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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, the and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Before we begin today, I want to let everybody know that enrollment for the Left Education Project spring classes is now open. These are classes that are available online and they cover a range of topics I think you will find interesting. It's your opportunity to learn directly from accredited university professors getting together, based on their own research and teaching, to offer these courses. They're for academics, but they're also for activists and they're for the interested general public. I will be teaching a course on Marxian class analysis together with Professor Shahram Azhar of Bucknell University. That will be on Wednesdays from 4 to 6 Eastern Standard Time beginning March 4 for four consecutive weeks. If you want information about that or any other course, please go to www. Leftforum.org LEP for Left Education Project. We want to make these types of educational activities more widely available. Please help us spread the word, let other people know, encourage them to register. I think anyone who takes any of these courses will be glad of what they get and glad that they participated in doing it. You can, of course, also support our work by going to our website, democracyatwork.info or by participating in our growing substack community, democracyatwork.substack.com and you might be interested in our members only extra material available by joining our patreon community@patreon.com Democracy at Work and signing up there. Please remember to like and subscribe to this video. It's your way to partner with us, to spread the word, to reach more people, and to make the kinds of interventions that we all know our times badly need. Today's program is our attempt to provide a kind of assessment. We've now had a full year of the presidency, the second president term of Mr. Trump. We've had a chance to see what he's going to do in his second effort. Clearly, he didn't get all that much done in his first. That's his estimate, of course, not when he's boasting, but the rest of the time. And I want to say, yes, we do now see clearly what you're doing and we're going to talk to you about it and we're going to tell you what we think so that the rest of the American people can get another perspective than the one they might be dependent upon if mainstream media were their only diet. I want to begin by stressing that Mr. Trump inherited something that Mr. Biden had before him and Trump and Obama and the others did, too. It is a profound historical change. And part of understanding these leaders is understanding how they interact with that change, whether it be by denying it, which is a very important one way people have of dealing with change or accommodating it or making it worse or trying to stop or reverse it. Most presidents do all of those things, Trump certainly among them. But nonetheless, they are also part of a tradition. Mr. Trump is as trapped by the tradition of the Republican Party as he is by the reality of the decline of the American empire. We are not the economic powerhouse we once were. The empire that the United States constructed after World War II, in which we replaced the old empires, British, French, German, Japanese, Russian and so on, that's over. The rest of the world is not happy being under the American empire, and the United States is itself unsure of where to go. We don't play the same role in the world economy we once did. The empire is slipping. And while it slips, we have, for the first time in a century, a major economic competitor, the People's Republic of China. It can produce everything we do, and in many cases better or cheaper or both. We know it because our homes are filled with those products. There is no history of Walmart without the People's Republic of China, which is where we produce what Walmart mostly sells, and so on. So Mr. Trump had a problem. The United States government trying to keep this economy afloat. As the empire declines, we're discovering as a nation that there were hundreds of ways having an empire sustained our economy. And as the empire fades away, so does that sustenance. The dollar was once the world's currency in a way it isn't anymore. American products dominated the world market in a way that they don't anymore. The United States is the big importer, but the exports, those are taken care of by other countries. We don't manufacture hardly anything. The decline in manufacturing is spectacular. Across the last 50 years, even this last year of Mr. Trump, where he promised these tariffs are going to reshore American business factories are going to come back from China, from India, from Brazil. Here's the statistic for the last total number of manufacturing jobs in the United states declined by 70,000 jobs. Not only did he not bring more jobs, he lost jobs. A total failure, which you won't hear much about unless you do the work, do the research, you'll see. But why is that? What Mr. Trump didn't understand is that a declining empire is a very powerful historical moment. It's teaching the whole world that the future isn't in the U.S. it's in Asia, it's in China, it's in the BRICS alliance that the Chinese have built. Sure, the brics have their enormous differences and enormous conflicts and enormous problems, as does the West. But that doesn't mean they are not on the upswing and the west is on the downswing. That's the reality. And there's very little way to change that. What are you going to do is really the question now, Mr. Trump. And the Republicans have organized themselves for many years in the following the number one priority of the Republican Party is to take care of the employer class in America, to give them profits, to give them tax cuts, to give them regulations that support them, rules that make organizing labor unions difficult. All of that. If you know anything about American history, you'll know that's what the Republicans have done. And in exchange for all that, service