273 - Richard Wolff: Iran, Israel, and the End of the American Empire

38:18Under Mr. Melenchon there is a unified left that ran for office. It is the largest bloc in the French National Assembly. It is a unity of the socialists, the communists, the greens, and Mr. Melenchon's own France unbowed, which in this country would be considered far left. They're the biggest and they did well in the municipal elections. It's a two tours though. There's another election coming up in a day or two. All of these things are making it impossible for these center-right people to survive. They thought their survival was in demonizing Russia and that would justify sucking up to the United States and get them enough votes to stay in power.

39:19The far right against it wants to make a deal with Russia. You love this. The left not so sure about Russia but has its own agenda separate. So they're trying to juggle this. And then the United States just pulls the rug out. Oh, you want to make a politic close to us? Let us show you how bad we can make you look. Now the far right and the far left will make fun of these leaders for being lackeys of a United States that's kicking them in the teeth. And they themselves in their protests against Trump are feeding the politics that will eat them up. You're trapped. The Europeans are trapped and they're whether these people will do it or they'll be all kicked out and in will come either right-wingers or left-wingers who both of which for different reasons will tell the United States to go jump in the lake.

40:24It's you know and And if they want to survive because they do need the United States, that kind of a politics will impose upon them for the first time a genuine effort at independent economic development. Now, as an economist, if you ask me, can they do that? My answer is it's a long shot. they have spent too long under too much of the umbrella of the United States. A few months ago, the board of directors of the Volkswagen Corporation in Germany, right? One of their biggest, well, you know, produced a VW automobile and trucks, sat down at the invitation of Mr. Trump's government to discuss moving the headquarters of VW to the United States.

41:30For Germany, that is, I don't know, it's like GM announcing in a fancy ballroom of a New York hotel. We're leaving Detroit and we're going to Nigeria. What? What? And henceforth, the new name of the Chevy will be the Niger. Of course, they couldn't do that because the pronunciation in this country would get them in trouble. it it's just that's why it's a very messy divorce in which the two sides are so upset now by what's pulling them apart that they can't think straight they both need lawyers because even though the lawyers have their own logic somebody has to hold them back from saying and doing really stupid things.

42:33The Europeans would have told them, don't go to war against Iran now. Don't do that. Please, until... We're fighting in Ukraine. Poor Mr. Zelensky. He's worried that the fighting in the Middle East will distract from Ukraine. Good morning, Mr. Zelensky. And aren't you a clever fellow? You're going to have a double game now, pretending that you're not losing that war in Ukraine? And blaming whom? In the end, he has to blame the United States. So he has to blame what he can't afford to afford. When you're in that kind of a box, it's usually a sign that whatever you had going isn't available anymore.

43:29right? He's getting very close to insulting Mr. Trump because he's not getting the support. And even if he got the support, he's losing. And a politician like him who's losing and whose losses are now so enormous that it's the whole country that he's about to lose. the Russians already have lopped off a third of what was Ukraine before what's left is a rump state and if he doesn't deal with them they are gonna keep moving and he can lie about it which he does with your believable frequency that's okay. Politicians do it. But he has to insult. He has to blame somebody. Otherwise, he's lost the war since he's in charge.

44:30So the way to do that is the Europeans aren't supporting me, or the Americans aren't. And if he blames the Europeans, they've already taken care of that problem because they blame the Americans. So the Americans are going to get blamed in the Ukraine and in Europe for the loss of the war in Ukraine. They're not going to say the heroic Russians defeated us. They're not going to do that. The Russians will do that, but they won't do that. They will look for who to blame. And Mr. Trump and the United States are the obvious choice. And whereas before they were held back because they need the United States, the tariffs, the withdrawal from Ukraine, and now the war in Iran are three punches in the nose of the Europeans that will make them much more willing to allow the blaming of the United States to save them.

45:34They don't want to blame. It'll make their notion, support us, because we're fighting Russia, look very lame. They cannot accept any blame. If you looked at Mr. Starmer yesterday, he welcomed Mr. Zelensky on his umpteenth visit. We're with you. We're with you. You're losing with us with you. That part wasn't said, but we're with you. He has to. And when that goes down, when that dead end comes,

46:11they won't deal with Russia another colossal mistake they won't deal with you have to what are you doing you don't deal with Russia they keep moving and you then attack send long long distance rockets into Russia to bomb them they can't do it back to you There's a very long land border between Iran and Russia. Any missile Russia has can be carried secretly across that border and launched from Iran.

46:54Now what? Good to keep that in mind. Mm-hmm. I don't know. Has that responded to your question? Yeah. Yeah, well, you gave a lot of very compelling reasons why this won't be good for Israel in the long run. Also, why it won't be good for Europe. As far as why it's a colossal mistake for Trump, the main thing I get out of your response is that it will really strain our relationship with European countries. But I'm curious about why or how it's a colossal mistake for Trump domestically. You mentioned earlier in our conversation that he's poised to lose certain upcoming elections. And something I've heard, something I wonder what your take on is, is that it's possible or plausible at least that Trump could try to leverage this or future conflicts into remaining the president for longer than his allotted term.

