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VIDEO .
The United States is in a declining position in the world economy it has
been but now it's being felt you could pretend it wasn't there you could deny it there are plenty of people who do that still but it's getting harder and harder as these tariffs and sanctions all show that's the most important thing to understand every country in the world and I want to underline every is thinking its entire foreign economic policy and your political alliances look at the departure of Americans from ner in Africa and being replaced by R Russian troops these are all signs you'd have to be really blind or desperate not to see all that's going on [Music] hello welcome back everyone today I'm very excited to welcome Professor Richard wolf who is one of my favorite experts on economics professor wolf taught economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for nearly 30 years earlier he taught economics at Yale University Professor is currently a visiting professor in the graduate program in international Affairs of the new school University in New York City and in addition to that Professor wolf is an author and co-founder of the organization democracy at work I'm sure many of you are very well familiar with it um and they do have a popular YouTube channel where Professor shares frequent economic updates interviews and so much more uh please be sure to follow the link in the description below to stay up toate on Professor Wolf's latest work Professor welcome thank you so much for joining me thank you for inviting me well let's get started with probably one of the uh most burning questions today I have several topics that I would love to discuss with you one of the most pressing ones is of course uh the national debt we're nearing $35 trillion dollar in national debt the government is adding roughly $1 trillion dollar every 100 days which is completely um surreal it is out of control and uh the interest cost uh to service that wall of debt is now expected to surpass all other government programs which is something that I think people really need to understand and that relates to defense spending to Medicare and Social Security so the worst part about this is that as trillions of dollars are mounting on there's really no value that's actually added that's actually created for the American people so what is the plan here if there's one well the basic answer to your question which is a good question is that there is no plan that this is a process in which uh political uh urgency drives endless expansion of the debt and let me try in a very simple but clear way to explain this we have a bizarre kind of capitalism in the United States and by bizarre I mean it puts our politic itions in a very strange and awkward position on the one hand corporations want the government to do lots of expensive things for them they want them to maintain a global Military to protect buying and selling around the world uh which the United States does as much or more than any other country on Earth and it wants to protect its ability to get materials to get them for a good price and having hundreds and hundreds of military bases around the world which is very expensive not to mention the wars which are even more expensive is part of the cost of servicing what corporations want at the same time those corporations resent and fight against paying taxes which would be the way the government gets the revenue to to then do what the corporations want the government to do all right let's take a look then not at the corporations for a moment but at the mass of working people they too have things they want and need from the government to do everything from Social Security and Medicare to maintaining the roads to helping Finance schools education hospitals and all the rest and like the corporations the mass of people don't want to spend the taxes to pay for all of that so we have corporations and working people both of whom put demands on the government to do things which cost the government money and yet at the same time the corporations and the massive people don't want to pay taxes last point the corporations have enormous wealth to get the government to do what they want and the mass of people do not that is nobody has so far organized the mass of people to put together the amount of money that might someday enable them to influence the government but right now and for most of the history of capitalism the division of the income in a society between corporations and the people and between rich and the massive people puts the overwhelming bulk of the wealth in the hands of Corporations and the rich and now what everybody knows who's honest the corporations and the rich have been very successful in removing the burden of Taxation off of themselves and onto the mass of people this has been going on for the last century and now here comes the point after a certain level the mass of people revolt they say we will not pay more taxes they make it impossible for politicians to keep doing what they've been doing which is Shifting the burden for example in case people are not familiar we used to rely on the income tax which is a progressive tax the higher your income the higher the percentage you have to pay then when corporations were strong enough they got that changed half of what the government raises now is it money off of Social Security withholding from the weekly check of an American that's not a progressive tax that does not go up in percentage as you get richer in fact if you earn more than $160,000 a year which rich people in this country do you don't pay on what's above $160,000 only the average people pay so look at how successful Corporation s and the rich