Dialogue Works
2025.06.26
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, June 26, 2025, and our friends Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff are back with us. Welcome back.
RICHARD WOLFF: Glad to be here.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: I'm going to start, Michael, with what has happened in the Middle East: the new confrontation between Iran and Israel, which later on the United States has joined and attacked Iran. It seems that, for the time being, we have some sort of ceasefire and they've stopped attacking each other. What's your take on what has happened in the Middle East and the implication or the outcome of those policies coming to the United States?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the ceasefire obviously lets both sides recover for a week or so, maybe a month, and the fighting is obviously going to continue. The fighting in the Near East by Israel, and the U.S. fight against Iran, is going to continue, certainly until the election. The majority of voters that have been tested in America are against the war. They're against the attacks by Israel on Gaza. They're against America's participation in the war, extending the war in the Near East against Iran. But the leadership of both parties is completely for the war.
We're in a very unique situation here. The leadership of both the Republican and the Democratic parties are diametrically opposed to what the voters want, which is peace. The fight against what the voters want, the fight against advocates for peace – advocates against the increase in the military budget at the expense of social programs – is becoming very vicious. You saw all of that viciousness in the election yesterday on June 25th for who was going to be the Democratic [candidate for] mayor of New York.
This is the first test of how voters actually feel against all of this, and what it means for what the American official politics are going to be in the war. That's why this is so official, because it was very explicitly a revolt against the Democratic Party leadership for who is going to be the Democratic candidate. It was framed that way. I'd like to give a little bit of background on this.
I think the election was about much more, as I said, against the mayor. It's the future of the Democratic Party. And the major reason for the opposition to the Democratic candidate against [Governor] Cuomo is the party's pro-war, pro-Zionist, pro-Wall Street opposition to labor. And yet the most immediate catalyst for the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York was the college-educated young voters. And for them, the major frame of this vote was what you've been hearing about for the last few months: Columbia's University crackdown on the anti-war protests and its punishment of student anti-war demonstrators.
This crackdown on opposition to the war has dominated the attention of the whole graduating class this June, and of progressives in general. And these protests are very much like the Vietnam War protests in the 1960s. Most students are against the war. Most progressives are against the war, just as the polls have shown. And so most voters supported the students, and there was a universal revulsion against Columbia University's president apologizing to Congress for not protecting these students against accusations of anti-Semitism.
When the Republican politician was accusing the head of Columbia, saying, you know, why did you let students say that they want peace and oppose the bombing of Gaza? If they support Palestinian rights, they are anti-Semitic. Columbia University's president apologized and said, of course, she will punish the students who demonstrated against the war. She will expel the students who gave speeches and wrote papers against the war.
And of course, she was fired when the public abhorrence of this toadying, this surrender to anyone who accused one of being anti-Semitic, that just has been in the front pages of the papers for the last few months – because it's not only Columbia University, [it's also] the fight against Harvard. If Harvard lets a professor write a paper or lecture about the need for support for a two-state solution or opposing the war, the bombing of Gaza, they're being forced out, and the students are being blocked.
President Trump wants to ban foreign students altogether. Well, Mamdani, the victor in this election, [was] running against the vested interests, against the Democratic Party's candidate, who one month ago was given a 97.5% chance of winning. There was so much money behind Cuomo. There were so many vicious attacks.
Everyone in New York – I live in Queens, and my mailbox was filled with large campaign propaganda against Mamdani. "He's a radical communist." "He's a socialist." "His backers are terrorists." You can't imagine the extreme.
And the fact is that the pro-war candidates, the Zionists, overplayed their hands to such a point that there was a revulsion at trying to smear him. It's as if to oppose the war is to be an anti-Semite. So the voters for the first time had a chance to come out and react to this polarization of the economy between the political parties on the right wing of the spectrum, the pro-war, anti-labor parties, both the Republicans and the Democrats, and the voters who are not pro-war and are certainly not anti-Semitic, but they're against the war. So anyone who opposes ethnic cleansing in Gaza is accused of being anti-Semitic.
