Air Date 2/4/2025
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
The era of unquestioned US hegemony is undoubtedly on the decline, but the future is much more complicated and uncertain than the straightforward idea of China rising to take our place that we've been told. Though Trump is not the cause of US decline, he may help send us out in a tragic blaze of glory.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today includes The Muckrake Political Podcast, The New Statesman, Al Jazeera English, Times Radio, The Red Nation Podcast, and the Democracy in Europe Movement '25.
Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there will be more in six sections: Section A, American Decline. Section B, China. Section C, Russia. Section D, France. Section E, Corporate Control. And Section F, What Comes [00:01:00] Next.
Things Fall Apart - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 1-28-25
NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: You've been afraid of this for a long time and have been sounding the whistle about AI. And, when you start to see just how good it can be, you start to feel like, yes, we're all going to have our own personal Jarvis, like we see in the Marvel movies, which in the movie version supposedly makes life easier. But I think we're going to be able to list a few things here, why this is so dangerous.
JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: I have a lot of things that I need to set the table with it. I don't think it's good. I think it's actually really bad. I think it's been marketed to us as this world-changing sort of technology, but it's just bells and whistles. It's just regurgitated stuff that has been stolen and then gets repackaged and sold back to us.
One of the things that tech insiders have been telling us for a while now is that we've probably already reached peak AI as we know it. It's not going to be some sort of a sentient creative genius that's going to change society. It's a gimmick.
And a large reason that we're in the situation we are right now is that we've had [00:02:00] decades of neoliberalism that has led to a monopolistic environment. We have all of these big major tech corporations that, we've covered it, they just gobble up all competitors. Basically the main goal that you have, if you have a tech startup or a business at this point, is that a bigger fish will buy you and incorporate you into what they're doing.
It has more or less stalled out innovation in the United States of America. We're in this weird period where our tech sucks, nothing really is making these big advancements. Everything from your phone to all these programs, they are not impressive and they're not actually pushing things forward.
Now, all of a sudden, you have an environment where the oligarchs who made incredible amounts of money -- and we've talked about it, merging with the state apparatus, this is one of the reasons why we now have this oligarchical class, they were carrying out the functions of empire -- now they have reached a point where they're in decay. They're not [00:03:00] really producing anything anymore that people actually want. They can't even make a car that doesn't explode or crash into a crowd of pedestrians at this point, right?
So, they have used their power to basically turn the government into a redistributive machine turned on high. We saw the other day, Nick, the announcement of the Stargate program, which supposedly was going to see half a trillion dollars put towards AI. I have a weird instinct at this point that was meant to anticipate this, to go ahead and blunt the effect of this technology being put out there and put forward by China.
We are now dealing with tech corporations that have effectively taken over nation states that are now competing for who will dominate a market. We've now moved into a monopolistic competition on the world scale. I have a few feelings about this, Nick. I think that the release of DeepSeek is going to [00:04:00] lead -- Mark Anderson, who's a complete asshole, has already called this "AI Sputnik moment." And for people who don't know the history, when Sputnik got launched by the Soviet Union, everybody freaked out and what did they do? They took the military industrial complex and turned it into the military, scientific industrial complex. They threw ungodly amounts of money into programs that basically took over colleges and science to try and meet the Russians where they were.
Now we're going to see more and more money and resources pushed towards AI, a program that doesn't particularly work, that most people don't actually want. And like you said, it probably is going to put a lot of people out of jobs. And on top of that, it's not even going to function in the way that it's being promised to function.
So it's only going to make things worse, which is the self-defeating cycle that we've seen take place over time, and it's only going to get worse until somebody stands up and calls this for what it is.
NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Your assessment of where we are technologically has gotten me thinking a little bit, parallel to what you [00:05:00] were saying, what is progress, then, if we've gotten to the point where we have these iPhones, we have these things and so it's well, what will we be expecting the next thing to be? What is the Sputnik moment, really? And it's we have to dig into Star Trek stuff where we need to have hovering crafts and we need to have star travel. This is what Musk is trying to talk about now anyway, right? Is that the real frontier? Because how else can technology really benefit us or help us live better lives? And I think maybe that would be your focus in terms of how technology supposed to work, side by side with humans.
