All language subtitles for Richard Wolff Trump Just RUINED America In Ways I Never Imagined…

[Music] I want to talk to you today about the big beautiful bill that's actually quite

ugly. The one just passed by the Senate and on its way as I'm making this

recording back to the House for a reconciliation as they call it. So, it's

now time to do that because the vast majority of what's going to be in the

bill is in it now. Uh whatever little tweaks they make before it's finalized.

And I want to deal with something that other treatments of all of this haggling

and horse trading and what passes for politics and is really just a variety of

corruption in which the White House buys off whatever senator needs to be bought

off with whatever little trinket so they vote for a bill that is horrible for the

people of the United States. So let me begin with that. What's the problem here

that others aren't talking about? Very simple. The single most important problem of the American economy that

everyone really knows is the fact that we are now one of the most unequal

economies in the world. At the end of World War II, the United States was

remarkable because it was less unequal than, for example, countries in Western

Europe. Now we are more unequal than the countries in Western Europe. We have

really raced to the four to be as unequal as we possibly could. Over the

last 40 years, to be crystal clear, we have had a redistribution

of wealth in the United States. Not the one that Republicans and Democrats worry

we might have and have to avoid. No, I'm not talking about that fantastic one

which never happened. I'm talking about the real one that happened that we don't

discuss, although we should, which is a redistribution upward, taking from the bottom, taking

from the middle, and giving it to the richest people among us. Let me give you

the statistics today, how unequal we are, and then go back and show you how

and why the big beautiful bill is really ugly. All right, I'm going to start with

the bottom half of the American people. The bottom half. We are a country of 330

million. So I am talking about 165 million Americans, half our people.

together the bottom half today 2%

of the wealth in this country that's what they own 50% of the people have to

get along by sharing 2.5% of the wealth try to get your head

around that and you will understand what it means when people tell you that half

of Americans are poor cuz that's the truth truth, not the makebelieve, not

the fakery, the truth. Now, let's take the next 40% of the people. They're

richer. They have more than the bottom half, but less than the top 10%. So,

we've talked about the bottom half, 50%, now the next 40%, what you might call

the middle of the United States. How much wealth do the middle of the United

States enjoy? 30%. Notice less than their share of the population. If the

bottom half get only 2% and the middle, so we're now talking

about the 90% of our people out of 330 million, they get 30%. That leaves the

remaining amount 23 of the income of this country is in the hands of the top

10% of our people. That is extremely

unequal. You could never have you could never dream of a democracy, one person,

one vote. If you take 90% of the people and tell them you live on onethird of

the income we all together produce and we give the top 10% the other 2/3

that will make the 10% rich and the rest of us spectators as to how rich they

are. Now, please keep that in your mind when I tell you that the only

significant economic act that was passed by and through President Trump's first

presidential term was the tax cut of 2017, passed in December of that year.

It gave an enormous tax cut to corporations and the rich. Precisely the

people who needed it least. Precisely the people who had enjoyed a rising

share of the wealth of this country being redistributed to them out of our

hands, out of our wealth. They didn't need it, but Mr. Trump gave it to them

anyway. And that's the secret to why we have a second Mr. Trump presidency.

