The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch, our show that reveals how extreme wealth inequality defines how we live while holding the people who hoard that wealth accountable. And today, we will be unpacking two topics that are critical to understanding how inequality defines and affects our lives and politics. Specifically, we’ll be breaking down how a highly politicized resource and the political economy it creates facilitates an authoritarian grip on our society in unseen ways. And then we will be breaking down how all of this leads to a frightening consolidation of power that threatens the very existence of our democracy. And to do so, we’re going to be joined by one of the most brilliant thinkers and popular analysts on the intersections of politics and economics on YouTube, Dr. Richard Wolff. But before we get to him, I want to break down an outline of our discussion today and the framework we’ll be using to analyze how wealth and power work in tandem to reinforce each other to the detriment of working people. So to get started, first I want to introduce my co-host and reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Stephen, it’s good to see you.

Stephen Janis:

Taya, thanks for having me, I’m so happy to be here.

Taya Graham:

Great. Now just to set you up here, as recent US actions in Venezuela have made abundantly clear, America’s imperialist ambitions are more expansive than ever. But what’s even more intriguing about the Trump administration’s interference with a sovereign nation is how explicit and upfront they’ve been about one of the key motivators behind removing Nicholas Maduro from his bedroom in the middle of the night, namely oil, crude oil to be exact, and Venezuela has a lot of it. Some estimates say that it’s roughly 20% of the world’s proven reserves. They’re second only to Saudi Arabia. And while administration officials have been less than forthcoming about how they plan to run a country of roughly 30 million people, they haven’t been shy about taking the nation’s most valuable resource. And let me give you a quote here directly from President Trump from truth social. I’m pleased to announce that the interim authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 million barrels of high quality sanctioned oil to United States of America.

This oil will be sold at its market price and that money will be controlled by me as presidents of the United States of America. Now this is an example of fairly naked aggression and it provides a perfect opportunity to drill down, no pun intended, into the uniquely horrific way this supposed liquid gold is shaping our lives and foreign policy. It’s a tool of oppression that is part of a growing economy of extraction, and a way to explain the increasingly bizarre world where the rich live like aristocratic gods and the rest can’t afford housing or healthcare. And a big part of this is due to the artificial addiction imposed on us by corporations and the governments beholden to them all focused on the preeminence of oil. So today we will, along with Dr. Wolff unpack how this works, affects our lives, and what we can do about it. And to facilitate this discussion to move beyond the obvious, we’ll start by unpacking oil as an idea, not just a resource. And for the purpose of this discussion, we’ll call it liquid authoritarianism. Now, Stephen, this is an idea we’ve been tossing back and forth.

How does this idea work with the notion that we’ve talked about before, which is the rise of an extractive economy?

Stephen Janis:

Well put simply, democracy requires movement of bodies, of ideas of people. And when you have something like oil and a restrictive resource that you can create false scarcity, you kind of have democracy in your grip. And I think that’s why, and the reason we’re bringing this up, and I think that’s why the Trump administration is obsessed with it, why they’re ignoring things like alternative energy and clean fuels and solar power or whatever, not even clean fuels and why they are tightening their grip by tighten their grip on this particular resource and why they seem obsessed with it. They want to pretty much own and monetize the circulatory system of a democracy, the free flow of people, ideas, bodies, whatever movement they want to restrict movement. And I think this gives them the perfect opportunity and it infiltrates the whole system. So that’s why we call it liquid authoritarianism.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, I really appreciate that insight. I like how you described the restriction of movement. But before we go further, we are so grateful to be joined by Dr. Richard Wolff. Though many of you are more than familiar with his work and ideas, let me just give a brief introduction for the few people who watch YouTube who don’t know Dr. Richard Wolff. Dr. Wolff has taught economics at a variety of universities. He’s professor at Economics emeritus at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he’s a visiting professor at the New York New School. He’s also an author of over a dozen books including Understanding Socialism, the Sickness is the System, and his latest book, understanding Capitalism. He also found a democracy at work, which you can find right here on YouTube. Dr. Wolff, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

It’s my pleasure, Taya. I am really glad to be here and talking about an issue as fundamentally important as the one you’ve just been talking about.

Taya Graham:

So lemme just start you off with a preliminary question. What are your thoughts on the US capture of Maduro and Trump’s promise to run the country and of course the oil?

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Well, I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already know. When I say to you that what Mr. Trump says and what is actually going on, bear only an occasional and tangential relationship, he can’t control what 30 million people in Venezuela are going to be doing. He can’t control how they react to what they are slowly coming to understand is what just happened to them. I wouldn’t dare to predict it, but he does. But that’s not because he knows it’s because he has to justify what he just did. And let’s be crystal clear about it. Capitalism as a system, it has a fundamental irrationality at its core and that irrationality is you are successful if you grow and you’re bigger year in and year out and you are unsuccessful. If you don’t, you are rewarded by expansion and growth. You are punished if you don’t achieve it. It means that every factory, every office, every store is busily trying to grow. This is craziness. Let me give you an example to help you understand it. Suppose you were organizing your family at home, mama papa, the children, maybe the grandparents. Would you give each of them the rule, make everything bigger? It would be crazy.

Very soon baby John’s room would start expanding and crowding out grandma’s space. You don’t do that. You work out a reasonable rational. Capitalism doesn’t do it gives everybody the same marching orders. It’s like one size fits all. It doesn’t. And one of the things it does is it makes capitalist countries pretty quickly start expanding and bumping into one another. Well, where that leads capitalism after two or three centuries is what we call World War I And World War II catastrophic murderous destruction because Britain wanted to go where Germany didn’t want it to and the Russians wanted to go where the Japanese didn’t and blew each other out of the water. It was so horrific that the human race decided all of ’em after the war set up a place where we can limit this capitalist system. They called it the League of Nations and it was supposed to meet and to try to resolve things otherwise.