The fact that a Muslim candidate advocating peace won so overwhelmingly against the party's interests shows that the Democratic central committee's attempt to fight against Bernie Sanders, AOC, and any defender of labor's interest, of public health, of public spending instead of military spending, is going to tear the party apart. And, obviously, that is going to affect how American foreign policy responds to the Near East.
And this Democratic Party leadership is the same that in the 2016 presidential election, they preferred to lose with Hillary Clinton instead of winning with Bernie Sanders. Their opposition against what they call socialism, which used to be called liberalism or social democracy, their opposition to this, their support of Wall Street, of the financial class, of the landlord class, of the military and budget, and the military industrial complex was responsible for Donald Trump's victory. Voters stopped voting for the Democratic Party.
You can look at the vote for the mayor of New York as a microcosm of what the fight is for voters against the Democratic Party. Last year, you had Jill Stein and me on your show explaining what the Green Party's position was against the war. Jill's campaigning in Michigan and the Midwest, Minnesota, was largely responsible for the anti-war voters not voting for the Democratic candidate and opening the way for Trump's victory. The Democrats saw that, and Kamala Harris said she'd rather lose the election than support the anti-war position. She lost the election by her support of Netanyahu and the Likud Party.
The interesting thing is that, as I said, the college-educated voters voted three to one for Mamdani. This is supposed to be the traditional support of the Democratic Party's professional managerial class, or the future professional managerial class. Cuomo won largely with the poorest income districts, especially in Harlem and the very wealthy sections of New York. The city was blanketed, and you have that polarization of the Democratic Party's attempt to base its voters on ethnicity and other identities that are not those of wage earners, not those of the working class. That basically shows the failure of their divide and conquer strategy.
All the polls of the voters in New York, as they're doing the post-mortems of the elections, show that they want the Democratic leadership replaced. It's holding on to power, it's denouncing Bernie Sanders and members of the Democratic National Committee who wanted reform and said we need younger members than the existing leadership. And we have to replace Schumer, who is the candidate of the senator from Wall Street and Tel Aviv. That he has discredited himself by the extremism that has polarized American politics.
For the first time, you're having all of this broken out into the open. The positions that most of your commentators have been taking on your show, Nima, are really those of the party. The Wall Street Journal's headline was: Wall Street panics over the prospect of a socialist running New York City. You've seen Trump call him a communist radical. Imagine: just for supporting rent controls, for supporting a raise in the minimum wage, this is now called communism. This is called radical. And it's called anti-semitism.
And the people who hate Mamdani, who've been funding him, there was a $20 million support of the PAC against him. The wealthy billionaire supermarket owner, John Catsimatidis, said he was going to close his Gristedes grocery stores if New York voted for or ended up electing Mamdani. The hedge fund leaders said that they would leave New York if Mamdani was there. Citigroup, the most right-wing bank in New York, has thrown all of its support against someone else.
And even though Mamdani won the election, Cuomo said he's going to run in the [election] to try to attract and get all of his funding to fight against Mamdani. And the Democrats have said, no, please don't run. We're going to back the current mayor, Adams. And we're also going to convince the Republicans not to send, not to mount a New York mayor's candidate, such as Curtis Leva, by offering him a job in the Trump administration, just so Cuomo will have another chance to run against Mamdani.
And we're going to throw the whole power of the press, of the public media, against them. I think I've given the idea. Richard lives in New York, too. So the fact is that both of us are right in the center of this. And I think its meaning is international in character, not merely local.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Go ahead, Richard.
RICHARD WOLFF: I would like to build on what Michael has said and talk a little bit about further dimensions of what has happened. But I certainly start off by saying I was dubious that he could do this, Mr. Mamdani, and I was wrong to be dubious. He did it. He did it better than I thought he could ever imagine doing it. I don't know him personally, but I would guess if he were sitting here, he'd probably admit that he's overwhelmed by it as well.
We live in a country that for the last 75 years has basically decreed that any candidate for elective office who accepts the label "socialist" is thereby committing political suicide and will not be heard from again. And one of the reasons Bernie Sanders is the important person that he is, is because he broke that taboo a few years ago.