Is that sort of the idea? What else can it do? Can it be like cleaning our house for us? Is that what we're looking at?
JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: And Nick, one of the things is I want to point out, because what you're bringing up right now are luxuries. You know what I mean? And I'm not going to dismiss how luxuries have changed people's lives. The feminist movement would not have been made possible if we didn't suddenly have luxuries that would have [00:06:00] created free time, that they weren't bogged down by having to do these things. And there have been great leaps in terms of social progress that have been tied to technology.
But what we're talking about now is like, are you going to be able to go in and ask AI to make a video that makes you laugh? You know what I mean? Or, kills some time. It should be about making lives actually better. And what have we seen from AI, Nick? We've seen it give falsified quote unquote hallucinations that tell people to drink poison or basically hurt themselves.
And so it's a product that isn't what it purports to be. Most people don't actually understand it. It has almost like a religious type connotation to it. Now we're just supposed to believe that these people who aren't even able to create anything worth a shit, that they're going to make the thing that's going to get us out of all these crises -- economic crises, political crises, health crises, [00:07:00] mental health crises. On top of that, the climate change crisis. And it's not working. And it's not going to work particularly with these people in charge.
And the bigger problem here, Nick -- and right before we started recording it came out that the DeepSeek program had been hit with a massive cyber attack, right? Which is obviously retaliation for it coming in and disrupting the tech market, disrupting the stock market. This type of thing, I would not be shocked if it has government-level coordination for it.
And it's got me thinking, it's starting to feel more and more if we do have a World War Three, what we're actually looking at is corporations going to war with each other, right? And it's what happened in the World Wars previously, in the major conflicts before, but this would be a more explicit version of that, which is using state power and military power and all those other sort of apparatuses in [00:08:00] order to engage in corporate warfare and espionage.
And that feels a lot like the direction that we're heading in with this thing, suddenly hitting and disrupting things immediately. And then there being this consequence to it.
The end of America's global dominance Part 1 - The New Statesman - Air Date 1-8-25
ROBERT D. KAPLAN: Since the end of the Cold War, the quality of the presidency has declined, in terms of presidential instinct. We've had George W. Bush, who may have been the worst president of the last few decades. Obama, who is a mediocrity. Clinton was a mediocrity. And then there's Trump, who is a world historical figure because he's so different.
So the quality of presidential instinct has gone down -- significantly.
Then there's the other thing that nobody writes about or talks about, but which is 80 percent of foreign policy, and that's the bureaucracy. Not just the secretaries of state and defense, but the deputy [00:09:00] secretaries, the undersecretaries, the assistant secretaries of which there are many.
America has been an empire since 1945, and it's this layered bureaucracy that runs the empire. And under Trump, as I argue in the piece, this bureaucracy went downhill dramatically between 2017 and 2021 and is set to go down dramatically again, because the quality of people that Trump appoints, whatever you may think of the quality under Biden, another mediocrity, was much higher under all the previous presidents, with the exception of Trump, and we can go into that if you want.
KATE LAMBLE - HOST, NEW STATESMAN: Yeah, what's the difference in Trump's second term? He's already been president for four years. What's different this time around?
ROBERT D. KAPLAN: This time around, Trump is more experienced, he's more vindictive. He's got people [00:10:00] around him, many of whom have no experience in the bureaucracy, many of whom hate the very bureaucracies they've been empowered to run.
And we're going to see a decline in American power in the 80 percent that's run by the bureaucracy. As far as the presidential instinct decisions, that could go in either way. Trump is very unpredictable because he has no well-thought-out worldview.
