guest Professor Richard Wolff. The end of the US automobile economy?

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:15]Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of In the Eyes of Truth.

[00:00:18]Today, for first time with us is Professor Wolf, Richard Wolf. Um, welcome uh to the show. Uh, I'm sure most of the audience have seen you uh in in other podcasts.

[00:00:31]Well, I'm glad to be here and thank you for the invitation.

[00:00:35]>> Hello, dear friends. Uh, just want to remind you if you like this video or you like what you hear, uh, click like, subscribe if you haven't subscribed yet, um, send it to your friends. Let's grow this channel. Uh, maybe we can finally hit it up to 100,000. Uh, that'll be a good round number uh, for the summer.

[00:00:55]So, let me know. U, leave some comments.

[00:00:58]uh and uh give a thumbs up. So, look forward to seeing you in the next video.

[00:01:03]Cheers.

[00:01:04]>> Right then. H where does one relocate properly?

[00:01:09]>> Desert 40° no water.

[00:01:14]Forests, rivers, four seasons, desert, 40°, no water, forests, rivers, four seasons.

[00:01:30]>> It's actually much simpler than most people think.

[00:01:33]>> Good lord, that's less paperwork than a gym membership.

[00:01:37]>> As a British man, I chose the place where I can still complain about the weather properly.

[00:01:43]All right, let's head that way. Sounds good. I'm ready.

[00:01:48]>> Move to Russia. Start a new life. It's easier with Moscow Connect. Website for details. Moscow connect.ru.

[00:01:56]>> Yeah, it it's uh our my pleasure. I'm sure the audience's pleasure. Uh, professor, it question uh I'd like to bring up uh with you uh at least a starting question. uh you know we've seen the damage done uh well at least some of the damage done uh to the Persian Gulf uh the disruption in supplies and yet uh we haven't seen as big of a hit so far in the economy and the politicians no well not as big a hit as one would expect and the politicians seem to be playing this off as nothing big what is coming down the pike uh what what are pe what should people be preparing themselves for well I think what what they need to prepare themselves for is to understand that the condition of the American economy was very poor when this war started. If I had time and if you were interested I'd tell you that the war is in part a reaction to that problem. Uh but unfortunately it wasn't only a military catastrophe. it has turned out to make a bad economic situation worse.

[00:03:10]So let me give you just a few examples.

[00:03:14]The most obvious place is in gasoline.

[00:03:20]Now I have to explain the American economic system for the last half century has been utterly built around the private automobile.

[00:03:33]Uh it's really crucial that you understand and that your audience understands that in this culture that we have here, there is a spatial uh distance between where you live, your residence, where you work, your job, and where you shop, where you buy your food, your clothing, your shelter.

[00:04:01]And there is no good public transportation system except in a few cities and it's not very good there either. And so you need a private car to navigate.

[00:04:17]We did not spend the last 50 years building our cities with an idea to coordinate residents, work and shopping.

[00:04:29]We could have we had earlier that system very well done in our cities. But in the post World War II era, we built basically suburbs. That was the growth area. And the suburbs have terrible public transportation.

[00:04:52]That was done to support the market for the car. But the market for the car then shapes the economic and the geographic development.

[00:05:05]Long story short, we depend upon the car and the car is dependent upon the gasoline. That is because we have not joined the movement away from fossil fuels. We have in fact gone the other way. We have made it difficult for fossil for electric vehicles to replace it and we have done nothing to improve the public transportation instead of either the fossil fuel or the electric car.

[00:05:43]Now, gasoline is 42, as I speak to you, 42% higher per gallon now than it was the day before the invasion of uh excuse me, the attack on Iran. So, February 27th compared to now, that's not a very long time. basically March March, April and half of May um 42% is a staggering thing and gasoline is a very important product. Okay.

[00:06:24]Now number two, just as a sample for you, we have been mystified here in the United States that there has been a dramatic drop and you will enjoy this uh visibly Russian culture. Uh a tremendous drop in the consumption of beer.

[00:06:47]>> Oh, that's why would there be Yeah. Why?

[00:06:50]Normally when there are economic difficulties, people drink more beer, not less beer. Right? So, a double mystery. We're having trouble. Uh, and here's the answer.

[00:07:07]Over the last 30 to 40 years, one of the ways the automobile shapes the culture is that every nearly every gas station, you know, where you drive, you put your car there and you put Yeah. has developed around it a quote unquote convenience store. I mean, maybe you know all this, but your your audience may not.

[00:07:34]>> Russia, by the way, has the same thing.

[00:07:36]Uh now, >> okay. So, when you So, when you get your gasoline, you go into the convenience store, you pay for the gasoline that you just used, and then you can buy coffee or milk or bread or beer.

[00:07:56]And it turns out that a wildly disproportionate quantity of beer has been purchased not in the supermarket, not at the alcohol store, but at the convenience store.

[00:08:13]>> And so they did a study and here's what they discovered.

[00:08:18]>> You can see where we're going. People went to the gas station, filled up their car, got a bill that shocked them so badly that they immediately decided not to buy the beer or or other things. And we have a problem for the beer industry in the country. All right. Uh let me give you another example more modest. The price of beef. Now, beef is the most widely consumed meat in the United States after chicken.

[00:08:55]Americans like beef. The price of beef is off the chart. That's not because of the war, although the war has made it worse, but it is a problem that was already really troubling the American people.

[00:09:11]You know, years ago, they could afford steak. They can't anymore. So they really got to enjoy hamburger.

[00:09:21]Now they are learning to enjoy a product which I don't know if it exists where you are called hamburger helper.

[00:09:30]>> Yeah.

