The Billionaires Do China (w/ Prof. Richard Wolff)

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Eskow, produced by the Weak Radio Network and broadcasting from the banks of the Anacostia directly into the halls of power. And now your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the program. Well, Donald Trump's delegation to China looked a lot like a Cub Scout troop for billionaires. I wonder what kind of badges they give out for economic parasitism and things of that kind. We'll be talking about that in this hour with Professor Richard Wolfe. So please stick around. We'll be right back. This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J.S. Gal. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash the Zero Hour.

And we're back on the zero hour. I, as always, am your host, Richard R.J. S. Gow. And you know I always look forward to speaking with Professor Richard Wolfe, economist, economic historian, host of economic update on free speech TV. a grand senior of Democracy at Work.Info and I mean, how many times can I say this stuff? And always a pleasure talking with him. So first of all, Richard Wolfe, welcome back to the program. And I feel exactly the same way. So right back at you. Thank you. Well, since as we record these words on Thursday, Donald Trump is in China, and I always get a kick out of, I guess because for a while, forgive me for this. I was a consultant for the State Department, so I always enjoy the ins and outs of diplomacy. But we'll leave that aside for a second, just to talk about the astonishing array of people that Donald Trump brought with him to China. I'm looking at a picture of Trump and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and besides Trump's coterie of underqualified Knutniks, I believe, is the technical term, Lara Trump, Eric Trump, and Stephen Miller and these characters. I'm looking at this huge delegation behind him, and here's what I see, Richard Wolfe. I see David Solomon from Goldman Sachs. Remember, this is the populist guy who was going to speak for the people. Sanjay Mahrotra, who runs Micron, Brian Sykes, who runs Cargill, Michael Mybach from MasterCard. I won't go through all of them, but head of Boeing, which has been incompetently run and bailed out by the U.S. government, also its biggest customer time and time again, Larry Culp of GE Aerospace, Jane Frazier of Citibank. Other companies Qualcomm, Visa, Apple, there's old Tim Cook there, Apple, good old Elon Musk from Tesla and Space X, Stephen Schwartzman, the Blackstone billionaire and constant complainer and self-pityer. And someone else, I think that's two people from Nvidia. Well, anyway, an Nvidia person is in there too. CEOs actually outnumber the U.S. government representatives, as far as I can tell. I'll tell you what I don't see. I don't see anyone from the labor movement. I don't see anyone from the agriculture sector. I don't see teachers. I don't see people who have to worry about the cost of groceries. All I see are these billionaires.

and Donald Trump, who if he wasn't a billionaire before returning to office, he sure he is now, what do you make of that? Well, I had a similar reaction, if you will recall, if you were watching TV during the inauguration when he takes the oath of office, he had lined up behind him. you know, a row of chairs. And the announcer, I forget who it was, on the televisions, commented without noting any significance that those chairs are normally reserved for high dignitaries, you know, members of the Supreme Court and other people like that who sit there to add... official solemnity to the whole business. They were gone, and but instead of them, but my reaction is the famous saying, If you're upset with merchants, avoid the middleman. Go directly. I think Mr. Trump is avoiding all the middlemen, and the billionaires are avoiding the middlemen they normally have between them and whoever is making the decisions. So they're going to go along and make sure that he speaks for them. by literally standing next to him when he does whatever negotiating he actually does. And so they're there to cut deals. So who's the middlemen you're talking about? Who are these, is that elected officials who these billionaires pay to win elections or is it somebody else? Exactly. It's all the apparatuses which they would normally operate through complaining, just as you just did, complaining. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of time. But they know that that's how the game is played. My reaction, they can't trust that anymore. Let me give you a parallel to make my point clear. Way back in 1967, people may remember it was a very hot summer. There were a wave of riots across American cities. And in most cases, it was the African-American community rising up from Los Angeles to Boston and in many, many places between. I was living at that time in New Haven, Connecticut, a small city, but like many American cities, about a third. black and Hispanic, living in the poorest neighborhoods, with the poorest public services, all the conditions to produce a riot. But the interesting thing about New Haven was there is the top. The top is called Yale University. It is the largest employer.