48:06because there are lots of open discussions about how he will remain in power, and that's another thing I'd like to ask you about. Well, I think the problem—let's go back to the problem for the United States.

48:24Mr. Trump and the people who support him are the top 10 % of the American income distribution. That means they own 80 % of the securities traded on our stock markets. It means they are pretty much in charge of selecting and promoting politicians into high offices.

49:07And so from their perspective, they have been successful now for quite a while.

49:22in financing and thereby controlling the only industry where the United States is now arguably in a leading position. By that, I mean the so-called, you know, the high tech in your part of the country, all of that. Apple, Amazon, Google, all that.

50:01Their economic situation is excellent. I'd be the last one to suggest otherwise. They have used the government very well to collect enormous amounts of money and siphon them, deliver them to the high-tech industries as subsidies of all kinds. and funnel the money into the stock market so that the inflation created by that kind of money explosion doesn't happen on the mass level, food, clothing, and shelter, but boosts crazily the prices of stocks in the stock market where it simply, you know, finances a bidding war of shareholders. So they win. I mean, their monthly statement from the stock market looks really good.

51:04They've invested in those fancy, you know, NVIDIA or other companies like that. So that's looking good. They're doing fine. And one of their self-indulgences has been, with the help of the media to pretend to themselves that their good fortune is the equivalent of the economic development of the United States. They they don't they don't grimace when Trump says this is the greatest economy of all time. For them that's about true. For him it's probably true. But for the industrial structure of this country, for its international trade position, for the position of its currency, the dollar it's a disaster they they think it's they're the same but they aren't they've gone this way over the last 40 years and they just don't know it's like think of it this way they were surprised and some of them still don't get it that when you talk about China you're not talking about an Asian society very poor that you read about in the National Geographic magazine every four issues it's a modern industrialized economy in many ways it's ahead of you they have no even those who go and visit.

53:05I met with them, come back, they didn't see it. They are a wonderful example that you don't want to see it, you don't see it. They think the United States moved up with them and they with it. It didn't. They took off. The rest of the country lagged behind and the lag is getting worse all the time. And so they don't grasp the splitting. Mr. Trump, cleverly, Mr. Trump mobilizes that delusion. He speaks to the people at the top, the 10%, what they want to hear. It's all great. That's what they want to hear. They don't need him to tell them about their own condition. They follow their monthly statements from their brokerage houses, they can do that.

54:18What they want to hear from him is that the whole country loves them and is happy the way they are, happy with their economic situation. They don't want to hear from democratic politicians, or for people like me, any noise about underlying economic problems. when you say to them one of the constraints on the united states is that it can't match russia's production of artillery shells they look blankly which they can't they look blankly at you and they don't believe you and i and i asked them i said you know it's interesting to me you believe me a lot of other things how come you don't believe me i didn't make this shit up You know, I don't do that.

55:16It's pointless. And their answers to me was, that can't be. Okay, it can't be. It is. Profit is a very harsh master. American corporations go where the profit is available, and they leave the areas where it isn't. Making basic goods and services has the Asians have out-competed us. And what they have out-competed us, South Americans, Eastern Europeans, and so on, have. So American companies stop making that stuff. Stop looking for workers. Stop buying the machines that make that. And they become disused to it. Could they become again adept at it? Yes. Could there be some government here that has the time and the brains to recommit to a rapid re-industrialization of the United States?

56:24Yeah, possible. But nobody's doing that. We're held back by our own ideology. And Mr. Trump is challenging that. Mr. Trump is actively intervening, buying shares of companies, which he's done a lot of, giving subsidies to this one, not to that one, making life harder for that one, not for this one. He's intervening because the capitalists of the United States have learned a lesson. Not enough of them, not yet, but a good number of them have learned a lesson that the reason the Chinese outgrow the United States every year for the last 30 years, an unbelievable achievement, more rapid growth, greater increase in GDP, year in and year out for 30 years, maybe 35 years now, has been because the government takes an active role in shaping.

57:32We do not, the Chinese do not leave economic development to profit. They use profit, they pay attention to profit. It is an indicator of what they do, but they use many other metrics, many other objectives in shaping economic development. And what they've proven over the last 30 years, which Americans cannot hear to their own laws. What they've proved is, if you have the government in there working closely on economic development, and therefore you make a whole lot of investments that don't happen to be profitable, but are good for economic development, you'll out-develop the United States and Britain by a lot.

58:21They've shown it's not like we can have a debate more or less government that's as old as Methuselah that debate. But and boring, equally boring. But to prove it we don't need to debate. It's done. It's done. The Chinese get it. You know when I was a graduate student Robinson, when I was a graduate student at Yale in the economics department, the most popular subfield for, you know, we had to choose after we took certain basic courses, we chose subfields that we could specialize in. And by far the most popular one was called Economic Development. And there was a whole building on Hill House Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut, which Economics Department had half the buildings on the street.