[00:09:30]>> Hamburger helper. You buy. It's a box of grain and you mix it in. So you can buy a quarter pound of hamburger or a half a pound and mix in poor people food. go grain, wheat, corn, and it has some of the flavor of the meat. You know, we are working our way to what has been the true meal for most poor people on this planet for centuries, which is grain flavored by a little vegetable, a little meat, a little fish that we are, we used to be different, we are not anymore. And I I mean I could go on and on. We are having a rental crisis. We don't build uh we don't build apartment houses anymore. Um except for very rich people.

[00:10:26]If you come I am sitting in Manhattan in New York City. If you came to New York City, I could show you beautiful new but they are out of reach of everybody but the top five percent of the people because they're too expensive. Those kinds of housing are still being built.

[00:10:46]Mass housing, not at all. In fact, we now have roughly it's it's approaching 20% of our housing stock has now been purchased by companies like Black Rockck and Blackstone. These are huge uh capital uh collections. their investment houses and they now buy individual homes and rent them back to the people living in them because they can do that at a lower monthly outlay than they had before to carry the mortgage loan with which they bought the house. That's a sign of a contraction.

[00:11:34]But maybe the most important way to teach this or to get this across is we have a level of angry, bitter politics the likes of which I have never seen. I I born in I was born in Ohio, right in the middle of the United States. I've lived here and worked here all my life.

[00:11:58]Never have I had anything like this level of division, of bitterness, of hostility.

[00:12:10]I mean, we are watching really and I say this with all seriousness. I'm not an alarmist. Uh history goes through many phases. I know that I can't predict the future any better than anybody else can. But I I can tell you the president is unique.

[00:12:32]This is not this is a president unlike anything we have put in office. This is a president who stays in office despite what he does.

[00:12:45]uh and it is very very dangerous. The kind of miscalculation that has been made and is now obvious in in Iran is in fact only the latest in a long list of them. But this one looks like it might be the one that breaks it open. Or at least the tension here in this country around it is greater than anything I've seen. Yeah. You know, I I lived in uh Houston, Texas for four years. Um and Texas uh they wanted to expand the rail because you're you're right, there's absolutely no decent uh uh public transportation just in the air center. Well, they want to expand the rail and it's obvious there used to be rail there once upon a time in that part of the city because you have two rows of uh of uh stores parking in front of them and rows that go in either direction and between them is about uh 300 ft of uh of grass, just plain open grass. It's obviously there used to be rail there.

[00:13:52]So, they wanted to expand the rail and the people came out, no, we don't want socialism. We need more roads. And the question is, wait a minute, who builds the roads? That's not socialism. And they and they turn it down and they're trying to tell the people, look, you have a business. It'll bring more customers to you. No, they they flat out refuse to do that.

[00:14:12]>> Well, let let me give you two responses to that story. Uh I lived for many years of my life in a city about an hour and a half from New York, uh called New Haven in the state of Connecticut. It's a hour and a half from here. And one day as I am mowing the little lawn, the little bit of grass in front of my house, you know, you in the summertime you have to cut the grass back. Uh there is work going on in the street in front of my house. They're they either are lifting the asphalt or they're re repaving it. The city has to do that to all roads sooner or later.

[00:14:59]So I stop mowing and I start talking with the workers there. You know, they are having a break. They're having a drink or something and we talk. And as I talk, I'm I'm seeing in the uncovered roadway railroad right down the middle of the road. And I and I say to them, "What is that?" And they said, "Oh, this is where the railroad used to come." And many years ago, it was paved over with asphalt to become a road.

[00:15:34]Wow. So, I can tell you most American cities, if you know where to look, have buried the railroads that were once there. Number two, once the automobile became an important industry, and that's in the late 1930s, the companies involved led by General Motors, understood that they needed to fight public trans that public transportation was an enemy of the development of a market for a private automobile and that there was much more money in making sure each of us had a car than there was in making buses or trains or so an a campaign spread across America.

[00:16:38]One of whose slogans was, "Public transportation is socialism and socialism is terrible."

[00:16:51]By the way, it wasn't, don't think of it, it didn't have particularly to do with automobiles.

[00:16:57]It was the end of the public housing program. Same issue. The car companies allied with the real estate interest.

[00:17:06]They wanted to sell every American, you have your own home. You must have your own home. If you have a if you live in a group home, that's as they want to push you into a group home, which was then described as though it were a prison or a hospital or some other awful place you don't want to go to, whereas your private home. Here's the irony which I suppose you could enjoy.

[00:17:39]In China, in the People's Republic of China, roughly 90% of people own their own home. When you say that to Americans, they look at you with the with a deep sadness because here in this country, it's very clear people are losing the capacity to have their own home. My students, because you know, I teach in the university. My students who are young, they're getting married or they're beginning to think about a family or children cannot afford a house. That's completely out of the question. And they're bitter because they were led to believe that they would be able to get a private house.

[00:18:26]>> They're very bitter. And when they confront what I tell them about China and China's housing system, there is a deep they're not angry.

[00:18:38]They're just so sad as they contemplate what is happening in and to their lives.

[00:18:48]And that's the most important response to your first question. This is a country that is becoming, and I mean it seriously, depressed. It's a depressed economy because it feels itself to be in decline.

[00:19:09]And it voted for this Trump character because he promised to reverse the decline to make America great again.

[00:19:19]They want they don't know what it means.

[00:19:21]They don't even care. it this is they just want something to stop and and so when they go to the gas station and now the gas is $450ents a gallon instead of $3 or it's roughly that it is is it's just as if you were tired and now someone you know hit you over the head with a tennis racket. It it's one more thing you don't need and it very depressing in the country and if Mr. Trump makes one more mistake. I think he needs one more.