And then AOC and the others who have come since have shown us, and this is the first important thing, they have shown us that the American people, despite 75 years of unrelenting purging of socialists and anyone who smelled or looked like a socialist, from public office, from respect, from a job, from an unbelievable program of 75 years of something akin to the Spanish Inquisition (it didn't quite kill people, although indirectly, given the jobs it destroyed, the mental health it destroyed, the people imprisoned and deported), because this begins with the anti-communism right after World War II. It is extraordinary that we can see millions of people come out to support Bernie, hundreds of thousands to support other congressional candidates, starting with AOC, and now the biggest city in the country overwhelmingly electing Mamdani is a city where the Republican Party has very little power.
So it's a Democratic city, and it's clear what it just did. This is therefore an historic event. No matter what happens between now and November, this is an enormous step forward for the rehabilitation of socialism within the American political discourse. Everybody should understand it, and that the person who carries that banner is not your charming grandpa Bernie and is not a beautiful young woman who articulates brilliantly, AOC, but is a young man who has the nerve to be supportive of the Palestinians and the nerve to present himself as a Muslim.
It really does tell you of shiftings in the American political scene that ought to have the leaders of the Democratic Party very worried. Number one. Number two, I would like to link the Middle East with this. And I want to do it in this way. Over the last 20 to 25 years, we have seen, I'm exaggerating, but I want to make the basic point – we have seen a shift of the definition of politics from something done locally, immediately by people going door to door, advertising their candidates and leaving a brochure, to spending money on the internet, on television, on big, costly promotions. We have, at the same time, seen the ability of our leaders to basically live and speak and act in their own psychological drama, unconnected with what people think.
When Michael reminds us that the majority of people don't want war and the majority of people don't want persecution of students who have a view on something happening thousands of miles away, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, he is talking about alienation. We don't believe the bullshit that's coming from the mass media. That's why it was possible for Mr. Trump to simply say, well, that's all fake media because enough people have figured that out. Not just the ones he called fake media. He's a fake too.
Nothing illustrates this more than the last two weeks. We don't know because the political leaders of our world don't tell us what's going on. Do you know what amount of damage the Iranians did in Israel? The answer is, no, you don't. You have a snippet here and a clip over there. But that doesn't tell you very much. Do you know how much damage was really done in Iran? No, you don't. Do you know whether the nuclear target was the real target? You don't know. Did they actually get that target? If it was, you don't know.
This is theater, folks. This is all theater. There's something going on, no doubt. And I wish I knew, and I wish you knew so we could talk intelligently about what the reality means. But we can't. We are a step back. The reality we have is the theater put forward.
There's a reaction that people have when they figure out, each in their own little moment, when you figure out that you don't know. And now you are angry because you're being played with. That anger showed up in the race for mayor in New York in a very dramatic way.
I'm going to give myself as an example. I live in Manhattan. I participated in that vote. The vast majority of candidates never interacted with me, neither where I shop, nor where I work, nor in my home. However, two candidates actually sent a human being. One, the local city council candidate, who won a young woman whose political affiliations are the usual, that is to say, nothing.
Two young people, excuse me, three young people came to me for Mamdani. On one occasion, two young men, and on the other occasion, one young woman. All three were in their 20s. I could see them and look at them. They had lots to tell me about Mamdani, but I cut them short and told them they didn't need to. This household would all go for Mamdani.
Mamdani made the decision, to his credit, to do that, to try to reach voters one by one in an endless process of citizens talking to citizens. And you know, you don't have to be a Freudian psychologist to understand the importance of that is not the words that are spoken, whatever they are. It's the moment in which a person like you, who lives a few blocks from you and has a life more or less like you do, and shops where you do, feels strong enough to come and talk to you. That's worth a million dollars of bullshit publicity.
Mr. Cuomo raised money and presented the usual theater. The people of New York responded by giving him the middle finger. You can't do that in Iran because it's far away. And you can't do it in Washington and you can't do it in Tel Aviv. But you are also angry at the theater. One of the few things that we know is real is that what's going on in Gaza is horrific and immoral because we have enough of the bullshit to know that nobody disagrees on that. The Israelis spin it as they wish, the Americans as they wish. We get that, but we know there's something real.
