NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi everybody, today is Thursday, September 11, 2025, and our friends Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff are back with us. Welcome back.
RICHARD WOLFF: Glad to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, let's start with what has happened in the United States, which somehow was shocking. Charlie Kirk was shot dead when he was talking at the university campus in Utah, if I'm not mistaken, talking to an audience. And the President of the United States came out and put the blame on the far left.
What's going on in the United States today, in your opinion, that they try to picture what's going on — the violence — and put the blame, on the left, right, and whatever. What is your take on that?
RICHARD WOLFF: My take on that is that the fundamental difficulty of the United States today is a declining capitalist system. The empire is in tatters. It barely exists. The domestic economy — yesterday, Jamie Diamond, the head of the largest bank in the United States, gave an interview (actually two or three of them), and talked about the weakening U.S. economy. Now, he always talks as if he were a spectator, rather than one of the people responsible for it. That's cute. Hopefully, nobody's fooled. But there he is, admitting what the others are afraid to admit, but pretending he's a spectator.
Well, Mr. Trump pretends in a different way, but is dealing with the same weakening economy, and the same vanishing empire, and the same hobbled capitalism. But Mr. Trump's specialty — and that goes back to the first time he became a serious public figure, if you remember, riding down that escalator somewhere in New York City, and explaining to the world that the problems we face are about Mexican immigrants, whom he then slandered — Mr. Trump specializes, as leaders often do in declining empires, in finding scapegoats. Mexicans are scapegoats. The Chinese are scapegoats. And the American left, that he understands as well as he understands everything else, namely, not at all, is likewise now going to be a scapegoat.
When you can't fix a problem, you blame somebody for it, to detract from your failure to fix it. Mr. Trump told us he was going to end the war in Ukraine, in a matter of days or weeks. False. He was going to end the war in Gaza, in a short time. False. He's actually gone to war in Iran, a war that wasn't there when he became president, and he's gearing up, evidently, to do the same to Venezuela. The man is finding people around the world to blame. I want to remind people — it's a parallel I would take seriously — Germany, in the years before Hitler, faced the loss of its empire. That was accomplished in World War I, when literally the German empire in Africa, Asia was taken away by the winning side of World War I. So the Germans lost their empire.
In 1923, they had the worst inflation in modern history that wiped out their entire middle class. All their savings, accumulated over the 19th century, were lost. And it ended up, by the end of 1923, all those savings were barely enough to get you a quarter pound of butter at the local store. And then in 1929, as we all know, the Great Depression hit. So in a very few years, 1918 to 1933, or 1929, if you like, the German working class was really whacked. And in desperation, they turned to a leader who promised them — I'll fix it right away, and here are the scapegoats: Jews, Roma people, Slavic people — all the collection of scapegoats Mr. Hitler specialized in. And then he went to war in order to distract the people from what was happening at home, so they could focus on the ‘glorious' victories being achieved abroad.
If it sounds familiar, it should. And if you think that I'm telling you a story that gets you depressed, don't be. Today's headlines are full of what the French people just did, saying: unh-unh [no], we're not going to tolerate this. And in Nepal, halfway across the world, another group, another people are rising up, and saying no. The real question, the important question, is not that Mr. Trump has found the left to scapegoat, that he wants to turn a killing in Utah into something more he can, say, arrest somebody of Mexican descent in order to slander Mexico as a whole. Cheap shot. We all kinda know better.
But, yeah, he'll try. And you know what that shows? Desperation is what it shows. And that desperation is, first and foremost, economic. We're facing a risk of inflation. We're facing the risk of a recession. Our foreign connections are falling apart. The rest of the world is mobilizing to go around us, to isolate us. That's the reality.
Meanwhile, the inequality in wealth and income gets worse, and worse. And we just had a spectacle in which the board of directors of a typical American mega-capitalist company, Tesla, offers its own CEO a pay package over the next few years worth $1 trillion dollars. That's the achievement of capitalism, to make the already richest person even richer than he has been up until now. It is obscene, and it will not last.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard is quite right in pointing to the weakening of the U.S. economy, and to the desperation that is guiding Trump's domestic policy. But I think that his dream, that somehow you can reverse America's deindustrialization, involves subordinating its allies, and turning them into subsidiaries of a shrinking U.S. West. Richard quite rightly points to the fact that, well, the rest of the world is opposed by this — the rest of the world, meaning the SCO, the BRICS, Russia, China, East Asia, the successful economies that continue to grow. But I think that Trump has a proactive — not Trump, I should say the deep state, of which Trump is simply acting as the frontman — has a proactive response to all of this.
