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Welcome friends, to Another Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I'm going to devote today's program to looking back over the year 2025 and going through nine, yep, nine things that strike me and I hope will interest you as key events of that year that's just behind us. It's the right time to have such an assessment. I know others have been doing it, so I thought you might be interested in how this program and this perspective looks upon the year just passed in terms of what stands out. Before we get to that, I want to remind you that there's still time to get your personally signed and addressed copy of our book, Understanding Capitalism. You can do so by emailing us at infodemocracyatwork.info and including understanding Limited Edition in the subject line. We will get back to you and explain how to get your copy signed and addressed to you. 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These are entirely produced by them without authorization or any support from us. I wish it weren't the case. We are doing everything we can to control it, but our powers, working with lawyers and with Google, are limited. In any case, thank you for letting us know as many of you have done, and please continue to bring these to our attention. Okay, let me then turn to the events of the last year that strike me as crucial. I begin with Israel's right to exist. It has been a very important right, not just for Israel, but for the whole world. And it is a right. I think 2025 supports the right of Israel to exist. But the Israelis have done something with the right to exist which is recognized by equating it to the right to impose a genocidal pogrom on Palestinians and that neither the Israelis nor anyone else has the right to do to anyone. And here is the by equating the right of Israel to exist with the right to impose a genocide on the Palestinians. Both rights, both rights have been endangered and at a great risk that neither one will survive. My second comment on 2025 is about an historic irony as Marx was one of the first to point out. One of capitalism's results would be to create a world economy to bring every corner of the world into contact with every other in a way no previous economic system had done. Capitalism could do it and Marx argued would do it. And we now know 150 years afterward after Marx dies that he was right. It has done exactly that. But that cuts in many ways that fact Europe found out the hard way in 2025. Much of the year was spent by the European nations led by Britain, France, Germany to try to use money taken from the Russians after they invaded Ukraine in 2022 to take about 2 to $300 billion. Russian money owned their property kept in western banks, as many countries keep money in western banks to take that money and the plan was to use it to fight the Russians in Ukraine. The European leaders loved the idea of using the Russians money to defeat the Russians. 2025, however, brought the Europeans up short. First, they didn't defeat the Russians. They got desperate in the second half of the year and decided to use the Russian money as collateral to borrow money in the world and give the borrowed money to the Ukrainians to keep that losing war going so they wouldn't have to face their own people having spent the money and the time on a losing war. But they discovered they couldn't do it. European countries led by Belgium, Hungary and the Czech Republic refused to go along. Made it impossible. Why? Because the Russians used the world economy and told the if you take our money, we will go into court in every country on earth saying you stole our money and you have to give it back. So anybody who lends to Europe to fight a war in Ukraine, who thinks there's collateral in case the Ukrainians can't pay back, which nobody in their right mind thinks they can, well then that collateral ain't gon be there because the Russians will have sued it away. That freaked out the Europeans. The whole plan collapsed. A world economy created by capitalism prevented Europe from pursuing that war and may well end it much sooner than it otherwise might have. In 2025, Russia and China strengthened their alliance and their collective alliance with the BRICS countries. So much so that when the United States under Trump tried to hit the world with a tariff, many of the chief countries hurt by the tariff stopped sending goods to the United States traded with one another. Instead, the alliance proved to have been created just in time to blunt the effectiveness of Mr. Trump's tariff wars. What a remarkable event in 2025. Then there was everything building up to the Venezuela events that then blew up. In the early days of January, Russia and China made clear, yeah, you can do what you want in Venezuela to a point, but beyond that, you can't. And we're going to see how that all played out. But one of its effects is no big landing, no big invasion, a little snatch and grab. And why? Because Russia and China may well have said, we don't yet know that you can go so far, but no further. Won't that be an interesting lesson in the limits of a declining American empire? Then Mr. Trump bombed a village in Nigeria. Yes. The president, who ran on ending endless wars, is provoking more of them, starting them, pushing them. The excuse in Nigeria was the killing of Christians. The people on the ground said, there aren't any. Not only no Christians, but nobody killing them. But Mr. Trump didn't seem to care. But across Africa, nothing is stronger than