, what's going on here is, well, let's not put too fine a point on it. It's profits. They were making a mountain of profits shipping these drugs. Of course, they looked the other way. They were complicit intentionally or otherwise, consciously or otherwise. They didn't want to question the flow of profits. And in this case, the pro flow of profits killed large numbers of Americans. Opioids killed more Americans than any military involvement we had for years. It is a catastrophe still is. And these companies are part of it. They should be called to account. There are no checks and balances on the profit system. That's one of its greatest flaws. Yeah, does profits sometimes drive people to do socially useful things? Yes. But the problem is, let's not be blind to all the times that the profit system drives people to do awful things and the opioid crisis, as the Barons magazine points out, led these pharmaceutical giants to do exactly that. I want to turn next to something called the Mississippi Market Co-op. This is an organized food cooperative in Minnesota. And by the way, Minnesota is the state that has the most food co-ops of any state in the United States. This Midwestern state is a leader in the cooperative movement that doesn't want to have corporations that are in it only for the profit. They have other objectives. They want people to get better service. They want people to have a say in the stores upon which they depend, in this case, for food. And they want the workers who work there also not to be drones exploited by a profit-driven corporation, but rather to be masters of their own fate in a business they cooperatively operate. And that's what they have. The workers there decided also to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, local up there, 1169 in Minnesota. They hated their irregular hours, their unsteady management, their lack of control, the sick leave policy, lots of things that were done to them to make more profits in food companies they could get away from if they ran the business themselves. And they wanted it to be a co-op in two different senses, and I stress that so people understand this issue. One kind of co-op is a consumer co-op. That's when the people who buy the food, who consume it collectively own and control the enterprise. But it's also a worker co-op, and that's when the workers collectively own and operate. And what you have in Minnesota is a combination. It's a food co-op that's a consumer co-op and also a worker co-op. By the way, you can have a worker co-op that isn't a consumer co-op and vice versa. But they've got both. So you know who runs the business? A committee, a coalition, if you like, of the consumers and the workers. And isn't that how it ought to be in a democratic society where the word democracy really means something? Hear the people. Those who really depend on this institution for their food, for their job, together decide what happens there. What a remarkable thing, and they've been very successful. It's a model, you know. It exists all over the United States, more in Minnesota than any other state, but let Minnesota be a model. We could be doing this all over the place. We have been doing it more in recent times. And one of the goals of this program is to stimulate explorations, experiments in more and more cooperative business. And now that strange story. We're told by politicians and economists and big businesses and the media they control that the economy is great. And if we have some problems, well, we know where to blame them. Some like to blame it on the immigrants and some like to blame it on the Chinese. Here's the story, you see. The immigrants are threatening our jobs, threatening our social services, bringing crime. You've all heard the story and we're going to do something dramatic. We're going to build law. Friends, I'm an economist. The United States is a country of 330 million people, one of the richer countries in the world. There is no way on God's green earth that 10 to 11 million undocumented immigrants. That's what our Homeland Security Department tells us we have among the poorest people in the world, by the way. They're not the cause of the problems of a country of 330 million people. That's simply ridiculous. So you ought to wonder when that kind of a fantasy story is told to you. And now the bit about blaming the Chinese, you all know better than that. I'm going to tell you the answer, but you know it. China didn't move jobs from Cincinnati or Chicago or St. Louis or Detroit or Wilmington Delaware or anywhere else to China. China didn't have the power. China doesn't have the position. You know who closed the factory, the board of directors of the company that owns and operates the factory. They make the decision what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the money that comes in when you sell the product. The corporation made the decision. They moved the jobs away. That Chinese didn't do it. It's bizarre to blame the Chinese. You know why it happens? Because our politicians have no courage at all. They're afraid to point the finger at the corporations. You might have noticed Mr. Trump did a very little bit of that when he first started running. Remember, Harley Davidson shouldn't move its factory to Mexico, which by the way it did. But in this last election, not a peep. No visits to companies scolding them for doing what they all do. He didn't. Kamala Harris didn't either. They're afraid. You can't point the finger at the system, capitalism, at the inordinate power we give to corporate leaders to move our jobs away, leaving our families without work, our families without income, our communities without people who can sustain the restaurant, the gas station or anything else. Come on, you know and I know where the power in this system lies. It lies with the CEOs. Those are the kings of our time. We got rid of the kings several centuries ago, but they reappear as CEOs. That's the kind of power they have, uncontrolled power, which they have used to hurt us, which means we need politicians to distract us from that fact and to make us hope that walls will do one job and tariffs against the Chinese will do another. You are tilting against windmills here. Those are not our problems and those are fake solutions which we shouldn't fall for ever again. The economy is in trouble and nothing we are doing is fixing it because we don't want to face what the problem is. As the slogan goes, we can do better than capitalism, but the way to begin is to admit that's the problem and not to come up with fake fantasy stories marketed to a people that are in trouble. Thank you for your attention. Stay with us. We'll be right back with an important discussion of artificial intelligence. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. It is with great pleasure that I bring to our microphones and our cameras Richard R. J. Escau. He's a friend of mine, has been for quite a while. We do all kinds of things together. More will be coming in the years ahead. R. J. Escau, as many people know him, is a journalist and a columnist and a host of the zero hour. That's a syndicated radio and television program which you can also follow on the internet at zerohourreport.com. Richard was the lead writer, speech writer, and editor for Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign. He has worked in healthcare, financing, public policy, and information technology in the United States and more than 20 other countries. He and I decided that I would with this program begin to respond to the many of you that have asked for us to deal with, to talk about, to explore artificial intelligence, AI, as it is known. And so here's a program in which I'm going to urge R. J. to talk to us, tell us what it is, why it matters, where it's going, and how it'll affect us. So let's start. First, let me thank you for joining us, Richard, and giving us your time. My pleasure. So tell me, why should we care? What is it that AI represents that makes it an important topic for programs like this? Well, the concept and the phrase has been around for many decades, the idea of artificial intelligence. So at its simplest, it's a fancy way of describing what any automated system does. Thermostat is "no" is quote, unquote, when it's too hot, right? And so it lowers the temperature. But over the years, what programmers have tried to do in various ways is figure out how to duplicate the functioning of the human mind. And there have been all sorts of theories, experiments, models for trying to do this. But it wasn't until relatively recently, the last decade or two, that they began to unlock a way of doing something that creating something that resembles or superficially resembles human intelligence. And they did it the typical corporate way, which is with massive expenditures of money, natural resources of data, of everything else. And here's how it works. What we call large, what people refer to nowadays as artificial intelligence, it's something called the large language model, LLM. It takes huge amounts of everything all of us do on the internet, whether it's send emails, whether it's write blog posts or comment on social media, like, not like, how long we react, how quickly we react to an advertisement, you name it. There's massive amounts of data that each and every one of us generates every day when we're online. And what these models do, simplistically, is they take these many billions of fragments of information, and they predict. In other words, when we see the words in an email, how are you? Question mark, they predict there are only a couple answers, I'm fine, not so great, I'm okay. You take that to a certain level of sophistication, it kind of seems like a human being, right? And obviously, I am simplifying, but to make it work, they have to crunch enormous amounts of data, which means using a lot of natural resources, creating a lot of pollution, and they have to get that data from you and me, which is one of the reasons why they've designed social media to be so addictive, because the more we stay on it, clicking and liking and commenting, the more we feed this enormous set of databases that is all that so-called artificial intelligence really is. Wow, okay. Does that make sense? Yes. Now, what do people need to know about the capabilities? In other words, let me put it this way. Why does it matter? Now you've told us what it is, what does it make possible that we need to be either happy or terrified or everything in between about it? Well, for one thing, it definitely can affect our jobs. There's been a lot of hype about how much it can or can't do, but one thing it definitely can do is replace us at our jobs, and put people out of work, and so one of the fascinating things about the debate around artificial intelligence has been, well, what are we going to do with all the people out of work? As opposed to, what are we going to do to make sure people only have to work two hours a day, now that they're so much more efficient? But it's going to affect our jobs. It's going to, if it stays in private hands, affect our private time as well. Remember, in 1944, Adorno at all wrote that entertainment is an extension of work. That's true now than ever, so if we don't take control of this, they're going to keep addicting us to social media and so on, because they're going to want to produce more and more data. I mean, there are many, many other implications, but the big ones are to do it. They have to impact the environment. They're going to affect our jobs. They have to manipulate our time and our private lives to do it. So these are all reasons to care, because for example, when they take our jobs, they're using our own labor, a donated labor, to put us out of work. So that's something we should be concerned about, when they use our talents to artificial intelligence, for example, is driving in many ways the bombing of Gaza right now. We may have some feelings about that, I imagine many of us do. So it's essentially our own time and effort and behavior that's being massively mined and used against us. So it is, what you pull all the hype aside, it's not intelligent, it's not a consciousness, but it's something, a fancy way of programming that's going to make a huge difference in our world. Okay, well, I want to pick up on one thing you said, I mean, there's so many, but one thing you said, if it's the employer class that is in the position of deciding whether