But there were three countries unhappy with that arrangement because they had been defeated in World War I basically Germany, Italy, and Japan. And so they broke apart the League of Nations and true enough, we went into another equally horrific war because we were bumping into each other. Germans wanted to undo what had been done by World War I, the British and Americans didn’t want it. We went to mass killing out of it, came to United Nations for 70 years. It worked. We didn’t have another World War. But what Mr. Trump is doing in Venezuela and across the board is withdrawing like the Japanese, like the Germans, like the Italians. He’s withdrawing. He literally withdrew this last week from about 65 organizations around the world. Why? Because as you said, quite correctly, he wants to control as much of the world as the United States still can, which is shrinking.

The American empire is shrinking. A new kid on the block, which I hope people might now understand is called the People’s Republic of China is the new economic powerhouse in the world and Mr. Trump can’t do it. Look, modern technology dictated already 20 years ago, thanks to the work of a pioneer like Rachel Carson, that we are destroying our planet ecologically and we need to do what? To stop growing like crazy people and sit down and say like in your house with grandma’s room and Johnny’s room, let us stop doing these things that are particularly destructive to the environment and that way we’ll all be better off. Right? We’re not going to all blow it up.

Speaker 3:

Okay?

Dr. Richard Wolff:

That led to replacing the gas guzzling car with the electric car, the gas guzzling truck with the electric truck, fossil fuel coal by solar energy. Okay? Everybody went to work to try to produce these products, including Americans. But here’s the problem with a new kid on the block, it turns out that the absolutely best and cheapest electric vehicles are produced by a Chinese company, the BYD corporation, in case you never heard of it, they sold more electric cars last year in the world than the number two producer, which is Tesla. So we ought to be careful. They produce the best in the cheapest electric cars and trucks. The Chinese produce the best solar panels to capture energy. Mr. Trump is the president of the country that lost the competition,

That didn’t figure out how to do what the Chinese did. So they went first one last point, they went first to Mr. Trump, he put a 27% tariff on Chinese cars. Mr. Biden raised it to a hundred percent and Mr. Trump leaves it at a hundred percent, which is why when I was in France a couple of weeks ago, I stepped into cabs, BYD, they are the best cars to get a cab in Paris. Wow, I can’t get one here because this country’s capitalism. Here was the wisdom of your point earlier, trying to hold on oil because we have a lot of that and we can control it. We don’t have the electric car or the solar panels. We don’t need oil. It’s retrograde, it’s backward.

And the American capitalist system far from being on the cutting edge of modern technology is holding back the world from life determining technology. We are in a situation that is grim in terms of the role played by the United States, and it’s all about your wealth question. The big oil companies want to hold on to their wealth. The United States wants to hold on to the wealth of its wealthy people, but it is causing damage and backwardness for the mass of people. That means, and I say this with all humbleness, the days of capitalism, they are numbered.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean I

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Don’t want to admit it, but it is everywhere written.

Stephen Janis:

Wow, Professor Wolff. But I’ve always thought that the idea was that capitalism would be rational in terms of preserving wealth or increasing wealth. But it is in the United States version, as you point out, is completely turned away from alternative forms of energy that are cheaper and more efficient. Why does, is it wealth inequality that creates these inefficient ideas and systems that kind of oppress us? I mean, is there something inherently about inequality that makes economics irrational or is our economic system as we’ve discussed before, completely irrational at its base?

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Well, our system, let’s put it this way, all systems are mixtures of rational and irrational components. Like all people, all of us have in us

Desires that are logical and warm and friendly, and then darker moments that we occasionally encounter if we’re honest about ourselves, alright? But we live in a culture that is now overwhelmingly unable to face what I just said. So what it has is a total blindness to the questions that a rational person has to ask. So for example, is it nice if somebody becomes wealthy? Sure it is. You have lots of things and you can access them. But suppose I told you that your wealth and your access is a problem for the people around you who cannot share it, who don’t have the access they have to watch that they can’t buy a college education for their children. They can’t do it. Okay? That produces difference, bitterness, envy, those are negative feelings which will have their consequence. So if you make great inequality, the good news for those who are rich is offset by the bad news for those who aren’t.

And now those people who aren’t blessed with wealth are going to make life difficult for those who are. And so we pick up a newspaper tonight and we read that Aunt Louise on her way home from shopping was approached by some crazy person who hit her over the head with a brick. And the headline reads senseless. It’s not senseless at all. There’s a very deep sense to it. If you treat some people the way we treat millions, you are going to hurt them. You are going to damage them, and with many of them, you are going to destroy much of their humanity and that is going to come back and bite you in the rear end. It’s been a lesson that should have been learned with the extreme inequality of ancient Egypt, of the Roman slavery, of all the intermediate learn. Not at all. The United States has become more unequal in the last 40 or 50 years

Than it ever was before. Nobody stops it. Democrats bemoan it and do nothing to stop it. Republicans celebrate it because they are trying to teach the American people focus only on Elon Musk, not on all the people who are left behind, not given the basics of life. We are suffering a growth in unemployment now in homelessness, now in the percentage of our people that have to take, I saw today in this headline, two jobs highest in 25 years. What are we doing driving people to take two jobs so they’re exhausted, they have no space in their life left for their children or their boyfriend or their girlfriend or all the other parts of life. European demand, what’s called work life balance. It’s a big issue in Europe. You can’t do to the working class there. What you can do here. They have it built in. Americans will catch up, but we are at a time when people who are crazy, not because there’s something wrong with them, but who are the supporters of a capitalism that’s irrational and they’ve adopted all that mentality. Look at Mr. Miller, Steven Miller advisor celebrating what was done in Venezuela because life is difficult and power is whatnot. You’re talking to a psychopath, you’re talking to someone who hasn’t learned where that kind of thinking has taken the human race, even though the last a hundred years are full of the most horrific examples of manageable,

These people are gone and I think we have to face that they’re in the driver’s seat and you ought to be very nervous if that kind of person is in that kind of position.