KATE LAMBLE - HOST, NEW STATESMAN: You talk about the political power, but you also write about the economics in America at the moment and how that's in decline. Tell us about that.
ROBERT D. KAPLAN: Well, in 1945, when World War II ended, half of the world's manufacturing capacity was in the United States. And that lasted for decades. One of the reasons why Kissinger and Nixon could do so much is because America was much more powerful then. Now America accounts for only [00:11:00] 16 percent of the world's manufacturing capacity.
Then there's the debt, which is about 36 trillion dollars and growing dramatically at about a trillion dollars a year. And neither party, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, have anywhere near the maturity and fiscal discipline to deal with the debt. It's amazing.
When you watch Congress debate the budget, it's like the last days of ancient Rome. There is nobody in the room who's even remotely responsible. They just want to spend and spend and spend, each party on different things. And this debt accumulates and takes up more of the budget and there's less money to spend on defense, on social issues. It's like a building problem.
And as I lay out in the piece, this is how empires decline over history. It's [00:12:00] not just ancient Rome. It's most empires, throughout history, have declined because of economic reasons and because of reasons related indirectly to economic reasons.
KATE LAMBLE - HOST, NEW STATESMAN: If we're talking about an empire falling, you said that the US has been an empire since 1945. Is its decline inevitable? Can it be stopped if someone decided to?
ROBERT D. KAPLAN: No, it's absolutely not inevitable. I make two points in the piece: That America definitely is in decline. But also, I point out that China is in a steeper decline and that Russia is in an even steeper decline. So decline is relative. America could decline and yet its power vis a vis Russia and China, even under terrible leadership, could increase, because it's all relative. There is no absolute here. So we're really facing a world where all the great powers are declining.
Will France and Germany's woes affect the rest of Europe? | Counting the Cost - Al Jazeera English - Air Date 12-12-24
ADRIAN FINIGHAN - HOST, COUNTING THE COST: [00:13:00] What's gone wrong? Why was Barnier's budget so contentious?
MATTHIAS BAUER: Yeah, I think France has spilled on too many fiscal deficits in the past. If you look at the country from the bird's eye perspective, France's biggest challenge today is its oversized government. Public spending accounts for nearly 60% of GDP, six-zero, right? Termed by one of the highest tax burdens in Europe.
At the same time, many Frenchmen amongst them, many business owners, they criticize that for them to be turned on this enormous amount of government spending is underwhelming including essential services like health care, education, public infrastructure, but also filling off. Unemployment, which is among the highest in the EU and the youth unemployment rate of some 18 percent also amongst the highest in Europe.
So, by many measures, France [00:14:00] operates and it's operated for many years now as what I would describe as A socialist economy with a dysfunctional state deeply embedded in pretty much every aspect of economic life. Now Michelle Barney and his government, they dared to attempt to address these issues rightfully.
So with, however, relatively moderate. fiscal reforms. But even though these reforms would just have been a very tiny drop on an increasingly hot stone, there was political resistance to austerity measures on the one hand, but also new taxes that derailed these efforts.
ADRIAN FINIGHAN - HOST, COUNTING THE COST: All right, let's move to Germany, then.
Its economy expected to grow, what, 1 percent next year. What's gone wrong there?
MATTHIAS BAUER: Well, the German economy is still doing better to put it that way. Let me stress that things still look good for Germany when you compare the country to France. So, Germany remains [00:15:00] one of the most advanced economies of the world, reflected by a strong and very diverse manufacturing sector.
An increasingly diverse services sector economy with high exports still, and I would also say an okay GDP per capita when compared to other EU countries, especially France and yet my mother country. I am German by passport is now also facing what I would describe a crisis of dysfunctional government services, plus high energy costs, plus economic stagnation.
If you like. And that's also driven by global developments a continuous relative economic decline when you compare Germany, but also other EU countries, including France to other parts of the world.
ADRIAN FINIGHAN - HOST, COUNTING THE COST: How will France and Germany's economic problems impact the rest of the EU? Could we see economic power shifting elsewhere within the EU?