have been in Shifting the taxes but they can't anymore the mass of people won't allow it they vote out anybody who raises their taxes okay now the politicians are in a jam they are demand the corporations and the people demand services but they can't squeeze more taxes out of the masses and the corporations and the rich have basically bribed their way out of paying much in the way of taxes so what is the government going to do what do the politicians do answer they borrow money the way they keep spending on the corporations and on the people is not by taxing but by borrowing the money and that's why the borrowing is getting bigger and bigger and all the national debt is is the accumulation of annual deficits over the years and they're going crazy now because the government desperate desperate to hold on to political power is spending money like there's no going out of style the most impressive example funding the war in Ukraine huge amounts of money simply spent out funding the Israeli activity in Gaza which we are also doing in the form of military supplies that are effectively given to the Israelis uh at little or no cost so Wars military expend everything is being spent without the ability to make the beneficiaries of that spending pay for it in taxes because it it's impossible for the politicians to survive if they would dare do that if you tax corporations in the rich they will fund whoever runs against you in the next election so you're gone and for the massive people they are so stressed right now that if you tax them an inch more you really will have a popular Revolt it's a sign that American capitalism is in a very bad place we are not the great economy our political leaders would like us to believe neither Republicans nor Democrats we are in very serious trouble and one measure of that is that this political absurdity of our politicians having to borrow more and more because they don't have the courage to tax means that we are in the situation you described we are loaded up with debt in a way that we used to identify with countries that were in trouble economically around the world now we don't hear that so much because it applies to us in terms of the ratio of the debt to the national uh income and make no mistake the debt matters people who are seeing this explosion are trying to calm the American people well it's not so important most of the debt is a debt of the government the treasury to the Federal Reserve which is another part of the United States government all of that is true but it is not relevant it's not relevant because in the end the government has to raise the money to pay the interest on this enormous debt and that means more and more of the money you and I pay in taxes in the United States is not going to give us a useful service it's going to pay off whoever lent money to the government and here's the last step the fundamental Injustice of the national debt is often overlooked who lends money to the United States government but the minute you understand this you will see it's rich people and corporations and to some extent foreign corporations and foreign governments the mass of people are not in a position they don't have any extra money to lend to the government so they don't the mass of people pay the taxes that are used to pay the interest to corporations and the rich who are in a position position to lend to the government if you see that here comes the punchline of punchlines you will understand that when the politicians borrow money they are doing an enormous service to corporations and the rich because they're basically saying to them we will not tax you instead you shall take the money that we could have taken from you in taxes and instead we will borrow it from you and after a you few years we'll give it back to you and during that time we'll pay you interest on the money that we've borrowed from you so for corporations this is a no-brainer of course it's better to have the government borrow from you than to tax you as corporations and the rich so that's why they tolerate it and that's why the mass of people even if they don't understand the economics understand they're being ripped off and the deficit is a mechanism for ripping off the mass of people who pay the cost of it whereas the benefit goes to the corporations and the rich who are the only ones to to be able to lend to the government one last Point foreign governments are also able to lend money to the United States government and most most of the people watching this program probably don't know that the two largest lenders to the United States government are Japan and the People's Republic of China ranking one and two among foreign lenders China has somewhere around $800 billion dollar lent to the United States government that is money that the Chinese to the United States government which the United States government can and does use in part to fight a war in Ukraine where China is helping the Russians if that sounds like a strange Arrangement welcome to modern capitalism this might strike you as even stranger with 800 billion dollars of US debt the United States has to tax all of us which it does to raise the money which it then sends to Beijing in interest on all the debt that the Chinese own of the United States government which means that part of the money China uses to build up its military is the money we American taxpayers deliver to them it's the way capitalism has organized the world and it's not the least of the Absurd contradictions that this system is living with and imposing on all of us Professor you mentioned so many important key points you said that effectively taking on more and more debt is a burden for future Generations it's it's something that future Generations