Mr. Mamdani is something real because he's so different from the normal theatrics. So, this is a vote that is corroborated by most of the polls that I see conducted by the Pew folks who do very good polling and many of the others. And that is that the majority of people in the Democratic Party are alienated from that party, and it is true of the Republicans now as well. Mr. Trump is too much like what he promised he would not be. And so he is falling into the trap, as many predicted he would have, so, you know, accommodating. And so he's losing what he once had.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but if you follow the logic, Mr. Mamdani is doing a better Trump than Trump can now do. That's why he won. The trick will be: can he sustain it? Can he build on what he has started, a good, solid foundation, a spectacular win? Can he? Will he get good advice from AOC and Bernie and the others to help him do that? Or will the assembled theater producers unify themselves the way Michael sketched it and rally behind anybody, somebody to try to fight this.
Their odds are not good. If they were going to do this, they waited for too long. They don't have a good candidate. Choosing Mr. Cuomo with his horrific record of anti-female sexism and being as polite as I know how, that was a very poor choice, to say the least. And most of the others they have don't hold a candle.
On the other hand, they have what a politics of theater needs. They have tons and tons of money. Look at the millions that were reported to have been given to Mr. Cuomo in the declining weeks of this campaign, from Michael Bloomberg, former mayor, from Mr. Langone, the Home Depot co-founder. You know, the billionaires lined it up behind Andrew Cuomo, just like the billionaires lined up behind Mr. Trump at his inauguration. Everybody knows it's a theater paid for by billionaires.
And Mr. Mamdani teaches everyone across the United States. Every city in America has socialists in it. That's the truth. They have all wondered, some of them for 50 years, would it ever be possible that a set of circumstances could arrive into which socialists could move? The answer is: that's what Mr. Mamdani just showed you. Yes, New York is different from other cities. But Bernie comes from Vermont, and that's very different from New York. And even AOC comes from Queens, which is quite different in many ways from Manhattan and from the Bronx, and on and on and on. Mr. Mamdani won across most of that.
This is, therefore, a very remarkable moment in which, as Marx would have loved to point out, the internal contradictions of capitalism, the financialization not only of the economy, but of the electoral process, its distraction from all human interaction, the desire of capitalists to make money by having each of us lost in our little cell phone, lost in our internet box, unconnected to anybody else, so that every human activity is mediated by their system of mass media and mass control.
All that we're watching is a reaction against that. The candidate who can mobilize that, Mr. Mamdani, in this circumstance, yet others we don't know of yet who will pick up this baton. If any of this comes true, as I see the possibility and as I know, others like me see the possibility, we are going to be in for some big changes.
Last point: even the theater is now becoming disorganized out of its own contradictions. Let's not miss this. The president announces with enormous enthusiasm the obliteration of the targets in Iran. Within hours, the intelligence chief of the United States says, No, it's not clear that we did it. It's in a mountain. We don't know. But it looks like not much was done. Okay? This is a poorly organized theater. You ought to be able to do better than that. What the hell is going on here?
And now the Iranians, as if they almost understand it, began in the first day or two saying very little damage was done. And yesterday released a statement, "Great damage was done." They're beginning to understand too that what is the truth here is utterly irrelevant. It's a theater. Everybody's thinking, what do I need to say about this event that will enhance whatever project I have? That's the only question. What the truth of the matter is, is of no importance.
You know, you can do that for 20 or 30 years. You really can. And then people begin to react to figuring out that's what you're doing. And then it loses. It's like chewing gum. Very good at the beginning, but within 10 minutes, you have no idea what that is in your mouth anymore because it is no longer able to do what it did at the beginning.
That's the lesson of every war. Michael made that point a couple of programs ago. The lesson of Vietnam was: don't put troops in these countries. A, you're going to lose, and B, you're going to lose because your own people will not tolerate that level of death and destruction. So now you have to have an electronic war. Yeah, but an electronic war can't do what boots on the ground [can]. The contradictions never stop, and they never see them, which is lucky for us because we do.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard's given a wonderful description of why so many Americans actually support socialism instead of what we have today. There have been a number of opinion polls of Americans saying, how do you react to the word socialism? And how do you react to capitalism? Most voters prefer socialism to capitalism as a word and presumably as a policy.