To what extent is that already happening?
MATTHIAS BAUER: They obviously [00:16:00] have. A lot of economic power, given that their industries are deeply intertwined in EU value chains. So if their economies perform weekly or increasingly, that will, of course, also disrupt value chains elsewhere in Europe as concerns political power, very hard to say.
I would not call it a crisis. Okay. A political crisis that we currently see in France and and also Germany. Okay. I think it's normal that governments break up. There will be new elections and so on and so forth. But this will obviously have an impact on how both countries engage in the European Council.
So, these countries have typically been there. In the driver's seat when it comes to EU policymaking, and there are other countries like Poland with the next council presidency that might want to step in, but they still do not have a clear agenda for EU policymaking.
ADRIAN FINIGHAN - HOST, COUNTING THE COST: Matthias just briefly, the EU already lags behind the US and China in [00:17:00] terms of competitiveness with President elect Trump threatening to impose tariffs on on imports from both China and the EU.
I mean, how is that going to exacerbate the problems?
MATTHIAS BAUER: You are right. There is this huge investment, technological and, you know, produce being competitiveness gap that has been rising For more than a decade now, and it's very, very difficult to address this gap to close it without meaningful structural reforms that however, need to take place at the national level in EU member states.
Not so much at the EU level. And here we need to talk about bold tax reforms, simplification of tax code, getting rid of subsidies that mainly go to sectors that we would consider. Disfunctional or unproductive. And this is a stark difference when you compare what is happening in the United States, where the economy is generally much less reliant on government spending [00:18:00] direct subsidies and a government that is not so much.
Inclined to apply a dirichist approach, command and control regulation that we see in large parts of Europe's Especially in France, but also increasingly in germany
Putin faces 'economic dilemma' amid Trump sanctions threats | World in 10 - Times Radio - Air Date 1-25-25
DAVID LUBIN : The idea of the U. S. using direct sanctions on Russian trade with the U. S. to change Russia's behavior is a bit laughable. Bilateral trade between Russia and the U. S. is pretty close to zero. In 2023, U. S. exports to Russia were about 600 million dollars. U. S. Imports from Russia were about 4. 5 bibillion dollars. In the context of the fact that the Russian economy, nominal GDP, is around 2 trillion, there's just nothing there. There's just no bilateral trade sanctions that will make Putin blink. So, the actual direct threat of additional sanctions on Russia is kind of meaningless. [00:19:00]
What's meaningful, I think, is the body language behind Trump's statements. And, I think the important bit of context here is the fact that during the course of 2024, Donald Trump on a couple of occasions, in an interview with Bloomberg, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, talked about a grand strategic objective of his. Which is to 'ununite'—his words, not mine—to ununite Russia from China. In effect, what Trump has been aiming at in these comments is a kind of photographic negative image of what Richard Nixon did by prizing China away from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. So, Trump's the, logic is that, Trump considers his main strategic rival to be China. And he just wants to weaken China by severing its alliance or its partnership with Russia, and [00:20:00] therefore, that sort of leads him to, has led him to express warm thoughts, warm views about Russia.
Now, what I think he's doing this week is trying to compensate for the fact that he spent a good chunk of 2024 and before. saying more or less friendly things about Vladimir Putin and Russia. What he needs to do, in other words, is to try and reinvigorate his capacity to negotiate with Putin. And so threatening to impose sanctions, threatening to get tough if Putin doesn't come to the negotiating table, is a necessary thing for him to do now, because in the past, Trump has spent a lot of political capital sort of aligning himself with Vladimir Putin.
LUKE JONES - HOST, WORLD IN 10: So is the real threat perhaps to countries rather than directly with Russia, but countries that have seen trade with Russia rise like China, [00:21:00] as you say, India, the Middle Eastern states, even some of those former Soviet states in Central Asia? Is that who these threats are directed at?