will have to deal with somehow and it's also part of why we're seeing um the middle class in the United States uh struggling and um there are forecasts and projections that say that effectively it is disappearing and there's going to be a wider a widening gap between the um to put it very simply between the the poor and and the rich those who have and those who do not have uh means to uh effectively survive and and uh function in the society and you mentioned a very very important point that I would like to sort of uh a bit expand on you said capitalism as we know it is um is is dying it's it's it's it's it's already changed and uh maybe we could speak a bit about the uh latest um tariffs and sanctions that the United States um uh implemented uh put in place on Chinese Goods so we know that the US has a wide range of economic sanctions it's historically U been doing this and it has sanctions on Russia of course on Iran on Venezuela China and and other countries and so this week this past week new trade tariffs on Chinese uh Chinese goods were announced these tariffs are very heavy they range from 25 to 50% and cover a variety of products not just semiconductors and um uh precious uh precious metals or raw Earth minerals I should say uh what's actually Behind these new tariffs because the current Administration is telling us that well we put them in place for your own good we put them in place as a protectionist measure to protect our consumers and our producers is that really the case or is there something else behind this move um okay let's let's talk about that the first thing is to remember very simply that putting tariffs on a vast array of products um is what we call Protection you are protecting the industries inside your country by hampering the competition they face from abroad now let's take the most egregious example of these new tariffs uh that were implemented this last week against China by the United States the most extreme example is the electric car and truck where the Tariff which was already in place at 27.5% was raised to 100% let me explain briefly what that means imagine an electric car or truck made in China I should tell everyone that China is now the world's number one producer of electric cars and trucks they have figured out over the last 10 years that people have been competing in various parts of the world to produce a profitable electric vehicle as the way our society is going to replace the horrible pollution of the gas powered automobile with an electric automobile put aside whether that is an adequate climate control response it isn't but let's deal just with the Tariff question okay the Chinese have done it they've won that competition hands down they produce the highest quality at the lowest price so the competition has happened lots of companies here in the United States have been working and producing electric vehicles and the batteries needed to power them but the Chinese have won that they their system which you can think about has been able to mobilize their scientific Talent their technology their corporations private and public and they've won the competition so if the world were going to buy the best cheapest electric vehicle we would all be buying Chinese much of the world is doing that including Europe with the Chinese cars and trucks you see them on the road not a problem but no American sees them why because the 27 a half% tariff means that whatever the Chinese charge for their trucks electric trucks and and cars you have to pay that price to the Chinese if you were an American Plus plus 275% going to Uncle Sam as the Tariff that prices the Chinese out of the American Market you're going to make this even worse because Americans know and have told our government that the Chinese continue to improve their technology so that that they're going to be even cheaper and even better than the Americans and others competing with them are likely to be for years into the future that's how far ahead the Chinese have uh achieved okay so we are now raising it to if the car costs $22,000 that you're buying from China to pay to the Chinese you'll have to add another 20,000 and pay 40,000 here in the United States because you have to pay 20 to US government in t on top of the 20 to China this effectively protects everybody producing a car here in the United States if it costs and just for simple arithmetic if it costs $35,000 in the United States to produce a roughly similar truck or car well then you can sell it at 35 you could sell it at 36 37 38 because it would always still be cheap deeper to buy that car than the 40,000 you'd have to pay for the Chinese that's why it's called protection and it is mostly occurring because the losers of a competition don't want to pay the price of having lost the competition there's no nice way to say this and nobody should be P fooled when The Losers of the competition insist that the winner cheated yeah that's what they always say it's never their fault it's not they didn't develop the technology they didn't develop the the expertise in batteries they didn't no no no no no they did everything right the other side is cheating uh Secretary of the Treasury yelen went to China and invented an entirely new economics excess capacity she said the Chinese produce huge factories of course they do that's how they achieve their efficiency it's called economies of scale it's something we teach economic students in the first year if you produce a lot of something you can bring down the cost per unit of what you produce so you always build in excess capacity competitive Enterprises do it all the time it's part of American economic history she's just ing Miss Yellen is on people not understanding these Basics and so finding this