Read the full transcript of Professor Wolff’s Economic Update episode titled “Capitalism, Lost Empathy and Rising Addictions.” In the second half of the episode, In the second half of the show, Prof. Wolff interviews psychotherapist Tess Fraad-Wolff on capitalism’s causal links to declining empathy and rising addictions.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
RICHARD D. WOLFF: 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. Today’s program has a number of interesting items I want to mention at the outset. We’re going to be talking about Mr. Trump’s plan to quote-unquote take the Panama Canal back. We’re going to talk about an enormous strike of 10,000 grocery store workers across the state of Colorado, which is really having major impacts there. And finally, we’re going to talk about corporations and mutual funds turning away from the few years of interest in diversity, equality, and inclusion that they no longer find worthy of their respect and what it means.
In the second half, we’ll interview Tess Fraad-Wolff, a practicing psychotherapist who has something to tell us about the linkages between a troubled capitalism on the one hand and the loss of empathy and the rise of addiction on the other.
As usual, I begin by reminding you that Charlie Fabian is awaiting comments, suggestions, that you have for improving this program. charlie.info438@gmail.com. And also the reminder that the new book I wrote and we published, Understanding Capitalism, is a good companion volume to this sequence of programs developing the arguments lying behind much of what you hear topically focused on this show. And you can get that by going to our website democracyatwork.info/books.
Trump’s Plan for Panama Canal
Okay, let’s go. Panama and the President. The President of the United States, a country of 330 million people, boasting the world’s hugest arsenal of nuclear and other weapons, has told the world, that is, Mr. Trump has, that he plans to, quote, take back the Panama Canal. Let’s take a look.
The population of Panama, you might like to know, is four and a half million people. Or right away, we got what is called, if you’re a jokester, a really fair fight. Nuclear arms, 330 million on one side, no arms, and four and a half million on the other.
The GDP, the gross domestic product of Panama, 84 billion in 2023. That is trivial relative to the 25 to 30 trillion GDP of the United States. This is a joke, except it isn’t funny. The currency used in Panama, just to give you an idea, is actually two different currencies. There’s the Panamanian Balboa, that you probably never heard of, and there’s something you know quite well, the U.S. dollar.
Okay, what’s going on in Panama? Very strange economy. On the one hand, they have the Panama Canal, the shortest way for shipping to get from west to east. It doesn’t have to go all the way around the southern tip of Latin America. It can cut a tremendous amount of time and expense off moving goods. The largest user of the Panama Canal, the United States. The second most important user, People’s Republic of China, and there you get a clue of what’s going on.
Panama has the dubious distinction of being one of the five most unequal countries in the world. It has a small group of high-skilled, high-paid people operating the country, the canal, the tourism, and the few industries that it has, chief of which are exporting bananas, gold, and copper.
When Mr. Trump said he was going to take it, the Panamanian president, Raul Molino, pushed back, said it wouldn’t happen. They are not giving back the canal. It is their sovereign property. They are an independent, sovereign country. Apparently, neither Mr. Rubio, our Secretary of State, nor the president give a fig about any of that. When Panama said that they had invested billions in developing and expanding and updating the canal, which would now be taken by the United States, nobody said anything.
When the Panamanians heard Mr. Trump say he feared China might block access to the canal, no evidence whatsoever. The Chinese have invested billions in and around the canal because they need warehouses, they need ship repair, they need all the things that go with a major user, just like the United States has.
Okay, I want you to understand that this may seem like some sort of tough guy bravado, maybe to some Americans who live in the world of the comic book mentality, but for most people on earth, this is naked power colonialism. It’s rich countries, powerful countries, simply taking from the rest of the world whatever they want under whatever excuse and brandishing military force if what they want isn’t given them. For most people in the world, that’s part of a history burnt into their consciousness costing enormous losses of wealth and life and well-being. They don’t find this bravado at all attractive. In fact, they hate it and watching the United States bully that little country, that will have costs in terms of how the United States is understood around the world that we ignore only at our peril as a country.
