https://vimeo.com/413859614

Robert Pollin of the Political Economy Research Institute

The collapse of oil prices is an opportunity for a public takeover of the fossil fuel industry and replace it with sustainable energy. As the depression deepens, it is also the time for large publicly owned banks to weaken the economic and political power of finance.  Economist Robert Pollin joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast

 

Transcript

Paul Jay:  Hi, I’m Paul Jay, and welcome to the analysis podcast. In a speech that President Roosevelt gave in 1932, talking about the Republicans and financial elites of his day, FDR said, “I read somewhere in a history book about a Roman senator who threw himself into a chasm to save his country. These gentlemen who represent us are of a new breed. They’re willing to throw their country into a chasm to save themselves.”

That seems to describe the American oligarchy today with save themselves, meaning save a system that has created unprecedented wealth, going to a tiny fraction of the society in spite of the cataclysmic threats of climate change and nuclear war.

Biden claims he wants to create the most progressive administration since Roosevelt. He should read some of Roosevelt’s speeches on concentration of corporate ownership and fascism to see what that would mean.

Now joining us is Bob Pollin. He’s co-founder of the PERI Institute. That’s the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts and author of an upcoming book co-authored with Noam Chomsky, titled “Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, The Political Economy of Saving the Planet. “Thanks for joining us, Bob.

Robert Pollin: I’m very happy to be on, Paul. Thank you.” 

Paul Jay: Well, let’s start with sort of the obvious big question. Given Covid, given the crisis, just how deep is this economic crisis going to be? How long might it last? What are we really looking at? Are we really looking at unemployment levels that equal the Great Depression or worse?“

Robert Pollin: Well, you know, the fairest answer, I think, is we don’t know. And the mere fact of the extreme uncertainty that we face certainly suggests ,that alone, is a crisis because you can’t operate a capitalist economy effectively with these massive levels of uncertainty. So, you know, there’s a lot of things. Most things we just don’t know. I mean, I can tell you where we are now as of today, as of April, 23rd, the latest figures on unemployment insurance claims, initial claims over the last five weeks.

We are now up to 25 million. So that’s 15 percent of the labor force. That’s not the official unemployment statistics, but it’s probably a better metric anyway. So in the Great Recession, what we call it, the Great Recession of a decade or so ago, unemployment never got beyond 10.2 percent. Now it’s at roughly 15 percent already.

So it could keep going up. If we continue with the lockdown, it almost certainly will go up. On the other hand, one of the things that the capitalists have learned over the decades, if they don’t know how to do anything else, they do know about bailing themselves out, and the bailouts for Wall Street and corporations are absolutely gigantic. They probably are not enough. They almost certainly are not enough. But nevertheless, they’re gigantic. I mean, we have the first stimulus package, the, ”Pear’s” package of the past couple of weeks ago, was two trillion. So that was 10 percent of GDP. The money that was supposed to go to small business,