to be some sort of argum as if the Chinese Have Cheated no they didn't they outdid you competition always has winners and losers and I know that here in America I'm born and raised here we cannot imagine the United States losing ever anything but we do we lost the war in Vietnam we lost the war in Afghanistan we're in the process of losing it in Ukraine but Americans need to believe that we're always winning the tariffs are a sign that American dominance which we got used to after World War II from the second half of the 20th century was the dominance of the United States and with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 it left the United States in what uh political scientists like to call a unipolar moment but that's over now the United States isn't what it was and the Chinese and their allies have become a powerful new competitor and the United States is having a hard time adjusting which I can understand it's like the British took them a century to realize that the British Empire wasn't there anymore and some of them still haven't understood it the United States is at an earlier stage the sanctions you see the tariffs you see that's a switch to protectionism by a society that has no confidence in its own company's ability to compete we used to that's when the US was the champion of free trade around the world that's because we could win in those situations we were the most technologically Dynamic we were the fastest growing but we're not anymore and we haven't been for a generation now and it's beginning to impact us day by day and nobody should be fooled by leaders who continue to sanction and to tariff as if we were free to do that without consequences here's the most important bottom line for Americans if you raise the price of the Tariff if you raise the cost of imported goods whether they are solar panels or semiconductor chips or electric vehicles or any of the other items if you put a tariff on them it means everything coming in from abroad costs much more which allows the American competitors to charge more than they could have ever gotten away with if they had had to compete and if everybody does that you know what that contributes to inflation we're supposed to be a nation worried about inflation tariffs are inflationary and they always have been and so the irony here is you're flailing around this is mostly political posturing Mr Biden is worried about voters in Michigan which is where a lot of automobile that burn gas are produced so he's going to say I'm protecting your job look the inflation is pricing people out of the supermarket out of the department store across America that means fewer jobs in supermarkets and fewer jobs in department stores and those lost jobs are more in number than the ones you're protecting in the Auto industry so they the honest statement here is this is mostly political posturing whose net effect on the economy is not going to be very significant one way or the other absolutely I couldn't agree with you more I um uploaded a quick video the other day on on this particular topic just very high level video and one of the questions that I received from a viewer was well why are you saying that tariffs are bad tariffs will allow producers to produce more but you you just summed up the effect that these tariffs will have on consumers and businesses so so well and I think what you just said answers that question just um very very um directly let me let thank you but let me amplify it a bit more the price of electric vehicles here in the United States will either be the $40 to use my example that we have to give to China 20 to China for the car 20 to Uncle Sam for the Tariff or we will have these artificially protected high prices for electric vehicles produced here but now keep in mind in the rest of the world our competitors can buy the cars they need the trucks they need at $20 they buy it from China the best and the cheapest so what goes into producing goods and services in Europe or in as Asia or Africa or Latin America are cheap cars and trucks which will allow them to not raise their prices of final goods the way Americans will have to because we're having to pay $40 for the same Chinese truck instead of 20 or an inflated price for our protected do American Producers which means our prices will not be competitive with those of of people producing in the part of the world where they can buy the cheap Chinese truck that's going to hurt our exports we are losing our export market and that hurts employment in the United States so it is simply not correct to say it's protecting jobs here it's protecting some jobs here in the Auto industry at the price of other jobs affected by the consequences of protecting the auto that's the honest answer and if a clever student raises his or her hand and says well which is larger the protected Auto jobs or all the other jobs the answer is nobody knows because that work depends on what's going to happen in the future it depends on all the other things but the simplistic notion the tarff was good for jobs that's not true and that is either said out of ignorance or more likely among the politicians it's good for a headline it pleases the people there and we hope nobody does the little bit of extra thinking that you and I are doing in this conversation absolutely and what's really interesting is that a couple of days ago um the United States reportedly threatened to sanction any country that signs trade deals with Iran so are we effectively you know we we we've got China we've got Russia now IR well Iran has been s sanctioned but now they're they're saying well we'll sanction anyone who even dares to do any business with Iran so are we now effectively going after the bricks block individually