the employer class, and particularly the biggest and richest of among them, fund the Republican Party. Give it the now hundreds of millions, even billions that they need. And what does the party do with the money the rich donor class of employers gives? They go out and they mobilize groups of voters. If you're a Republican, these voters include fundamentalist Christians, people who oppose abortion, people who love their guns, people who hate immigrants. I could go on white supremacists, you all know this. And they mobilize those people and they give them symbols, at least of support. Now, for years that worked and you had Republicans like the Bush family taking care of business, give tax cuts to the rich, but also make life harder for people who want to get an abortion, make life easier for people who want to have guns and so on. They don't do very much. It's mostly symbolic. The people against abortion were always frustrated with how little the Bush administration really did. So they were ripe after years of being frustrated that way. For someone to come along, Mr. Trump, and say, okay, I'm going to come in, I'm going to do everything for the rich, but I'm going to actually do more for you. For you white supremacists, for you anti abortionists, for you gun enthusiast. For you patriot, for you anti immigrant, I'm going to do more than you've seen. I'm going to talk harder and harsher and tougher and I'll do more. And that way I'll win elections and I'll go to the rich and I'll give me even more so I can do this because then we'll get elected. And I can do more for you, in case you're wondering. Here, let me show you how it works. In the first presidency of Mr. Trump, the first thing he did was to give corporations and the rich the biggest tax cut they'd ever have, the one that was passed by the Congress he controlled in December of, of 2017. And the first thing he did in his second term was the big beautiful tax bill that he got passed early in 2020 five months after he took office. First priority, first act, take care of your main constituent. Then he did ice, then he did all the other stuff in he's been doing and the rich want him to do even more. The government is borrowing too much money. The world is not willing to lend to the United States the way it once did. We better do something about our deficits or we'll be unable to function because we will be unable to borrow. Okay, I'm going to raise taxes, which Republicans never did. A special tax, the tariff. He kept saying that the foreigner would pay it. That's because Mr. Trump is either clever or ignorant. Americans have paid 97% of all the tariffs, either American business or American consumers. How are the Democrats different? Well, the answer, which many of you have already noticed, is not very they too go to the biggest, richest corporations and beg for money. They too take the money and then mobilize their voters. And who are they? Union members, women, non white people, liberals, academics. And they try and that's how they win elections. I'm going to continue showing you how Mr. Trump is wrapped up in, in this way of running a country when we return. 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're doing an assessment of the first year of Mr. Trump's second presidency. We've been talking about what the Republican Party under him have been doing and what the Democrats have been doing. And the Democrats have been sitting there doing relatively little, hoping that the Republicans overshoot the mark, go too far, and thereby bring about their own defeat so that the Democrats can come in. It's been a strategy Republicans and Democrats have used against each other, try to mess up the other one. Each one does. Try to slow them down, try to undermine whatever they're doing, then blame them because they didn't get it done and hope that people switch and vote to you and people do, but they're not stupid. So more and more Americans don't bother with politics. That's part of why Mr. Trump succeeded. He was so harsh, so blunt, so vulgar that people realize he's a little bit different. Maybe he can do something, but what was he supposed to do? Well, number one, he was supposed to do something about the terrible deficit. The government borrows trillions of dollars, gets itself deeper and deeper into debt, makes it more and more likely that foreigners won't lend, and we need them to, because our deficits can't be covered by our Americans alone. Haven't been for years. What did he do? He hit the world with tariffs. He angered, embittered the whole world, every country, by hitting them with tariffs, not having a conversation. How do we solve our problems in a mutual way? Not making compromises, not saying, how about we do this for you and you do this for. No, no, no. Announcing with bravado. I'll do this. I'm going to hit you with a big one. If you want me to reduce it a little bit, I will. But that's your choice. A lot of pain or a little pain? Of course, Americans can't understand why the rest of the world is angry at them, but the rest of the world has no problem understanding it at all. But here's the interesting the tariffs, after a year, maybe $200 billion, sounds like a lot. It is a lot of money. Does it solve our deficit problem? Not even close. Completely different order of magnitude. And as if to mock the whole thing, Mr. Trump announces again with great bravado, he's going to increase his defense bud by $600 billion in one year, completely overwhelming anything that the tariffs could do, might do in the present or the future. No, our deficits will be worse, not better, under Mr. Trump. Did he succeed? No, he failed. Did he end the two wars, the horrible War of Ukraine and the horrible genocide in Gaza. No, he didn't end either of them. The so called ceasefire in Gaza is punctuated on many days by more killing than that day had in Ukraine. And the war in Ukraine continues also. And then he bombed Iran in June and he bombed a village in Nigeria and he abducted the leader of Venezuela. And he threatens war against Iran all the time. And more war, you