And he says, well, I've applied my tariffs, and to threaten to cause chaos to other countries if they don't support and subsidize the United States economy. The threats of tariffs and the sanctions didn't work against Russia, didn't work against Iran. China is too independent for it to work then. So, we're not going to try to spend and dissipate any more U.S. wealth fighting Russia — at least Russia — and even trying to increase the Cold War. What we can do is consolidate our control over the Western economies. And if American firms won't reindustrialize, we can tell Europe, Korea, and Japan to dismantle their own industry, and relocate their industry in the United States. And they will reindustrialize the United States.
What the U.S. is trying to do in response to its decline, is to imitate what the British Empire did in the 19th century. It's treating its allies as colonies — just like Britain treated India, and other countries, to sort of say, keep your savings in pounds sterling; keep your savings in Britain. Don't industrialize yourself, but become dependent on American industry.
What makes Trump realize that there has to be a shift is there isn't American industry for them to become dependent on. So he's told the European industry — especially the Germans — to relocate in the United States; to tell Korea that, well, if you want to make money and profit selling cars, relocate Hyundai's production in the United States. And to tell Japan: You can avoid the disruption of imposing heavy tariffs on you by lending the United States half a trillion dollars by the time my four-year presidency is up. And you will give us a trillion dollars. You will have no control over this. I will have total personal control over what's going to happen. And after we make investments, and you will be repaid your half a trillion dollars, America will have 90% of the profits from your investment here — not 50%, as the Japanese press originally reported, but only 10%.
Well, none of the details of this agreement with Japan have been released yet, but the Financial Times today had just a wonderful discussion, saying how horrendous the agreement with Japan is. And the Financial Times reporter leaked it all and reported a glowing [Howard] Lutnick, who — the American negotiator — appeared on CNBC and said, this is the most fun he's had working for this period. And Trump has complete discussion. And the Financial Times describes this secret agreement that has not yet been published by Japan, because you can imagine what the Japanese public would feel if this agreement were made public. And the Financial Times said: "This reeks of coercion, a sovereign nation forced to funnel private and public sector investment to a much richer one, under the structures unashamedly directed by the U.S. President."
Well, you can see the problems. And the most abject surrender has been that of Germany and Europe. And there's been hardly any coverage in the U.S. press of the bait-and-switch that America had with — [Ursula] von der Leyen said: We will do whatever you want, President Trump, as long as you give us security — and at least we know what's going to happen — so that you will protect us from Russia invading us. Well, what happened was there's no security at all. Trump agreed not to impose punitive tariffs on Europe, but, all of a sudden, he changed his mind. And instead of lowering the tariffs from 25% to 15%, he said: Well, we're still going to keep the tariffs we have — 50% on steel and aluminum — and if it happens that any of your manufactures contain steel or aluminum — up to 50%.
Well, this is treating Europe just like industry. Well, there's been a cry out of the European industrialists saying: Wait a minute. When we do make a manufactured good, it does include steel and aluminum, and we're going to have to close down our operations. Trump says: Well, there is a solution. You can avoid the tariffs by relocating in the United States and doing the kind of deal that Hyundai has done in the United States, that Japan has done.
This is a shakedown, pure and simple. And you can see what is happening. The SCO and the BRICS are seeing that it's so fortunate that they didn't even try to engage with negotiations with Trump — go your own way — and you're seeing the world really dividing into what the United States can retain from the countries it defeated in World War II — Germany and Japan — and the Korean War in 1951. They all have the Stockholm Syndrome among their leaders. They somehow identify with the victor, and the United States has been able to carve them out. And that's the proactive response to all this.
None of this has to do with what you'd call "the left." We're talking about national interest. But I'm sure that Trump will accuse foreign opponents of saying: Wait a minute. We want Japan to have the profits from its investments. We want Korea to be able to bring our skilled labor over when the United States does not have contractors that can build the Hyundai factory. And the Germans, who say: Well, we can't just relocate to the United States. It takes years to build a factory. We'll go bankrupt in the process.