[00:20:01]the the people of this country will turn on him and it will be as long remembered how remarkable he was as it will be remembered how he went down in a blaze of rage in which his current followers will lead the rage against him.

[00:20:26]>> Yeah. in in Russia uh between um owning your own place well not necessarily a house but could be just as well a flat uh it's about 80%.

[00:20:35]Uh ownership rate.

[00:20:37]>> Yeah.

[00:20:38]>> Yeah. It's it's pretty high up there.

[00:20:40]>> So yeah.

[00:20:41]>> Yeah. Uh well well the question is what happens when the price of uh gasoline in America goes up to what your average minimum wage job earns you in an hour post taxes. I mean what happens to the economy at that point where you're just pay paying just for the gasoline to get to work and get back.

[00:21:04]>> Well I I I as I said I think you would have a social explosion. I don't I mean I don't know how far it has to go but eventually what we're doing and by the way I would argue that there are so many other things that are also deteriorating that even if the current noise here in the United States that there is a degree there there's an agreement of some sort between Trump and and the Iranians to at least stop the fighting even Even if that happens, even if the straight of Hormuz is reopened and oil and gas flow, um even if the price of gasoline came back down to $320 an hour, whatever it was, a gallon, the explosion is coming. There is no solution.

[00:22:03]You know, he has no solution. I mean, look at the desperate effort Instead of a solution, he has discovered colonialism.

[00:22:16]He's going back. He's going to take Greenland and Panama and Canada is going to become a 51st state. And he took the leader of Venezuela and put him in a jail. And he's now going to attack Cuba.

[00:22:35]He's reconstructing a colonial empire this time not as the expansion but as a holding on as the rest of the world becomes uncontrollable for him. He can't he can't control it.

[00:22:53]Half of the Gulf states now, you know, Qatar, um, Bahrain, Kuwait are seriously contemplating the the exit of the American bases. He can't hold on to his bases. He the United States ability to control around the world is ebbing obviously and it's having very bad effects here at home. Because in part, and this is the other way I would describe the weakness of the American economy across my lifetime, it has become very much more unequal.

[00:23:40]I didn't grow up with Elon Musk and Jeffrey Bezos and these people. We didn't have people with hundreds of billions of dollars. Yes, we had the stories of Rockefeller and Carnegie and Henry Ford. Yes. Yes, we had we had very rich people and all that. But there was there was neither the grotescery of how much wealth they have nor the experience of a lost middle class lifetime. Our middle classes are gone.

[00:24:19]We have 10% very comfortable at the top and then we have 30% not yet terrified but increasingly worried. These are people who cannot get their children through the university without enormous personal debts. And then there's the bottom half, at least half, maybe 60%, maybe twothirds, who are desperate. I'm talking people who live paycheck to paycheck, who if something unexpected happens, an illness, if they get hit by a car, something happens, they are they are lost. They they will probably never recover economically from that because they have no reserve, no way to survive. We have no national health. We have allowed wild proportion of wealth to acrue to the top and nothing for everybody else. Social programs reduced. You know the you may know in the first months of Mr. Trump's presidency, he had Elon Musk with a chainsaw getting rid of go. The image will come back to haunt Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk for generations because the people getting it slowly, I don't want to overdo it, slowly the gap between rich and poor is becoming culturally unsustainable.

[00:25:58]>> Yeah. Um, you know, there's there's a big difference when we moved uh back to uh to Russia back in 2010. Uh and and I saw what the where the US was heading.

[00:26:09]Uh and it was it was unsustainable. It was ab, you know, when I went to NC State uh my first year at NC State, I I went up three degrees of there, so I spent a bit of time there. But instate tuition 1990 was $400.

[00:26:24]>> It's around $9,000 right now.

[00:26:27]>> Yes. That that's that's that's insane. I mean that that's absolutely insane. And it's growing continue to grow.

[00:26:34]>> When I went when I was, you know, I'm I'm older than you obviously, but when I I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, you know, >> I went to the elite schools in my life.

[00:26:45]So I'm a product of that system.

[00:26:48]>> Anyway, when I went to Harvard, I was unusual because my family had no money at all. Uh, so I was a scholarship kid and all of that, but my family had to scrape together about half of what it cost per year. So I remember sitting around the kitchen table with my mother and my father and you know good, you're going to Harvard that my my parents are European by the way. I my mother was born in Germany and my father in France and I've spoken those languages all my life but I was they were refugees so I was born in the United States and so they they barely understood what Harvard was. None of us did. Later on I learned what it was. But so we're sitting around and I remember because it was very psychologically fraught this conversation >> and they we would get the the university gave me a scholarship. Then they gave me a job, a part-time job for which I would get paid. But then the rest of the money beside the grant and the job would have to come from my family. Would have to come I had no money, my parents.

[00:28:11]And I remember the number for one year at Harvard, tuition, all fees, room where I would live, and food in the dormatory, the cabin, $2,700.

[00:28:27]And so my father >> elite university >> my father had to come up my father had to come up with $1,400.

[00:28:35]Um and the other part would be my work and my my scholarship. And that's how I I I I went to Harvard, you know. And my father had to borrow from friends part of the money he paid for me to be able to go to Harvard. You know, it just >> Yeah.

[00:28:58]>> It's just think it it now because you know I I still have to do a little bit so I I have to write letters of recommendation for for people wanting to go to Harvard and all of that. in the budget that a family now is told it must set aside per year to go to Harvard on a on a you know a 4-year program for a bachelor's degree is $90,000 per year. Wow.