not as a whole but country by country yes the bricks for everybody who doesn't know China and its allies the world economy is now split in a way it hasn't been for 75 years years sorry the world is now split in a way it hasn't been for 75 years for most of the last 75 years the dominant economic Block in the world was the United States and its allies these days this is called the G7 the United States Canada Japan Britain France Germany and Italy those seven countries were the dominant reality of the the world economy that is no longer true there is now a second block of countries namely China and its allies they are called The Bricks because the first five that got together Brazil Russia India uh China and South Africa and and a half dozen more that have joined since to give you an idea uh as of 2023 last year the total GDP the total output per year of goods and services in the G7 was around 29% of the total output of the world if you look at the bricks their output all of it was about 33% in other words as a block the bricks are already a bigger economic unit than the G7 that is a momentous change and it's a gap getting bigger with each passing year they were roughly equal in 2020 they're already significantly far apart in 2023 it's going very fast the United States is in a declining position in the world economy it has been but now it's being felt you could pretend it wasn't there you could deny it there are plenty of people who do that still but it's getting harder and harder as these tariffs and sanctions all show that's the most important thing to understand every country in the world and I want to underline every is rethinking its entire foreign economic policy to take account of the fact that there are now two power blocks if you need to improve your exports or your Imports or get a loan or get investment you don't just go to London or par or New York you can now go to New Delhi or you can go to Beijing or you could it's a whole new world and your political alliances look at the departure of Americans from ner and Africa and being replaced by Russian troops these are all signs you'd have to be really blind or desperate not to see all that's going on look at the miscalculation in in Ukraine my God the West thought it was fighting a war with an isolated Russia wrong Russia could turn and did turn to China and India and Brazil and got enormous amounts of help meaning that the West misunderstood which is why the West has had to escalate the fight and is still losing as a result I mean this you're making colossal mistakes because you don't want to face how the world economy has changed and what that uh what that really means last point there are many studies many books articles about sanctions like the one you mentioned if anybody trades with Iran well then then okay this is lovely you know what this means very little countries that were trading with Iran will now make an arrangement they will make an understanding with some Third Country we're going to ship what we used to ship to Iran to you you have a relationship with Iran that is different from ours you are too important for the United States to bother with so we'll work through you it's a little extra cash to pay for the extra expenses a little more recordkeeping but sanctions are evaded that is the history of sanctions the more you put them down the more the people you put them on figure out ways around it it's a little bit like tax law in the United States every year Congress rewrites the taxes and every year people who used to be in Congress are now private accountants and they advise their rich clients how to get around the latest and then the government adjusts the law and the people who evade the law adjust the evasions and this silliness is good for headlines but doesn't change the basic situation Russia did not stop doing in in Ukraine what it's doing because you hit them with the mother of all sanctions Iran didn't change its government last month over the over the last month the Secretary of the Treasury uh Yellen and Secretary of State blinkin went to China urging them to change their system the Chinese must look at them and say over the last 25 years we have grown our economy two to three times faster than yours year in and year out that's why you're here visiting us we are the greatest escape from poverty the world has ever seen over a billion people escaping poverty in a generation it's unheard of nobody in their right mind would come here urging us to change a system that has worked this well you can't what are you doing it's ridiculous and you know most of the world looks at at it that way only here in the United States does it seem reasonable for the United States to go to China after 25 years of doing less well giving them advice on making their system look more like ours wow absolutely and those trips by uh treasury secretary Yellen and uh Anthony blinkin um state Secretary they were nothing short of embarrassing it just it just when you when you look at it and you're you're just kind of thinking how could this be it's unimaginable to think that uh you know like China or or any other country comes to the United States and tries to tell us oh you need to stop producing you need to stop doing this or that because it's it's not in our favor but that is precisely what they did and it certainly didn't really go over very well and I think the um this past week with uh Vladimir Putin's visit to China and so many new trade agreements and um the way he was um received and kind of the overall coverage of that visit it proved that that China probably didn't really uh take uh blinkin or Yellen visit seriously anyway and this past week may have been a response to those uh forms of of of trying to force uh force them