When Richard says there are going to be big changes as a result of this, the change is going to be how this preference of voters against the pro-Wall Street finance capitalist policies that we have is ever going to express themselves politically in what's become, as Richard said, a financialized electoral system. There's nothing I can add to what he said about socialism, but I want to make one comment about how Netanyahu's attack on progressive American Jews is splitting them.
Netanyahu has said that the greatest enemies of Israel are the progressive American Jews, who are not supporting Israel's attack on Gaza. He said that anyone who does not support Israel against the Palestinians is an anti-Semite. Well, New York City has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Tel Aviv. So you're having here an expression of how the extent to which this Zionism has itself become anti-Semitic. I won't say anti-Semitic, but against Judaism.
Netanyahu and Israel's reading of the covenant of the Lord backing Israel is a radical misleading of the Jewish Bible. And, over the weekend, Senator Ted Cruz said he's supporting Israel and wants to be Israel's strongest supporter in Congress because the Bible tells him that God supports Israel and you have to support Israel if you support God. It's all but saying that the secular Jews, the assimilationist Jews, the Jews who are not pro-war, are atheists.
But this compact of the Lord, I want to say something about the compact of the Lord with Israel because I've written a number of books on this with the leading Hebrews in Israel, Baruch Levine, and by one of the leading Israeli Zionist professors from Yale. They're part of my group, my Harvard group, on the history of economics from the Near East to ancient Israel.
Most of the Bible is about a class war that occurred within the Jewish community. Most of the Bible is about what the Jewish prophets accused the Judaic ruling class of: abandoning social justice and letting its economy polarize between the rich and the poor. You have Isaiah, Amos, and the other prophets denouncing them for monopolizing the land and putting house to house and plot to plot together until there's no room for the population in the land. This led to Israel and the 10 tribes of Israel withdrawing from the house of David, saying, "What has it done for us?" There's been an oppressive class.
While the covenant with the Lord in the Bible was all about [how] the Lord will support the Israelis as long as their religion is one of social justice and even treating the alien decently, that's not how it worked out, with the wealthy classes essentially enslaving and appropriating the land of the poor. You had the prophets, Isaiah and others, saying, first of all, the Lord was displeased with Israel, Judaism, and let it be conquered by Assyria as punishment for violating the compact with the Lord to promote social justice and free the population.
Once again, after the war, the Jewish ruling class continued to polarize the economy. So Isaiah said, we've lost to Babylonia because the Lord is not supporting us if we don't support the poor. If we don't support the covenant as spelled out in the book of Leviticus, especially chapter 25, the Jubilee year, if we don't cancel the debts and return the land to the population and liberate the dead bondservants, we're going to be defeated again and again because the Lord will not support us if we do that.
Well, today, Israel is one of the most economically unequal economies in the world. There's a very wealthy ruling class there, but most of the Israelis are not so wealthy. And it's very hard to find social justice or mutual aid or protection and tolerance of aliens, as the indigenous Palestinians are called. Very hard to find that. And you could say that if the Bible says anything, it says that Israel will be punished for its behavior against this. This is the exact opposite of what Netanyahu says.
So the fact is that the Zionists and the Likud party have a travesty of what the Bible is all about. A travesty about [what] Judaism is all about, and also a travesty about how Jesus emerged from this class war within Judea and gave his first speech before the synagogue, unrolling the tablet of Isaiah and announcing that his mission was to restore the Jubilee Year and lead to a debt cancellation.
We now know there was a very large movement in Israel, not only Jesus' followers, but it was a majority of the popular movement against it. It was defeated by the Jewish rabbinical class led by the rabbis. You had the same kind of class war that ended up with Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and the Lord's Prayer: Forgive them their debts as we forgive our debtors. So, the majority of American Jews have played such an important role intellectually and politically and financially because they believe in universal equality. They believed they were fighting against any kind of ethnicity and total war, obviously because they had been the victims of all of this.
They were against any kind of racism or economic inequality because that was why they'd immigrated to America to begin with, just as so many Protestants from France and England, the Huguenots and others had come here. This attempt to characterize any socialist, any advocate of social justice and of world peace, as being anti-Semitic should be exposed as the travesty that it is.