Because they were so happy with what he did for them in December of 2017 that

they brought him back for another term and he just delivered the same tax cut

to them again. He extended the one from 2017 and he added a bunch of extra

goodies for them. He will by this bill which is admitted by the Republicans,

those who have half a brain at all. Even they understand it. This will make

inequality worse just like his first tax cut for them did. Because we need to go

back to really make America great again would mean to make it as less unequal as

it once was, not more unequal as it now is. But Mr. Trump won't tell you that

cuz he's, as you might have noticed, among the people at the top. And he's

loyal to them. Not to you necessarily, you who voted him in, but to the people

who put him in. And that's different. We are making our society a society of

extreme inequality. And history teaches us, if it teaches us

anything, that in the long run, as masses of people understand

the inequality imposed on them, and what it costs them, in careers they can't

have, in jobs they can't get, in income they can't enjoy, in promotions denied

to them. as it becomes clear that that's what an unequal society produces, they

will not tolerate it. And then the bad news comes as the people at the top

realize that the long-term payoff to taking more than a fair a fair share is

you lose it all. It's happened over and over again. And to those who think it

can't happen here, watch. It is happening here. It's not sustainable

what we are doing in this country. The people at the top, the millionaires who

dominate in the Senate and the House are simply feathering their own nest,

imagining it will never come back to haunt them, imagining they could just go

on and on. And they have been doing it for a long time. I'll give them that.

But they're running out. They can't anymore. It's too extreme. We are

watching what happens when that crucial moment is arrived at. The Democratic

Party is so corrupted by its donors that it offers no significant opposition. in

France twice in recent years the government tried to do the kind of step

towards inequality we're doing here and both times the French people did the

same thing out into the streets they went their left-wing political parties

their progressive parties their anti- capitalist parties led them into the

street and said this country will not go to that level of inequality. And let me

remind you for those who may not know, in France, the law is once you graduate

from high school or college and you take a job, the law requires your employer to

give you five weeks of fully paid vacation every year. You get that? And

next time you hear an American politician say we're the greatest country, remember what I just told you.

Likewise in France, and there are other countries like it. I just know France well, so I'm picking my example. You're

covered with health insurance from the day you are born to the day you die.

Anything that happens to you, the government covers the cost of your

medical care. It's a right you have as a citizen depend on whether you have a job

or what job you have or what your employer is or isn't willing to give you

as medical coverage. None of that. It's your right and you get it as a matter of

right. I'm a college teacher. In France, colleges are free. That's right. No

tuition, no fees. You pay your room and board, but you are not required to pay.

So you don't build up a big load of debt to get through school. That's all

burdensome because we're not allowing that. We want a society in which the

rich pay a big share of their wealth to have a decent society and not one that's

falling apart because they want to keep the lion's share as I've just told you

of the society's wealth. The rest of us, we're supposed to produce the wealth in

the factories, the offices, and the stores where we live. But we don't get

the wealth we produce. We the people get onethird and the 10% at the top, the

boards of directors of the corporations, those people, they take two/3s. We

should have the courage and the determination for ourselves, for our

brothers and sisters, and for our children not to let the growing

inequality proposed by Mr. Trump now rammed true by

Mr. Trump simply to continue. It is taking us in a direction none of us will

want to see the last steps of. If presentations like this strike you as

valuable as part of the national conversation or what should be the

national conversation, the notion that the way you organize the production in a

society is by the juxiposition of employer and employee within the market

framework out of which you generate then exploitation, the appropriation of

surplus, its distribution and a society built based on that organization that

has not yet been in my judgment at all basically challenged not by the people's

republic of China and not by the bricks as a collective what they have challenged is the economic dominance of

the west of the United States but of the G7 that is the United States Canada

Japan Britain France Italy and Germany that is gone I do not think we will ever

see that again. And it marks the decline of Europe and the American offshoot of

Europe. That is historic. And that will play out in ways we haven't even begun

to appreciate because we haven't seen it or we don't yet know what it is we are

seeing. of the fundamentality of that with the qualification that the employer

employee structure which is what I understand capitalism's core to be that

remains to be challenged and whether and how the bricks do that is at this point

in my view an open question if I understand professor Patnay correctly if there's no fundamental challenge to the

employer employee relationship to what for me is the core class structure of

capitalism, then it isn't so surprising that in the political system, you

likewise get decisionmaking made by a very small group of people at the top of

these societies, often involving immense social risk to the mass of the

population, including dying from bombing and warfare and all the rest of it. And

yet that's the premise of the international system and bricks doesn't seem to change that all that much. It

changes who plays the role with the desire for inclusion is the statement by

the elites in the BRICS countries that they no longer be subordinated to those

in the west. And I agree that's an enormous step that you know is momentous

in in many ways we haven't yet seen. But I see a link there. If you don't

challenge the organization of production, a small group of people, the board of directors, if it's a