[00:29:35]So, so think about uh $360,000 to get your child a BA, which these days isn't worth very much when it comes >> that that's that's just that's a almost upper middle class income. Well, post tax is an upper middle class income. So it it that's why they they they now give various discounts and if you can show your family income is under I believe the cut off now is 200 if you can show that your family earns less than 200,000 they will give you a break you part of that will be reduced so you know you have to give help to people earning $200,000 it give you an idea >> that's insane I No, that's that that you know my uh one of my kids is going to uh university right now here in uh Russia.

[00:30:36]She couldn't get on the free uh program, so we had to pay uh because the positions were all taken. So I'm paying for her tuition about $1,500 equivalent.

[00:30:49]>> Yeah. No, you know, >> somewhere around there. And that's that's expensive. Uh it's was not not the most expensive, but it's expensive for Russia.

[00:30:58]Well, well, I went to tell you another story that illustrates this. I got my PhD in economics at um Yale University.

[00:31:07]I mean, I told you I'm part of that system.

[00:31:10]>> And at the end of the thing, I'd written my doctoral dissertate and all of that. I got a job offer from another Ivy League school, John's Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

[00:31:26]And my professors at Yale called me in and congratulated me on a job and and I looked them in the face. They were nice people personally, but I looked them in the face and I said, "I'm not taking that job." They looked at me as if, I don't know, as if I had just said, "I'm not continuing with my education.

[00:31:51]I'm deciding to grow bananas in Honduras or something like that. What are you doing? I said, I'm taking a job at City College in New York City.

[00:32:04]Why would you do that?

[00:32:07]I said, well, they have open admissions.

[00:32:10]They had just passed a new law that any high school graduate in New York City, black, white, I mean, you know, you know, United States. So, black, white, Chinese, doesn't matter anything.

[00:32:25]Doesn't m if you did well in high school, if you didn't do well. We will take you. If you need remediation, we will develop your arithmetic. We'll do what we have. It's open. You can come here and the cost of tuition at City College at that time, zero free, the only free university in the United States at that time. And I said, I want to be part of that.

[00:32:55]Okay? They looked at me as and and my lead professor, a man named James Tobin, uh you may know his name. me. He won a Nobel Prize in economics. Some years later, he he took me aside and said, "You're a bright young man. You are throwing your career away if you do that."

[00:33:21]So, I threw it away. I went there.

[00:33:27]>> That's >> But I enjoyed it. you know, all of these institutions produce people like me that, you know, their worst nightmare. So, I'm enjoying being what they did not want to see happen. It it it is it's just incredible. I mean the cost of everything uh that in the US that was uh you know but but okay so right now you know I I spent 15 years in oil and gas services supply chain director and in EPC uh for oil and gas >> so you know I look at I've looked at the damage for the videos the looked at damage at Qatar uh you know you're looking at I thought it was going to be about three to five years uh or actually first I thought it was going to be two and a half three years to get everything up and running and then I started reading and looking what other people were showing at photos. That's that's gone for 5 to seven years. So you have Europe which is out of gas.

[00:34:24]>> Are you talking are you just let me interrupt. Are you talking about the natural gas facilities in Qatar?

[00:34:31]>> Yes. Yes.

[00:34:33]>> Or are you talking generally about all of >> No, no. Uh the natural gas facilities in Qatar.

[00:34:39]>> Yeah. there, which means also the uh the fertilizer from uh you know, it it's it's gone too off the market. It's going to take them at least 5 years to get all that back up and running.

[00:34:49]>> Um Europe is out of gas and they're planning on buying everything that they need from the US because they won't buy from Russia, obviously, not officially anyways. Um they they've lost the Middle East. Uh now they're looking strictly at the US.

[00:35:05]Is is there a capability in the US to supply the Europeans and not to break the American public while we're at it? I mean, that's going to drive costs up in the US, too.

[00:35:16]Absolutely. It's only a matter of time before the natural gas producers here uh have to face up. They haven't quite done it yet, but they're going to have to face up to the fact that they can get much more money out of the Europeans quickly than they can get here.

[00:35:41]But if they cut short their provision here, they will run into political trouble, serious political trouble here.

[00:35:52]and they haven't figi fig figured out how they're going to manage all of that.

[00:35:57]And it becomes even more complicated because much of this hangs on the need to undo horrible damage done to the American connection to Canada. a very I mean I don't know how well people understand the Canadians have decided that their only survival is to decouple states to as much a degree as they can and they have worked out that the gas and oil they used to provide to the United States has to go elsewhere and they have been making deals around the world, especially with China, but not only uh to sell.

[00:36:52]If that happen, if all of the oil and gas coming out of Canada, present and future is taken away from the United States, then the United States's capacity becomes much more limited. We don't have the self-sufficiency that is often attributed to us. We have a lot of oil and gas, but we don't have an unlimited supply. Russia is closer to that situation than the United States.

[00:37:24]That's been true for a long time. So I think what you're seeing now is a complicated negotiation in which the oil and gas people here are trying to undo the tensions between Trump and Carney and all of that in order to recapture the Canadian in order to resolve this problem. They want to sell to the Europe because they can force you to pay crazy prices. They can't do that here. They can't do that yet in much of the rest of the world. Uh now, if that changes, their strategy will change, but that's where they are at at at the moment.

[00:38:14]>> Well, if Canada goes away from the US, and it looks like you're right, you're you're looks like Carney is looking toward China. Well, Carney's got huge selection right now. Everybody needs his gas. Everybody needs his oil.

[00:38:28]>> Uh would do you think Trump would might invade Canada to to grab the resources?