Stephen Janis:

Well, remember the first guilded age was pretty bad. Are we comparatively speaking in the second guilded age and is that why we see this cruelty of the Trump administration? In other words, the rational side of the rational sort of capitalism trying to justify this extreme wealth has to be cruel to the people who are victimized by. So are we in a second golden age? That’s actually worse than the first one

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Maybe. Yes, because in the first so-called golden age, the American empire was on the upswing. It was emerging from its primitive back past as a colony of Great Britain. It had acquired its independence, it had gone through a wrenching civil war and had established itself as a new developing capitalist industrial country. And it took off and it gave us a century, a century and a half of real rapid economic growth. So successful partly because we ethnically cleaned all the indigenous people out. We murdered them. We did to the indigenous people here, what the Israelis are doing in Gaza to the Palestinians. We did that. It’s part of where the Israelis got the, and so we had a golden age that was rich enough to give some to the mass of the working class. And you had to because you had no domestic workers, you killed off the indigenous people.

You could only bring so many slaves from Africa. So you had to convince wave after wave of European to come here by offering decent wages. Long story. It was an expansive moment. Here’s the difference today, and if I can get this across, it’s more important than everything else. The United States is now a dying empire. It’s declining and people have to understand, we’ve had many empires in the world. They all go up, they plateau, and then that’s why we go to view ruins of the Greek on the Parthenon in Athens or the temples, the coliseum in Rome, all the leftovers of the departed empires. It’s much better on the upswing than it is on the down. Why? Here comes the answer to your question because when the downswing happens in empire after empire, there begins to be a horrible struggle between whom, between the people who have amassed the power and the wealth in the empire who want to hold on to it and the mass of people who don’t have the wealth and don’t have the power.

So what happens is those who have wealth and power offload the costs of economic decline of empire decline onto the rest of us. Mr. Trump last this last week announced and no one paid attention to it. In the midst of all the hoop oodle about Venezuela, he cut federal government support to a half a dozen Democratic states for their social welfare, for their childcare, for their, what do you think this is? Having Elon Musk fire all the people, the DOGE fiasco. None of that makes any sense. You know what that is? That’s offloading the costs of a declining empire on the most defenseless people you can find. That’s who you do it to. And that’s why the rich can continue. 2025 was a very bad year for the American working class, but the richest billionaires in this country increased their wealth by hundreds of billions of dollars. They’re already the richest people and they got much richer.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, 2.2 trillion, I think.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Yeah, you’d have to be completely nuts to have that make sense. What do you do? Why would you and ask yourself this as an American with me, why would you jeopardize the social stability of your country to make the people already richer than you can imagine? The billionaires even richer rather than using it to take care of the basics, give people a home, give them a decent diet, give ’em clothing to be warm. That is so stupid that you even from a point of view of the rich, what’s the matter with you? You’ve lost your mind To understand this, you need that fairytale. Remember the Midas touch, the sad king who everything he touched was gold and he was all excited. He hugged his daughter and he lost her in that moment, she turned to gold, he lost the living daughter he wanted and needed, and he got a statue. That’s us. That’s what we are doing. Only we’re too stupid as a nation to face it.

Taya Graham:

Wow. That is such a powerful image. Yeah, absolutely. And you really captured the irrationality of the people who are at the head of these companies and the ones who are hoarding this wealth. And so to kind of address irrational economics, I’d like to just pivot a little bit and ask you about what a lot of people are calling an AI bubble. You see a lot of circular business where one AI company is buying products and services from another and they turn around and buy it from the same firm. Is there an AI bubble? And if there is, what could be the consequences of it bursting?

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Okay, let me go backwards. If there’s a bubble, what would be the consequences? Well, the reason we call these things a bubble is that they burst like bubbles. Do you put your finger in a bubble of soap? Well, and it opens up and it collapses. Is that possible? Absolutely. The financial press that I read every day, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Financial Times, things like that, full of debates for months now about whether AI is a bubble or not. So anyone who tells you it is with definitiveness or it isn’t with definitiveness is somebody you should not bother listening to because it’s just, the truth is we don’t know, which is we don’t usually know that a bubble is a bubble until we look back after it has burst and we realize, oh my goodness, why didn’t we see it? Okay, so let’s go through it.

The stock market has crashed three times, as has American capitalism in this new century. We had what was called the.com crash. Why? Because there was a .com bubble that burst in 2008, we had the subprime mortgage crash. Why? Because a mountain of credit had been built on top of mortgages of people who couldn’t afford the mortgage. And that bubble burst in 2020. We had the pandemic. We had the fact that we had allowed all kinds of investments to be made because our president told us the COVID-19 was nothing to worry about. Just drink a little Clorox or whatever it was and you’ll be cuckoo kaka stuff. And so people didn’t stop and make the adjust, so the bubble burst. Okay, so first thing to understand, bubbles are normal. Bubbles are a recurring problem in capitalism and they have been for a century or a half.