corporation, the owner of the enterprise, the person who started it, it doesn't really matter. a small group

of people who make the decisions what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output,

which the mass of people have to help produce, but are then excluded from

those key decisions. And then you replicate that in the political system including the international system and

they are mutually reinforcing at that level of basic theory basic orientation

that professor Putnak was pointing to and I think that's correct and my hope is that the enormity of the change of

the bricks will embolden those caught up in it by seeing what can be changed that

they might have thought couldn't. be that they will now go on and be ambitious in what else needs to be

changed to break finally not just from the hegemony of one but from the hegemony of any. But I I see here in the

United States a consequence of the rise of the bricks. It's a consequence of

many things but among them an important influence is the rise of the bricks. So I am in a position of saying to you that

the ability to question capitalism as a system has never been greater in the

United States in my lifetime than it is right now. That is the audience of our

people here for the notion that the economic problems of the United States

are exactly as I think professor Padna is wanting us to see that the audience

United States is now more open to that level of criticism than it has ever been

is aware in the beginnings of a consciousness and that's all we have the beginning of a consciousness of the

decline of the American empire an awareness that that's what's going on is

having the effect at least for the moment of allowing of opening the space

here for the critique at the foundation of the whole capital worker

relationship. that that's not an acceptable way to organize a society and

that a genuinely more democratic participation of the mass of people at

all levels of economic decisionmaking is the alternative that interests people. I

am surprised that I can say that to you at this point but I can I'm overjoyed by

it. I don't deny it for a minute. But there is a process at least here in

which the rise of the people's republic of China, the rise of the bricks and the

effect it has on limiting the hegeimon's ability to do what the hegeimon wants

and that we see it as a nation more and more has opened the space to do exactly

what professor Padnyak wishes to see more of as I do too. Uh but it is

underway. here. I cannot tell you if it will survive. I cannot tell you if it

will last and spread. But for the moment, it's extraordinary. Can give an

illustration. I'm in touch with people from uh a number of African countries.

And in those African countries, I have noticed over recent years that the

existence of the bricks and of China, and this is in countries that have not yet joined or publicly indicated they

wish to, but I can tell the kind of people I know, people on the left, etc.,

etc., that it does exactly what Professor Putnik said. It opens the space for them now to militate inside

their countries with their political parties and their leadership a way to

say there is a different path that you could be following. You keep go sending

missions to London and New York to get the advice and to get the money and to

get the deals made for the development of this country here in Africa. But you

could explore a different if you were to send the mission instead uh to New Delhi

or to Beijing or Sao Paulo because you would get not only a different set of

possible path forward but now you can get the funding that you used to think

was only available in the west and you can see export markets maybe here if you

got this investment and the Chinese particularly are willing repeatedly to

make such arrangements, it is changing the politics inside African countries.

And my guess is more broadly than that, part of the reason I think we are talking about the bricks is that they

are an element of what is opening everything up with all the qualifications and the criticisms which

are appropriate and should be directed at the bricks. No question. their heterogeneity, their willingness to

accept most of the rules of the game, their disinterest in in fundamental criticisms of the of the of the existing

economic system, all of that, but is a factor that opens up. Let me give you a

couple of others. Yes, the universities are doing in the west what they have always done. But then again, two things.