In New Haven, it is the largest landowner. It is the law. You name it, it's the largest. And they normally allowed the Democratic Party. The last Republican to be a mayor of New Haven was in 1953. Not since then, as New Haven had a non-democratic, basically mayor. And so Yale was used to dealing with one Democratic Party flunky after another, who did whatever it is they wanted. They don't pay taxes the way they ought to, you know, the overwhelming bulk of their property, which is therefore an enormous part of the most valuable downtown New Haven property because the university is right in the middle of the city. Doesn't pay tax. It's disgusting. The whole, and I'm a graduate, so I'm a Yale graduate telling you about Yale, which as an economist, I had to study and learn. Well, when the riots hit, suddenly, The president of Yale and the big officials at Yale literally stopped talking to the mayor or the city, the board of alderman, which is the city council there. They went directly into the black community, found whoever they could, who could speak for that community, a minister in one case, an activist leader in another, and they negotiated with them. And for a number of weeks, The city was run by Yale University and these African-American leaders. And the whole rest of it was simply spectators. And we have all become spectators. Look, the biggest impact of China on American society. has been Chinese workers replacing American workers in the manufacturing core of the global economy, which was once in America and is now in China. So what would be more reasonable than having... properly chosen representatives of the American working class wanting to say what their concerns are about not a word, not a one, no invitation, not even the formality of a window dressing. Inclusion, not at all. This man, Mr. Trump, and these people, they're not going to waste time on the intermediary. They're working out with China what's profitable and what the, you know, it's American history.

For the last 40 years, it's been profitable to close the factory in Cincinnati and open it in Shanghai. And that's it, profit. The consequences for Cincinnati, who cares? You know, Detroit, when I first wrote about Detroit in 1970, the population was just under 2 million. The population today is 650,000, all right? What a statement. The majority of the people of Detroit left the city. They voted with their feet. It was impossible to stay. A good half of that city right now is abandoned housing, which goes up in flames all the time when some homeless person doesn't put out the fire properly. We are watching a decline, and here he does. He takes literally the people who made the decisions, and he excludes the people who suffered the decisions, and he goes and makes a new set of decisions with those Chinese leaders once again. I can only imagine to myself what goes through the mind of a Xi Jinping or the other Chinese watching this bizarre process. Well, two thoughts come to mind about that, well, multiple thoughts, and thanks for that take. But one of them is... Well, in no particular order. One is what you describe about Detroit, and now I've written about Detroit, too, very similar to my hometown of Utica, New York, which when I was growing up there, had a population, I think, about 110, 120,000, lost some textile mills. First, they moved south because, of course, the southern states didn't have the labor laws that the northern states had. So that was kind of an internal... internal, you know, outsourcing or offshoring. And the rest of the city was decimated by trade with China and elsewhere. So that when I last went there to write about it in 2011, the population was, I think, about 65,000. of which one, roughly one third were refugees, because they had made it a refugee resettlement center, because there were so many vacant homes there. And vast portions of the city look like they've been bombed out, just the industrial area is just wreckage and vines running through them and just, you know, post-apocalyptic kinds of things. So this is something that's been played out multiple parts of the country. There was a little something called the WTO agreement in the presidency of Bill Clinton. There were protests in 1999 in Seattle, Harbingers of Things to Come, the Democrats, coziness with all of this.

had hurt them politically. Hillary Clinton's endorsement of what was then called the Trans-Pacific Partnership hurt her and was one of the multiple factors, I would argue, that caused you to lose in 2016. And yet here we have Donald Trump who couldn't be more blatant about who he's representing, because they're coming to represent themselves. And among other things, what struck me about is, you may recall it was not that long ago that when the first few months of Trump's presidency, corporations seemed cowed by him, afraid of him, and they all dismantled their DEI initiatives and did other things. to please him and to make sure they didn't upset him. Now I'm not sure who's the guard dog and who are the chickens here between the government employees and the corporate representatives. But there's not even a pretense here. You know, when Nixon would initially went to China and met with Mao and all of that, there was the idea that this would create American jobs. There was at least that pretense, but if you look at these companies, Goldman Sachs, MasterCard, well, maybe Boeing, but Qualcomm, Visa, Blackstone, City, Apple, which does all its manufacturing in China, none of these deals are going to. produce work for American workers, it may make me improve if they're successful, the American, the U.S. GDP, but at the price of even worse inequality, or at least that's the way it looks to me. But there's no secret here in the penalty that the Democrats deservedly paid for pandering to this class. I'm not sure there'll be any penalty to Donald Trump for not only pandering to them, but inviting them along so they can tell him what to do. Yeah, and that he can ingratiate himself with them. You know, Mr. Trump is supremely aware that if he has to leave the office at the end of his second term, assuming he gets that far. He will then go back into quote-unquote private life. Now, one of the reasons he became a president was he was always among the big billionaires, a small-time player. If I remember correctly, his fortune was around $3 billion. Well, the fortunes of... of Elon Musk, for example, are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. So he only had Elon Musk cavorting around the White House because he was the president. When he stops being president, which is now two and a half years away, he is going to be a little fish again.