This is Trump's response to the world. And I think that goes beyond anything that the left, or even the right, had even dreamed of a year ago, before Trump won.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me intervene, and perhaps here I will disagree just a bit with Michael, but maybe not. Yeah, time will, for sure, tell whether a return of big business from the rest of the world, moving its production to the United States, is a serious phenomenon. So far, we only have words. We have promises, we have all of this. And as I have known, and as Michael knows, and as most people who follow this thing, it's real easy for a prime minister, or a big corporation, to tell you about the enormous investments they're planning to make next year, next year, three years from now, in five years. Most of the executives in top positions who make those promises won't be in those positions three years from now, when those promises will likely be forgotten, or excused. Number one.
Number two: The problem of the United States is, it's not in a position to get the lackeys it's had since the end of World War II — Western Europe, Japan, and so on — to do what it needs to have them do. Michael is right. They should all now become colonies. And colonies, let me explain. Colonies, in the following precise sense: They are being charged to do business in the United States. You want to sell in the United States, you're going to have to work out with the importing company, if you yourself don't import into the United States. You're going to have to pay a fee. It's an entrance fee to the American economy. That's what a tariff is. If you sell in the American economy, you're going to have to pay the American government a fee.
And the American government is so desperate, it says: Either you pay it — the company abroad coming in — or the American importer pays it. We don't care. We are equally burdening you and the American — that's not something the American government wants to do. It wants others to pay, but it can't get that. So it has to do a deal which hurts its own so-called program: Why in the world would you come here, if one of the things you're going to have to do, as a business, is pay real high tariffs, which could be raised at any time, on the imported portion of whatever it is you produce here, which, at least for the years ahead, is going to be significant?
No, I think what I see is a declining empire no longer able to control huge parts of the world — China, India, Russia, BRICS — and therefore having to eat its own colonies — to savage Canada and Mexico, its major trading partners — doing God knows what kind of damage to those societies.
And I want to be clear: The United States may get von der Leyen, or [Friedrich] Merz, or the Japanese leaders secretly to give away their country's needs, but the only way to sustain that, the only way possible for them to stay in office, is to hype a great danger: That's the hysteria over Russian invasions, which you can see ratcheted up six more notches when some drones go flying over Poland. You can see the hysteria working its way up. This is a very useful hysteria, focusing the blame on Russia, when your problem is the United States.
But you can't say that because they can really hurt you, which the Russians can't. The Russians are having trouble subduing Ukraine. They're going to go after the rest of Europe? That's a joke. Nobody in their right mind — except if you're desperate, if you need a scapegoat. And what's the scapegoat in Europe for, this scapegoating of Russia? They are in a position in which, to salvage anything in their economy, they have to come up with a whole new programming — here we go — of subsidizing their own industries.
That's part of how they will react, and are reacting, against the United States, whatever they say publicly. The Europeans know what is being done to them. They don't want it. They are afraid that if they are hollowed out of their industry, their own people will turn against them. And you can see it already, in the streets of France, in the right-wing shift of the German political scene, the British political — [Nigel] Farage in England, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany — and so on. It's not working real well.
The Americans are desperate and are taking care of themselves. They hope to do that at the expense of their used-to-be allies/colonies. So they squeeze the crap out of them, who in turn demonize Russia, to justify the military build-up, which will be the mask for subsidizing their own industry at the expense of their social democracy welfare states. That's what's happening. I don't think that's gonna work. And that's Mr. Trump's worst nightmare: that all of this scapegoating will not work.
And here's a last point: a friend of mine is an industrialist in Europe. I can assure you, he understands perfectly what's going on. And in my latest conversation with him, where I said: Is there any way that you might actually move your production to the United States? He said, laughingly: Are you crazy? And I said: Well, why? He said: Every day in our newspaper — in the country in Western Europe where he lives — we see pictures of American troops patrolling American cities. You're a country that I wouldn't move to in a million years. There's too much turmoil. And then I watched your new army, your ICE army, closing down a South Korean battery plant in Georgia, out of the hysteria you have cultivated against immigrants. I'm not moving there. I'm not entering that crazy place that is occupying its own cities.