59:22And one whole building was called the Development Office. And there was an Economic Development. and we had classes there, seminars, visiting lecturers and all that. And we were developing the economics that would inform the post-World War II economic development programs that the UN, OECD, and everybody else was promoting. Many of my colleagues went to Asia, Africa, Latin America, as on teams of advisors to the local governments, newly independent. These were mostly ex-colonies who wanted nice young Yale people to give them a quickie step up to economic development. But of course nobody went to China because they were communists and therefore you know you're liable to pick up syphilis, some other local disease.

1:00:37So we didn't go to China, we did not go to North Korea, and so on. But the big one was China obviously they're the biggest country in the world so they didn't get any help as a consequence of which they are the great success and all the countries we helped aren't so it should tell you something the west was an amazing achievement until it spawned And the people who did an end run around the West came up with their own recipe for how to make themselves no longer poor and showed the way to do it. This is not the first time that that has happened. If you're a wise leader of the United States, you don't expect it never to happen.

1:01:40the best you can do is keep your eyes out and see where it's happening and then work out some livable arrangement. If you don't, they will replace you. Not because they're nasty or in the language of American politics, the Chinese are aggressive. No, they're not. They don't have 700 military bases around the world. They have one. We have 700. They don't. We call them aggressive. It's a joke. Nobody's laughing, but it's an endlessly repeated joke. The United States needs to learn from China. And here's a real joke. It's the big tech businesses who've learned it. they see that China is now developing better AI software than we can.

1:02:40Why? Because of how they're doing it. So what do we want? We want a lot of government help so that we can have a coordinated, you know, that's what we want. We want to do, the big businesses are learning from the Chinese model. However, they don't understand that if the business makes it, it's very different than if the Communist Party makes it. Because they are very different institutions, responsive to different people in different ways. They will learn that lesson, but you and I will no longer be here before that happens. Meanwhile, it's just the United States watching this colossus overtake it.

1:03:27And that's what's already happening. The GDP, as I've told you, the GDP of China and the BRICS is now far greater than the GDP of the United States and the G7. And since the G7 is the United States, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe, the divorce I'm talking about between the United States and Europe means that more and more of Europe and Canada and Japan is going to be looking to salvage its economic future by tying itself to the other big power. And that's not the United States. You can see it already with Iran. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz threatens Japan and South Korea, two of the most important economic units in Asia for the United States.

1:04:26The rest of Asia is either neutral or BRICS. So it's South Korea and Japan. But they depend for their oil on the Strait of Hormuz. And what are they doing? They're busy making other arrangements. What does that mean? Disconnecting from the American control of the Gulf and the Middle East and what they're doing. It's you watching the process of this empire dissolve. And these are moments in which, in the irony of the irony, the effort to slow the decline of the empire, which is what's going on in the mind of the president who makes war on Iran, cannot fathom that the step you're taking worsens the decline of the empire.

1:05:28Because the answer is, what am I going to do? I can't rely on Israel to be my agent in that part of the world if the Israelis tell me that the only way I can be your agent is if you get rid of what can wipe me out, which is the Iranians. So you've got to come help me wreck the Iranians so I can be your great ally. Yes, Mr. Trump should have said, but if I do that, I risk a real diminution of my role in the world and your obliteration. You think your obliteration is on the horizon anywhere. And you may be right, but that's not my concern. I got to deal with the country I'm responsible. You know, I don't mock these people.

1:06:24I mean, I don't like them, but I don't mock them. This is very difficult situations that they are in. Israel made a decision years ago to be and do what it does. You know, it's a settler colonialism in a time when that's not on the historic agenda. We remain in the era of anti-colonialism. The settler colonialisms that Israel patterns itself on, including the American, we came here in the 17th century when slaughtering the native population was perfectly fine, was okay, was rationalized in all kinds of ways that at least for those coming in was enough to justify wholesale murder. But we don't live in that.

1:07:25That's not the situation now. the people who are in charge of large parts of the world are themselves, you know, survivors of anti-colonialist efforts. What are you going to do with them? There's a reason that the most important European supporter of the Palestinians are the Irish. Why is the Irish government and parliament pro-Palestinian long before? Because they're, you know, the Irish feel they were treated by the, they understand what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. The Irish feel the British did only over an even longer period of time. And they're right. And so the Palestinians have friends in Ireland, always have to this day.

1:08:26Well, you can't do what Israelis are doing. They couldn't face that. They couldn't. So if the British, horrible colonialists, if there ever were any, if they carve up the Middle East into little warring territories, which they did, and give the Jews a place, the Zionist portion of them. It was in order to keep them fighting with one another. That was the British plan. That's basically what's going on now. When Persia bombs Bahrain and Kuwait and, you know, UAE and all that. It's these little countries who can't survive fighting for each fighting for survival against each other. Kursia has to bomb them because they made a deal with the United States to sell oil and to invest petrodollars and give the Americans a base.

1:09:34So the Iranians go okay you're gonna be a base for our enemy and shoot your base down. Yeah, but they don't have anything else. And they depend on the straight of hormones.