One, I am a product of the western universities. I am in fact a product of

the elite ones here in this country that I went to school at where I was taught

half of my professors are Nobel Prizewinning economists. They tried very hard to persuade all of us that

capitalism was the ultimate achievement of the human race and they failed. And not just with me, they failed. There's a

consistent number of us for whom this did not work. Well, I still teach. I ste

teach at the New School University in New York City that you may know of uh which is a little bit different

university but the end not not fundamentally different at all. Now in this situation I've noticed the

following. My students in huge numbers are deeply upset by what is going on in

Gaza. deeply upset by the Israeli behavior since October of 23 and are

questioning not only Israel but are questioning the United States as the basic sole backer of Israel and trying

to understand what it means and this is as true of Jewish students as of

non-Jewish students and the attempt of the government under both Biden and

Trump to destroy to crush to arrest to imprison people, deporting them and so

on in order to keep the opposition down and yet a polling which indicates

majority of Americans do not support Israel. This has the same effect. Let me

be a little daring. I think that these and other aspect of the decline of

American empire hegemony are coming together to open an ever wider space and

an ever deepening space for the kinds of criticisms that professor Patnyak and I

have been spending a lifetime trying to develop and to disperse in our relative

communities. And so you get from me an optimism that I have not felt before and

that has been slow to emerge but is now a very strong sense of what is going on.

For the first time in my life as an academic here in the United States, the

debate among my colleagues has shifted. the age-old debate, which is the

unspeakably boring conversation about whether a little more government or a

little less government is the good thing or the bad thing, whether you should be a Keynesian or a neocclassical, as if

that were what we ought to be debating is looking as lame and weird and off the

mark as it always was. And when I introduce, you know, we could be discussing hierarchically organized

production system, capitalism, with a horizontally organized worker

cooperative alternative organization of production. They all look at me and say, "Well, haven't that been debated?" And I

smile and I allow a moment to pass. And then I say to them, never in my

education did any professor with one exception. When I was a student of Paul

Bars in Stanford many years ago, he introduced during the semester that

question. But never before and never since in all the elite in the universities I spent my life did anybody

think this was an interesting question. Now I have opportunities to make that the interesting question on a scale I've

never seen before. And I think that is in part thanks to China and the bricks.

And I want to acknowledge that if you look at the distribution of wealth and income in this country, we became much

less unequal in the Great Depression of the 1930s. But as soon as that depression was over, by 1945, we resumed

the kind of capitalism that creates ever greater inequality until we get to the

crazy stage we're in now with the Elon Musk and the Jeffrey Bezos having wealth

beyond what ancient pharaohs were able to produce with their slave societies.

In every society there is a system of production has to be. Human beings

cannot live for very long on nuts and berries and running around the woods collecting them. Human societies early

on and throughout the millennia have been reliant on producing more and more

of what they come to depend on. They produce their own food. They produce

their own shelter. They produce their own clothing. and on and on. And Marx's

insight is this. In the act of production, inequality is born and

maintained and deepened so that the efforts of good people to go in a

direction of equality and fraternity and justice and democracy are frustrated. At

best, they achieve them, but they don't last. The way you organize production is the way modern society has frustrated

the effort to produce liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy. Slogans of the

French and American revolutions that produced capitalism in that part of the world. Every society, Markx says, of

human beings involves setting some of those people to work to use their brains

and their muscles to transform something they find in nature. So that

is better and more useful to human beings to discover in nature the thing

we call a sheep in order to figure out which humans did that you can cut the

hair off of a sheep and it is transformable by human labor into wool

and wool can keep us warm at night. Wool can clothe our bodies during the day

etc. Learning how to transform lightning into electricity. learning how to

transform, fill in the blank. Okay, every society that we know of, human

society, carries out the production of more or less of its needs. When the

society does it, it however also makes a second decision. It decides what portion

of the people in the community will be assigned the task of using their brains

and muscles to carry out production and what portion of the community will not

have to do that. Now, it starts with communities that want to pass on their

community to their children. Because you see, children, especially in the early years of their lives, are consumers who

literally cannot produce. They're too small. They're too weak. They're too uncoordinated. Their brains and muscles,