RICHARD WOLFF: I want to get yet another dimension of all of this on the table so that we've talked about it and your audience can think about whatever it finds reasonable in it. Mr. Trump became an oddity, a Republican candidate who was very strong for peace. He came very close to what Michael was just talking about.
He promised that he would end the war in Ukraine. I believe he said, either I'll end it in a week or I'll end it in a day. One of his typical exaggerations. I'm being polite. He said much the same about Israel in Gaza. He seemed to recognize that by far the most destructive war at the time that he was running for president was the war in Gaza. In other words, the Israelis were killing people, at a rate on a daily basis, far exceeding what Russia and Ukraine did to each other.
So, if anything, he was giving us to understand that he understood that difference and he would bring wars to an end. Remember, "I'm going to end the forever wars in the Middle East, etc." He has not done that. He has given us a theater of doing it: on again, off again. He will not stay with Zelensky in Ukraine. He will. He's now going to meet him. He isn't going to meet. Unbelievable.
But one thing we know: the war is not over. And even if he withdraws, he is encouraging the Europeans to keep this war going, which they seem concerned to do, because they live in the same theatrical universe that we do in this country. They have leaders who are in a fight against Russia, but the mass of those people do not feel part of, do not want the war in Ukraine, and will not participate in it. Meanwhile, the leaders keep doing what they're doing because they're engaged in a theater. They are making a theater of the evil intentions of Russia, for which there is no evidence and no foundation.
What did he do about the war in Gaza? Nothing. He sat by, like Mr. Biden, and allowed Netanyahu to continue to use American money and American weapons to pursue what was the most horrible of the existing wars. But he has gone further. He's now attacked Iran, with whom there was no war before.
He gets the full credit for starting a third war in that part of the world. He didn't stop the other two. He made it. Now we have a ceasefire. Both sides will now be reorganizing themselves because it would be folly for either Israel to assume Iran won't bomb it, or vice versa. So we're sitting on top of more theater, but now, the biggest theater of all, which can't be spoken.
If it was true that Mr. Trump believed that there might be nuclear enriched uranium, enriched enough to be weapon-ready in those three sites in Iran, and he dropped the biggest bombs we have on them, what could have happened is that the bombs blew up the nuclear material, in which case we would have had what? Another Chernobyl. If we believe him, the risk he took ought to throw him out of office. He risked a nuclear catastrophe, which he didn't have to. Iran wasn't doing anything to the United States at the time.
Maybe he knew there was nothing there like that, that he could defend himself. But if he did, we would get more evidence that it's all theater. As we are getting hints now that the Iranians knew to move their stuff out of those sites, just like the Iranians told the Americans before they hit the base in Qatar that they should leave there, which they did.
We're at a point which was prefigured by a film made by Dustin Hoffman many years ago called Wag the Dog. And his point was: a war was simulated. I don't know if you've seen the film, but if not, see it. A war is simulated by Hollywood to achieve the political and other objectives of the people who pay for the theater. That's where we are. That's why Mamdani won.
There is a reaction going beyond the details of Israel or Judaism or any of this. It's the honest expression of a population that knows it's being ripped off economically, politically, ideologically. Whoever can emerge from this bad time with some genuine honesty attached to him or her will do very, very well. Right now, to my fellow left-of-center Americans, Bernie has that, and AOC has that, and now Mamdani has that, from which certain lessons should be drawn for all of you in terms of thinking about what strategies you should pursue to try to take advantage of this situation.
Mr. Trump is the president because he figured out that nobody had any sympathy, not in the Republican Party and not in the Democratic Party, for the victims of 40 years of neoliberal globalization: white, male, Christian factory-working union members. They were the forgotten. They were the unimportant. And he addressed them. "I'm yours."
And he was brilliant. He focused them not on the corporate executives, whose decisions to move production to China, to automate and to bring in immigrants – they were exempt. He knew whom he had to please. He knew who he was. So he came up with the solution. It's those horrible Democrats who have been favoring black, brown, and female people at your expense. That's why you're screwed. That's why you have no job, no future. Instead of being a union machinist, you're a greeter at Walmart.