1:09:50In retrospect, it's all pretty obvious. Maybe the interesting question is, why did so many people implicitly connive with one another not to see it for so long until it comes and blows up in their face? but i think that the troubles for the united states are just are just beginning

1:10:18i i have been alive as as have you in the last several wars of the united states korea vietnam afghanistan iraq four maybe ukraine five initially in all those wars popular support for the United States participation was pretty high it came to be accepted wisdom that it takes two or three years into a war before Americans popular opinion turns against the war when you know when dead dead young men and women come back in body bags when social problems get worse but this war is a minority supported war from day one you know all the tv pictures of missiles honing in and flames shooting at didn't work the majority opinion, even the gutless Democrats are able to whine a little bit against the war.

1:11:41I think that's in the momentous side. You know, and you can blame Mr. Trump. You didn't prepare people for, yeah, you didn't. But usually that's not necessary all that much. and a little bit he did. And now he's trying to make up for it. They're going to develop nuclear weapons. They're going to threaten us. If you don't fight over there, then the next thing we'll be fighting here. All that doesn't work. I take that to be an enormous warning sign to Mr. Trump. You don't have much time, Jack, Don. You better get your act together and have something to market this craziness. Because you're all alone.

1:12:30No one's going to help you. The more difficulty the Americans get into, the more the Europeans will publicly congratulate themselves for not being in that swamp. Blah, blah, blah. What a wonderful story. The United States didn't pull out of Ukraine because they had a disagreement. The United States pulled out of Ukraine, thereby causing the loss there in order to fight the crazy war in Iran, which none of us wanted. makes Mr. Starmer look clean. And he's got a harder election ahead of him than Mr. Trump does. Mr. Macron is not worried about his election. His chances of getting re-elected are equivalent to yours.

1:13:20Zero. He is a historical dead. My family is part French. They're not very political. they hate him they don't dislike him they hate him I've never seen it my whole life in my family I've never seen that level of hostility toward anybody that they have towards him I mean they didn't much like him at the beginning but they thought let's see oh boy it's only humor if his name comes up there's immediately a joke about not flattering, often scatological.

1:14:08I don't think Mr. Trump is in much better shape at this point. He has his 20-30%. He has them. And I'm impressed by that. I don't think I understand that very well. I still don't. I never have. I still don't. something happened in this country to our working class that made that portion of it go hard right as their way of expressing their discontent that is a standing criticism of the left that it didn't or that still doesn't understand it nor have anything like the power it ought to have to deal with. But that may not matter because Mr. Trump is so effective in mobilizing hostility in the United States.

1:15:10He may be very good at mobilizing support in that 20 to 30 percent. But what people have to understand is he's also put it this way. for the left in the United States, I would give Mr. Trump a star to stick on his forehead. He's the best recruiter the left has. What he opens his mouth, more people get interested in the left. You know, I'm living in New York City. We just elected a Muslim socialist mayor of this city by a lot. He didn't win by a little. He won by a lot. Nobody got close. What is going on? I know my neighbors. I talk to them about it. They are enthusiastic, even now, now that he's in office for a few months.

1:16:05They remain very pleased, very happy with who they voted for. These are people for whom the term socialism remains scary in an abstract way. But this nice young man is not tarnished by that identification. You know, and I don't, I'm still, the best I can get, in case you're interested, is that his very difference is what makes him successful. The very idea that a young man with an excess of facial hair, so he can look a little like the image of what a Muslim young man might be expected to look like, and that he's a socialist, makes it so clear that he's different that he doesn't have to talk about that he gets the benefit of everybody who says the regular Republicans and the regular Democrats have not changed anything, which is true.

1:17:12And so we need to, this is different. I'm going for this. It's amazing. And the younger the person, the better Mr. Mondani appears in their minds. So he's not going to, if he doesn't make a big mistake, he's going to go far. Even our governor, who is, as my building mate loves to say, a nothing burger, our governor, she has to pander to him a good bit in hopes that he doesn't turn against her. because if you want to be the governor of the state of new york you have to be acceptable to the city because the city is such a big factor within the state so she she's nothing she's she's your classic empty empty suit um but she has to struggle with him over the wealth tax and And the other things he pushes forward.

1:18:20And she looks bad for doing it. But she has to struggle to hold on to the rich people who fund her. But she doesn't want to go too far because then she'll lose. And her biggest fear is that another one like him will challenge her, which won't happen this time, but will happen next time.

1:18:46Well, don't let me forget this. I do want to come back to Epstein and Joe Kent, who you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation and the connection between Israel and the United States in this war.

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1:19:59Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details. But something I appreciated very much earlier, you went through the historical perspective of the war with Iran. And you happen to be the right person to ask about the economic perspective. And the Strait of Hormuz has come up, oil and the Shah. I wanted to ask the extent to which this is a war about oil. Oil is very, very important. It's a basic commodity. The 20th century made that. That's how the 20th century evolved to make a world economic revolution based on oil as the number one energy source. the 21st century was supposed to be different to wean the global economy off of oil particularly but also gas and to substitute to wind, solar, and with some trepidation, atomic energy as alternative.

1:21:39And that process was underway, is still underway, but the very progress of it was undermined when a combination of right-wing politicians and industries dependent on oil connived to slow it down. I don't even think they think they can stop it, but they can slow it. And there's enormous amount of money to be made if you can slow it down.