It is a fundamental flaw of the system and that’s why you haven’t heard about it because in America we don’t talk about the flaws of capitalism. We have to constantly tell each other that capitalism is the best thing since sliced bread, only even better. So we can’t talk about it flaws. We’ve had bubbles over and over. They were called financial panics in the 19th century. They had a variety of names. What are they? They are, when people get excited about the prospects of a technical change, whatever it is, they’re get all with electricity or with a atomic energy or with the computer or whatever one you’re looking at, we’re going to be able to make profits. Oh boy, we can replace all these workers and we’ll have this equipment or this software program or this machine. And everybody gets inside. Everybody wants to make a killing.

They’re going to buy the company that does that first and they’re going to buy the shares of the company that makes the machine. That’s what’s going on. We have an explosion in Wall Street of people buying the shares of a small number. It’s like 20 or 30 companies. Some of them are big and famous, the name Apple, Amazon, those kinds of companies. And then a whole bunch of big and small companies that are involved either in making AI equipment or making the software for it or involved in manufacturing the little bit that’s left in America, which can use AI products in their own work stores offices. So there’s an enormous excitement and the prices of the shares of these companies go crazy. They go complete. Suddenly a company you never heard of is the number one country in the world because the value of its shares are now in the trillions.

That company often has never made a profit. It’s not trading on what it does. It’s trading on what people think it will be able to do. And let me tell you, in case you haven’t figured this out, nobody knows the future. I don’t. You don’t. They don’t either. So here’s what happens. They go in and buy it. Somebody else says, oh, I want to get in on this. So they go in and they buy the share of the first guy got giving him a big extra to buy it from him knowing that they can sell to the next yokel who comes along with this idea. So it builds on itself. Or to be more honest, it builds on the goal ability of one. And if you work in Wall Street, you’ll quickly discover if there’s a boom, you better be in on it. If you’re not, your boss will call you in and say, I look at my competitors. They’re all making money on this rising stock. You haven’t bought any what tails are not. You’re fired. You income somebody who goes with it. So they all buy it until somebody, this what always happens points out that the number of sales of those chat, the programs that do the ai, those sales are not going very well.

That started happening about four months ago. So that’s why in the literature now everybody’s going, oh shit, this could be another bubble because it’s beginning to look like a bubble. And then there’s something else that’s going on now that Americans don’t want to hear about. But it is crucial that while the United States is doing this, it used to be you didn’t have to worry about the rest of the world. We were at the cutting edge. We were where it’s happening, not anymore. China is very able to do ai in fact is better able at this point than we are in a number of areas. So you have a whole new element that could burst the bubble, which is the announcement that it could happen any day. China announces, we’ve just understood it has already happened several times and then the balloon collapses as everybody realizes, AI has a great future, but it’ll be for the Chinese to cash in on it, not us.

The Chinese now have one of the most widely used AI programs, which they made available at a ridiculous price. The Americans can’t compete with that price over the last 30 years, including this last year, 2025, people have to understand the Chinese economy. Second already to the United States, grew three times faster than the American. That has been the case now for 30 years. Roughly speaking, GDP grows in the United States two to 3% a year and grows in China six to 9%. That’s a three to one ratio. That’s we’ve never seen that before. No one has ever achieved what the Chinese already have, and they’re not slowing down and they are changing everything. And the United States relative position keeps shrinking. And so you can’t, I don’t know how to get this across. You can’t talk about the American economy anymore without reference to what the Chinese have done to change the world system.

But Americans, that’s what Mr. Trump is mostly for. He’s a mascot whose antics are supposed to sustain. Joe Biden did that by his verbiage, but he was half asleep, so no one took it all that seriously. Mr. Trump is a loud mouth, but it’s the same effort. And Venezuela, whatever else it is, is also a show and tell product like a little kid going into second grade to show the little lantern they made. Look at us, we’re the empire. He has to do that because he isn’t. It’s the effort to do what you can’t do anymore. That’s why it was so odd. If you’re going to control Venezuela, you have to have large numbers of people on the ground. But that’s too dangerous. The last time the United States did that in Vietnam, it lost the time after that, it did it in Afghanistan, it lost, then it did it in Iraq, it lost, and now it’s doing it by proxy in Ukraine and it’s losing there too.

There’s a clue in what, I just don’t do that. So their hope is, and that’s all it is, snatch this man and his wife literally out of bed, yank him here, put him on a show trial that no one in the world will take seriously and hope you can control Venezuela this way. You can’t. The only way you’re going to control Venezuela is if you have a mass of Venezuelans willing to play the role for you. And you may be able to find that that’s possible. We don’t know. Mr. Trump doesn’t know. I don’t know. Your audience can’t know whether any of that will be possible. And if it does happen, those people may be crookeder than last week’s Wonder Bread and demand a huge cut of the action for themselves leaving Venezuela, what it was, an unequal society with a different collection of players, but not a very different game.

Are those things possible? Of course they are. The fact that Mr. Trump tells you this is going to happen, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Half of the stories he tells are concocted. This is the man who said, and I’m an economist, so I will tell you this, who said over, he still says that his tariffs affect the other country. I’m hitting Russia with a tariff or I’m hitting the Europeans or the Canadians or the Mexican tariffs don’t hit other people. Tariffs are paid by Americans, they’re attacks. And the United States can only tax its own people. Now, you might hope that the foreigners fearing the loss of an American market because of the tariff raising the price will lower the price to offset the back of the tariff. You could hope for that. You might not get it, you might. Well, we now have a paper released last week by Goldman Sachs, if I remember who the Economist worked for. I read these papers part of my life by my work. So here’s what the American economist found. The overwhelming majority of the tariffs collected by the United States government were paid by Americans. American business paid part of it, and the consumer paid the rest of it. Wow. That’s what Mr. Trump did. The leader of the Republican Party, the party of no taxes hit the Americans with a tax,

He called it a tariff and mumbled noise about it being a punishment of others, but it wasn’t. It was a punishment of Americans.