I want to quote to you finally a statement made by Vice-President Vance yesterday. In commenting on the occupation that's supposed to end — although I gather it isn't — in Washington, D.C., by federal troops, the Vice-President said, with great enjoyment, that his fondest hope is to see that done in cities across America. That's what he said. And I don't have the exact words, but that is the exact quotation. He is — you know, foreign industrialists say: That's not a place I want to go to. Given everything else happening in the world, I'm not moving to a place that looks like it is falling apart.
And with the shooting of that right-wing fellow yesterday, you can see where this is going. Of course, he's right. What am I going to tell him? Oh, you don't have to worry about violence in the United States, about situations like the South Korean battery plant? This is crazy stuff. And we are in a country that is falling apart. And all the pretense of it scapegoating this one, that one, shooting from the hip, before you know anything — they don't even know who did the thing in Utah, let alone what the motivations might be.
Nor will it be believable once they do. We can't believe anything anymore.
Michael and I used to use the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the last three weeks we have had two demonstrations: The president fires the woman who runs it, and the next person in charge explains that for the last year, we have overestimated the number of jobs in this country by a million. These are all symptoms, folks. You can pretend, with this one or that one, to dispute it or to quibble about it, but the bottom line is everywhere: The retreat, the desperation, the scapegoating, is a substitute for being able to do anything serious about this.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard has given what could be a summary of exactly my views, by emphasizing the role of scapegoating and the almost parallel-universe ability of the U.S. to have been able to support leaders that can insist that Russia actually cares enough about Europe to actually invade it — instead of saying: We don't want anything to do with it, we've turned our eyes east; all we want to do is to be left alone, and not harassed — but that's all that the United States can do.
Trump also gave a speech yesterday. He said: America will fall apart without the tariffs. We need the tariffs because the tariffs are what's balancing the budget, so that we can cut the taxes — he didn't say this, but the implication, to finish his sentence, is America will fall apart because we won't have tariffs to enable us to cut the taxes on the wealthiest 10%, while we raise taxes on the 90%. It's all about the polarization that Richard talked about earlier. How can America support an economy that remunerates the 10%, including the trillion-dollar paycheck to [Elon] Musk, without getting the money from its colonies, its de facto colonies — the countries that it defeated in World War II and in Korea?
So, what Trump followed up was to say, well, you know, who's opposing this? If you oppose the tariffs, that's the left. Well, of course, the left doesn't want to see the polarization between the wealthiest stockholders and bondholders whose wealth is increasing, while the net worth of 90% of the population is actually going down. And when you get to the bottom 50%, it's going down pretty rapidly.
Well, the interesting thing is that in Europe, that Richard rightly points to, it's the nationalists who are saying, you know, put our country first. And the nationalists are considered to be the right. What's ‘left,' and what's ‘right,' about whether you're for your own country to take control of your destiny? The press, and the vocabulary that is being used to describe this process, both in Europe and the United States, has become meaningless between left and right.
Although, certainly, the nationalist right in Europe agrees that, yes, we should be independent, so that we can make our wealthiest financial class even wealthier — that is the fight that is very explicitly broken out in France, when the new prime minister is a supporter of cutting back social spending, and refusing to impose the 2% wealth tax on the wealthiest that the lower house of France wanted to impose.
So, when the only response to dependency on the United States' right is to have a European right-wing response, you know that we're in a "Bizarro World" that the old vocabulary of left and right had no way of anticipating logically.
RICHARD WOLFF: Could I comment on that?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, before commenting on that, I don't know if you've heard the French National Assembly deputy Mathilde Panot. She's from the left, La France Insoumise?
RICHARD WOLFF: "La France Insoumise."
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, here is what she said from what's going on in France:
MATHILDE PANOT (CLIP): The result shows beyond [François] Bayrou's government is the fact that [Emmanuel] Macron has no more legitimacy. Only a third of the National Assembly gave him its confidence, which means that the Macron policy for the rich, and against the people, has had two-thirds of negative votes. Therefore, this is a minority in the country. I don't think that Bayrou and [Michel] Barnier can continue the same policy, taking no account of the results of the election […].