1:22:38And so they did. A huge amount of money was spent on muddying the consciousness, literally, of the whole world, of introducing into every conversation, wherever you could, ambivalence, ambiguity. The studies aren't so clear. It might not be. There are other factors. All kinds of stuff like that, but systematically put out so as to lessen the transition. And that has been important enough that the oil business has survived. Look, a few years ago, major oil companies were investing in alternative energies. They, too, recognized it was over. Much of that has been pulled back or modified or slowed or reduced.

1:23:43as they realize there's still a good bit of life in the oil-based economy, and that the United States could get a real advantage if it could do two things, hold on to the use of oil in its own economy and free itself from dependence on oil from outside. You had to have both. It wouldn't do to hold on to oil if it made you vulnerable to import. that's why the issue of fracking was fought out in the united states so that you could get oil no matter what the damage to your water or earthquakes or anything else you could hold on to your oil-based industries without running into the trouble of import dependence.

1:24:57And you can see it now in the boasting that the closed Strait of Hormuz is a horrible discriminatory blow against Europe and Asia, but not for us. We don't get oil that way. So holding up shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, not our problem.

1:25:25Of course, that has not led our oil companies from missing the opportunity to jack up the oil price. when my students ask me, how do you explain that? If it doesn't affect us, why is the gasoline private? And so I explain to them, imagine you were the head of the oil company of Oklahoma and you saw oil in Europe going for$102 a barrel, which is what I think it is today. but you're getting$65 a barrel. Would you consider no longer selling to an American but taking your oil and selling it in Brussels? Because look, you're making 60 % more money per barrel. You normally expect a lifetime before you're going to see that.

1:26:28Then they understood. So the price here is going up because that's what markets do. If you love the market economy, then that's what markets do. They enable people to find each other in that way. So I think what we have for the moment is, once again, the kind of blindness I was telling you about before. The 10 % of the people who sit at the top here will support the war in Iran until it really bites them. It hasn't done that yet. You know, we are depleting our stockpile of missiles, which is wonderful news for a dozen companies and a thousand suppliers of those companies whose market is just being renewed and revived by each day's passage.

1:27:36They love it. There's nothing happening to the American financial situation that would disrupt it yet. So the disadvantage to Europe, well, Americans tend to enjoy that. So that's not gonna make anything happen. The displeasure of our European allies, you know, a few people will worry about that, but less than ever before. There actually will be most anxiety, I think, if there's any, about damage to our allies in Asia. And that will depend on what the South Koreans and the Japanese in particular, what they do about all of this. Perhaps also a little bit of Australia and New Zealand. What are they going to do?

1:28:33India, that's more important. What are they going to do? It looks like India is going to just renew its use of Russian oil and gas and pay off the Russians who enjoy getting paid the money they need to fight the war in Ukraine at less expense to them. You notice that when Mr. Trump did it, it was extraordinary. The Europeans virtually said nothing. It's just, wow, wow. He takes a step that everybody said would close the Strait of Hormuz. You will have to pay even more for energy than you already do if that happens. Even if they go around the African Cape or come up with other solutions, it's all going to mean more money for you to pay.

1:29:36Are you not troubled by a war you weren't consulted on, whose impact on you operates at multiple levels? Nope. Not the first week? No. They were told by Mr. Trump that the Straits either wouldn't be closed or wouldn't be closed for more than a couple of days. And they believed it.

1:30:04I don't. I usually see ways out. And I think Mr. Trump has found ways out of a variety of the dilemmas he's gotten himself in. So I give him credit for that. And I give him even more credit. He may find one now. I've been wondering whether the noise about Cuba is really the preparation for some kind of drama, Maduro-like drama down there, because it gives them at least a few more days of basking in the light of something that is successful, at least in some rendering. so then before people go back to the war that is declining there.

1:31:03The real question of Iran has been from the beginning and is now. How long can the Iranian people take this? I don't know the answer to that. Why is that the real question? Because what do you think happens when the answer is no longer?

1:31:38It would allow, well, it depends on what it means, how they stop. But if it's a real collapse, then what we have is many years of a guerrilla war, an American installed government that will be hounded from the left, from the right, from the nationalists, from the leftists, from everybody. And ungovernable, unstable disaster. Leeching millions of refugees who will head to Europe and will produce in the Balkans and Greece and Turkey and Yahoo, and then into the heart of Europe beyond. Very, very dangerous. That'd be one scenario. If they could get what they fantasize, a regime change. something like what they got in Venezuela a regime half of the old people now chastened by what happened to want to make deals with the United States and be a docile colony the way most of Latin America has mostly been, that would be their ideal.

1:33:25And then they can dictate who Iran sells oil to, and they can make that work to their advantage, which means probably shipping a good bit of it to China. That's okay. That's okay. If troubles happen with China, it becomes a card they can play, and they will. But they can live with the alternative. They would be disarmed. They would systematically go around the country getting rid of the missile silos. because what's really doing it to Israel, and by the way, to the Americans too, are the missiles and the drones that the Iranians can throw into the battle.