DAVID LUBIN : I hope so, because if you want to put additional pressure on the Russian economy, the most effective way of doing that by far, I think, is to work hard to further limit Russia's access to hard currency revenues. Before the war, before the invasion in early 2022, about 50 percent of Russia's oil exports, its energy exports, went to countries that pay in convertible currencies. And now it's about 10%. So, in effect, Russia's hard currency income has gone down from about 300 billion dollars a year to about 60 billion dollars a year. The difference has been [00:22:00] made up by non convertible currency income flows in the form of the renminbi or the Indian rupee or in rubles themselves, from non traditional trading partners.
Now, that gives the United States and Europe a strategic advantage over Russia, because the more that Russia receives non convertible currencies in exchange for its energy sales, the more vulnerable the Russian economy becomes. Because, although you could say export income is export income, you know, if Russia generates renminbi in exchange for its oil revenue, oil sales, then what's the difference? No, it's a significant difference because it's still the case that Russian citizens form their view about inflation, about the state of the economy, [00:23:00] that their confidence comes not from the rubles exchange rate against the renminbi or the rubles exchange rate against the rupee, but from the rubles exchange rate against the dollar.
And the fact that foreign hard currency revenues have become so depleted has put pressure on the ruble exchange rate against the dollar, which reached over 100-to-110 earlier this year, strengthened recently. But the point is that the less Russia can depend on hard currency revenues, the more vulnerable it becomes, and the more intense Vladimir Putin's dilemma gets.
And what I'm trying to get at in saying that is the following: the more depreciated the ruble gets against the dollar, the more it weakens against the dollar, the more Russians start to form expectations about higher inflation in the future. And therefore, the central [00:24:00] bank has to react to that by raising interest rates. And, there's a chart—I wrote a piece for, it's all on the Chatham House website, a couple of weeks ago, everyone can go and look at it—but there's a chart there that shows the very close relationship between the inflation-adjusted interest rate in Russia and the ruble-dollar exchange rate.
So, what the West should want to be doing is to do whatever it can to make the ruble-dollar exchange rate go higher and higher. In other words, to make the ruble weaker. Because that puts more and more pressure on Elvira Nabiullina, the central bank's president, to raise interest rates in order to control inflation.
And the fact that interest rates are so high in Russia, because the ruble has been under so much stress during the course of 2024, the fact that ruble interest rates are so high, has put an enormous stress into the political system. The Prime minister, the [00:25:00] group of Russian industrialists, lots of civil society figures have been criticizing the Central Bank for having excessively tight monetary policy and threatening what would amount to a kind of stagflation in Russia. In other words, a simultaneous high inflation and weak growth.
Now, the dilemma that this presents to Vladimir Putin is as follows: Putin for many, many years, well before the invasion in 2022, has always backed Nabiullina. He's always stated his preference for low inflation because he believes that high inflation would threaten his legitimacy. But the cost now of backing Nabiullina, the cost of pursuing a low inflation Russian economy is becoming higher and higher. And so the [00:26:00] dilemma that Vladimir Putin faces is, does he stick with his preference for low inflation at the cost of a very weak economy, or does he let inflation rip as President Erdogan has done for many years in Turkey, but allowing the Russian economy to accelerate because monetary policy isn't as tight as it's been recently.
The more the West can intensify that dilemma for President Putin, the more difficult life becomes for him. But even then, the link between sanctions on the one hand and a change in the behavior of the country receiving the sanctions, is really pretty tenuous. Sanctions is, often described as a spray and pray strategy. And I don't think that there's any [00:27:00] perfect sanction that can predictably change the course of the war, that can predictably change Putin's behavior. So, all that we can do really is acknowledge that an intensification of sanctions doesn't really change the spray and pray quality of them. But it might intensify the dilemma that Putin faces and therefore help to bring him to the negotiating table.