RICHARD WOLFF: Just for the record, it's called "La France Insoumise," and it's an alliance of a half a dozen of the left-wing parties who got together in France, in a way that other countries still have to learn from, and presented a common front. And that left-wing, together, is the largest bloc of votes in the National Assembly. So, unlike other countries, the left is a big power. You will not hear about it in the American press because the bias here is grotesque. You either hear about Mr. Macron, who is now supported by barely 20% of the people in public polls, or you'll hear about the right wing, [Marine] Le Pen, and all of that. What you don't hear about is the larger political formation, which is on the left. And if you think that's an accident, well, you're not paying attention.
Now, let me try to explain what Michael just ended up with: why right-wingers are taking the lead in much of Europe — not all, not by a long shot, but in much of Europe. Why would it be the right-wing? And by the way, when I answer that question for Europe, I'm going to be answering it for the United States too.
When capitalism crashes — which, let's remember, we have a downturn every four to seven years, on average. We've had that for three hundred years. The NBER [National Bureau of Economic Research] in Washington gives a record of all the ups and downs. Wherever capitalism goes, it's a fundamentally unstable system. If you lived with a person as unstable as capitalism, you would have moved out long ago, and you ought to think about that. Okay. So why?
In the 1930s, when capitalism crashed, large numbers of it went to the left. For example, in the United States, what did millions of Americans do that was remarkable in the 1930s Great Depression? They joined a union for the first time in their lives. They joined two socialist and one communist party, who all worked together to produce what's called the New Deal. Right? That is the most left-wing activity demonstrable in American history. Is it possible for the working class to go to the left when the system starts to break down, like it did in the 30s? The answer is yes —and by the way, similar things happened in Europe.
But after World War II, and in the last seventy-five years, we all know what the United States and Europe experienced: a cold war, which had much less to do with the Soviet Union, and much more to do with rolling back the New Deal in the United States, and undoing the power of social democracy, from Scandinavia in the north to Greece in the south. And that's what we've been doing for seventy-five years: hammering — anti-socialism, anti-communism — all of that.
So why are we surprised that now that capitalism is experiencing its latest, and maybe its final, decline, we have people — the working class — moving in large numbers to the right? They've been trained to do that for seventy-five years. The left has been demonized. What you're seeing now, the demonization of Mr. Putin — and I'm not here to support him, one way or the other, but the demonization is childish — why would you do that? Mr. Putin is now the same as Mr. Stalin. This is kind of silly. What are you doing? Because you're desperate, because that's the way you think. Not just the leaders. The leaders in Europe couldn't get away with this childish demonization, if there weren't in the population, still, the residues of seventy-five years of indoctrination.
But here's the good news: The right wing has no solution for the collapse of capitalism, and the longer it flails around, the more that will become clear. That's what's happening in France. Of course, they're the first ones. They have been for the last three centuries. They're the canary in the coal mine, letting us know — uh-oh, what's coming? When the right wing is exposed as having no solution at all, then the people will move to the left. Watch out, because that's coming down the pike.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard, how can the working class move left without a political party? That's the problem. At least in Europe, the left could create a new party, as Sahra Wagenknecht has done in Germany. But America is only a two-party system, as we've described. And you can see with a Democratic Socialist — Mr. [Zohran] Mamdani, overwhelmingly getting support in his run for mayor of New York, supported by Bernie Sanders and AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the Democratic Party denounces that as being the left. And the Democrats say: We are not the left. Socialism is poison for us — and they preferred to lose the 2016 election with Hillary [Clinton], instead of winning with Bernie, just because the Democratic Party is the great enemy of the left.
So that's why the working class has moved to the Republicans, because they've given up, quite as I have, certainly — well, I never supported the Democrats to begin with, since I was always a socialist — but there's a perception among the workers, and the middle class, and the ruling class, that the Democrats are the ultra-right, Cold War, neocon, neoliberal party.
RICHARD WOLFF: I agree with you, but let me again play the same role. Over the last week, two polls emerged: one, the New York Times, the Siena College poll; and the other one, the Gallup poll. And here's what they show — and here I am borrowing, I should give credit where it's due, to an article in the American Prospect by one of its leading writers, Harold Meyerson. And in that article — it's all available right now — those polls show that a majority of Democrats want Bernie Sanders, want the left solution, want people like Zohran Mamdani. And I want to also point that Bernie is beginning to see it too. He endorsed, in Maine, a very important candidate for the Senate, to replace Susan Collins, who is a disaster. And the person — Platner is his name, Graham Platner. He's an oyster fisherman choosing not to run in the Democratic Party.
