Federal Employees Fight Back

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Democracy at Work

Coops, Economics, Economy, Workercooperative, Capitalism, Politics, News, Government

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on the firing of government workers by Trump/Musk with an economic analysis showing it to be an attack on the U.S. working class followed by a discussion of Trump's foreign policy of turning against Europe as merely an adjustment to an "American Capitalism First" project that is as old as the U.S. The second half of the show, features an interview with U.S. federal employee Colin Smalley, a sixteen-year member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and an IFPTE union member who discusses how and why workers are fighting back.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome, friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the
0:26.2	economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children.
0:30.5	I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.
0:33.4	I want to jump right in today because we have much to cover and not enough time as usual to do it all.
0:40.2	I do want to remind you that the book Understanding Capitalism is available at our website,
0:47.1	Democracy at Work.Info, and it is a useful companion to this program. It will elaborate many of the points we have to go over
0:56.0	quickly here. All right, let me start with one of the biggest issues of the day. The massive
1:03.6	program of firing public federal employees here in the United States, authorized by President Trump, and carried out by
1:15.2	his good buddy, Elon Musk.
1:19.8	I want to talk to you about the economics of firing tens of thousands who may become
1:26.2	hundreds of thousands on the way to doing that and who that may
1:30.8	become millions. We don't yet know. It's not too clear that Trump and Musk know either.
1:39.9	I want you to understand the economics, whatever else you may think about this.
1:45.7	Number one, right now, those tens of thousands of people were earning salaries from the government,
1:56.0	being paid, and doing their jobs, whatever it was.
2:01.6	Inspecting meat.
2:03.5	You know why they do that because meat is forever being badly produced.
2:11.4	Profit dictates shortcuts and so the meat may be diseased.
2:15.9	There's a listeria epidemic killing people in old age homes across America as I speak to you.
2:23.2	We need government inspectors to stop that.
2:25.6	We have needed them for the last century plus.
2:29.0	Okay, we're laying them off, people like that.
	...

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