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 Wolfe. I want to remind everyone

that a volunteer, Charlie, has agreed to process any suggestions you have about topics to cover

segments, to prepare documents, to review that can aid and support this program. In effect, we're inviting you to be partners.

Send anything that you have for us to look at to Charlie. Info-438 at gmail.com.

Today's program is going to be devoted to politics, in particular politics of the left.

It's not the caricature of the left that right-wingers like to propose in which all the

distinctions among socialists, Marxists, independence, left-wing liberals are all smashed together

and made into an evil awful. That's not serious. That's the kind of hatchet job that

passes for politics in some areas, but we're not going to bother with it.

And we're also not going to deal with the dismissal of the left that you get from leaders

of the Democratic Party, particularly its centrist wing, like the Biden folks or the Clinton folks,

who deal with the left as if it were an irritation, except, of course,

during campaigns when progressive ideas are all the rage until the election is over.

No, I'm talking about the real left. That is something I need to define. It's millions of people in the United States,

and for that matter abroad, who have come to understand that the problems we face are the

problems of the whole system we live in. And that system change is the solution, one way or another,

that we are, in fact, aiming at. That's for me the real left. It has many forms, it has many

particular objects of its interest, whether it's the relations

between men and women, between white and non-white, regional, ethnic, whatever else.

People concerned about the planet and the destruction of nature. People who see the injustices of economic, political,

and cultural inequality.

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