to change their trade policy to change their uh policies in general do you feel that this past week was a message that they sent or was was this sort of a a new step towards multipolarity and uh economic development for uh countries that have been developing but now found this new block where they can uh sort of um play off of each other and and help each other grow the bricks block I think my answer is it's both I mean I I am as you are I find it embarrassing that these leaders from the United States are so toned deaf that they cannot imagine how what they are doing looks to people in the rest of the world I mean American foreign policy on many levels ever since at least Henry Kissinger back in the 1970s so half a century ago has been devoted to preventing a an alliance between Russia and China so you'd have to say that everything of the last 50 years is a colossal failure because Russia and China are closer together now than arguably they've ever been you know back in the 1960s uh Russia and China came to military blows against one another on the border between their two countries even though both were were you know organized under a communist party the Russian the Soviet one and and the Chinese one so here they are now Russia quite different rejected its revolution China is still with its Communist party and now they are even though they're different in this important way they're closer together than ever that's really a product of American policy it's not only that American policy failed to keep them separate but American policy gets a good bit of the credit for bringing them together especially with this war in Ukraine which if they had understood what they were doing which they clearly didn't they would have understood this is a possible side effect which makes the whole project an idiocy to undertake not even to speak of the terrible Damage Done to the people and country of Ukraine etc etc uh so you're seeing in my view all the signs of a decaying Empire of a decaying capitalism you know capitalism always has moved let's be economic historians together just for a moment you know here I live in the United States our the history of our country we once had capitalism Dynamic and growing in the area called New England Maine Rhode Island Massachusetts Connecticut and so on then eventually it moved into what we call the midatlantic states New York Pennsylvania and so on then it moved to the Midwest Ohio Indiana Illinois then it moved to the South and the Far West California uh and so on and it left behind empty factories depressed economic units in recent decades it's left the United States all together General Motors produces more cars in China than it does in the United States ditto for Ford and so on well guess what friends capitalism looking for profits goes where the profits are the highest and over the last 30 years what China has done no great secret it has said to the world's capitalists come here we want you we welcome you we offer you an educated disciplined labor force much cheaper than what you pay your workers in Western Europe or North America or Japan and because we are growing we offer you the fastest growing market and because we have a huge population it's the world's biggest and fastest growing Market well I've been a professor at Business Schools and I can assure you teach the students who are the future Business Leaders that if you want your business to succeed you go where the wages are low and the market is growing that's what you do and so capitalists have left the United States western Europe and Japan and moved into China India Brazil and if you don't like that if it depresses you about what that means that all of America is now experiencing the decline that New England and Mid-Atlantic experienced half a century ago then the problem for you is capitalism not this or that detail it's a system that goes to where the profits are and the profits are not here unless you create them artificially tariffs give you artificial profit opportunities by being able to jack up the price but that that's called an inflation has other very negative consequences the poor capitalists are stuck what they do to solve a problem makes another problem worse that's another sign of Decline and this may be a naive question but you mentioned economic decline you mentioned you know dying Empire essentially and um so this may be an NA question I just want to preface it with that but why do you feel the US foreign policy has been so unwilling to adapt to this changing landscape International in terms of um centers of power and in terms of economic changes that uh move profits to countries that are just like China that have a lower cost um of Labor and that are emerging in terms of uh their Market well the United States at this point is stuck on its own on its own history it can't adjust you know it has developed a society which told itself and its people that profit the profit motive is the Royal Road to prosperity and success let companies pursue the profit and well over the last 30 years companies did that they pursued the profit and they went to China or they went to India or they went to Brazil which they're still doing and so Americans were stuck what were they going to say we don't believe in the prophet motive the results of the Prophet are not good for us they would have to rethink the entire proc capitalist ideology that private pursuit of profit leads to the best outcome for everybody look that's what's taught in the universities where I've been a professor all my life that's what was taught to me and went to all the elite universities here that was the ideology and the problem is that misunderstands that capitalism is in fact a profit-driven system and it will therefore go