So turn your anger, turn your bitterness against black people, brown people, women, all the DEI beneficiaries. They're your enemy. Classic. "Vote for me. I'll fix it." What does he fix? Nothing. What does he solve? Nothing. We got more war in the Middle East than when he came. But he knew that he could cash in.
I'm telling us, learn the lesson. Mandani, AOC, Bernie, they have taught us something. The system has destroyed the basis of its own mass support. We have to act if we're going to become the inheritors of the reaction against where this country has landed.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think what Richard has described so wonderfully as the theater of "how do you frame the issue?" and "how do you frame the issue in a way that avoids talking about what it's really all about for wage earners in the economy." This is the theater of deception.
You can say that the United Nations – and Nima, your guests have pointed out how the International Atomic Energy Authority has been a theater of deception, pretending to make the world safe from economic, from nuclear war. Well, [IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano] Grossi, according to the Iranian documentation, simply acted as spies for the CIA and for Israel to turn over to Israel the names of the atomic scientists for assassination, and to locate where we've inspected the actual places where uranium is stored, for the Americans and Israelis to bomb and the Israelis to drop American bombs on.
This whole framing of deception is sort of broken away by an intuitive sense of American voters, and I bet voters all over the world, to realize that this is all deception. The dominant politics of almost every country have become based on framing the issue in a way to distract attention from what most voters care about: the economy and the way that society is structured.
What is this really all about? It's what kind of an economic system, what kind of a political system are we going to have? There's the perception now, the reality that the political system of both parties here is corrupted, just as the European political parties are corrupted in supporting NATO and the war in Russia against the votes of their own population, against the NATO war, against all of the polling of the voters. You have, from America to Europe, politics versus the voters. This is not democratic. This is the antithesis of democracy. That's what's at issue.
RICHARD WOLFF: I want to pick up on the question of Europe that Michael just raised. The theater there is so obvious that I think Europeans can be expected to give us events like Mamdani in New York soon.
Here's the theater: with the United States, Ukraine is defeated by Russia. We've been watching that for three years, and that's not going to change. Without the United States fully engaged, the Europeans have even less chance. So, why the demonization of Russia? What in the world is going on? The answer: Russia no longer needs Europe to sell its oil and gas. It can sell oil and gas to India and China forever and do very well in the process, as well as cementing a political alliance: the BRICS, which is crucial for all of them.
So, what is the European plan? You hype the Russian danger. Why? So that you can shift governmental spending from social benefits to militarism. What we're watching is a classic program of military Keynesianism. The government is going to come in. Look at [Chancellor Friedrich] Merz in Germany, an $80 billion a year rearmament for what? You're going to fight Russia? You're going to lose again.
The Europeans, there's no stomach for it. There's not enough money for it. And whatever they could do, let me remind you: $80 billion is the German allocation. The United States in one year allocates 10 times that amount of money. They're not going to threaten or endanger the United States, and they're not going to do that with Russia or China either. It's way too late, but they don't care, because that's not the point.
The point is, with higher energy costs, because these idiots sanctioned Russia and wouldn't buy its oil and gas. So now they have to pay too much. They're deindustrializing. Their companies are leaving, moving around Europe, moving to the United States, going anywhere. They have to stop that. Otherwise, they literally become a tourist attraction and a little more.
So now they've found the way. They're going to subsidize industry at home by an enormous military Keynesianism. And to cover that, to make that fly politically, they put on the theater of evil Russia that endangers all of us from right underneath our beds at night. Otherwise, the absurdity of the Russia bashing would have to be explained. Russia isn't the reason for it. Russia's job is to be the player, the symbol in the theater for what is necessary.
That's what I mean. These are theatrics designed to cover in some acceptable idiom a project that they dare not honestly present. We have a political system of theater which has now run out of tolerability. Even large parts of Europe don't believe their own leaders.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Exactly. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.
RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you. Thank you all.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: See you soon. Bye-bye.
Transcription and Diarization: hudsearch
Editing and Review: Cindy Mitlo
Photo by A Chosen Soul on Unsplash