[00:38:36]>> It would be so cra I mean my first answer is oh my god, no. But then again, the man is desperate.

[00:38:47]>> The man is desperate.

[00:38:49]Um, if the last two days are any indication, both the Democratic Party here and half of his own Republican party uh will use what he's doing now as an opportunity to distance themselves from him in the hope that he will go right into the toilet and get overwhelmingly voted out in November and that they have better longerterm prospects as politicians under that scenario than anything else.

[00:39:34]>> They are now they are worried >> they are they are worried that the desperation you see now if the election is behind us. So imagine us Christmas uh this year, Christmas of this year. He will be a lame duck president. Two years left on his term.

[00:40:00]No future at all. Neither electorally nor any other way.

[00:40:07]He'll be the classic crazy man, you know, unleashed.

[00:40:13]And I think they are now persuaded that it's too dangerous for them now.

[00:40:21]>> Oh yeah, >> these are very I mean I I I can't comment on your politicians in Russia. I don't follow them. I don't know. But the level of opportunism and corruption here is again I'm used to it. American politics has never been very clean. But we are at levels of grubbiness that are really kind of Let me put it to you this way. It's not just me. It's the average American citizen is now talking like you're hearing me.

[00:41:02]They are saying Republican, Democrat, I can't decide which is worse.

[00:41:10]In other words, it's a kind of the whole thing. And and let me prove it to you.

[00:41:17]New York City is the largest city in this country. I'm living here. I've been living here for 20 years. Um I live in an apartment building. I'm on the ninth floor. So I have to get to get in and out of my house. I have to sit stand in an elevator with other people.

[00:41:35]We go up and down all every day. So we we talk, you know, these are my neighbors and they're friendly. I'm friendly. We talk.

[00:41:46]Nobody speaks well of any politician. It's just it's nothing but did you hear what this one did? Did you hear what that one did?

[00:41:58]This one is stealing and that one. You know, >> you know about the Epstein business, right? The Epstein.

[00:42:05]>> Hard to miss that. Yeah. Right. But you know, one of the reason it's disgusting.

[00:42:11]It's horrible. Of course, >> it is.

[00:42:14]>> But it it is for everybody a kind of summary. That's who these people are.

[00:42:22]It's all of them. the big businessmen, the politicians, you look you Clinton, Trump, they all war, you know, it is the French have a wonderful word vom to throw up. You know, it makes you want to throw up. Okay, here's the proof.

[00:42:46]We had an election for mayor here in New York City. your normal boring Republican Democrat. Uh Republicans very rarely win in New York. It's a Democratic city. Uh so we had the usual uh the usual politician, a man named Quomo who worked in the federal government who was the governor of New York State and now he was going to run uh for New York. He had he was nothing. He had two bad marks against him. He had to quit because 20 women came forward. He was touching them and all that. Uh and then he during the pandemic he he he faked the the numbers of the nursing homes. He reduced the number of people who who had been announced had died in a nursing home. Many more died.

[00:43:46]But he wanted to be the governor who could say in my state old people didn't die. So he simply said they didn't die.

[00:43:54]And then he got caught. Okay. But he was running for mayor. He had tens of millions of dollars. Who's running against him? I don't know if you know the story, but you must understand the meaning of this. A young man, maybe 30 years old with a beard, a beard, proudly self-identifies as a Muslim. A Muslim.

[00:44:26]And who says he's also a socialist. He's a socialist. Muslim, 30 years old.

[00:44:35]Nobody knows anything about him except they do a little research and they discover his father is a professor at Colombia University who is a one of the few professors in any American university who's a well internationally well-known Marxist scholar.

[00:45:00]He won. Not only did he win, he won the Democratic primary, then he won by huge margin, then he won the mayorship by huge margin. This is a city that has more Jewish people than any other city in the United States. The Jewish people, and by the way, uh Mr. Uh, Zoron Mandani is his name was asked, "What would you do if Benjamin Netanyahu visited New York as he has often done?"

[00:45:33]>> Mhm.

[00:45:35]>> Donnie waited a minute, looked into the camera, and said, "I will have him arrested."

[00:45:42]Right. The Jewish community here voted for him in a big majority. Right? You know what that is? that's uh Republicans and Democrats here. We don't want you.

[00:45:55]We want change. And that young man didn't have to say much because the very idea of a Muslim socialist running for an office made it crystal clear he was different and he won the race. You know, it's amazing. It's amazing.

[00:46:13]>> Has he changed anything?

[00:46:15]>> Not yet, but it's, you know, it's only a few months. He's done three interesting things, by the way.

[00:46:24]And if you know Soviet history, you'll you'll smile.

[00:46:28]He has organized cheap grocery stores in all the poor neighborhoods where people either didn't have any place to go or had to go to a convenience store and pay much higher prices for everything.

[00:46:49]Number two, he has given every city employee free daycare for every child 6 months or older with a promise to extend that to the whole population over the next year, but it already exists for the city employees. And the third thing he did was announce that he's going to impose a tax on people's second or third apartments if they have more than one in New York. And he's going to put a tax on, in other words, rich people's apartments are going to have to be taxed. That's what he's done.

[00:47:34]And by the way, he's very I I'm waiting to see in my neighborhood, but so far they like it. They are very happy. And every time he does one of these things, which you are not allowed to do, he proves to the people he's different. And that's what they want. That's what they want. And all the ariodite bankers and businessmen who get on the television, not a good plan, that won't work. The people go, you know what this in America means?

[00:48:10]>> Oh, it means the same thing everywhere.

[00:48:12]>> Okay. Okay.

[00:48:14]>> Yeah, that that's a universal symbol these days.

