Title: John Kiriakou Podcast: Prof. Richard D. Wolff on Debt, Taxes and the Economy
Show: The JK Report
Date: 2026-07-07
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJBzt-emxhw
Duration: 2526

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[00:00] Hi, I'm John Kuryaku. Welcome back for another episode of Deep Focus. Donald Trump has shaken up the economy more and in a shorter period of time than really any previous president over the past couple of generations. Trump's tariffs on literally all of the country's trading partners have caused chaos in global stock markets. They've laid the groundwork for inflation and economic contraction and have led to political upheaval here in the United States. And what does all this mean for the coming months, even the coming years? Well,

[00:30] we're very happy today to be joined by Professor Richard Wolf, one of my favorite people. He's one of the most recognizable and sought-after economists in America. He's professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs at New York's New School. He's also taught economics at Yale University and the Sorbone, among other places. Richard hosts a weekly program called Economic Update. You can find that on YouTube, Free Speech TV, NWBA FM in New York. That's on the

[01:01] Pacifica Network. He's also the author of many books. I can't even name them all here on economics. Most recently, one called Understanding Capitalism. Richard, thanks so much for joining us. I'm really looking forward to this. >> Thank you, John, for inviting me. I'm looking forward as well. >> Thank you very much for that. So, let's start with Donald Trump's tariffs. Other presidents of course have threatened tariffs. They have imposed tariffs, but we've never seen this level of tariffs. Well, maybe not never. We haven't seen them in generations. Um, when there have

[01:34] been tariffs like this in the past, even going back into American history, what did what did they lead to? What should we expect to see here? >> Well, I'm glad you reminded us of the history. That's usually my job. Uh, so you've saved me from that. Let me let me just remind people that tariffs have been used by countries for hundreds of years. There's nothing new about it. Uh the United States has used them on several occasions. So it's part of our

[02:04] history as a nation as much as it is of virtually every other nation at one time or another. And what that means is that it's a wellrecoognized tool of economic policy. There's an immense literature. If you go to any big library, you know, you'll have shelves and shelves of books and hundreds and hundreds of articles. In every economics department that I know of of every college and university, one of the courses typically offered is called international trade. Uh it's a part of

[02:37] the curriculum of economics. I have taught such courses. Uh students who've been majors in economics have had to take them and so on. In those courses, there's always a segment on tariffs. That's how established it is as a part of what you want to know about if you're doing international trade. The reason it strikes many as suddenly surprising is that we are coming off of a period of 40 years roughly since the 1970s

[03:09] when the name of the game was the opposite of tariffs namely open trade or sometimes called free trade or neoliberalism or globalization has lots of names but it mainly means that for the last 40 50 years we have been celebrating as a societ society. The idea that the best thing in international trade for everybody would be free trade, no tariffs, no interference by any government in the

[03:39] free decision of people where to buy, where to sell, where to go, all of that. You know, it's part of the right-wing ideology that the best government is the least government. The notion that the government is a burden. uh this has been very dominant and clearly Mr. Trump represents the utter rejection of all of that. Now it's peculiar again particularly now for Americans because

[04:10] the Republican party of which Mr. Trump is the head at this point has for at least a century become famous in the United States for everybody as being the party against taxes, always wanting to cut your taxes, always making fun of the government as wasteful and unnecessary and therefore we didn't need to pay taxes to such a wasteful unnecessary bureaucracy. We all we all grew up in that kind of talk. It's the right-wing

[04:41] spiel. It's the right-wing mantra and it gets repeated forever and the Republican party is the embodiment. So now you can realize what a pickle we must be in if the Republican party and its leader, Mr. Trump, >> right, are now doing what? The opposite. The total complete opposite of what we've been doing for 50 years and what the Republican party has stood for for a hundred years. What is he doing? Number

[05:11] one, the tariffs. He has the that's the government coming in and interfering in the trade between the United States and any company in the world that ships stuff here. Any country in the world which encourages its producers to ship stuff here to make money. Instead of being able to find a market here and serve that market in a free enterprise way, the government is coming in and saying, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do any business unless you have a