All right, final joke. There has been much study and exploration and even the beginning of decisions that make all of this even sillier. The possibility that Mexico and China will build a railroad across a very narrow part of the world right near the Panama Canal, but in Mexico, which would be an alternative for shipping. So the whole thing is an effort in self-damaging colonialism that may not even make sense on the most practical level. Strange what the costs of bravado and bullying might end up being. Keep it in mind, it’s going to be part of our history.
February 10th was the anniversary of the birth of Bertolt Brecht, the greatest playwright probably of the last couple centuries, certainly of the 20th century, which is when he lived.
I bring it up only because he deserves being known. His plays, some of which you may know, The Three-Penny Opera, Mother Courage, and many others, played an important role politically and theatrically. And I want you to know that if you like this program, my presentations reflect the enormous impression on me made by Bertolt Brecht’s plays.
Colorado Grocery Workers Strike
10,000 grocery workers went on strike February 6th in Kroger owned stores in Colorado. Speed up making work fewer workers do work harder and faster so that the employer can fire some workers and have those that remain do the work he used to pay more workers to do. Very classic.
Unusually the Attorney General of the state of Colorado has sided with the workers filing a lawsuit against Kroger and Albertson’s another huge grocery store chain because they had reached an agreement he says not to hire each other’s workers during strikes so that the striker at one grocery store could earn a living at another one while being on strike at the first. They got together to block that which is not legal.
What it shows us is the so-called class struggle between employees and employers. It’s always going on above the surface below the surface. One of Marx’s insights that we would be well advised to think about in Colorado you can’t avoid thinking about it seeing it and feeling the effects of it.
You know if workers co-ops existed instead of capitalist enterprises the workers would be the boss as well as the employee and none of this would need happen. You want to deal with the problem of speed up and strikes change the way the businesses are organized. It’s the best way because capitalism has never solved that problem. How can it? It’s based on the employer-employee differential and there’s been little coverage of this important strike which is one of the reasons I’m talking about it here and now.
Corporations Abandoning DEI
Over the last few years and particularly over the last two there’s been a massive outflow of funds from investment firms that all kinds of people had given their money to because these firms emphasize what is called sustainable investing. That is they wouldn’t put money in a company that’s polluted. They wouldn’t put money in a company that discriminated and didn’t hire all kinds of people because of discriminatory preferences. It was an effort to say that corporations of all kinds should be held accountable as by the way they are by law in Europe to include diversity, equality, and the inclusion of people left out of modern society in their goals. Not just profit for the investor but some social responsibility.
And for a while there was enough social movement to get corporations to do that and it helped. But the minute that social pressure relaxed the corporations were in a rush to go backwards which they’ve done. To go reverse in history which they’ve done. Stop including anything other than the maximization of profit because that is the capitalist way. That’s what you get when you allow capitalism to be the dominant system.
The logic of it is that executive who maximizes profit earns a lot and has a good career ahead of him. And the one who doesn’t, who actually cares about diversity, equality, inclusion, the climate, and things like that, suffers and his career may disappear. In the end, once again, the worker co-op could easily commit to all the objectives never making the profit the only one. That’s the key issue here that we need to learn from.
We’ve reached the end of our first half. Stay with us. The interview with Tess Fraad-Wolff is coming up.
Before we jump into the second half of today’s show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year, and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition, linen-covered, hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover, and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send an email to us at info@democracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do.
Interview with Tess Fraad-Wolff
RICHARD D. WOLFF: Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today’s Economic Update. It is with real pleasure that I bring back to our microphones and our cameras Tess Fraad-Wolff. She’s a psychotherapist in practice in New York City for well over a decade. She works with couples as well as individuals and has trained in hypnotherapy, art therapy, somatic processing, and tapping. She often speaks to the interplay of psychology and politics with special attention to the intimate effects of capitalism, and that’s why I brought her back, because many of you have let us know that you find this material particularly interesting. So first of all, Tess, thank you very much for joining with us today.