[00:48:20]Yeah, it's um you know I I've got friends who I mean I got a lot of friends in the US uh who I grew up with um and yeah none none of them are feeling good that I know of uh and people who are well off careerminded uh people who were you know in high levels >> but nobody's saying anything I haven't heard one person say something positive in the last probably six seven years >> if not longer. I mean, they're they're all >> although although if you go to places like well what you know Houston >> Yeah.

[00:48:57]>> or or virtually any place else in Texas except Austin not not where the university is but everywhere else in Texas. He still has a lot of support.

[00:49:09]There's a very intense political race there and that will show he's lost support but how much he's lost it's not so clear not so clear >> I spent a lot of uh I mean I spent probably about 13 years in North Carolina maybe more than that including I I used to be an officer in the army so I I spent quite a bit of in Fort Bragg too and it North Carolina you know when when my my wife was uh from Republic of Georgia. I was a military adviser there and she came back with me and then we were living up in Raleigh and Raleigh was you know this is uh early 2000s. Raleigh wasn't bad bad off.

[00:49:51]I'm like look you know you got to understand the way we're living the majority people aren't living like this.

[00:49:55]So it took her down to see some of these towns. And if you go south of Fort Bragg, I mean, that's just a a devastated economic zone, and it's been that way since the late 90s when all the factories left for China. Uh, and it's just it's dead. Dying farms, dead towns.

[00:50:14]Uh, and it's just it's just devastated down in Lumberton, those areas. Uh, you know, that was a big eye opener for her because she'd seen Hollywood and things like that, but it's like, okay, and this is how everybody else lives in reality.

[00:50:28]>> Well, you know, I I I've done that. I've taken a few people visiting, usually academics that I've known or crossed paths with, and I've taken them. I mean, the most dramatic I did was about four years ago. I took a group to Detroit, Michigan. Oh, >> and I said, I want you to see >> American industrial capitalism. You to understand this country.

[00:50:59]And I went through with them. In 1970, this was the place to which presidents of the United States would take, you know, visiting dignitaries and say, "Look, look at our factories. Look at these workers. They are in a strong union, United Auto Workers, which it was. And look, there's a significant number of black men and women. And that was true because with integration and and here, let me take you to this part of Detroit. They live in, see these houses? those workers own those houses or with the bank loan they have and and I said the population of Detroit just shy of 2 million people four years ago I said now take a look first the population 650,000 >> wow it's gone down low >> majority yeah the majority of the people I said try to understand that in a 30 to 40 year period during which the I show them on a graph. The decline is a pretty straight line.

[00:52:13]You live through a decline, you try to do something. You have politician after politician saying we have to reverse this decline as it continues. Nothing happens to decline uninterrupted till this moment.

[00:52:31]And you know their mouths fell open.

[00:52:33]They they had no idea. By the way, this included also several Americans who came along.

[00:52:41]>> And then I said, "Now I'm going to take you into the neighborhoods where they live." And you know, it is to this day I shiver when I tell the story. House after house, it's empty.

[00:52:54]>> You can see in the front yard, the grass is too hot. Nobody cuts the grass. the the the bushes are growing into the house or next door to the house. You see the same thing except it's half black from the fire that was there that I said half or more of Detroit looks like this.

[00:53:17]You know, the only people in there are drug addicts who want to get in out of the rain and they can find one of these houses where there's enough roof left that the rain doesn't get but that's it.

[00:53:30]It's it's all and many of these people I said they went to Cleveland or to Wilmington, Delaware and I said you know what it happened again to them there.

[00:53:41]They left one declining capitalist center for another.

[00:53:47]Detroit has never recovered. What you see in Detroit now in downtown, a redevelopment funded by some real estate hustlers where they have office towers.

[00:54:00]Looks very nice, but like you just said, if you walk three blocks away from there, disaster. You know, you can only like uh Detroit if you go there, take a expensive car from the airport to one of those hotels, stay in the hotel, go to the conference at the hotel, eat in the restaurant at the hotel, get another car back to the airport. If that's your awareness of Detroit, it'll look like something good happened there. Other than other than that it is you know for the mass of people unspeakable unspeakable >> how much does that reflect uh now I I haven't been back to the US since 2018 how much does that reflect uh the majority of the cities because all the cities have bad have had bad districts but >> no it it does vary if you're um let me give you an example of a city that's doing well s have did you ever go out to California. Have you ever been there?

[00:55:04]>> Um, I was a couple times. Well, with my parents when I was little and then as an adult, I I was once out of California.

[00:55:11]Uh, in 200 2003. Yeah, that was the last time.

[00:55:16]>> All right. If you went if you went to California today and you went to San Jose, it's not the big it's not as big as San Francisco or Los Angeles, but it's a sizable important city. It's uh two three hours south or maybe two hours south of San Francisco.

[00:55:38]>> So it's close it's at the bottom of the so-cal peninsula.

[00:55:43]>> Right.