[05:42] tariff paid. Tariff is simply a word for a kind of tax. Nobody should be fooled. It's a tax by another name. You know, you could choose to call a rose a Google. It doesn't change. It's still a rose, but you need to call it a goooo. And the only interesting question is why? Well, it's very clear why Mr. Trump wants us to talk about tariffs. He's hoping that a good number of us are not aware that a tariff is a tax because then he'd have to explain how is it that

[06:13] your Republican party is hitting the not just all Americans but the whole world with taxes. This is is going to make Mr. Trump as unpopular as you can imagine. Actually worse than that. Uh maybe we can get to that. All right. Now, who pays the tax? Another area of confusion. >> That's right. >> Americans pay the tax, not the f when Mr. Trump says, "I'm putting a tariff on China." That's very nice. That makes it sound like Mr. Trump, who's the leader of the United States, can put a tax on

[06:45] Chinese people or businesses. He cannot. It's not the way the world works. The only government that can tax is the Chinese government, just like the only tax uh only entity that can tax Americans is our government. So the tariff is a tax paid by Americans when they bring foreign goods or services into the United States that were produced somewhere else. That's all. It used to be called earlier in American history an import duty. But it's all the

[07:18] same thing. Tariff, import duty, tax on imports. Americans who bring stuff in pay it. And they pay it to the American government. And that's where this is the story of how serious our country's troubles must be if the party that is anti- tax is hitting all of us with an immense new tax. No one should be fooled by the language being used that wants to

[07:51] point everywhere else but what I just said. That's the first thing. The second thing is about Mr. Trump and then I'll show you how they're connected. The second thing is this nonsense another game of word play the department of government efficiency d o g e the responsibility of Mr. Trump's other president uh Elon Musk who's going through with Mr. Trump's approval, of course, and slashing government programs

[08:25] by firing huge numbers of federal employees. Now, let me begin. I'm a professor of economics. I teach what efficiency is. This has nothing remotely to do with efficiency. Calling it efficiency is like calling a rose goooo. It's still a rose. This efficiency has got nothing to do with efficiency. Here's what it does have to do with the problem of the United States. It has many, but one of

[08:55] them that is summarized is the fact that we are out of control as a society with the level of our governmental debt. Our government has chosen under both Republicans and Democrats alike to pay for the things the government is called upon to do. Not so much by taxes. Why? Because corporations and the rich don't want to pay the taxes. And the mass of working people cannot pay anymore in

[09:28] taxes. Between the masses who cannot, who don't want to, who are already desperate, who already suffering with inadequate income, will look very unkindly on any increase in taxes. That's what the Republican party has counted on, and that's how it's gotten into office. But the corporations and the rich are equally unhappy and unwilling. Yeah, they have a real power. They can say to the candidate, you tax us, we don't donate to you, and we will donate to your opponent. So, the government finds

[10:01] itself blocked. It can't go after corporations and the rich. If anything, the two parties compete in giving them tax cuts, and no one has been more generous than Mr. Trump in doing that. But they also can't go to the masses. So what they have done is borrow the money. They go to corporations and the rich and they say okay you win. We won't tax you. But now we want you to take the money you didn't have to pay us in taxes and lend it to us. We will keep it for a few

[10:32] years. Pay you interest every year while we do and then pay you that money back. Now if you're a rich person this is a no-brainer. Obviously, rather than pay taxes and say goodbye to your money, you now can lend it to the same government that would have taxed you and you'll get it all back plus earn interest. So that's what we've been doing this year. For example, we were scheduled at the beginning of January as the statisticians in the government went to work to run a deficit this year of just

[11:02] shy of $2 trillion. >> That's the deficit, not the debt. >> That's a deficit. And the deficit adds to the debt of >> So it's a $2 trillion deficit in our budget. That is the government plans to spend two trillion more than it takes in in taxes for the year 2025. That's right. And that is so enormous relative to our history, relative to other countries like us that it is beginning,

[11:33] and this is very important. It's beginning to make the people and the entities that lend to the United States government making it possible for it to run a deficit to say to the US government, we're not going to lend you anymore because you are a dead beat. You're the kind of country that borrows and then cannot pay back and we're not going to risk our money. Last a week