Stephen Janis:

Wow. Well,

Taya Graham:

I just wanted, you said something really interesting about AI in China, and I just wanted to follow up on that because there are a lot of scenarios. People are putting out white papers. These are scientists who were part of the AI industry where they talk about the possibilities of how AI could harm humanity. And an AI arms race is often how it begins, throwing aside caution and guardrails in order for a country to have the most advanced AI the fastest. Now, as you said, China’s already positioning itself to win this race by this early investment in developing affordable and renewable energy sources. Now, I know you said it’s not right to predict the future, but with your knowledge base, can you speculate, can you share what your concerns are about ai and do you think any country can really be a trusted steward of this technology?

Dr. Richard Wolff:

I don’t know if a country can be a trusted steward. I don’t know how to answer that question, but I don’t think that anything like that’s going to happen. I think the first part of your question, you’re dead on. You’re absolutely right. The Chinese have made a commitment to equal or surpass the United States on everything, and people used to make fun of that commitment no more because they’re doing it now. Why are they doing it? Well, the reasons are not far to look. First of all, we got to start with a naked fact. For every American, there are four Chinese, or maybe even by now five Chinese, so they just have more people. Number two, they are pouring investments into schools, technical institutes, universities, research centers. We are cutting back in the United States and they are exploding them. Alright, now it’ll take time, but that already tells you where this is going.

Then the United States bets on a fossil fuel future. The Chinese have to be careful because they still rely on fossil fuels. So they have gone all over the world very carefully, very systematically to develop the sources of energy they need coal, oil, gas. Much of the development of those resources in Africa is connected to the Chinese as the exploration of the huge expanse of Northern Russia gets underway, and that’s barely begun. The Chinese will be all involved in that because it’s available, it’s near them and they have the technology. So the United States is betting its long-term future on a dying energy source, and the Chinese are committing most of their resources to make sure they have enough oil. But then to look into electric cars, to look into the solar panels. They’re the number one producer in the world of solar, converting sun into energy, and they’re working on wind and they’re working on water. They’re the future.

Karl Marx deserves to be in these conversations more than he is given time for, has a very famous theory that economic systems are born when they can promise the mass of people a more developed technological standard of living than an old system is able to do. But that what seems to happen is over time the institutions of a society change and instead of being agents of progress become fetters. That was the word he used ERs. That’s what we got. When Mr. Trump invades Venezuela to get oil, he’s committing himself to the energy source of the past. China is going to represent itself as the place to go. If you want energy that doesn’t pollute, I don’t know how sick Americans are going to have to be with the results of the pollution we are going to be living with for a long time before millions of them say, stop. We don’t want. We’re going to make a shift. And that shift is going to be controlled by China.

The Chinese are a very smart people and we have to understand China is one of the few parts of what we used to call the third world. That was never a colony. Unlike India, unlike so much of Latin America, China was never anybody’s colony. Bits of China were taken along coast, but China as a society, China as a culture, kept its independence and then it had a civil war and the communists came to power in 1949. Thereafter, they were a pariah because of that, they got no Marshall plan held from the United States. The economics profession of which I’m a part, which studies economic development. The United States sent people like me to many countries around to help develop them, but never to China. Like never to Russia, not to Cuba or North Korea. But here’s the joke that history is playing. It’s the countries we didn’t help that have done the best.

China did the best, and China did it on its own. It didn’t get help. So it turns out that the help was a two-edged sword. It helped you in some and held you back. The Chinese said, Uhuh we’re not doing that. They had no choice. They wouldn’t have been helped by the west anyway, but they’ve ended up showing that they could do better on their own than any colony or colony has been able to do. China’s far ahead of India, China’s far ahead of any of the countries helped by the West. That ought to stop and make you ask what happened here? Why did a country that got no aid? And by the way, if you ever want to understand how far China has come, I believe she was American, an American missionary woman. You may have known her work. Pearl Buck was her name and she wrote a novel called The Good Earth many years ago. It’s about the poverty of China, which she encountered as a missionary. Wonderful book, brilliant writing. But you will never forget that level of poverty exceeds anything any of us have ever encountered. So to say that China is today the great competitor when literally a century ago it was the scene of Pearl Buck’s book, we ought to be studying in our universities. What did they do? What can we learn? I try to explain it to people. Is that a part of the curriculum here in the United States? Oh no.

The Cold War is alive and kicking. Oh no.

Taya Graham:

And Dr. Wolff, let me just say in advance, I know your expertise is economics, but I think you have a right to speak on this as a human being, as an American. I’m sure you’ve seen the recent current events, the actions of ice, and in particular that tragedy that occurred in Minneapolis. I believe it was Renee Nicole Good who was shot in Minneapolis by an ICE agent. And I just wanted to know if you wouldn’t mind just sharing your thoughts on the actions that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are taking in our nation right now.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Well, sure. It’s crystal clear to me that ICE is part of a program in which this government organizes its own unique army. It is not comfortable for them to rely on the existing police who come out of the existing American history, whether it’s state police or local police or FBI or any. They want to start from scratch a whole new police apparatus that they fund and that they control and that they recruit and that’s what they’ve done. And they begin because they understood that was smart by saying, this is only about immigration. As if you could put a boundary like that on as if there wouldn’t be opposition to what they do, and that therefore you are putting them in a position of confrontation with Americans, which means you’re setting up your military against your own people. This is a momentous risk you’re taking any honest government would’ve that would have to go before the Congress.