unless he has made good friends with one of the big fish. He just collected a bunch of big fish and to give them a free ride to China, be present in the great celebration in whatever the most magnificent hallway that Chinese have in Beijing, which I assume, I've never been there, but I assume is magnificent. And so he's doing what you need to do, financially, personally, and even in terms of trips. to get himself ingratiated with the people he will be looking up at once he's out of office. And you know, as well as I do, that if we play a hypothetical here, a big hypothetical, in my case, bigger in your eyes and say, suppose you and I were advising the Democratic Party on this. One would assume that any rational advisor, and I've done that, to be fair, to come clean, would say. Milk this for all it's worth. Here's your Republican president and basically cult leader of the current Republican Party openly selling your government out to billionaires to the country that for whatever it's virtues and weaknesses. basically decimated your hometown because these guys, this is the cabal that sent all your jobs over there. Now, obviously, he's planning to do it again. We got to get rid of this guy as quickly as we can. We've got to elect Democrats to the House and Senate to stop this guy from giving away your jobs. And yet, you know how many statements I've seen like that? Zero. Maybe there have been some. But I sure as hell, I haven't seen them. This hasn't been a dominant theme when all these would-be presidents, Cory Booker and Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris are trying to stake their claim now for, it's going to be a long two years. I don't hear anybody saying, you know, where's your interest being represented as we go negotiate with this? We'll be right back after this with more of my conversation with Professor Richard Wolfe. I'm Richard R.J. Eskow, and you're listening to The Zero Hour.

You are listening to the We Act Radio Network produced in Washington, D.C. Visit us online at weactradio.com or at YouTube.com slash weactradio, D.C. And we are back on the Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Escal. We now continue my conversation with Professor Richard Wolfe. Look, if you wanted an example of the Democratic Party, led by its centrist wings, appealing to the same individuals, they're doing exactly what you described a few moments ago. Richard. They are sucking up to the donors. They're not, they don't want to offend them, they want to please them, they want to be supported. They have fear if they did what you just said, that somebody would hold it against them. They'd mention the name of Elon Musk or somebody else. And by the way, Elon Musk, among others, makes unmentionable comments about the Democratic Party. They pay Mr. Trump back by, you know, hyping the endorsement of him and whatever the reverse is for the Democrats. So, yeah, I think there's just craven fear of losing out, if not the majority of the money, then at least that portion of what these big donors give to the Democrats. to offset the notion they only give to the Republicans, the clever ones give a little to both, or give a lot to the Republicans and a little to the Democrats, to teach both of them. Republicans, we could reduce you to that, Democrats, we could raise you to that, and then both of them will pander all the more. It is extraordinary, and you're right. The lack of critical comment about this. And by the way, Around the same time as he left for China, I believe it may have been a bit earlier, he made a remark, apparently in answer to a reporter's question, the reporter asked, what do you say to the American people who are facing rising prices for gasoline and other things? And his answer, because he, it's the way he is, his answer was, I don't, a virtual quote, I don't care about the financial. The important issue all Americans know is to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons because then we're all dead. But you know, the press picked up, I don't care about the financial implications of this war for the American people. Well, that sure is what they care about. And I did notice. that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and the other leaders of the Democratic Party jumped on Mr. Trump for that remark, but didn't say a word about the billionaire's bonanza trip that just got organized for them. And, yeah, maybe it was something like, I don't pay attention or something like that. But, yeah, with something like that.