[00:55:43]>> Okay. That's Silicon Valley. That that is the area where all the high-techs. So you see huge buildings they are fully occupied. Um that city is doing well. It has no slums that I remember and if it has any very small and restricted to MexicanAmerican, you know, to Hispanics, right, >> who are there. San Francisco, you know, it has a couple of slummy areas, but it's basically a redeveloped city. It it it it has survived. Uh, Los Angeles has much more of a presence of very poor people who live in tents under the highway uh, and who are in a in an endless struggle with the police. Uh, >> and if you go to the Midwest, that's where you see the whole city is decimated. I mean, Cincinnati, St. Louis, uh, it's just Milwaukee. It's just awful. And e and you have to you have to know what you're doing because in some cases the the breakdown occurs inside the city limits and you could and you can see them. But often the way they worked it is they pushed these people into suburbs so that if you go there the local people will explain to you these are the nice suburbs. this one and this one and this and these are the suburbs you do not want to go to in the evening and you got to pray that if you ever have a breakdown of your car it doesn't happen where the highway goes through that neighborhood you know it's that you know e east St. Lewis >> is perhaps the worst in the country. It is an un It is a place It is a place where black people were dumped as they were pushed out of St. Louis. There was no money and at a certain point the city government just stopped. I mean it's hard. There were no police, no fire, no nothing. If you had a problem, you called out of your district, hoped you could reach somebody who might come and help. I mean, literally the breakdown of of civilized life and that is coming. That is because I tell you something which you know needs to be reported on. It isn't just inequality.

[00:58:32]There is something that happened in the inequality story of the last 30 to 40 years that made us not just have super rich people but super rich people who with a very very few exceptions.

[00:58:51]There are so but very few exceptions have an attitude that makes them oblivious to what they're doing, oblivious to seeing it around them. I mean, we the other day we had the head of the the JP Morgan Chase Bank. That's the largest bank in the United States located based here in New York City where I'm talking to you. A man named Jamie Diamond, he's the head of that bank. He's been the CEO for >> 15, 20 years.

[00:59:32]asked the question and repeats. You know, it's so wonderful living in a country where you can start with nothing and work your way up to be a millionaire and a billionaire like me.

[00:59:50]I mean, you know, I you're left speechless. You're left speech the tastelessness of it. He's on television. This is going to be seen by countless people. You know, it's the kind of childish junk I I was told in school here. I mean, I we were all told that. But, you know, you grow up and you know that there's not a nice man comes down the chimney at Christmas and leaves presents and you get over it. But there are people who believe he he believes it. He I you know the the the the woman who handles the press for Trump explains when when she's challenged just look at the stock market and I remember part of the speeches I give I go around the country is I explain to people that roughly 10% of our people own 80% of the shares. It's the richest 10% who own it. They're the ones who own big blocks of shares. You have four shares of Ford Motor that your grandmother left you when she died.

[01:01:04]That's very nice, but it's also irrelevant. This is where the the wealth and you know you CEO of a company is elected by the shareholders and you have as many votes as you have shares. So these people run the show. Do you get that? The 10% run the show. You don't.

[01:01:26]They look at you even to this day.

[01:01:31]They're sad. They know you're right.

[01:01:33]They don't dispute me. They know I'm right. But they really wish I hadn't said it. It really messes up their mourning. So, we have rich people who don't understand what's going on. Have no intention of correcting. There is an exception. You know the name Warren Buffett?

[01:01:52]>> Yes. Yes. Of course, Warren Buffett, he's an exception.

[01:01:57]Not he doesn't do anything.

[01:02:01]I once said he and his partners brought me out to to where is it? Nebraska.

[01:02:08]Well, Omaha. In Omaha, Nebraska, uh to give a talk. They didn't like what I said, but they brought me out there. Um Warren Buffett has said publicly that there's something wrong with America.

[01:02:22]that his secretary pays more every year in taxes than he does.

[01:02:29]>> Yep.

[01:02:29]>> Okay. At least you can see with humor he was saved. And there are a few like that. But they don't do I mean other than those remarks, which I'm grateful for, but nonetheless, other than those remarks, they don't do anything. We We are not doing any. We are cutting government services. I mean, it's just it's wild.

[01:02:54]>> It's as though nothing has nothing was learned.

[01:03:00]The whole New Deal of the 1930s, >> the whole social democracy, that's what it's called in Europe that we've had here in our form has been systematically undone.

[01:03:17]You you notice uh the the old uh railroad barons, the the steel barons, the other people like that from the the 1800s. And in Russia, too, while we're at it, >> they would uh when they rose up, they would at least, you know, they they built colleges. They uh they built railroad stations. They gave it back.

[01:03:35]They gave something back to their people. I mean, even the uh the library named after Lenin in in Moscow wasn't built by uh the Bolsheviks. It was uh built by a merchant who got really rich and he built the library and gave it back to the city. Uh just as a thank you because it was his city. But you don't seem to see that at all anymore with these billionaires. Or am I missing something? Seem like they do anything back for the people no matter what.

[01:04:02]>> Oh, they don't have it. They they have a kind of I mean we have it here too.

[01:04:08]every every little city in town in America, I not every but a awful lot of them have in the middle a a pretty nice looking building which is the little local library. And if you go inside the building, you had a little plaque. This was donated by Andrew Carnegie. He was the big steel uh Rockefeller steel people and and he has a big excitement. He believed in literacy. So he was going to put a public library in every town and not only build it but give it an endowment so it would have enough money to pay a librarian and to buy books and to keep the whole thing going. And they've been going ever since. is now a century and a half.

[01:04:58]>> Wow.

[01:04:59]>> And it's the library. When my children were young, they went to one of those libraries every week to get children's books and take them home and read them and all the rest. No, they don't do that at all. They don't do it. The closest thing they come is they do give gifts to universities in exchange for getting their names on the buildings. So if if you go back to Harvard, the when I was there, the buildings all had different names because each generation of rich people.

[01:05:40]But that changes nothing. It's still Harvard. It's still the place where rich people send their children. It's still it's everything it always was. Serves the status quo from morning till night here. Uh but it funds itself by big gifts from rich that they do. That they do. You know the tax code here means that if you give every dollar you give is deductible from your income tax. So it it is >> it is federally funded charity.

[01:06:20]>> Socialism for the rich.