know, can distract people from their domestic problems, but be the end of war. No running around and telling the world he ended eight wars, none of which had the force or the potential that Ukraine and Gaza had is not an offset. I want to also talk about monetary policy. The Federal Reserve, we have an ongoing inflation, but the Federal Reserve dare not raise interest rates, which is what they normally do when they want to cut back on an inflation for fear that we're also on the edge of recession. What does that mean? It means our economy is unstable. The job of the Federal Reserve for the hundred years we've had it has been to achieve full or near full employment and price stability. We don't have either of those things. We rarely do, really. What the Federal Reserve is doing is trying to make the downturns last less long, be less severe than they otherwise might be, and the inflation be less horrible than it otherwise might be. But that's not a very happy story, is it? And when you're the outs, like Mr. Trump was during Biden, you can talk about how it's a failure. And the minute you become president, our economy is great. No, it isn't. It's exactly in the basement that it was under Biden. And in terms of inequality, in of terms it's worse in terms of its relationships with the rest of the world, unspeakably worse. NATO is falling apart. The EU is trying to figure out whether to be the friend or the enemy of the United States. Europe is genuinely afraid that the United States is going to snatch the Greenland. What is going on here? The truth of what is happening in Europe is that Europe is discovering that its great protector and ally isn't interested in doing that anymore, partly because it can't afford, doesn't have a big empire generating the wealth to enable all that to be done. If it's going to beef up its own military, it doesn't want the burden of protecting the Europeans. Mr. Trump wants out of Ukraine. The Europeans want to defeat the Russians in Ukraine. Mr. Trump says, you want to do that, you do it. I'm not going to do it. This is a radical change from what happened after World War II, when the United States wanted allies, needed allies, courted those allies had a big defense for them. Of course, for them isn't quite accurate. The help for their military made them buy the American tanks and the American bullets and the American technology. It's good for American business as well as protecting them. But we can't do what we used to do. That's what a declining empire does. Let me drive that point home, because it cannot be overstated. When empires decline, the rich and the powerful inside, whether they admit it or face it or deny it, they go about trying to hold on to their wealth and their power. So as the empire declines, if the rich hold on to theirs, so much the worse for the middle and the poor, the majority. In other words, the rich and powerful offload the costs of a declining empire onto the middle and the lower around them. That's what's happening to us in the United States. That's the historic task given to Mr. Trump. Savagely cut the government offices. That's what Elon Musk and Doge did at the beginning. Refused to continue the subsidies for medical health insurance that were instituted during the pandemic to help the American people. Take that help away. That's what the UN Congress just did. Take away, take away, take away. Under the heading of getting rid of undocumented immigrant criminals. Who in the world is going to support them? What you're actually doing and what the agenda was all along, obviously, is trying to terrorize the entire immigrant community. They're the scapegoat. Things aren't going well. Are you going to admit the empire is declining? Are you going to admit that the Chinese are out competing us? You want to get a good electric car, the best one in the world. Byd, a Chinese company, want to get a cheap electric car. Best in the world. Chinese. Byd, the head of the pharmaceuticals industry in the United States, predicted a couple of days ago that the Chinese will soon be the dominant producer of pharmaceuticals in the world. I mean, the signs are everywhere, everywhere. And we have a government here that pretends it isn't there. The only thing they can say about the Chinese is they're aggressive. Well, the Chinese are not demanding Greenland. The Chinese are not abducting leaders in other countries like Mr. Maduro. The Chinese are not sending their military all over the world. The Chinese don't have 700 military bases around the world the way the US does. The rest of the world will not buy the nonsense, even in the United States, and it's wearing thin. All of these are signs of a declining empire. It is not a criticism of Mr. Trump to say that not only does he deny it, but he's not able to do anything about it. Lots of bravado, lots of talk, but very little action. And that means a continuing shrinkage of the American economy. We used to talk not about the American economy alone, but about the G7, the seven big industrial economies allied with the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Italy. But we can't talk about that anymore because that G7 is fractured and by now fractured beyond hope. The recent trips to China of Mr. Carney from Canada and Mr. Starmer from Britain. They are looking to make economic arrangements with the new emerging economic superpower. They have been rudely awakened by the United States to a changed world. The United States is going to try, if we're all lucky, to find and carve a place for itself in this new world order, not as the dominant power, which it was from 1945 to 2015, but now as one nation among others, with an over built military, but nothing else. And that's not enough to shape the world, might be enough to destroy it, but not enough to shape a living future. That's the reality and that's what a year of Mr. Trump has taught us, if we're willing to see and face what, what's actually going on. I hope you found this overview, this assessment of interest, and as always, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.