That would probably require a referendum, none of that. So I begin by saying, wow. Then number two, I’m an economist. I study and I discover there are 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. They are being scapegoated because there’s no way, not at all that a rich country like the United States with 330 million people is profoundly affected in its economic wellbeing by 10 to 12 of the poorest people on this earth who come here who literally come mostly with nothing, barely their shirts on their back to blame them to make them we’re being invaded and invited to call them criminals. When the FBI statistics show as they do everywhere in the world, that the immigrant population is less written with crime than the native born for the simple reason that if you, you’re not legally here and you have problems with the police, you are in much greater danger than if you are a native born.

And they know that. They know how tenuous, so they’re really careful to avoid it. Then there’s the statistic that under 30% of the people detained by ice have any critical criminal record at all. And many of those criminal records are criminal in the sense of tickets while driving too fast or something and don’t belong in this conversation. So this is a largely invented political ploy. It was clever for conservative circles to scapegoat the immigrants and to make that his program. So he did that. So I’m upset that there is an ice and I’m upset that it’s doing what it’s doing.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. And do you think Go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Then one last thing.

I’m an American who has watched decades in which Black men were shot in the back by police officers who said they were in danger. That is the officer said he was in danger even though the person was shot in the back, which suggests they were going the other way. So you’ll pardon me, but to hear the president and the vice president who couldn’t possibly have had the time to do anything remotely like a thorough investigation or rate about how this young woman weaponized her automobile and thereby threaten the officer, only leads me to this conclusion. On the one hand, we have a young woman unarmed. On the other hand, we have a police officer heavily armed and at least theoretically trained in the use of those arms and he kills her.

You don’t have to condemn him. I’m not in a rush to condemn him, but the notion that you know who’s at fault here, she threatened him. That’s preposterous. You can’t know that. That would be a difficult decision probably even if you knew a lot. And more and more, as the videos are shown, more and more people are actually reaching the conclusion that she was innocent and then he is the one at fault, but no one cares because this country is so badly divided that the decision has been made if you are a Republican. I watched Mr. Johnson, the head of the House of Representatives. He talked about her weapon. He said he hadn’t seen any of the information.

Stephen Janis:

That’s amazing.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

He mouthed their argument. You see what’s going on.

Stephen Janis:

I have to sort of continue the discussion about the new police force and kind of tie it back to your idea of how our current form of capitalism is not just irrational, but to justify that irrationality. There has to be omnipresent cruelty, and are we seeing a new American sort of phase of cruelty exercise by this new police force which could become an instrument or a government that seems to be based upon cruelty because it’s supported by oligarchs and bolstered by the same wealth inequality that seems to define our lives. I mean, are we talking about this new national police force as an instrument of the cruelty of the economics we all live with?

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Yeah, I mean, a short answer is yes. There’s some intermediate steps. For example, Mr. Trump at the end of last year was given to saying that this year, 2026, they would go after people who were un-American and then he listed they were anti-Christian, they were anti-capitalist. Whoa.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. That’s not the first amendment.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

To be anti-capitalist, to be a critic of capitalism is in their minds tantamount to a betrayal of the United States. That’s the end of any kind of free speech. And how are they going to enforce that? Well, they have their police department. They can’t rely on the local police. If you go to the cities where ice has been, there’s lots of bad blood between ice and the local police, the local mayor, the local elected representative, we don’t want you. The Supreme Court took them out of Chicago in part because there were pitched battles in the streets of Chicago in which large numbers of people, not immigrants themselves, didn’t want this police. This is an occupational force.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, it’s going to evolve. It’s going to evolve, right?

Dr. Richard Wolff:

People look at it in the way that Venezuelans will look at American troops if they are landed there. It’s the way Iraqis looked at American troops when they were there, or Afghanistan troops. Afghanistan people against the American troops that were, it’s an occupational for which it is.

Stephen Janis:

And what’s brilliant about what you’re saying is that as they expand these ideas of prosecuting people for ideas like not agreeing with capitalism, they’ll have this police force that they can mold to enforce this, right? In some ways, it could become something where you’ve expressed anti-American ideals. Next thing you know, ICE is at your door.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Is that possible? Yeah. ICE is at your door and you have a lawyer and the lawyer goes up and says they’re having a meeting discussing things. This is not a crime. Well, we’re very sorry, but we got a call that there might be a bomb. Everybody out the meeting’s over and then you reschedule it for two weeks later and they do the same thing. What are you understand a hundred ways this game can be played.

Stephen Janis:

Exactly. You’re making great point. Once you cross that full transom,

Dr. Richard Wolff:

And then when some of your rambunctious members have the nerve to go up to them and say, you played on that. You played that game on us two weeks ago. Get out of here, he’ll be arrested. He’s resisting.

Stephen Janis:

Obstruction, resisting,

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Don’t want, and now he’ll be arrested for something. Someone else will come in to defend him and they’ll be hit in the head with a rifle. But that’s how this works.