[01:06:22]>> Exactly. We had that look now we have it. Mr. Trump is giving trill billion dollar gifts to this industry to that ind. We are taking a page look they would never admit it but in the halls of these people and I know some of them personally so I know what I'm telling you.

[01:06:49]They say we have to be more like Russia and China. We ha the government has to be able to give us a lot of money in a hurry when we need it. Otherwise, we can't compete.

[01:07:08]>> And they say now they say a little bit with Russia, but they mostly mean China.

[01:07:14]They look at China and they are green with envy. are just you it coming out of the I make jokes they are not happy with my jokes I make jokes you agree with envy no but you know they look at their growth rate I said yeah look at their growth rate you can't do that can you no we can't do that >> and when and when the Chinese >> when they broke through with the with the I mean you'll know these things better than me. But the ability to do the the chat the AI chat system better than the American with that deep whatever the hell it was >> deep seek. Yeah.

[01:08:02]>> That the symbol for these guys the symbolism was unarable.

[01:08:10]>> Yeah.

[01:08:11]>> They had their own IT guy come and tell one of them told me the story. They came to me, the two engineers that I rely on, and they told me that we have a program.

[01:08:24]They said, "But it's it's not fast enough. We're going to we need you to buy Deep Seek." He had just read an article.

[01:08:35]He didn't want to. They persuaded him to, and he did. In the end, >> the um the Chinese have just, by the way, uh uh came out with photonic chips.

[01:08:45]light based photon chips. They're up to a thousand times faster than what Nvidia has. And they've got a line to produce them. They're going to have about 12,000 of these chips out by the end of the year. Uh so >> I I can't I caught that when when uh the I don't know how to pronounce his name, the guy who who runs Nvidia. Uhhuh.

[01:09:08]>> He went with Trump to Beijing, you know, when when Trump took it, the the 12 billionaires that he takes everywhere with him when he can. This the head of dream.

[01:09:22]>> Yeah. He he they all got on board in Washington, but the head of Nvidia was in California. So he got a his private plane, met them all, I think in Anchorage, Alaska. He got on the plane so that they could all arrive in China together. And his job there was to get Trump and Zinping to agree to let Nvidia sell its best chip. And Xiinping smiled.

[01:09:51]And I had this firsthand too and said to them, I appreciate it. It's very good of you. We don't need it.

[01:10:00]>> We have we have our own now. Ah, that's Yeah.

[01:10:05]>> And he did, you know, he didn't didn't overdo it. He didn't make a mountain out of he just quietly thanked them very politely said, "We don't need it."

[01:10:16]>> Thank you. You're late to the party. The dance is over. There's the door.

[01:10:20]>> Anyway, I'm sorry if I'm talking too long.

[01:10:23]>> No, no, no. No, sir. Uh, that's that's been great. Um, we're uh we're about out of time. Uh I know I've held you on for for over an hour. Um if people want to find your work uh work in the uh they can look you up.

[01:10:40]>> Well uh the best two places. One is our website and by our I mean democracy at work all one word no punctuation democracyatwork.info that's our website. Everything we do you can access that way. And we we are now a uh surprisingly s I'm surprised successful in this country at this time. We have about um 600,000 YouTube subscribers.

[01:11:20]>> Wow.

[01:11:21]>> We publish books. We produce videos of all kinds. I I do a weekly radio and television program. It's been going on since 2011 called Economic Update. You can find all that out at our website. And the other place is to go to our Substack where there's a lot of material that you can also get and again democracywork.substack.com will get you there.

[01:11:52]>> Okay. So, uh, everybody, please check it out, uh, and sign up, uh, for the videos and the updates. Grow got to grow all the channels. And, you know, it really does change when you tell when you remind people sign up. I've noticed on my own, I started telling her I sign up.

[01:12:08]I just always forgot about it. It's like all a sudden people start signing up. It works.

[01:12:14]>> Listen, by the way, how do how do you like your first name pronounced?

[01:12:19]>> Uh, it's well, the full name is Stenislov. Uh but you can call me Stace.

[01:12:23]Uh that's the the short version.

[01:12:26]>> Okay. Uh can you send me a link and then we will post and promote >> this conversation as well.

[01:12:33]>> Of course.

[01:12:34]>> And that way there's also our audience can learn about you and so forth.

[01:12:39]>> Absolutely sir. Absolutely. I'll I'll have it up uh in about two days. U maybe tomorrow. It depends how fast I can get to it.

[01:12:47]>> Uh and then I'll >> fine. And then if you want to continue or develop the conversation uh particularly on economic issues, uh this is what I'm doing. I'm glad to do it.

[01:13:00]And if you wanted to do it again, I'd be glad to do it.

[01:13:03]>> Absolutely. Uh you know, I've got uh my my fir my first degree is uh uh was business with uh a my well it was business international trade. Uh the second one was computer science while I was in the army. Uh and the third one was an MBA in supply chain. And I also got a minor in economics. I just decided since I wasn't going for a PhD, there was no point in uh in and and doing another semester, finish out uh the BA in uh in economics, but spent a lot of time still on on on the economics of taxation and everything like that. So, it was always interesting. It just yeah, I wasn't going for mass for a PhD. So, it's kind of pointless pursuing it too far further.

[01:13:47]that has only become more true uh with the passage of time.

[01:13:51]>> All right.

[01:13:54]>> If it's you go, please feel free to get in touch anytime.

[01:13:58]>> Thank you. Thank you. Everybody, please leave some comments uh and uh I will make sure Professor Wolf has the links as I said and he can answer the comments as he wishes.

[01:14:09]>> Take care.

[01:14:10]>> Thank you everyone.