So, yes, Bernie endorsed Mamdani, who is running [as] the Democrat, but he also endorsed Platner, who isn't running [as a Democrat] — and you're going to be seeing more and more — what we see here is what, again, happened in Germany. Sahra Wagenknecht is part of what was called — before — "Die Linke," which is the left-wing party. "Linke" in German means left — Die Linke is "The Left" — that's the name they chose. And together they get more than 10% of the vote already, Wagenknecht and Die Linke. But here's the origin of Die Linke: A split-away from the German Socialist Party — the one that is all the time, half the time, in government, a rough equivalent of our Democratic Party — the left wing of that broke away, and allied with the independent left, including what was left of the old Communist Party of East Germany. They formed Die Linke, and they are now throughout Germany a left-wing alternative, that holds seats in the regional parliament, etc., etc.
So, the notion that this all has to go in a right-wing direction is a mistake. We shouldn't be surprised that that's where it goes first. When this starts to unravel, this capitalist game, well, then the first reaction of frightened people is to go where they've been told you ought to be. When that fails too, then we'll have our chance to present our idea.
Look: In this country, if I stood up and I explained that rather than allowing the Tesla Corporation — which depends on the United States — to give a trillion dollars to one man who is already the richest man on this planet, that we could better tax that trillion and use it to deal with the problems of this country — if I stood for election on that platform, I'd already win. And we're not even at the point where we can —
Michael is right. The left in Europe is better organized. But that's a problem we can solve, because the support, the idea, of what our political system ought to be, relative to what it is, that's already for us. We now just have to organize and mobilize it. And that puts the left in a better position in the United States than it has been since the end of the Second World War.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I wish I could agree with you, but I'm so pessimistic about the rottenness of the Democratic Party, and the fervor and hatred that it has for the working class, for socialism, the hatred for Bernie Sanders, the hatred that it has for Mamdani, as an existential threat to its loyalty to Wall Street and the financial sector that are its candidates. You mentioned that, you know, if you were running as a candidate — but how can someone with your and my views, or Bernie's views, get nominated for presidency? You saw the corrupt theft of the 2016 Democratic nomination by Hillary. You've seen the right-wing press. I don't see how the scenario that you're describing can occur, without dissolving the Democratic Party as it is legally constituted, as an independent corporation run by its board of directors that have excluded anyone with a tinge of the left.
So, of course, the Democrats' poll supports what you and I, and Bernie and the others, support, but they have very little effect on who the candidates are going to be for Congress and the Senate, and the actual political administrative system. And I think that's why there's sort of an intuitive sense for voters, such as — well, if we, of course, we would like a Democratic Party that represents working-class interests, but in order to do that, we have to replace the Democratic Party as it is now politically and legally structured. And the only way to do that is to just block it from winning altogether.
Yes, there will be one — suppose there was one — party, a Republican Party, at all. Well, that was the dream of the founders of the Constitution: There shouldn't be sectarian — there should be one party. Well, at least, then you would have a variety. You would have left-winger socialists running against Republicans, all in the same kind of primary that many people think, technically, would give more of a chance for a left-wing politician — to make the laws, and levy taxes, and determine American foreign policy — than they would have by a Democratic Party controlled by the neocons and the neoliberals. That's really the dilemma. I don't see a way out of this, without replacing the Democratic Party as it's constituted. And that's why I supported Jill Stein for her run, that was making these very points, including on our shows on Nima's discussion.
RICHARD WOLFF: No, I understand your position. I know that many people feel that way. I would suggest that, from my experience, the majority of the American working class that I interact with feels pretty much that way, and is pessimistic about the situation. And I can't say I'm surprised, that my whole analysis makes it clear to me why, after seventy-five years of this, we have such a situation.
Let me talk for a moment about it very directly, politically. I live in New York City. I'm sitting in New York City, as I believe Michael is, as well, as we make this program. I'm watching a very modest socialist, a Social Democrat or Democratic Socialist, if you like, Zohran Mamdani, running for mayor —clearly, the front-running candidate, gets polling always in the high 40%.