Stephen Janis:

That’s how it grows.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

By the way, they know that this is an old practiced arrangement. We live in a country that is facing fundamental problems without a vocabulary or a conceptual framework with which to talk rationally about them. Russia and China have nuclear weapons as many or more than we do as fast or faster than what we do. World War I and two, were not nuclear except for the United States at the end of World War II in Japan, as we all know. So United States the only country on earth that ever used the nuclear weapons on people, but the Russians could and the Chinese could. So you’re not playing in the same sandbox as you were with wars one and two in the 20th century. You are now moving in a war direction, boarding that Russian ship in the North Sea over the last two days. What do you do? You claim this is a sphere of influence in Latin America, but you boarded a ship in the North Sea. This is not a sphere of influence. This is an attempt to hold onto your global empire, but you can’t do it. That’s a very dangerous contradiction. A powerful country committed to doing what isn’t doable very

Stephen Janis:

And all because of the irrational capitalism in this us. It needs to be preserved,

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Which cannot be questioned, which not only can’t you analyze, how does our capitalism shape our difficulties, which is a rational question.

What would be the benefit of moving from one to the other taboo? I have my economics degrees just to drive it home, and that’s the only reason I say what I’m about to say. I went to Harvard when I graduated from there, I went to Stanford, and when I graduated from there, I finished my education at Yale. I have a PhD from Yale, three master’s degrees from Yale and Stanford and my BA from Harvard. So presumably I’ve been at the best education the country has, and no one ever allowed me to ask. I mean, they didn’t muzzle me, but nobody gave me the opportunity to explore any of these questions. And I raised my hand, and when I saw the reaction, I stopped raising my hand. These were taboos and there was no, I had good teachers, bad teachers, and mediocre ones in between. But one thing they all had in common, we’re not going anywhere near any of that that you are interested in. That’s not, and the 3 0 4 who were honest with me told me what the others wouldn’t. They said, look, if I talk to you in class, you ask that question. If I answer, the rumor will begin this spread that I know something about. I’m interested in Marxism or socialism. I can’t have that. If I come to my office and close the door, we can talk about anything but in a public way. No, you’re going to hear from me like, I am stupider than cement and I have nothing to do with anything.

Stephen Janis:

Well, professor will, it sounds like medieval religion in terms of his constrictions on your intellectualism.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

It was,

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

When people ask me what my experience was 10 years of my life in the Ivy League, my answer is I was embarrassed. Wow. I didn’t come from that in my home. My mother and father encouraged me to ask any question, and when they couldn’t answer it, they said, we don’t know.

Stephen Janis:

Such a consequential lack of inquiry into a system that has brought us to this point. I think what’s great about what you talked about today is that when we look at Trump and we say, why is he doing these crazy things? You’re like economics, rational, economic thought, which has become irrational. Taya, you want to chime in?

Taya Graham:

Dr. Wolff, I just wanted to thank you so much for your time and for your insights. And I’m grateful because I feel like I get a whole semester worth of economics, no student loans, so I’m very appreciative. But I just want to say too, the way you share this information is really empathetic, and that means a lot.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

Taya Graham:

We appreciate it.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. You have empathy for working,

Dr. Richard Wolff:

If I could add another little economics. Absolutely, please. Because you made the remark about without student loan, people should understand in Germany, in France, in many European, not all, but in many European countries, university education is free.

No tuition, no fees. I have taught in France, I mean, I know what I’m talking about. The idea there is an educated person is a blessing to the community. She or he brings years of study of learning about the world into their daily reactions with other people and their children benefit and the neighborhood benefits and their work at their employment benefit. Of course, we do this if we are going to spend money in the community on a lovely park so that families can have a picnic on a Sunday afternoon because it makes life better than we sure as hell can provide a free education, not just in elementary school and high school, but in college. I remember one of my questions at Harvard, why in the world do we do? Why do we give a free elementary and a free junior high and a free high, but you can’t go at that time free to the university. Where in the Bible is it written that a free education has to stop there? No one had nothing. We got fudge and marshmallow for answer because they didn’t know they didn’t want to go in that direction. Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

Wow.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

Very strange.

Stephen Janis:

Very strange. Very strange. Agreed. Agreed.

Taya Graham:

And again, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you.

Dr. Richard Wolff:

My pleasure. And let me tell you, I encounter references to the real news all the time. So I know hope from my students and from others that the work you do gets around. It makes a difference. It’s another voice that people can turn to who are looking for an alternative way of thinking about the world. So you’re doing a very important job, and people like me have at least as much need for what you do as vice versa.

Taya Graham:

Oh, Dr. Wolff, thank

Stephen Janis:

Dr. You made our day.

Taya Graham:

You so much. Alright. Absolutely. You made our day. Thank you so much. I did. So,

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Take care. Goodbye. Thank you.

Taya Graham:

You. The more I learn about these topics from Dr. Wolff, the more I understand it’s a really fluid discipline, and the premise and the analysis depends on who’s doing the thinking and who’s shaping that narrative. And in that case, I think we just should be really thankful and appreciative that someone that insightful has been here to share his perspective with us. So Stephen, do you have any thoughts before I go into my analysis, my end of show rant?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I mean, I think the idea of this evolving, iterative police force that could be used for other things and then immigration was kind of striking and terrifying. But also the things that’s great about Dr. Wolff is connects it to what really matters to these people, which is money, wealth, and the power that wealth inequality buys. And I think the wealth inequality purveyors seem to need are going to need some enforcement mechanism because as Dr. Wolff pointed out, equality is only sustainable. It’s not permanently sustainable. And what we learned covering policing in our other show, the police accountability report, is the idea that you need policing to police inequality. And it just makes so much sense to me than Dr. Wolff brought up this sort of new police force, because these are really inequality warriors. I mean, when you were talking about the video and I was watching it, one of the things that struck me as really, really fascinating or kind of disturbing was the fact that the officers, when they approached her car, immediately began to grab her out, take her out, tried to take her out, which is not constitutional.