the hostility to European colonial powers bombing controlling Africa. The damage to the Americans will be played out in the years ahead. But this was an unbelievable blunder. It's matched by another one. And if I had time, I would go into this in detail. But there's been a shift of public opinion. We made a big issue of scapegoating immigrants. Americans have been told, especially by the Republicans and especially by Mr. Trump, that their problems are in some significant way caused by those poor people from Central and South America who've come here looking for a better life. The way all of the immigrants over the years have. They were told, no, they're hurting you, they're threatening you, they're damaging you. They were blamed, even though the idea that a rich capitalist economy of 330 million people is significantly endangered by 10 or 11 million of the poorest people on earth is ridiculous on the face of it, cannot be supported by any economic logic. I am aware of this scapegoating, which is all it ever was, produced ice a whole new police force in this country whose purpose is to hunt down, terrorize and deport immigrants, which it was doing. But 2025 is not remarkable because ICE was doing its business. It's because the number of times it arrested the wrong people. Immigrants who were legally here, immigrants who had no criminal record, immigrants who showed by their lives what the FBI reinforced, that the crime rate among immigrants is lower than what it is among native born people. Which should surprise no one. It's the normal situation. But what I noticed in 2025 was, was the end of it. That's right. The people began to be hostile to ICE and not to the immigrants. ICE overdid it badly. The kind of people ICE recruits, the kind of training it gives or doesn't, the resistance of communities that have done nothing wrong and nothing different from what generations of Americans and and their ancestors did changed. ICE is now under the microscope. Not the immigrants. It's shifted. Who knows? May shift back. I can't predict the future, but it's a remarkable change and part of why Mr. Trump has to have adventures abroad. Because the adventures ice cream unleashed and he unleashed ice are not working well for Mr. Trump are turning people against him, not cheering him on at all. We've come to the end of the first half. In the second half we will continue and look at the other remarkable events of 2025 that enable us to assess the importance of that year. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition linen covered hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send an email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your copy signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. We were going through a list of significant events in the year 2025 and I want to continue this listing with some analysis of why these events that I've chosen are as important as I think they are. Over much of the year, the European Union, often with American support, sometimes not from Mr. Trump, but from many others in America. The Europeans and those Americans accused Russia of seeking to dominate all of Europe and to eventually attack other European countries, take over Europe, all that kind of possibility. They made a big deal of Starmer in England, Macron in France, Merz in Germany and others. At the same time, Russia accused Europe particularly, but also forces in the United States of seeking to dominate and break up Russia. For them, the Russians said trying to move NATO, the Western alliance into Ukraine was the last straw, an attempt to get literally into Russia. Ukraine used to be part of what the world took to be Russia was a way to a wedge to break it up. Now Mr. Trump, as if dancing to the script that Russia wrote, spent much of the year talking about taking parts of the world Greenland, Panama, Canada, Venezuela, Mexico and possibly others. By contrast, Mr. Putin in Russia and Mr. Xi in China made no comparable threats. Perhaps you might think of an exception as Taiwan, but the relationship of Taiwan to China is rather different from the relationship any of those countries I listed has to the United States. So there's a kind of a difference that the whole world has been commenting on. During last year, the two sides in the Ukraine war accuse each other of wanting to go much further, having ambitious plans. One side, the United States, with no dissent from Europe, says so. The Europeans say something about Greenland because that's sort of part of Denmark, which is part of Europe. But even there it's weak, it's mild, and it seems to have no effect. We don't know yet whether the Europeans, other than the Spanish, will have something to say about the US Activities in Venezuela. But I find it stunning, and I know the rest of the world does that. All the speaking of a neocolonialism, of an America demanding control over other parts of the world, other countries, people who have been separate and independent and good allies in some cases like Mexico and Canada, that the United States is seriously considering taking them over, saying so, threatening military action on their soil and so forth, whereas the other side, Russia and China, aren't doing that. It doesn't prove anything, but it's not unimportant, and it hasn't been in how the world looks at who is a stable element and which of the two sides is a destabilizing element in the modern world. I've also been affected, as I know many of you have, by the following event that took place over much of 2025, a slow but steady revelation of unspeakably awful behavior by the political and economic elites in this country, the so called Epstein scandal. What do we see there? Well, we are in the middle of a process of revelation, of seeing documents which the government has had for quite a while and withheld from the public, obviously protecting Mr. Trump, who is deeply implicated in all of them. What do we see? We see a total depravity, a corruption of our media, a corruption of our judicial system, a corruption of our political system, and a corruption and destruction of the lives of who knows how many young women and girls by these people. Yes, it's salacious, yes, it draws the attention of the sensational seeking mentality, but it is also important as a political and historical event. And let me tell you why I think so, because all kinds of social forces have now begun to turn politically. The support for Mr. Trump is clearly eroding over the second half of 2025. His poll numbers show it. Interestingly, former devotees of Mr. Trump, like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and others have decided to quit, to leave politics, not to run for reelection, to turn against him. And many have said, even though many haven't, many have said the Epstein scandal turned them. Well, I don't think so. I think the significance of their turning lies elsewhere. I think what we're seeing is the beginning of a change in the American mentality, one that we should have known would happen sooner or later. And now it is. It is a revulsion against the inequality of this society. It's still too early. Given the heavy ideological training and indoctrination that Americans are subject to, it's still too early to confront that inequality explicitly, to say it out loud. Bernie Sanders says it what do we need billionaires for? He asks. There really oughtn't to be any, he suggests. Well, for most people it's not quite capable of doing that. We're supposed to admire, emulate, respect, great wealth. But somewhere else, lurking in the consciousness of the American people is a horror for the injustice of it all, of what it means that some people get all the best medical care and others get afford to go to the doctor because they don't have the insurance, or to afford that important medicine because they can't, etc. It's impossible. That doesn't go away, that kind of bitterness and anger. But if it can't be spoken about the inequality itself, if you can't get beyond laughing when the comedian makes a joke and says the punchline is eat the rich. But here, then maybe is something you can do when the super rich in their wallowing in wealth treat people the way Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump and the Prince In England and all the others treated young women on that island in ways we still are only discovering. When they behave in that disgusting away, it becomes. It becomes possible to begin to attack, well, not the wealth, but clearly what this wealth seems to have enabled and entitled them to do. It's the beginning of a critique. It's the beginning of the recognition that if they would corrupt judges and prosecutors in Florida, where Mr. Epstein's behavior first came to the attention of authorities, if lying and cheating and corrupting and bribing was done there by these rich, well connected people, if Mr. Epstein himself was snuffed out when there was a risk he would tell the story, then you begin to understand the lengths to which rich people will go to hold on to their privileges. Does it distort people? Yeah. Does it make them different from the rest of us? Yeah. We're seeing one way and that's opening a channel for criticism. And it's changing politicians and average people in ways that will make 2025 a very important year of change. Finally, Europe. If I were doing this program for Europeans primarily, this would have been my first one, but it'll be my last one because we have an European audience and my roots, as the roots of so many Americans lie in Europe. Europe is at its lowest point in my memory. Europe is now the third player in a duet. The world is more and more the United States on one side, although becoming more isolated, and Russia and China on the other, although becoming better allies and better connected in the rest of the world. But in that story of the confrontation of the US and Russia, China, Europe is a footnote. It's hitched its star ever Since World War II to the United States. But the United States has now abandoned Europe, doesn't care, looks upon Europe as a parasite to be squeezed for whatever juice you can still get. And still the Europeans hold on, afraid to carve out an independent power role of their own. Not clear that they can or may already be too little and too late. They're too divided. The very nationalisms that helped Europe become the capitalist center of the world, helped Europe come out of its feudal past. That nationalism separating the French from the Germans, from the British, from the Italians, etc. Is what prevents them from the unification without which they can't compete with the west or the east. 2025 drove that home to the Europeans in a way that will shape world history, but above all, the history of Europe in crucial ways. In 2020, the world has changed. Above all for Europe. I hope they can figure a way to dig out of the hole into which they have driven themselves. Thank you all for your attention. I hope you have found this review of 2025 Provocative in the Best sense of that word. And as always, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.