1:34:28Otherwise, they're mostly killing civilians. And what that does, and you kind of wonder with them whether they're just too gung-ho or too uneducated to know. But there was real opposition inside Iran. That's a modern society, well-educated people, huge movement against the ayatollahs of younger people who are not excited about the religion, who are not excited about that government, who are dissatisfied with the jobs that are available. They're a powerful opposition, and powerful oppositions have existed in Persian society always. All that's gone. Everybody's unified behind the dead Ayatollah.

1:35:21I mean, you unified that country. Last June, you went to war, a war you claimed to have won. You have obliterated their nuclear material. Evidently not. because you're using the same excuse. Either you obliterated it or you didn't. And what they did is what they said they wanted to do was to provoke opposition. But they didn't. And instead, what they did is they led the opposition to imagine the Americans would back them up. But when the Americans didn't, when the Americans stopped after 12 days, you had an exposed opposition, which it was then relatively easy for the regime to get rid of in the succeeding six months.

1:36:26So now you come back early in 2016, half a year after you tried the other, and you called for people to rise up, nobody rose. Of course not. Look what happened to them last time. They were invited to rise up. They were promised all kinds of help. They didn't get it. They got an attack. They got a decapitation of some of their leaders, but they didn't get the mass support from them. So now you have nothing. The people who are against the regime are supporting it because that's, as one of them said on television, we are the ones who are going to pick the next regime, not the Americans. You know, what are you doing?

1:37:17You've unified a country, already unified by language, by tradition, by religion. now you've unified it against the foreign invader oh man that's picking a battle under conditions and on a terrain where you're going to lose you are going to lose either in the short run or the long run but you're going to lose and why the ukrainians at least have this story that they were invaded by the Russians.

1:37:56But the Iranians, they were the invaded party.

1:38:05So I don't think the Americans get it. They just, they don't, they don't, they don't understand who they're up against. They don't understand what it means to fight an ancient civilization with 92 or whatever the number is, million of people. And they don't understand that the American working class is not at all interested in any of this. Much more interested in the price of gasoline. Much more. And not happy that they're so interested in the price of gasoline. They're interested in it because the cost of living is unbearable. I keep talking just To be very personal, I keep talking to my students, people getting BAs or master's degrees or PhDs who can't find a job.

1:39:00When I graduated with my PhD, I don't think I worried ever about a job. I simply assumed I had a job. And all my fellow students, we might not get the job we wanted, the one in the, you know, in the Redwood Forest, by the water, with a lovely view. We might not get that. But we would get a job. Of course, we would get a job. And by job, we didn't mean being an adjunct over here for two courses and then doing a part-time gig for this professor and then doing another adjunct course at the community college. No, not that. That was not in my head. It's just... And the new school university where I teach is disintegrated.

1:39:53It's one of those universities that's literally falling over. They call me, and there won't be any teaching in my department of economics. There's one of those scheduled to be eliminated. Oh, wow. I hadn't heard that. Yep. And the reason they're eliminating it is that the money is only there for professionally related. So the Parsons School of Design will survive. and the school of pharmacology will survive. It's a difference between high school and what we used to call trade school. Remember trade school where you go and learn how to be a carpenter or refrigerator technician or something like that.

1:40:47The Chinese making a joke of our education are opening new universities every few weeks. I get notices about it from some of them. Oh, wow. We're closing them. They're opening them. Yeah. They already have many more, you know, graduates than we do. It surprises me that they're opening new universities just because of the advent of or the rise of AI. It seems like you might need less educated people or there would be less demand for it or higher education. But one reason AI feels relevant to me right at this moment, this point in our conversation is earlier, you mentioned how surprised you were to discover from, I think it was a Chinese newspaper that Ben-Gurion Airport had been bombed and there was no coverage of it here.

1:41:45It was an Indian paper, not Chinese. Indian paper. What, this just makes me think about bad intel and AI and that, of course, brings... On December 12th, Disney Plus invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six-episode docuseries. I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book. The end of an era. And don't miss Taylor Swift, The Era's Tour, the final show featuring for the first time the Tortured Poets Department. Streaming December 12th, only on Disney+. This bombing of the girls' school in Iran. And I wonder if you see that bombing, perhaps even the connection to AI that has been reported, though not by our president, that that is itself symptomatic of the decline in some way.

1:42:53The AI story is symptomatic of how technology is handled in capitalism. For me, that is a great story of dysfunctional screw-up. for me AI the so-called AI phenomenon now reminds me of what the internet was in the 1990s and early years of this century or what the computer was two or three decades before that and so on. It's always the same. The innovation, whenever it is discovered by capitalists, is discovered by them in terms of its availability as a tool for making profits. And the story is really very simple. The capitalist gets the idea that if I can install this thing, whatever it is, a software program, a piece of machinery, it doesn't matter.

1:44:24then I can fire ex-workers because this machinery can substitute for them.

1:44:42and the hope and the dream is that the machinery will become available that it will become available at a an affordable price and by affordable price i mean a good bit less money than I would have to pay the workers whom I can fire by virtue of buying this equipment or this machine. And out of this basic story, you generate the enthusiasm of the devotees of profit, that is most of the people in capitalism, or you get the predictions of doom and gloom from the labor force, because they're hearing about firing, and that's bad news for them. They're going to lose their job. And they're often aware that the instrumentalities available to laid off workers under these circumstances are poor.