You know, I guess if I look at it dispassionately, you could say that And this is the kindest interpretation in a way for the Democrats. They're in a doom loop, which is to say the way they do politics, they need big donor money. They can't escape from it. If they were to try to do what, you know, Bernie Sanders does and run campaigns on $27 a contribution, well, that'd be a huge transition and they'd probably lose some races given their... the track record a lot of them that's if they even want to i don't know that they even want to but uh so they're damned if they do damned if they don't as long as they are who they are right because They are still going to cultivate the billionaires, which means not only that they can't criticize an assembly like this, but remember, no candidate before his time ever got as much Wall Street money as Barack Obama did. And they don't want to let that go. But then the consequences of that, then they let dark money into their primaries. Now we're seeing... occasionally there's a left-leaning victory, but we're seeing race after race where hidden APAC money, other billionaire money is affecting the outcome, the AI industry, which is an ideal way for a populist pro-worker, pro-environment party to fight back against the billionaire class. They've got... Pax. We had a guest on the show a couple of weeks ago, one of the co-founders of Sludge magazine, which profiles corporate corruption. And he was talking about how these AI donors are big in the Democratic Party. We have the financial creativity set, Bitcoin and all that. You may remember that not long before his arrest and conviction, Sam Bankman freed. with sharing stages with the likes of Bill Clinton at Davos and elsewhere. So they're caught between a rock and a hard place. But meanwhile, I was interviewed myself the other day and I was asked about what the interviewer called techno-fascism, you know, the billionaire class and how it's changed under Trump. And I've argued. I know there's a Marx quote about the creativity and self-adventive capability of capitalism, but my answer was that this class represented by Elon Musk and NVIDIA, and even you could argue the financier is Goldman Sachs and so on is endlessly adaptable. It's like the monster in John Carpenter's The Thing. It becomes whatever it needs to become.

And if it needs to be pro-D-E-I to make the regular later's happy, then, man, you better sit through your consciousness-raising seminars or, you know, as an employee. If they need to become anti-DEI, then you need to forget everything you learned at their consciousness seminar. Whatever it takes, they'll do it. And to me, nothing is a clearer example of that than this coffee clock of... of billionaire CEOs and Donald Trump and his posse negotiating without a damn bit of interest about how this affects the rest of us. No, and I think it bespeaks and we ought to. beat this drum to death here. It bespeaks the way this economic system has always worked. It's arranged by the people who have the money to hire the teams that make the policy and do the work and the fallout, let the chips fall where they may. We run the auto business the way we think. Okay. Meanwhile, the Japanese And the Germans coming back from World War II understand. The Americans dominate. So how do you deal with this? You've got to figure out how to make a car better or cheaper or better, better and cheaper. Otherwise, you're done. And that's the way the world works. That's the way capitalism has always worked. But the Americans didn't understand it. For most of the second half of the Second World War, the people running American capitalism seemed to imagine that we were so far better than the rest of the world that it would stay like this forever, that these people would never catch up and never surpass. The country that grew up and surpassed the empire of which it was a minor part, couldn't imagine anyone else doing that. You know, and in my judgment, they entered this war with Iran. living in a fantasy of how powerful they were relative to how powerless Iran was. And they got that wrong, big time wrong, so that they got in there and now they're being defeated. Robert Elena Kagan writes an article in the Atlantic explaining how we got defeated, right? There he is, Zionist, Neocon, the whole bit, and even he. can see, whoa, was this a mistake? I mean, he will not be able to figure out why, or he'll come up with some other story. Well, you know, we have, it's interesting that you mentioned the neocons because everybody

got bipartisan resolutions in the Senate, one of the military, I think it was one of the military funding bills. They got a provision added that said that you could not draw down troops unless you had the written approval of generals, the appropriate generals, which is like, first of all, I thought the elected officials told the generals what to do, not vice versa. And number two, what general, you don't get to be a general unless you're, you know, an ass protect, you know, you know how to cover your own ass. You're not going to say, yeah, go ahead, take out 3,000 troops. Then if there happens to be a blowback, you get it. The safe. thing to do and you know the same thing if you're a general because you know how to survive and thrive in a bureaucracy the safe thing to do you leave him leave him there the next guy will figure it out and uh so that was just one example but uh you know trump has they were also but i would say the primary reason they turned against him was because of his lack of zestful enthusiasm for uh ongoing uh war in Ukraine, that they were all very, and this is when the Democrats embraced them wholeheartedly because Joe Biden did not take the diplomatic overtures that could have either prevented this war or ended it just as it began. And the final settlement once they're, once they get one, it'll be much worse than what it could have been in, let's say April of 2020. would it be yeah and um so that was when they made common cause with the the John Bolton crowd was isn't it horrible that this man uh didn't want to send uh more and more troops and prolong and unwinnable war so okay that that helps me understand it but I don't see any recognition at all of the declining empire hypothesis. It is so far from these people that they don't even refute it. They act as though it isn't there. It's extraordinary. And they won't see the link between imagining that we don't have that problem. and making the miscalculation that now virtually everybody understands underlies the war in Iran. It's just misunderstanding who you're fighting, what their capabilities are. I remember taking people through a map. I said, China has now got the biggest manufacturing base in the world. It's bigger than the United States and Western Europe combined. They can therefore produce missiles and drones infinitely. That's what a manufacturing, they have all the companies, large, small, and medium. And it's all worked out, and the transportation is all done. They can produce it. Then I said, now look at the map. And they're transported with Russia. So the Chinese can give the Russians everything.

And look at the Caspian Sea. Russia has a coastline. Iran has a coastline. What the Chinese can give the Russians, the Russians can put on the freighters they already have in the Caspian Sea and deliver it literally to Tehran. What do you? When the president of we've knocked out their missile capacity, no, you haven't. You haven't even knocked out the ones they've already got installed. But their capacity is China and Russia, and you're not going to knock that out. Well, and I met an artist many years ago, a photographer, who did these books where he photographed giant Chinese factories. And they were incredible. And he is not an ideological effort on his part. He just thought they were amazing human artifacts, which they are. So I get what you're saying. And I kept some closing, maybe just tying it back to the Chinese piece of it. I wonder what would have happened if some really savvy worker representatives, this is a fantasy world, obviously has things stand now, but maybe not forever, went with a president to China and said, we don't care if the GDP of the United States grows who shrinks. What we care about is getting your help and bringing some jobs back to the American worker. We understand you need to grow. You know, we understand you have needs to, but just to understand our objective is to meaningfully employ as many Americans as we can in jobs that were lost without forcing you or other countries around the world to make undue sacrifices. Such a mission impossible or not? No, that's just, see, they're so sad to hear you ask that question, Richard. Because that's the obvious, rational thing to do. How do you, you know, Britain tried twice to smash the independence of the United States in the war of independence, and then again in the war of 1812. Twice they fought a war they expected to win, twice they were taught that a little colony could defeat them. And they stopped. And for the rest of the 19th century and for the 20th century, Britain and the United States didn't clash. They worked it out. All right, the conditions are different now. I get that. But that's the job of the Chinese and the Americans. A declining empire works out a live-and-let-live arrangement with a rising empire. And let me give you a couple of examples of how that would work. You're hesitant to locate a, you're doing well in China. You're hesitant to locate a factory in the United States, given what the Trump administration is prepared to do. Hit you with a tariff, hit you with a trade war, hit you with God knows what other. This is too dangerous. You can't, you cannot justify doing it unless you worked out with the United States.

We will move these 16 factories to the United States. You must move this equivalent. You won't mess with us because we could mess with you. And we'll choose them. Ah, in other words, we'll take into account our different places and our different interests. But we can help each other if we do it like this. To hear the rest of my conversation with Richard Wolfe, please go to zero hour report.com where you can also support our work. And we'll be right back after this. I'm Richard R.J. Eskow, and this is The Zero Hour. This is The Zero Hour with Richard, RJ Eskow. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash The Zero Hour.

And we're back on the zero hour. Last but not least, a new archaeological discovery has pushed back the earliest evidence of dentistry. By 45,000 years, a meanderthal tooth was found recently, 60,000-year-old molar. It shows that Neanderthals seem to have used stone tools. to treat dental decay, tooth decay, by drilling out the cavity, which sounds absolutely brutal. So the fact is one of the professions that is popular among grandmothers everywhere is more ancient than we think. And I leave you with that to ponder until next week. We'll be back. As usual, next week.