etc. So one of the first things we notice is society saying that the people

who produce must always produce more than they themselves consume in order

what to leave over an extra a surplus that can be used for example to feed the

children otherwise you won't have children becoming adults they will die

societies understand that we have to organize who does what? Who bakes the

bread? Who makes the shirts? Who cooks the meals? Who who who? But we also have

to do it in such a way that we produce a surplus that those who work, not

everybody, the children for example, don't must produce a surplus. They must

produce more than they themselves consume in order to sustain others. And

now you can see how Markx begins to think. We might also, and that's what

slavery begins, have a situation where we say some people, not just children,

some adults, are going to be free from using their brains and muscles to

produce the food, the clothing, the shelter we all depend on. And who are they in slavery? We know. You know, the

masters. They don't have to. They can live in the great house, consume wonderful meals, wear fantastic outfits,

and live the life of Riley because other people are producing so much that we can

feed and clothe and shelter them, the slaves, and still have such an enormous

surplus, that we can take care of the children and also a community of adult

masters. And then Mark says that's how slavery works. The masters being in

charge keep down what the slaves get to consume. They make the slaves work as

hard as possible, produce as much as possible, but take for themselves the

minimum. And they'll sustain a group of people who don't do work and give them big sticks and call them the military

whose job it is to beat up on the slaves to make sure they work very hard and

keep a minimum of what they produce. Why? Because that brings the biggest surplus for the most magnificent life

for the master. And it turns out, Mark says that getting rid of slavery is

possible. We know that there were revolts against slaves wherever they existed and that they eventually

succeeded in overthrowing slavery, whether it was in ancient Rome

or the American South in the Civil War or many, many other examples. But what

they put in place of the slavery, often feudalism, turns out made people free.

No more slaves. And feudalism, the surf wasn't the property of the Lord. So it

changed. But here's what didn't change. You organized production with a small

group of people at the top. Not masters cuz they're gone, but lords, not slaves,

cuz they're gone. Surfs. And guess what? The lords used their wealth that they

got from taking the surplus produced by surfs to make the surfs work harder and

faster to make them do so at a lower wage or a lower share of the produce.

They did a lot similar to what the slave masters did but it's different system

but one that couldn't realize the dream of the slave which was to be free. the

dream of all those who wanted liberty, equality, fraternity, freedom, and democracy. And when feudalism blew up

because the surfs wouldn't tolerate it anymore, you had a transition to

capitalism. No more slave, no more surf, no more master, no more lord. What you

had instead was employee employer. And guess what? The employees found their

wages and their income pressed down just like the slave and the surf. And the

employers accumulated incredible wealth just like the masters and the lords.

Why? Because you had a production system in which some people produced a surplus

that they delivered to other people. Therein lies the durability of

inequality. Those people who get a disproportionate share use it to keep

it. Those denied the fruits of their labor find themselves forever compelled

to produce surpluses for the other. The working people today have to go to work

to live. At work they produce a surplus. It shows up as the profits of

enterprise. The capitalists get the profits. You probably noticed that they

get the dividends four times a year. An envelope arrives with your dividend. You

own shares of this or that capitalist company. You don't do anything there.

You don't work there. You just own the sh you're wealthy and because you're

wealthy, you get more wealth. Whereas the worker, because they don't have any

of that property, because they're not an employer, are stuck with earning enough

to kind of keep themselves alive. Why? Because the employer needs them to be

alive and working. Otherwise, you won't get the surplus that they produce. All human societies are class divided. And

by class he means those who work and produce a surplus versus those who just

gather the surplus into their hands. On one side slaves, surfs and employees

like you and me. And on the other hand, masters, lords, and employers, you know,

like Elon Musk. And the gap gets wider. Employers in the United States,

according to the US census, are 3% of our population. The richest 10% of our

people own 80% of the shares of stock of American enterprises. Okay, we know what

we got. But to change that, to get equality and democracy, we have to

change the system of production. No more factory, office, store run by a tiny

handful of people who of course use their power to get rich just like they

use their wealth to get power. To keep this system going is to frustrate the

desire for liberty, equality, and democracy. Or to say the same thing in the words Markx used, the problem is

capitalism. The problem is the system that organizes production in this

fundamentally wrongheaded way. wrong because it is the

opposite of egalitarian or democratic.