1:45:57That those workers will not get another job or will become greeters at Walmart or another awful substitute. But that no one will give a shit. They're on their own and it doesn't usually work out well. And for me, the logic of that story is okay then there is a loss for those workers who lose their job there's a loss for their family members who live off the income in part at least there's a loss in the local community because the reduced income of these workers means they can't buy a drink at the bar or a trip to the bowling alley or whatever they used to spend. So there's a whole bunch of losses in the present and the future.

1:47:00How disturbed is the unemployed family that daddy or mommy are not working anymore, what strains are put on parent-child relations, what strains are put on husband-wife relations, how many families dissolve under the pressure versus the profit. And then I put on my politics hat. The number of people affected in the losses is many. The number of people affected by the profits is usually few, and initially very few. So I don't see this as a clear win for capitalism. The gains you will get, and there are some, from the higher profits will be offset by the losses, which could be substantial and running deep into the future, that you're paying.

1:48:15Is this good for the economy as a whole? I don't know. And this is not because I don't believe in progress. I actually do. But I look at it and it's not crystal clear at all that this is progress in some social way. Some people benefit. I can identify those. And some people lose. I can identify those. But I can't really measure to be sure that the benefits outweigh the cost, etc. And then of course there's always, because I'm a Marxist, that I ask the logical question. Is there another way to handle the technical breakthrough, AI or the computer or the internet or whatever, that would be a better statement.

1:49:15And my answer is, yeah, pretty clearly. If the business were run not as a capitalist enterprise, but as a worker co-op, what would we have? Well, we would have all the workers get together and say, there's now a new machine on the market at such and such a price. It's an AI program. And it makes every worker twice as productive as he, she was without this equipment. We had a long discussion and we agree we're going to get this machine. Just like the profit-driven catalyst, we'll get the machine. But unlike the profit-driven catalyst, we're not going to fire half of ourselves. What we're going to do is we're going to cut the working day in half.

1:50:20We're going to work four hours and then we're done. We'll come at 9 and we'll leave at 1. And in that way we will produce exactly as much as was produced before the technical change.

1:50:39We'll price the output at the same amount of money per unit. We'll thereby raise the same amount of revenue. We will give what we gave to the workers before in wages again. their wage will be the same. The portion that was profit last time will be profit this time. The employer or we as a collective will get the same profit. But the one thing that will have changed is the labor leisure of every worker. The workers who are many will get half of every day off. That is a spectacular advantage. And the capitalist gets the same way a profit. He doesn't get more, but he gets the same. So he's not worse off, if you allow me welfare economic language, he's not worse off, but all those workers, the majority in any workplace are wildly better off if they value leisure, which we can assume they do.

1:51:57They get the same wage, they're not deprived of a nickel, and they get free time. What about that? Why isn't that a part of the discussion? Why do the workers have no say in whether or how a technical change is installed? Because that's how capitalism works. So we'll never know whether this was a good idea or not, whether it could have been better handled with another system because we rigidly control the conversation so that we either discuss the wonderful profit opportunities or we lament the job loss. And almost invariably we are told that progress demands that we go with the capitalists. And so we slide the social issue out of the story by a rendition of progress that begins with the assumption that there's nothing to worry about.

1:53:19The workers will find other jobs. For me, I'm so taken with that aspect of the conversation, that I usually don't let people spend more than a few initial moments telling me about the profitability of AI or telling me about the lamentable loss of jobs of AI. Because for me, those are the wrong issues for us to be discussing.

1:53:52well rick we're rapidly approaching the end of our our time today so i think the i mean there are still many more questions i'd love to ask but the i don't know the the best one to end with i think is to to acknowledge that you're not a soothsayer excuse me but uh to get your prognostication for where you see this conflict heading going forward?

1:54:25At this point, my guess is that the decision of what to do is in Mr. Trump's hands. and that he will

1:54:48try to find an off-ramp, as it's called,

1:55:00as soon as he can and by as soon as he can i mean he has to be able to perform a theater of victory he has to in some way that's at least vaguely plausible to say that he has won.

1:55:40He may be helped in doing that by shifting the focus from Iran onto something else.

1:55:56I'm of the opinion, others don't agree with me, but I'm of the opinion that major, not the only, but major, two major causes of the decision to attack Iran were that it would distract public opinion from his difficulties in the Epstein scandal. And number two, that it would distract attention from the declining economy he is going to be held accountable for. And that these things were getting worse. The February numbers for total job creation was a loss, if I'm right, about 72 ,000 jobs. The man's whole tariff policy, his whole foreign policy, has been in favor of reshoring American industry. Well, we need 150 ,000 jobs per month just to absorb new entrants, people graduating from high school and college and starting to look for a job.