where the profits dictate if you're the place to which profit dictates investment you're having a good time you're having the second half of the 20th century in the United States but if you're living in a country which isn't the profit attractor because that's somewhere else China India then you're going to be on the bad side of the profit motive that's what's forcing itself into the consciousness of the United States they're now seeing that free trade and profit driven is what lost the jobs you referred to it earlier correctly about the disappearing middle class they're beginning to understand that's why we have the support for Mr Trump he at least sounds different doesn't do anything different but he at least sounds like he's going to do something different whereas Mr Biden sounds like the same old same old continue with and that puts Mr Biden in a very dangerous position because he is not responding in the minds of millions of Americans to the felt economic crisis this is a generation of Americans who don't believe that their children are going to have a higher standard of living than they do when I was growing up in the United States that was assumed to be somehow the magic benefit of being an American each generation would live you will live better than your parents they lived better than your grandparents etc etc it was just built into to what came to be called American exceptionalism that it what it was nothing exceptional at all it was that profits were better here for all kinds of reasons and capital came here and when profits became better somewhere else Capital left and it and the politicians don't know what to do you know their ideology was free market that didn't work out they're now switching to economic nationalism protecting everywhere sanctioning funding this company funding that company billions have been given for example to Elon Musk the production of electric vehicles in this country by Tesla is a government funded project Americans don't want to face that but if they hadn't done that then he would have done everything elsewhere or he wouldn't have done it at all the government is crucial not just when we collapse like in 2008 and n and the government had to Comm and bail out the banks or in 2020 21 when the government had to save us from the covid pandemic the government is continuously now being brought in because this capitalism cannot compete and that takes us right back to the beginning of our conversation we can't compete with the electric vehicles either and so we're protecting without facing that this is going to worsen the inflation that we're supposed to be fighting these kinds of absurdities these are signs it's like a doctor reading a patient your body there are signs that a medical trained person can see that you've got some serious issues to deal with it's not just that you have a rash here or a pain over there there's something more fundamental going on and hopefully they can figure it out and treat it we're in that situation except we have a country whose politician have to end every speech by saying we are in the greatest economy in the great it's no longer true the wages aren't the highest here the standard of living isn't the high it's all not true but we have a cheerleading political environment that hasn't yet been broken although I must tell you the number of people that I encounter as an American who are questioning capitalism I've never seen that in my entire life what I am seeing around me now and the willingness of young people particularly young people to challenge and question what the government is doing well you can see it on the campuses around Israel and Gaza but that's the tip of the iceberg they're questioning everything and that's because they're not being offered the jobs they were taught to expect they are not being offered the economic future they were taught to expect and they are asking the questions that intelligent human beings have always asked when things don't work the way they're supposed to and you mentioned that even younger people are starting to sort of think well things aren't really going as we're told on you know in in the mainstream media so people are starting to realize that these changes that we're facing they're not going to um it's not something that will impact us 50 years from now this is something that's already impacting us our society our purchasing power so uh maybe um my last question for you uh for this video what is what would be fair to say um would be um the economic developments or the situation five or 10 years from now just based on these processes that uh you just described here's what I think is going on and of course you know the future is always a guess your guess my guess and I don't claim any more than that but here's my guess I see particularly again the younger Generations asking questions about the economic system much Bolder much deeper than I have ever seen before and and certainly that was true of my generation when I was a university student and so I've asked myself where is this going and the answer I've come up with is the following these young people are not going to be persuaded that voting for a Democrat versus a Republican or for that matter vice versa that's not the solution they they understand the problems are deeper and that these people are fundamentally puppets of the way the system is laid out you know a couple of days ago the Washington Post carried an article which I found remarkable uh someone had given them the transcript of a WhatsApp conversation and it was a conversation among very rich corporate people discussing how much money they were going to give and what kind of support they were going to give to the mayor of New York Adams to have the police in New