[12:03] ago, Monday, we had a crisis because the largest single creditor of the United States, which is the country of Japan, made a decision that looked like it doesn't want to lend anymore. It's the number one lender, by the way. The number two is the People's Republic of China. >> That's right. >> They're not so interested in lending either, especially to a country that attacks them and provokes them, which Mr. Trump does literally on every occasion when he can think of it. So we

[12:35] are in trouble now. I can connect on the basis of this the tariff on the one hand and the firing of large numbers of federal employees on the other. So firing the federal employees saves the government spending on them. You don't have to pay them a salary. You don't have to give them a budget to run the aid or the IRS or the you name it as they savage them. Much more important by the way than the wages say that isn't

[13:05] very much right. >> Not spending all their budgets. That's a lot of money. So you're reducing the deficit by firing in huge swaths federal employees. Now the tariff the tariff is a tax on working people. It's fooling American workers. Here's how it works. The American importer of Japanese electronics or French [snorts] wine or or Italian uh suits, they now have to

[13:36] pay X dollars of a import duty if they bring that product in. And that's their business. That's what they're going to do. So for them, the price of everything they bring in has just gone up because they have to pay a tariff tax to Uncle Sam. What are they going to do? Answer. They're going to try to push the burden of that tax onto the retail customer, you and me. So the wine in our liquor

[14:06] store is going to go up because the merchant in that store had to pay more to the importer in New York who brought the wine in uh because of that tax. And in this way we in the higher prices we have to pay or the importer in whatever he takes of it himself if he doesn't raise the price to us and it's out of his pocket. The government is now raising more taxes while it spends less on all those federal employees it fires.

[14:39] It's reducing the deficit. And who is left unhe hurt by all of this? Answer. Corporations and the rich. They're the ones that are they're not paying. And even those who do pay a little extra on the tariff, they're rich. >> They don't care. They're rich. They don't care whether the eggs cost $12 or $4 or not. If they want eggs, they get eggs. That's how it works. They they they don't have anything to in fact >> they want this because it means the

[15:11] government by saving money on the mass of people by burdening the mass of people with the higher prices that these tariffs are going to cost us are making the government a more reliable entity to lend that money to that they don't have to pay in taxes. Here's a way that one of my close friends, a fellow economist who some of you know the he used to be the minister of finance in Greece name is Jiannis Varuis. He put it very nicely in a recent interview. Trade war is

[15:43] simply a disguised form of class war. It's the war of the employer class against the employee class. Remember folks, the US census tells us that 3% of our people are employers. They're the ones who decide whether a price goes up or down or stays the same. They're the ones, those employers who are going to decide how to handle

[16:13] passing off the cost of the tariff onto the rest of us. But make no mistake, we the retail buyer will when all the dust settles be paying the lion's share. And in this way, we will be f [snorts] funding the tariffs that go to Uncle Sam. Mr. Trump is doing the work of the corporations and the rich who run this country. And you have no better illustration of it than what's going on

[16:44] right now. The financial press said that current economic numbers are deceptively strong. They're deceptively positive. And as a as an example, they used the Chinese uh economic growth figures for for this quarter, 5.5%. I say deceptively because they say deceptively that that the tariffs have not struck yet. Once they do strike, does that push us into a recession? Is that what we should be expecting now?

[17:14] Well, the answer is we are due for a recession in any >> anyway. >> In any case, let me briefly explain. Capitalism is one of the most unstable economic systems one could imagine. In the last 400 years that capitalism begins in England and then spreads eventually to cover the whole world, uh, a government agency in this country called the National Bureau of Economic Research, very wellrespected, keeps

[17:46] track of the ups and downs of capitalist economies, both here in the United States and globally. And here's what they tell us, having looked at the history. On average, every four to seven years, capitalism crashes. We have lots of words. Crash, recession, downturn, crisis, depression. Why do we have all these words? Because it's always with us. It's like death in taxes. If you're in capitalism, it goes down. Now, some of them are short and shallow. Others of