and how to bring artificial intelligence into the workplace, then we have all the scary predictions about millions of people no longer having a job, because it can be done by means of this artificial intelligence. Are we doomed, therefore, to have to go through this experience? Are we heading into a time when millions of us will be out of work? Is that the unspoken reason why we are building walls around our country to ward off immigrants? Because we don't want them to come in, we won't have enough jobs for us anyway, and they'll just be more people looking for scarce job. Or is there some option here that we need to think about? Well, first of all, the fact that the discussion is the way you describe it, which is exactly how our policymakers talk about it, shows how much the world has changed since the 1960s, the last wave of automation, when everybody was talking about things like the sociologist, David Reesman, talking about the crisis of leisure, because people, workers, we're going to make so much money, doing so little, because unions were more powerful than now. We're talking about just assuming people are going to be laid off and get the short under the stick. So there is a way out of it, but to me, it's a paradigm shift back to putting workers in charge with the understanding that this is not like previous forms of automation of a bunch of people getting in a lab and with tubes, have vacuum tubes and making eniac or whatever their computer is, this is you and me and everybody listening and everybody around the world making it. So it's ours. So the best way to manage it is, dare I say it, socialistically, because it is a socialist technology. It is a technology created by everyone with everyone's contribution. So the real way to address this is not with trivial regulations or what have you, or even I applaud the writer's guild for having some artificial intelligence provisions in their latest contract, but this is nibbling around the edges. What we really need is to recognize this technology for what it is, which is our common public creation and demand that we be in control of it based on the ethics of it being something we've produced. Yeah, you know, I'm reminded listening to you of what I was taught many years ago by a union organizer who said every new technology comes in and the employer fires the people he doesn't need anymore and replaces them with the machine, because the machine makes each worker twice as productive. Well said the union organizer to the class that I was in. He could have accomplished the same thing by cutting the workday in half. Then you have half the workers. They would be twice as productive as before. So he'd have just as many widgets coming out at the end of the production line as before, but all the workers would have gotten more leisure half time off to be with their families to pursue their hobbies, to build their relationships with their friends. And since that's the vast majority, not the profit earning employer class, but the wage earning working class, the democratic way of bringing the technology in is to do it to free up the time of the human beings, the majority. Would the same logic apply to AI? Of course, I always remind people that 60 years ago, the norm was reflected by the Jetsons comic TV cartoon. George Jetson worked three hours a week at a factory and on his income, he could raise a family of four, have a robot made, applied, saw your car. This is what people expected with the added difference now that the technology they're creating today, they're mining us, they're mining our time, they're mining our lives. You can say that's a metaphor for all labor, but the fact that they're doing that means if anything, it's even truer today than it's been at any point in history, that this mechanical innovation, this enhancement to production is something that belongs to everyone and should be managed by everyone. Can you give us an image? I know it's hard. How would that work? Well, that's something that we need to get a collective of smart people together and talk through, but it begins with conversations like this so that people understand what the issues are from there, exerting pressure, data strikes, whatever it might be, actions of various kinds, withholding our data perhaps, but in the end, the end product might be something like a voting system or a could exist on different levels. For example, if you work in programming, they're now taking the work of programmers and putting the programmers themselves out of work, programmers, guild of some kind could determine how their data is used, a chef's guild could determine or short order, it cooks guild, and so on. So there are different ways to do it, a kind of syndicalism, but it begins with, look, we have the imagination and the technology to create this AI. We should use the same level of imagination and technology to manage it for the public good, the common good. Yeah, and for me, the punchline once again is, if we leave it in the hands of profit driven capitalist enterprises, we will have ourselves to blame for the results, they will use it as they have all the previous technologies, as you pointed out, and we'll be left bemoaning what could have been, but which we did not make happen. I wish, of course, we had more time, the topic demands it, but you've been at a huge help, Richard, in getting us started. And I hope you'll be willing to consider coming back and talking about this some more in the not so distant future. Of course, anytime, my pleasure. All right, thank you very much. And I hope this has been useful to you as it has been to me. And as always, folks, I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Support from the production of Economic Update comes in part from Democracy at Work, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and publisher of books by Richard Wolf, who is a professor of economics emeritus at UMass Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School University, has authored numerous books on the subject of social economics, including brief thinking Marxism, understanding capitalism, and democracy at work, a cure for capitalism. Further information is available at democracy@work.info and rdwolf.com. (chimes)