RICHARD D. WOLFF: Okay. Here we go. There is pretty abundant evidence now that there is a troubling, I think that’s fair to say, a troubling growing lack of empathy among Americans and in the capitalist system where Americans live. The demonization of immigrants when once there was sympathy, when once we celebrated the Statue of Liberty welcoming them as part of America’s proud heritage. Now they are an invasion of criminals. Something has happened here. When jobs are cut, when homelessness rises, we don’t pick up. Of course, there are exceptions, but we pick up a remarkable lack of empathy. Could you tell us a little bit about how you understand that kind of phenomenon?
TESS FRAAD-WOLFF: Yes, absolutely. I mean, the first thing is I think there’s a trickle-down effect with bullying energy and energy of trying to attack the most vulnerable, easy scapegoat, which I think the immigrant group composes. I think we have pedestalized a sort of sadism, a lack of empathy, as you put it, and we have pedestalized greed. I think that capitalism in particular really prioritizes greed over empathy, which spills out and leaks into a larger population. We’re all supposed to chase the almighty dollar, and that throws to the side many other values, including the value of empathy, solidarity, compassion, all sorts of pieces of the human experience upon which we rely to keep a coherent, civilized society together.
RICHARD D. WOLFF: Now, you know, in the first half of today’s show, I tried to make the point that there is something extraordinary about the richest country in the world, the most powerful, telling a tiny little country like Panama, we’re taking away the basic economic foundation of your whole society, and doing it with a bluster and a boasting that shows, among other things, absolutely no empathy for the shock of what this might mean to this country and the long-term effects.
TESS FRAAD-WOLFF: Not only do I completely agree with that, I think there’s something kind of repulsively masturbatory about delighting in your own braggadocio. docious, sadistic way of bullying. It shouldn’t be anything of which to feel proud, nothing about which to boast, to go after a being, a person, or a country so much less able to defend itself. I’m not going to go brag about beating up a baby. I’m going to feel like an idiot.
But there’s a way in which because of this bullying culture and because of this dominance for its own sake, greed addicted society, that they really think greed is a drug and we don’t talk about it that way. Greed is a dangerous drug and if we say you’re good and we’re going to stick you on this magazine, we’re going to put you on the highest pedestal, stick you in the highest offices. If you try to just scavenge more and more and more, it doesn’t matter how much money you get.
You’ll never use it. You don’t use it now. There are people who work ten times harder than you, a thousand times harder than you, many of whom are immigrants, by the way, who don’t make money. But all your job is is to make money and make bigger piles of money. Everything else becomes forgotten. And we have a society of people who forget that they need each other, that we need to be a society more than we need to be an economy because we are people.
And the first three letters of society relate to the letters of socialism and needs of the people over economics, capital, which is the needs of money. It’s not serving the masses and we’re turning against each other, especially under this administration.
RICHARD D. WOLFF: All right, that leads me to the next question. I have been reading, as I know you have and much of our audience has for years now, that we have an absolute epidemic of people dying from overdoses of chemical substances, drugs, and so forth, and that there is a problem of people who are addicted, through their addiction, dying or wanting to kill themselves. There must be a connection here between the very powerful words you’ve just uttered about a loss of empathy and a kind of sadistic disregard and people feeling so bad about their situation and their lives that they become addicted, they take their own life. Could you talk a little bit about capitalism and addiction in the way you did about capitalism and the loss of empathy?
TESS FRAAD-WOLFF: Yeah, absolutely. I think that addiction is an extreme form of attachment, that we addict to, sometimes it’s substances, but sometimes it’s not substances. I think a lot of times when we hear the word addiction, we think of substances, of drugs or alcohol, and certainly that composes a lot of addictions. But first of all, it’s really important to understand you can get addicted to anything. People can get addicted to starving, which some people do, and restricted eating, eating disorders. People can also get addicted to compulsive eating, to overeating. People can get addicted to gambling, to having compulsive sex, to pulling out their eyelashes.
These are just a few of numerous addictions that are well documented. And then there are rarer addictions, but we get extremely attached when we get addicted. We get sometimes very singularly focused. The addiction sometimes organizes our life. All we think about is getting a hit of this, whatever this is, this to which we’re addicted. And when we’re, again, shown this dollar sign, get addicted to this, go after this. This will make you good. This will make you superior. This will give you material comforts that are admirable. This will give you admirability.