1:57:12We didn't get$150 ,000 in February for new entrants. We didn't get any new jobs. We lost 72 jobs. This is very bad. It's not the only month. It's not as though other months were great and this was an anomaly. This was the second worst month in the last eight or nine. Last October was even worse. So he's not he's not doing it, not getting the jobs. Inflation, which was coming down across the second half of Mr. Biden's term, has stopped going down or flattened out. And now between tariff refunds and so forth is gonna go up. And then the oil thing for sure will make it go up. So Watching the man do things to distract, I think he needs another distraction.

1:58:11And preferably one where he can look good on television. And getting rid of the bad communists or whatever they'll be called in Cuba seems to be where he's going. And maybe he'll do it Maduro style if that goes over publicity-wise better. than landing American troops. Either way, if you think the Iranians will fight long and hard against any American control there, you're right. There's nothing compared to the Cubans. The Cubans said they've been doing this, well, as long almost as the as the iranians you know the attempt to overthrow castro is in 1960 61 the overthrow of musadik if you remember was in 1953 very close and cuba has been militantly dealing with oppression from the United States, an embargo all those years, every kind of disruptive intrusion, military and otherwise.

1:59:32So he has his work cut out for him. But the short-term distraction, if you pardon me, trumps other considerations. And so he, I would expect that, if not Cuba, and something else will present itself. I don't think it will solve the problem of a declining empire. I don't think it will solve the problem of neither Epstein nor the economy, which are not good for him and which keep lurking on the edges of publicity that nobody quite forgets. And since Americans love salacious news. The Epstein thing for sure will keep everybody glued to their way of accessing that kind of news. I think the tragedy is there will be continued no discussion at all of the declining empire.

2:00:37One of the reasons you hear me talking about it is the vain hope I know it's been, that at some point we will get a leadership that actually thinks about it. Thinks, what, is that really going on? What are the signs? Are there signs it isn't going on? Are we not giving them enough attention? I'm willing to listen to that, to hear that. But I know that in the presidential election at the end of a year ago November, the three candidates, Biden, Harris, and Trump, never said a word. Not one word. There is no empire at all. There is no decline of the empire that isn't there. We don't have any such a situation.

2:01:36okay, for me, you know, I'm enough of an academic that if you can't put it into words, if you can't get a concept of it, your chances of solving it by stumbling into a solution are somewhere between slim and none. And so for me, if I could predict the breakthrough would come if and when it's understood that this Iran, what did he call it? Excursion. If the Iran excursion of the United States military provokes an awareness that this is an empire retreating, dying, being pecked to death by a hundred bites, then maybe you could have the kind of conversation in this country that could lead to a lot better ways of coping than what we're seeing.

2:02:38And we're all scared. Look, I talk to my wife, I talk to my friends, everybody's very nervous. Everyone has, let me leave you with this, everyone in my circle of acquaintances, not just people who are good friends, but just people who are acquaintances that you know to say hello to, they all agree that these are somehow hard times, bad times, dark. I hear it all the time. There is a sense that people articulate that I haven't heard all my life. When I was younger and even until recently, I heard yes and no and good and bad about this or that, but kind of an underlying sense of malaise, the French would call it, of something ill at ease in English, perhaps.

2:03:40Ill at ease. Something is wrong. It's not so much you're outraged by this or that that Trump says or does. It's the whole phenomena. There's a kind of anger that we are vulnerable to what each day's headlines throw at us. And we're angry at being vulnerable in that way. I have no idea what to do. And the Democratic Party, the, you know, loyal opposition, is nauseatingly irrelevant. I mean, people just look in disbelief at the kind of empty nothingness of Hakeem Jeffries or Schumer or the California governor. My God, in these times when we all feel we need something, we get that? We get that? That's it?

2:04:44There's a warning there in the election of Mamdani. I don't mean to any disrespect to him. Smart young man, ran a very good campaign, and is managing to be mayor of the biggest city in the country quite well so far. But he was not elected because of him. He was elected because the overwhelming majority of people in this city looked at the conventional Republicans and Democrats and said, absolutely not any more of that. That is so bad, so irrelevant, so passive, so lame. Young people love that word. Lame. That they're not going to vote for it. and they got excited about mom don the young fresh energetic young man that's what they wanted to see and you know and the fact that he was a muslim and the fact that he was a socialist was not enough to offset his attractiveness as young new and different i think that's a condemnation of this country in its way more profound than if we had a political party that everybody was all excited about, unless it were a very new and different kind of political party.

2:06:18Nobody voted for the DSA. Everybody voted for the young, energetic, new Muslim socialists. That's very clear, at least very clear here where I live in a part of Manhattan, which voted, by the way, overwhelmingly for him in this district where I live, where we have few socialists and no Muslims. A handful, I'm sure, but there's no difference. In this neighborhood, a considerable number of Jewish people, which I only mention because the Muslim, which was used by his enemies to try to get Jewish people not to vote for, did not work.

2:07:11Well, Rick, it's not going to be today, but I do wonder if one day we're ever going to have a happy, upbeat conversation, because I'm very curious. I'll be very curious to see what you're like, and it's not doom and gloom. But given the world we live in, it's not surprising that this is how our conversations often go. But again, thank you so much. I always love having these conversations with you and getting to listen to your thoughts. So I know our listeners do too. So thanks so much. Okay. Thank you also, Robinson, for doing all of this.

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