She’s an American citizen. She has constitutional rights. But now the entire framework of that has been lost. No one’s talking about it. No one’s saying you can’t just drag an American citizen out of their car without probable cause. They’re not articulating probable cause, so they don’t have any. So what we are seeing in the beginning, elements of this idea that policing can just police people without constitutional rights and really police economics and police inequality, which I think is what has created this presidency and this power, and I think ultimately where it’ll land. So once again, Dr. Wolff kind of illuminated a subject for me in a way I didn’t think about. So I’m appreciative of that.

Taya Graham:

Yeah. So I want to explore just a little bit more the idea you shared with us about the extractive economy. And I have a really good example to explore that with. There’s a hard truth that we have to remember, and that is an idea whisper to the boardroom of the ultra rich becomes a violent storm with life-changing repercussions for those who don’t have a say. And I think sometimes it’s honestly hard to fathom how the rich and powerful can ignore the needs of the many with utter callousness and disregard how they can install a president who allows critical healthcare subsidies to unravel while throwing sumptuous parties and throwing invectives at innocent people. And it’s a disconnect that’s becoming worse over time. Recently, Oxfam noted that billionaires acquired and additional $2.2 trillion in wealth. But like it was said, real people are suffering to provide this extreme wealth.

Lives are being impacted, needs are being ignored. And case in point, this is the example I wanted to share with you, Stephen, is the failure of a critical hospital system. The result, a private equity greed, which caused immense suffering for too many patients to count. Meanwhile, it netted the purveyors of the fiscal chaos, the most garish symbol of our current Gilded Age, a super yacht. The story starts with private equity, otherwise known as Vulture capital. Now the process is of taking a public firm, private, then stripping its assets to pay huge dividends, and then leaving the business to fail. Now, unfortunately, for the communities affected by the storm, I’m about to tell, private equity firms have decided that healthcare is the next on their frontier and their quest to extract eye-popping profits, which is exactly what happened to the healthcare provider called Steward Hospital System.

Now, this was one of the largest providers of care in the country. Steward was created in 2010 when a private equity firm known as Sebus bought six struggling hospitals from a Catholic diocese in Massachusetts. Now, the firm quickly expanded buying up to 50 hospitals before cashing in. Now they were looking to reap huge payouts quickly. So Sebus decided to sell all of the real estate assets owned by steward to a trust, which would then lease them back to the hospitals that used to own them. That transaction netted the private equity firm, nearly $1.2 billion, which they used to fund massive dividends to themselves and investors. But the consequences for the patients were devastating Stewards struggled to pay its bills and fund adequate care. It was teetering on bankruptcy. The quality of care quickly collapsed, and the hospitals became rated some of the worst in the nation, and Bills went up and up, and the consequences were devastating.

A patient reportedly died when a vital piece of equipment was not available because a vendor didn’t get paid. And this is according to an excellent investigation by the Boston Globe. So did the private equity firm and its executives pay the price for providing subpar care and endangering patient’s lives? Were they held to account for taking the vital assets of a critical healthcare system and cashing in without concern for the consequences? Well, no. Not in the age of extractive economy. In fact, they were rewarded for pushing the firm into bankruptcy and degrading the quality of care in communities across the country. The CEO of Steward, Ralph de la Tore got this a $40 million yacht named Ameral. This is 190 foot vessel with a gym and state rooms and a dining room and a crew of 15, and it costs over 4 million a year to run it.

But that’s not all because the investigative reporters from the Boston Globe who broke the story about the Ameral, found out that de Tore had a second yacht, a 90 foot beauty called the Genco that cost $15 million. So there you go. A hospital system that people depend upon for lifesaving care goes bankrupt while providing poor service. And the CEO who engineered the fiasco ends up with not one but two luxury yachts. And just as a side note, that same CEO refused to testify in front of the Senate during its inquiry as to why steward failed. So in other words, the rich are just not like us. They can simply ignore Congress. So when the topic of wealth inequality comes up, mainstream media pundits who say the ultra wealthy should be celebrated as job creators or stewards of resources or innovators who engineer better products and services to improve our lives.

Please remember this tale of avarice and greed. We and them need to keep this front and center, the harm to the planet and the impact on our lives that is foisted upon us by the needs of the ultra rich. We need to remember that private yachts and jets, which of course Del Tore had, are spoils of a war against us. Their prize for the CEO, who can be the most merciless and the least compassionate and also personally reckless with our assets and their worth is measured by their ruthlessness, their competence, by their lack of obligation to us and the planet and their superiority is defined by their appetite for wreaking havoc. And finally, their crimes against humanity prescribed by a couple hundred billionaires. Well, they’re feasting on us an increasingly sick society with their fossil fuels and corrosive social media platforms, and they plunder the earth and our minds as we go along with it. And that is what we mean when we talk about the consequences of wealth inequality on this show, how asset hoarding and profit gouging and the political economy it fuels creates distrust and despair. And this is the future that awaits all of us. If we don’t resolve to fight back now, and hopefully with intellectuals like Dr. Richard Wolff, we will, because truthfully, we don’t have a choice anymore. I want to thank my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, for all of his incredible work, getting us prepared for our conversation with Dr. Wolff. Stephen, thank you.

Stephen Janis:

Taya. It’s great. It was a great conversation. I’m glad to be here.

Taya Graham:

And I just want to say that I’m Taya Graham. I’m the host of the Inequality Watch, and I’m your inequality watchdog. And as always, I’m reporting for you.