He's running against an incumbent mayor whose level of corruption even exceeds what we're used to here in New York, and we're used to an awful lot of it. Most of his key associates are either in jail, or on trial, or being investigated. It's horrible. And he is busily making deals, secret and otherwise, with the president to welcome the ICE, that the rest of the New York political system rejects, and so on. Right? That's one candidate against him.
The other one is a former governor whose distinguishing characteristics are his sexual oppression of the women around him, and behavior during the pandemic that endangered elderly people in nursing homes on a scale that makes you back away.
These are his two candidates who are being flooded with money by the rich people of New York City — not all of them, but many of them — in their desperate hope not to be taxed the one, or two, or three percent, which is all Mr. Mamdani has even said he would try. What a spectacle of absurdity this all is.
So my answer to Michael is: "We" won't do it, the Democratic Party will do it to itself. The Democratic Party, as he correctly describes it, has a leadership that will literally push its own membership away. It'll become a junior party — the plaything of the donors who keep it alive — shrinking, as a real political force on the left replaces it.
The left doesn't need the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party needs the left. And that fundamental reality becomes truer with every passing day, because of the declining American empire and the declining American capitalism. It can't solve its problem. You send ICE in to terrorize the scapegoat, and you offend so many other people by misarresting them, by hurting them, by obvious excess violence, that you're undoing your own effort.
It's a little bit like what they just did with that battery plant in Georgia. What a very stupid thing to do. South Korean enterprises, who are among the most important they hoped to bring here, are saying: Wait a minute. In addition to all the other risks we take, we run the risk that if we send over a team of people, because we know our technology, you don't — you know, poor Mr. Trump has to come limping along afterwards: Gee, we should have brought some over here to train our workers.
Really, really, you think? What an interesting idea, after you've smashed everything with your absurd ICE game. Sure, it's an internal army. Sure, it will be used to hold the people back, but it won't work. Those things don't do that. By the time you have to do what Mr. Trump is doing, you've waited too long, and it is too late. And you're going to suffer all of the missteps, all of the mistakes.
Instead of sitting down with the leadership of that company, and talking about what their workers are, or are not, in the way of immigration, and working out a reasonable plan, you did the theatric. But you always have to ask: Why the excess theatric? Why the excess scapegoating? Because the situation is desperate. Desperate people do what we end up calling self-destructive behavior. We're living it.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I agree. I can't disagree with any of that. We're in the same — I don't know where all this is leading, or have any sense of the timeframe being imminent.
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I can tell you, if we all watch — or at least I assume many of you watched — the videos of the last couple of weeks in which a boat, which is defined as a boat on which eleven people are present, in this boat, and the boat is moving through the water, and then suddenly there's an explosion of light, and it is explained to us that these eleven people are now blown to smithereens. They are dead. And we don't know until two or three or four days later, and the information dribbles out. The boat is a thousand miles away in the ocean. Therefore, it is not threatening the United States, at least not yet. It is somewhere in the area of Venezuela, but it is not clear, nor could it be, whether it is going to Venezuela, or from Venezuela.
The president and the vice-president announce to us, with no evidence presented at all, that these are drug runners, that the boat is, perhaps, carrying drugs, and it has to do with Venezuela. And therefore, the United States has no obligation to arrest these people, to subject them to a trial in which they have the right to defend themselves, and to receive a punishment, if they are found guilty, that is in some sense proportionate to whatever crime they might be — all of that is dispensed, and Trump and Vance become trial, judge, jury, and executioner, all at once. And nobody — I take that back — relatively few people think that there's something wrong. You want evidence of desperation? That's it. And will there be significant numbers of people who go along with it? Yeah, those who are gone to the right, out of their genuine suffering in the last forty years of economic decline.
But even those people are mumbling at the bar this evening about giving a trillion dollars to Elon Musk to add to his already $400 billion — the level of obscenity here requires metaphors taking us back to the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, and little of them is left.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to say something about the attack on the boat. In the last two days, it's come out that it wasn't the Coast Guard that attacked the boat — everybody said, well, wait a minute: A boat is supposed to approach the target and tell them to stand down, to ask what they're doing, to let themselves be boarded, or whatever — the boat was shot down by drones.