We can really, again, lose sight of all these other important ingredients that we need to tap into within our human experience, especially that foster the sense of connection. Because ironically and tragically, the sense of connection is what we chase with an addiction. But we forget that what we need is connection with people, connection with nature, connection with our sort of holistic as a society.
So we chase connection with, to use some of the examples, a certain drug, behaviors. We connect to that instead of connecting to the human energy that we need. We can also connect with people through the very empathy that a lot of these addictions push aside.
RICHARD D. WOLFF: Why is it so rare, at least in my experience, and I’m interested in these things, why are the kinds of connections you’re now emphasizing so rarely and publicly discussed so that we could, for example, as a community, talk about these things, explore what they’re varying causes are, and then really fashion a broad-based program for the whole country to pursue to ameliorate these problems that so many are suffering from. It’s almost as though the suffering continues because there’s a taboo, almost, on asking, especially linking these problems to a particular economic system that we’re living under.
TESS FRAAD-WOLFF: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. And A, I think we’re a deeply, I call, psycho-ignorant society. We’re not taught about psychology the way that we’re taught math and science and whatever semblance of an edited history we’re taught when we’re younger. Psychology is the study of us, of human behavior, human relationships. What better thing to get at least a thumbnail of understanding? We don’t do that. So people who are very, very smart in multitudinous ways are ignorant about psychology. Addiction is a cornerstone of psychology. So that would come with that.
And another sort of darker way, I think you point to something very well, which is, the overlords in this society and within a capitalistic society with its love of hierarchy are not going to want population to understand these things. Because the more that you understand these things, the powers of addiction, the more that you understand that you really need to bond with other people, that we need the collective. It’s what keeps us together. It’s what we do in times of crisis. We bond together. It’s how we survive trauma. People say this community is everything. People say like, oh, spend time with your family. Sure, if your family is lovely, and I hope they are. And we all need community. We all heal in community.
But this is minimized. This is why we’ve decided the word commune is somehow threatening. But it’s about community. And it’s about really respecting the fact that we need each other. We are pack animals. And the myth of the individual is really manufactured.
RICHARD D. WOLFF: Here’s a tough question, but one I know is on many people’s minds. How do you see the phenomena of Trump in relationship to the loss of empathy, to addiction, to the role of capitalism? How does he fit into the analytic you’re offering here?
TESS FRAAD-WOLFF: I think that we could see what I would refer to as a greed and power addict, someone who has become addicted to power, which is, again, we can get addicted to anything, and someone who is deeply addicted to greed and possibly also attention. And so instead of getting, again, I called it extremely attached. Addiction is deep, deep, compulsive attachment. When it’s not safe emotionally or in other ways to attach to certain people, we attach to things. And that can really take over our life. We can become maniacal, tyrannical, very abusive to self and other. And I would regard Trump as someone who capitalism has materially very much awarded, rewarded, and someone who has been emotionally deeply malnourished from what looks like the get-go.
RICHARD D. WOLFF: I wonder then, is it reasonable? I once read a book years ago, and it had a title which was funny but also profound. And the title was Capitalism Makes You Sick.
TESS FRAAD-WOLFF: Yep.
RICHARD D. WOLFF: Is that what you are with an emphasis, clearly, on mental health? Is that what you’re telling us?
TESS FRAAD-WOLFF: Yes, I think capitalism breeds greed in the way we’ve discussed more and more and more and more and more for its own sake, for no reason. The ideology of a cancer cell, growth for its own sake, cancerous. What could be more disease-ridden? But also that it brings us into states of being separate from himself, the estrangement from the self, that if we’re chasing the dollar, we don’t really think about what we need, let alone what other people need, what we could need as a whole, the larger solidarity, the larger community. It’s just more, more, more.
And we know, I think I’ve said in previous ways, we know that this is problematic and unhealthy, not meaning it’s worthy of condemnation but worthy of attention, and that it’s deeply problematic and can be extremely destructive to hoard things so we can’t walk, to not think about functioning because we’re too busy using a substance to detriment, first and foremost, our own bodies, possibly losing control and hurting others.