[18:18] them are long and deep. We all know if we've ever studied history that in 1929 the United States entered into a a downturn of capitalism which has ever since been called the Great Depression because it lasted 11 or 12 years and in 1933 its worst year 25% was the official unemployment rate. That's six times what it is now. Right? To give you just an idea of how bad it got. So if the

[18:49] average is every four to seven years, if the last one was the 2020 crash, which is what the last one was, by the way, we're so unable as a country to face that we live in an unstable economic system, that we have to give each crash its own name. >> Oh my god. >> That way people can think it has to do with the particular name, not with the recurring phenomena. So in the year 2000 when we had one we called it the dotcom

[19:19] crisis and in 2008 we called it the subprime mortgage crisis and in 2020 we called it the coid9 the names change the phenomena does not we're back to Google versus rose you think about this all right if the last one was in 2020 and the average is 4 to seven years we are now in 2025 right on schedule we're going to have one if not this year then it could be next year. Nobody can time these in advance because that's telling the future and the only people that do

[19:51] that are the folks at the carnival and we know what that's about. Okay? So, I can't say to you it's going to happen now or it's going to happen next year. But is it going to happen? Well, if the last 400 years are any guide, Uhuh. If you're a betting person, don't bet against it. You're going to lose. What the what the uh tariffs may do is bring it a bit sooner. That's possible. Or what the tariffs may do is make it last longer or make it cut deeper. All of that is possible. And in a way, the

[20:23] recession has already arrived for federal employees because look at them. They're losing their jobs. And let me just for a moment talk about that because I know your your audience is interested. every audience I deal with is the phoniness of of all of this is so obvious that it'll only take me two minutes to explain it to you. The federal government in this country employs about 5 million people. Half of them are in the military and the other half, two and a half million, keep that

[20:54] number in your head, are the civilian employees of the federal government. Those are the people that are being fired in huge numbers. that 2 and a half million civilian employees of Washington of the federal government. But if you really wanted to do efficiency, you would look at all the government employees and most of the government employees in America are not employed by the federal government. For example, the

[21:25] 50 state governments together employ 5 million civilian employees. I didn't know that twice. Yeah, that's twice the number of the federal. Is there an efficiency raging through them, firing them? Not at all. >> Then we can go to the third level of American government because we have a federal, a state, and then what we call local or municipal government. You know, the mayor who runs the towns and the cities. They employ, get ready, 15

[21:56] million civilian workers. So state five, local 15, that's 20 million government employees. If you gave a damn about efficiency of government employees, you would be looking at the state and the local because that's where most of them are, not the federal. The only reason he's picking the federal is that he can fire them. He can't fire. he'd have to go to each governor and half the governors of this country wouldn't cooperate and even a larger percentage

[22:26] of the cities and towns wouldn't. So this is a political hustle not an efficiency. And then let me give you one more quick statistic. I did the work of going back to the 1960s and in the 1960s I said how many people are employed in the civilian service of the federal government and I was surprised to discover 2 and a half million. >> In other words, >> we have the same number of federal employees civilian today that we had 50

[22:59] 60 70 years ago. Meanwhile, our population is a hundred million bigger. In other words, we have been able to have the federal government serve a much larger population with no increase in the number of people they hired. You know what that's called in economics? Efficiency. That's what that's called. So, the last place you would want to go is there. Mr. Musk is a hustler. This is BS. It's what you've all learned. It's

[23:31] calling a rose goooo and hoping hoping that nobody notices that you're weird with your names rather than this thing isn't the rose that you can clearly see and touch and smell as a rose. It's awful to watch the hustle that Americans are being subjected to. Don't be fooled. >> Richard, a little bit further a field. Um, what effect should we expect these tariffs to have on other parts of the

[24:02] economy like interest rates for example, real estate, that kind of thing? >> Well, here's the problem. We're back to what the employers who bring goods and services into the United States from outside, what are they going to do? So, part of the answer is they may absorb the cost themselves. They may just live with lower profits. And then we would have to ask the question if they had lower profits what's their next step what are they going to then we would

[24:33] track that to see or they will be successful on putting it on us then the mass of Americans are going to have to pay higher prices for what we bring in. And let me remind people that's not esoterica. Right? If this morning you like me had a excuse me had a cup of coffee with sugar, let me tell you coffee comes in from outside and so does the sugar. So your coffee, your latte is going to cost you 20 bucks or 15 bucks,

[25:05] not what you're paying now. I mean I can't tell you exactly what it'll be because remember >> it'll be higher. >> It'll be higher >> because the the the company bringing in the coffee has to pay that tariff. They're going to charge the wholesaler to whom they sell the coffee a higher price to recoup what they have to give Uncle Sam for the tariff. The wholesaler is going to ship it to your local coffee shop and say, "I need more money from you." By the way, if you've been buying coffee, you should have noticed over the last several years, long before there was a tariff, they were already raising

[25:36] the price. And they do that to make more money. This is going to give them an excuse, which they didn't have before. They had to tell us stories about oh the farmers of Brazil or Colombia. I mean mostly it isn't true but it's a story they tell. Now Mr. Trump is giving them the story. Just talk about the T which they will but it's not going to help us because if we have to spend more on imported goods because of the tariff that's less money we're going to have to spend on everything else. That's going

[26:07] to mean less purchases. Look this is all that's why I call it a class war. You are depressing the the standard of living of the American people. You're making them have less purchasing power because the prices are going to go up. Almost everyone thinks we're going to have an inflation again. Prices are going to go up as soon as these tariffs kick in and then we're going to worry ourselves sick. But it's no mystery why the tariff

[26:37] why the inflation is going to be happening. It's because of the tariffs. We are also dependent on how the rest of the world retaliates because you wanted to know about a recession, >> right? >> China has put tariffs as big as ours or almost >> yes >> almost as big as ours on our stuff. Other countries, particularly the European countries are thinking of doing that. And this kind of tariff, let me take a step back and forget about economics. Just think as a as a citizen,

[27:10] the president of the United States has just burdened every other country with a tax problem. Other countries know very well that if they've been selling iron or steel or electricity or whatever it is or avocados into the United States, if now the importer has to pay a tax to Uncle Sam and therefore the prices go up, we are all going to buy we Americans are going to buy less of those things

[27:40] because the prices are higher. We can't afford them. So, you know, if we have avocado toast, it's going to be a very thin sliver of avocado that we put on there because we can't afford it. That means they'll sell fewer avocados in the US or fewer botts. So, every country woke up on the 3rd of April, the day after Mr. Trump dropped

[28:12] his tariff bomb and they said, "This man who is the president of a country far away, the US, whom we didn't elect, has just given us lots and lots and lots of economic problems. Our exports to the United States are now going to become more expensive, and we're going to lose a certain portion of the sales we had enjoyed." That hurts our companies. That hurts our country. They're not happy with this. Mr. Trump has made the United

[28:45] States disliked on a scale we haven't seen for half a century. >> Well, along those same lines, politically, I mentioned at the at the start, William McKinley. William McKinley imposed these huge tariffs. He crashed the economy and then he was killed by an assassin, but that didn't have anything to do with tariffs. But certainly, our political leaders aren't all stupid. Certainly some of them have some understanding of history. So they know that tariffs are harmful. They know what this is going to lead to. Why the

[29:17] silence? Why the absence of leadership? This is what I have to tell you. And I know it'll be difficult for people to hear. You should read this and you're quite right. Everything you said is correct. This is a sign of desperation. You don't do these kinds of things if you're not desperate. You know, uh, think, you know, make it very personal. I think the last time uh you were really cruel to someone close to you, someone that's important to you in your life, and then hopefully

[29:47] you you were a big enough person to go back a little later and say, "Look, I'm really sorry. I I snapped at you or I yelled at you. I was worried about this other thing and I took it out." Which would be the way to deal with that if you're an adult, right? We have to we have to have an adult in office. We don't. An adult would have sat down with the rest of the world. There are a lot of ways of doing that. The UN would have been one and say, "Look, we have economic problems. We need an adjustment. Can we work out with the

[30:20] rest of the world a way that we can solve our problems without making it too difficult for you? You know, you help us and maybe there's a way we can help you." That would be the He didn't do that. >> No. >> No. Being Mr. Tough Guy. And by the way, other presidents have done that kind of behavior, too. Not maybe as blunt as Mr. Trump, but let's let's not get carried away with the particular way. He's doing what he's doing because the position of the American economy is deeply

[30:50] desperate. I've been trying to say that for several years now. The numbers are wonderful, but if you cherrypick numbers, I can assure you there are all every economy all the time has good numbers and bad numbers. If you're if you're a hustler and you want to say it's good, you pick those numbers. If you're a hustler and you want to say it's bad, you pick those. If you're decent and honest, you do what a doctor does. You weigh and you come up with a diagnosis that takes into account what

[31:21] is working and strong and what is breaking down and weak. That's what you want from it. You don't want the doctor to give you gloom and doom if you don't need it and to give you happy happy if you don't deserve it. You want the honest ability to keep living. >> Let me ask you about that even more specifically. You're originally from Youngsttown, Ohio. I'm originally from Newcastle, Pennsylvania. We're neighbors, >> right? neighbors in the rust belt, >> right? >> Uh the rust belt uh has seen some some bad years going back to the 70s, even

[31:52] before the 70s, >> right? >> Do these tariffs in any way help the rust belt states where where Donald Trump has claimed to want to try to bring back manufacturing? >> Yeah. Well, the only way to bring back manufacturing in this country, well, let me take a step back. I agree with you. Youngstown is a it's a lovely place and good people. It's >> great place to grow up. Disastrous economically. >> When I when I was born, my father was pushing a wheelbarrow in something

[32:23] called the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, a major steel. >> In fact, I remember the day the Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed. I was in seventh grade and kids were balling in the hallways because all of their fathers had lost their jobs. >> They lost their jobs. Many of these men were in their 40s and 50s. They were looking at no job like that ever again. Their seniority was gone. Their future was I mean it and nobody cared. The company decided for profit reasons to

[32:55] shut it down. All those rich corporate leaders went off and did other things. Uh the workers were just left and the town couldn't survive. It couldn't raise taxes. nobody was working, so it couldn't maintain their schools. You had the decline that you can see now in Cleveland or in in Detroit or in St. Louis or in Wilmington. I mean, it's just on and on and on. So, yeah, I'm acutely uh aware of all of this. It's not a matter of stupidity.

[33:26] It's a matter of the economic history that we have come to. The colonial period when Europe and America had colonies around the world plunged the world into a period of extraordinary unevenness. Those parts of the world broadly speaking, Asia, Africa, Latin America were left behind and wealth was concentrated in Europe, North America and Japan. And for a long time, more than a century or two, that was how

[33:58] inequality grew. Meanwhile, in the United States, a labor movement arose as working people demanded a piece of the wealth they saw all around them to which their labor contributed and they were reasonably successful with a lot of struggle, a lot of losses, but they won a rising standard of living. Meanwhile, the standard of living of their fellow workers in Asia, Africa, Latin America was depressed by colonialism. So now we

[34:29] get to the present day or the last 50 years. A capitalist discovered 50 years all of them did two things that we all learned about. One is the jet airplane about the 70s and the other one is the internet. And what the jet engine and the internet did was allow capitalists to say, "Wait a minute. We can watch, literally watch our workers at work, if they're sitting in Shanghai as easily as if they're sitting in Cincinnati. We don't need to stay in the United States.

[35:00] The workers who struggled and got high wages, we don't want to pay them those high. We never did. That's why they had to struggle. So now we have an easy way to defeat them. We just leave. We get we close the factory in Youngstown or in Wilsbury or anywhere else and move it to Shanghai or India or Brazil or any of those other play Vietnam these days and so on. We we're not responsible for those workers. They're all fired. Bye-bye. Go

[35:30] become a greeter at Walmart. That's your future. We're going to make a ton of money because we're setting up a factory where we can pay people a tenth or a third or a quarter of what we pay you. And we can watch and make sure they do the job. And it's so profitable with those low wages that we can pay the freight of bringing all that crap that we produce, you know, your clothing, your appliances, everything back to the United States. So that's what they did. And here's the bad news I got for my

[36:01] fellow Americans. They're not coming back. The last eight presidents, all of them, uh, the Bushes, the Clintons, Obama, B, they all ran for office promising to bring manufacturing back. And not a single one of them delivered on the promise. Not the Republicans, not the Democrat. Mr. Trump is promising, but if you're a betting man or woman, don't bet on it. They usually don't deliver. All right. He

[36:33] He's doing something. He's a showman. So, he's hitting the world with tariffs. It is showy and it'll it'll have its effects, mostly bad ones. >> But it will it solve the problem? No. You know what might solve the problem? >> And I know this is scary, but I got to tell you, if you want my opinion, is pressing down the wages in America so that they become competitive with those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So that Americans who used to watch television and see those shots of people

[37:05] living there and saying to themselves, "Well, we live better than them." Uh, that's going away. Friends, that gap is being narrowed. You can see it most dramatically in the People's Republic of China because they are the most dramatic story of a standard of living going up for the working class that we have anywhere in the world over the last half century. And part of the upset of the leadership of America and why China is the big enemy now is because as

[37:36] Americans learn about what has been delivered to the working class of that country, they're going to be increasingly dissatisfied with what has not been delivered to the working class of this country. That's much more important than anything having to do, for example, with the little island of Taiwan. >> That's right. Richard, tell us uh where people can learn more about the work that you're doing. Tell us about your show, your books. >> Well, what are you working on? >> I've been a

[38:08] a critic of capitalism all my life. Uh I'm a product of the elite schools of the United States. I went to Harvard and Stanford and Yale, so I can wave my pedigree around if you want. And they all tried. They did their level best. And I had, you know, good teachers, bad teachers, and those in between like everybody else. They all tried their level best to make me an enthusiastic pro- capitalist thinking person. They did that not just to me, but to everybody in the class. They tried hard. I was a good student. I listened

[38:40] carefully. I did real well, but I was never persuaded. I mean, they tried. It didn't work. And the more I live in the capitalism, and you can see with my white hair, I've been around a while. Uh the more I live here, the more convinced I am basically that the human race can do better than capitalism. I feel as though we need to go on just like it's as if we all lived in a slave society and we were all slaves and we told each other, you know, you can live better than this slave master business or if we were lived in medieval Europe, we can do

[39:11] better than this lord and surf feudalism business. Well, we live in capitalism. But my view is we can do better than this employer employee arrangement. I don't want I don't want to see Elon Musk with $400 billion dollars while most of my fellow uh Americans can't afford to send their kid to college. I I don't understand that that that's not reasonable. That's not fair. And it has nothing to do with democracy at all. So I'm a critic and all I can tell you is over the last 10 years my audience has

[39:44] grown >> exponentially. The number of people in the United States, out of the United States that are interested in critical assessments of what's going on >> uh is off the chart. I mean I can't keep up. I can't I turn down more invitations to speak uh than I get. I'm very proud of it. I'm flattered by it. All of that. All of that. And I've had to organize because I can't do it all myself. I organized an organization called Democracy at Work. Because one of the

[40:16] ways I think we can do better is to change the way we organize our workplaces from having a few people with a lot of power, the boss, the owner, the board of directors, and the mass of us as employees having to do what we are told with no say about it, which is not what democracy means. I think we can do better than that. I know we can >> and I and now I have a group that works together. So if you want to know what we do and we produce books and articles and videos beyond all word, we're active

[40:48] across the entire social media space. X, uh, Instagram, Tik Tok, Substack, you name it. We're busy there. You can find us under democracywork.info. That's our website. We have a weekly radio and TV show called economic update that is on WBAI among others on indeed on all the Pacific Pacific. >> So we're in a position now we're a group of us. We work together. Our job is to

[41:20] present a critical perspective but it's one designed really in the best and most honest way I know how to gather together the people who know that we can do better than the capitalist system. we live in and that is now in the kind of trouble that requires desperado leadership of the sort Mr. Trump is providing us. >> Well, there it is. Professor Richard Wolf, thank you so much for joining us. I always feel smarter after we have spoken. So, thanks for that. And in the

[41:52] meantime, I'm John Kuryaku. Thanks for joining us on uh Deep Focus. Please hit the subscribe button. It means a lot to me. Until next time, bye-bye.