The U.S. apparently has drones simply flying throughout the ocean off of Venezuela, to shoot down whatever moves. Now, talk about scapegoats. The drones had no reason — to answer your question of was it going to Venezuela, away from Venezuela — just the fact that it was there, the United States had to shoot down a boat. It doesn't have enough ships to go everywhere in the ocean, the Atlantic, around that area. So, it just used drones to find a boat so that Trump then could say: We've just prepared what will be the first step in a series of attacks on similar ships having anything to do with Venezuela, or in international waters, anywhere of it.
It was Senator Rand Paul, the Republican, sort of extremist, in the Senate, that pointed out the fact that all of this was done without all of the legal niceties that you're supposed to do to follow the formalities of war. And this is what Trump says: There are no rules at all anymore. Don't you get it? The 1945–2025 era of United Nations rules are gone. It is totally under U.S. rules. This is more radical. It's something that spans the whole political spectrum from the left to the right that's occurred. I would imagine that other discussants, military discussions on Nima's programs, will be elaborating that, and how utterly radical it is.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, and again, we're repeating: for me, desperate. There's no need to do this. There is no need to do this. Those eleven people are a thousand miles away. No American — and no one has asserted that any American — was endangered by these people, or threatened by these people. What are you doing? Why would you deliberately violate all those norms of international law, of the law of the ocean, of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty? All of those things, what we're supposed to revere as Western values, chucked out the window in order to kill eleven people, and then wonder who they were, and what they were doing. What do you — what?
This is the act of — I can see Mr. Trump, who, I presume, had to authorize this sort of thing, being in a bad mood and wanting, therefore, to deal with his frustration at being unable to stop the war in Iraq, or stop the horror in Gaza, or stop, or stop, can't do any of it — can't avoid the recession, can't avoid the inflation, can't decide whether the tariff should be up, or down, or paused, or not paused, or what to do about India, now that you've pushed away the single most important foreign ally you could have acquired — the level of frustration is probably high, and this is an outcome.
This is an impulsive act done by a desperate person, who should have known better, who may even know better, but is caught up in the level of downturn, and decline, and frustration. That's what makes our times difficult — not Mr. Putin, and not Xi Jinping, but the problem that they are not. Here, they can't be other than extras in the story. Our story is about our economic system, our U.S. dominance in the world, and it's over.
And it's terribly difficult for the American people to face it. And Mr. Trump rides on that difficulty. He rode into office on it, and he will exit office on it. And he will not solve it. And that will be the legacy that haunts him, and the right wing that supports him, for years to come.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Maybe he won't win the Nobel Peace Prize.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Actually, before wrapping up, they know what to do with India. Before wrapping up, I'm going to play a clip of Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, talking about India:
HOWARD LUTNICK (CLIP): […] they want to open their market. Stop buying Russian oil, right? And stop being a part of BRICS, right? They're the vowel between Russia and China. If that's who you want to be, go be it. But either support the dollar, support the United States of America, support your biggest client, who is the American consumer; or, I guess, you're going to pay a 50% tariff. And let's see how long this lasts.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: What better solution can you offer?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That's right. That's right.
RICHARD WOLFF: Mr. [Narendra] Modi took a trip. His answer to Mr. Lutnick is: Did you notice where I went? Mr. Lutnick is an example of a very self-satisfied American businessman, who comes out of the last seventy-five years imagining that those seventy-five years have lasted, and will last, forever. And therein lies the catastrophic mistake that all of history teaches: The past is not the future, and if you extrapolate forward, you will make misjudgments that will destroy you. That's what he's doing.
MICHAEL HUDSON: The guiding illusion is that other countries need the American market, and they don't need it. The big market is in the BRICS and their allies. That is the illusion, along with the illusion that Russia, and Iran, is a military threat to Europe. You're dealing with illusions, which have a kind of life of their own. The fact is that Russian oil is the key to energy production and energy use in India, and, of course, India finds the reliance on Russian oil more economically important than the U.S. market. That's what the Americans can't understand. The rest of the world does not need the United States.
So, that's the question: Why do the colonies agree to remain as part of the U.S. Empire, instead of joining the global majority? That's the big puzzle to be solved. And that's the geopolitical position that, I think, overshadows the whole issue of right and left.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much. Richard, do you have something to add?
RICHARD WOLFF: No, I think we've done a good conversation about urgent issues. I feel good about it.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
Transcription and Diarization: hudsearch
Editing: Kimberly Mims
Review: ced
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash