Richard Wolff (0:20)

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Today's program will begin, of course, as we usually do, by reminding you that Charlie is waiting your communications. If you have suggestions or comments for the program, you can reach him at charlie.info438gmail.com and also to remind you of the book Understanding Capitalism, available at our website, which is a companion to these programs in terms of going much more deeply into all of the kinds of topics we deal with here and giving you, as I say, more depth to understanding them. And I think it's a worthwhile companion to the program. In the second half of today, we're going to be talking with Professor Geert Dont, an economics professor at an unusual economics program here in the United States and who will talk to us about the profession, the teaching and the special program that they operate. All right, let's jump right in. I want to begin by talking about something I've occasionally brushed up against in these programs, but many of you have asked me to go into in some more detail, and it's nothing short of the death of libertarianism. Libertarianism has been a way of thinking now quite powerful, quite dominant in the United States for a good bit of the last 40 to 50 years. In other words, most of the lifetime of most of you. And here's basically what this idea that an economy like ours, a capitalist free enterprise economy, works best if the government stays out of it. Once upon a time this was called, when the French embraced it, laissez faire. That means in French, let it be. The government should let the economy be. Don't interfere, don't make rules and regulations. Stay out of it. That the economy works best if individuals negotiate with one another buying and selling, including selling their ability to work to an employer who buys it by paying them a wage, etc. Etc. The economy will work best that that way, don't interfere. Don't interfere inside each country and don't interfere internationally. Internationally, it had a kind of a sister name, if you like, called neoliberalism or sometimes just globalization, but it was the same libertarian idea that capitalism is a wonderful system that that works best if the government doesn't interfere in it. Now, for most of the last half century or longer, the chief beneficiary of all of this was the United States. And for no mystery reason, because the United States came out of World War II much richer, much more powerful than anybody else that's why the dollar became the global currency. The United States produced a share of global output far larger than its share of global population. Wealth was concentrated here. The gold of the world was stored in Fort Knox here, not somewhere else, etc. Etc. The United States was dominant. Nobody could compete with it. And so a free world, free for economic power to do its thing, was very advantageous to the United States because they had more dollars to play with than anybody else could even imagine. All of that is over. All of that is dead. The United States is no longer the dominant player. This hasn't been told to the American people because no politician wants to have the task of bringing that message. So the politicians evade it, avoid it, deny it. But I'm not a politician. I don't have to. And you would like to know what's really going on, or at least I'm going to assume that you would. So we're not in that position. And how do you know it? Because libertarianism, this whole idea of the government unnecessary, keep the government out, that is completely dead. And no one has played the role of burial assistant more than Mr. Trump. Let's take a look. Mr. Trump got up a few weeks ago and said, I am hitting every country on earth with a tariff. I am intervening. I'm shaping the market. I'm saying, you can't just come here and sell your goods to an American the way you used to negotiating with the American company or the American consumer. How much you pay for, how much you get. No, no, no, no, no. That's over. I'm telling you. You want to sell here, you got to give a tax to me. Uncle Sam right here in Washington. I don't care where you come from, I don't care what you produce. I don't care what the Americans do who buy your stuff. You want to sell here, you got to deal with the government. That's the opposite of libertarianism. Then he started giving money, actually following Mr. Biden, who did it, also giving money to selected corporations in the microtub chip business or in the solar panel business in order to shape their ability to compete with the Chinese. Oh, my goodness. You're intervening directly. Then we started sanctions. Mr. Biden was good at that, too. So this is kind of a bipartisan burial party for. For libertarianism. We need the government, it turns out. How do I know? Because the President tells us that national security requires that. I'm going to take what, the Panama Canal away from the people who own it. Now, I'm not going to buy it. I'm not going to discuss it. I won't take it. The government's going to come in there and. And then I'm going to take Greenland and I might make Canada the 51st state. This is massive government intervention, often justified by we need it. The economy is in trouble and will be fixed by doing this or national security. I'm not so interested in the reasons. We had national security problems before when we celebrated neoliberalism. We had economic problems before when we celebrated neoliberalism. The problems aren't new or different. It's the answer that is. And why. I'm afraid that answer is pretty obvious, too. For the first time in a century, the United States has a major economic competitor, the People's Republic of China. This is not an endorsement of the Chinese. This is not a statement that they don't have economic problems. They do. Everybody does. I'm talking about the fact that if you add up the output of goods and services per year, which is called the gdp, gross Domestic product, and it's a statistic we keep for every country on earth. It's a rough measure of their economic footprint, how big, how important they are. At the end of World War II, the United States dominated everybody. The GDP here outranked that of all the other major countries, all of whom had been destroyed by the war. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, all of them China too. But today is a completely different landscape. China and its allies, known as the BRICs, together account for more than 35% of the total output of the world. The United States and its allies, called the G7, they account for about 27%. Not even close. China is the bigger, richer economic power. That's the reality. And when you add to that that China and the brics have more than half the people on earth population in their countries, whereas the United States, 330 million comes out to 4.5% of the world's people. 50 to 60% over there, 4.5% here. Stop. We're not the powerhouse we were. And Mr. Trump is here to tell us we're going to use the state every which away. Are we going to allow freedom of people to move around the earth as best they can looking for jobs? No. We may have become a powerful country by letting tens of millions come here, urging them to come here. That may be our history, but the world has changed and Mr. Trump recognizes it. You don't have to behave the way he does to do that, but he has recognized it. So. So there's no more free movement of human beings. We are deporting people. People who've worked here for 20 years, who've paid their taxes dutifully, who've never had a crime attached to them, are being deported. We didn't used to do that, or at least most of the time we didn't. We do now. We're tariffing everybody. We're sanctioning. The number one sanctioning country in, in the world is the United States. We go after people's property, we take it from them. We took 300 billion from Russia and froze it and won't let them get at it as part of the Ukraine war dealings. These are remarkable things. It's the end of neoliberalism. We are now in a world of economic nationalism. And it better be understood, because it is the justification for everything Mr. Trump is doing and increasingly for what the Democrats say. And if we're going to be critical of their policies and where they lead, one of the things we have to take into account is the neoliberal libertarian ideology that that is no longer the justification. The only place you see it is in Mr. Musk when he fires large numbers of federal employees. He restates the old libertarian mantra. We don't want government words more efficient if the private sector. Nobody believes that anymore, Mr. Musk. And that, like everything else you do, is turning around to undercut your wealth, your Tesla corporation and your reputation. It was in the cards all along. The only other update in our first half that I have time for has to do with the corporatization of American universities Mr. Trump is going after, particularly the elite ones, and he's saying, I'm not going to give you money the way the government has been giving you money, because I don't like the ideology you put out. You make liberals, you make Democrats. We aren't liberals, we aren't Democrats. We want Republicans and conservatives. And if you don't adjust your courses, your faculty, your programs, we're not giving you government money. Well, you know, in a way, the corporations who are screaming bloody murder and the universities, rather, who are they really have themselves to blame. Once upon a time, those placesand I'm, let me admit, I'm a graduate of Harvard and Stanford and Yale. Those are the schools I went to. Those are the schools in the crosshairs of Mr. Trump's cutbacks. They could have been universities. They were the way they mostly were when I went to school there. But they decided to become bigger and richer and to do many things other than educate. So they got into bed with corporations to partner and they got into bed with the government to partner and they took a lot of money to grow rich and be big corporations. And now they're paying the price. They should have stayed independent, committed to the education which was their beginning. And if they don't learn that lesson, we're going to see much more government control of universities than we're already seeing attempted. Now, thank you for your attention. Stay with us. We'll be right back with Professor Geert Dante. 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@info democracyatwork.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. I am very glad to bring to our microphone and to our cameras Professor Geert Daunt. I have known him for many years. He has quite a record of winning teaching awards. He is an associate professor and department chair of economics at the John Jay College of the City University of New York. His teaching and research focuses on the economics of crime, the justice system, if that's the right name for it, and race, and that's an area that he is a specialist in. I have asked him to come and speak with us because I want to hear from someone directly involved in university life, especially in a position such as Geertz, who is a chair of a department and therefore has administrative responsibilities alongside of his teaching. So first of all, Geert, since we've known each other, I'm going to take the liberty of calling you by your first name. Thank you very much for your time. Okay.