York intervene at Colombia at NYU to squash the uh protesters around the Gaza uh activity okay uh there it is the young people know this they didn't know those details those are new but they it confirms what people have begun to understand that if you live in a system that produces great wealth at one end and mass of people having a kind of hard time getting through uh you're going to literally create in those people the use of the money that has has been concentrated in their hands to do whatever they want so if for example these people are very supportive of Israel in this case that's was the case they want to shut down these protests that support the Palestinians and and Gaza and all that so they offer money and they are listen to the mayor answers the phone these are important donors they talk about donating more to him so he can be reelected the money is doing what it's doing it's showing the young people and they've learned it that we have the best government money can buy but that's not the government they want and they're now smart enough to understand the problem really isn't in the government the government is acting out what an unequal Society will make it do and that has always been true you know and therefore you got to deal with that well how do you deal with the horrible inequality that allows a few people to shape what a a mayor of the biggest city in the country does over the telephone against young people who are peacefully protesting in the University where they are students well the young people are asking basic questions so now I'll tell you why that's the answer to your question they understand that the origin of the inequality is in inside the Enterprise it's inside the factory the office the store and it comes out of the way those are organized because in all of them factories offices and stores a tiny group of people the owner of the business uh the board of directors if it's a corporation they have all the power they make the decision what is going to be produced what technology is going to be used us where the production will occur and then the big one how to utilize what to do with the revenue you get from running the business all of that's decide a board of uh board of directors in an American corporation is usually between 10 and 20 people they may hire 10,000 but it's 10 and 20 individuals who sit around they usually meet four times a year and they make those decisions and guess what they give the money the revenue the debt The Profit whatever you want to call it they give it to the shareholders who the ones who elect them to be on the board or to the top Executives which often includes themselves in other words the people at the top take the Lion's Share of the net revenue of the Enterprise which should surprise nobody they're the people who run it they're in a position to do it and they do it Boeing aircraft who has had one safety disaster after another for the last several years just raised raised the annual pay of their departing CEO a Mr Calhoun from the 22 million he got last year 20 in 2022 to 33 million for 2023 he preserved Ed over the worst safety record any modern air airline has ever achieved okay there's no connection between what he did and what he's paid and the board of directors voted him that money was not just him it that's how the they take care of themselves so here's where we're going I think five or 10 years from now this generation will have put on the agenda a radical change in the organization of the Enterprise the factory the office and the store it's going to be called I suspect the democratization of the Enterprise all Enterprises are going to be run one person one vote as a democratic community no individual is going to get hundreds of millions no bill Bill Gates no Elon Musk none of that you can give a reward to people who make a good invention you can honor the one who improves the technology and give him money too sure but basically we are not going to function to produce this kind of inequality and that's going to save us from rich people who buy the government when none of us are going to be in a position to do that I think that's the kind of fundamental change we're talking about so it'll be on a scale of deciding for example no longer to organize our factories offices and stores with Masters and slaves as in slavery or with Lords and surfs as in feudalism or with employers and employees which was capitalism it's a new Democratic organization which will seem to the that generation a much better much more grounded solution to the problems that are accumulating than doing peace meal or imagining that the leaders of our corporations today or the politicians they buy are going to help us out of the situation they have created and from which they benefit I couldn't agree with you more I think you brought up so many interesting points that uh I would love to uh hear hear your thoughts on um hopefully in the next videos Professor thank thank you so much for such an interesting conversation I really enjoyed it and I know that our viewers did as well we're definitely living in very interesting times and it seems that every single day every week if not every day every week there's something that let's just say surprises us right something that happens and we we never thought it could happen or it would happen that exact way so I would like to remind our viewers that uh Dr wal's YouTube channel and his website democracy atw work will be linked in the video description below please give him a follow he has wonderful wonderful content as I'm sure many of you already know and uh Professor I hope you come back thank you so much for your time today thank you for inviting me and I'd love to continue the conversation in the future