But, if I can just repeat the point, what Trump wants to get out of Putin is difficult to discern because if Trump's ultimate goal is, as I said, to ununite Russia from China, then the amount of pressure that Trump wants to put on Putin might be limited. And that's really the test. That's really what we have to wait and see, whether [00:28:00] the goal that Trump seems to have of ununiting Russia from China Is something that supersedes any effort to bring this war to a conclusion during the course of 2025.
Goodnight, Pax Americana: Neoliberalism and the decline of the US Empire w/ Radhika Desai Part 1 - The Red Nation Podcast - Air Date 9-22-23
RADHIKA DESAI: People in the United States love to say, well, we are not an empire, we don't have colonies, etc. Which is, again, not strictly speaking true, because as Daniel Iberwa has pointed out in a recent book called How to Hide an Empire, actually, the United States has a lot of colonies. like Hawaii, for example, or Puerto Rico and many other such colonies. So as I was saying, the United States has all these colonies, so in that sense it's not really a non colonial, but a number of particular American historians actually see the process of the expansion of the westward expansion of the United States as a process of internal colonization, as some of you may be well aware.
So this process of internal colonization continued all the way until about 1870 when the[00:29:00]
And it was only then that it began to look for 1890s, pardon me, and only then when it began to look for other colonies, it realized that the rest of the world had more or less been accounted for, by other countries and therefore it could not really acquire any colonies. a territorial empire anymore so in that sense, I think that what you, the, indigenous struggles that you're referring to, and also, of course, the struggles of other peoples in the United States, black people, Latino people, et cetera, these are all, I mean, in a certain sense, the United States in that sense, especially in the neoliberal period has gone back to be, to being ruled more or less as an empire where the welfare of ordinary citizens seems to be the.
largely absent from the national agenda beyond sort of managing resistance in opposition. So I would say that, in that sense the indigenous struggles now, you see in Canada, and the U. S. of course are similar in one sense, they have both taken over lands of indigenous people, but the process has been a little different in [00:30:00] Canada, where it was less of a kind of exterminist type of thing, where in the United States, the indigenous population, which was actually larger compared to the indigenous populations of the territory, which would be called Canada.
Yeah. But they were systematically exterminated. So today, as a proportion of the American population, the indigenous population is relatively low. Whereas in Canada, it is a little higher. It's like maybe four or five percent, and it is rising today. And I think part of the reason is because in, in Canada, we got colonialism on the cheap.
In the sense that the British simply said, yes, And, we agree with some treaties or whatever. We agree to respect you, et cetera. But these treaties are not. were not fully respected but nevertheless these kind of treaties were made and now they are being honored only in the breach and so we have this indigenous resistance and, so on.
So, in Canada, by the way, the whole question of indigenous land ownership is actually very material economic issue because Like the United States, [00:31:00] Canada also relies a lot on extraction and agriculture and therefore land based activities. So in that sense, the indigenous demand for their own land is very important and has the potential to destabilize a lot of economic activity in Canada.
Yeah, because If, how can you open a vast mining operation if you don't have rights to the land or logging or for that matter? So, there is a lot of focus in Canada on the land issue where indigenous peoples are concerned. But I would say that, that tends to leave out the struggles of indigenous peoples, which as you rightly point out, many of whom are integrated into the labour force.
So they have constituted, it's not, you know, To me, when Marx talks about primitive accumulation, that is to say, separating people from the land, which is something that happened in Scottish enclosures, but also happened on a huge scale in the settler colonies in particular, where indigenous populations were displaced.
And so on and, put on smaller pieces of land for reserves following, [00:32:00] which of course, is a system that South Africa began to practice in the post second World War period as well. So, this kind of system, it is, so when Marx talked about primitive accumulation, what is, or rather original accumulation as.
As he called it in in German. This original accumulation was always about two things. One was to take land away, which is what everybody focuses on, but the other was to create a landless proletariat, which would have, a group of people or vast masses of people who had no option but to work for other people because their access to their livelihood, which is the land, which, you know, every.
People that and that we have known in history had some original attachment to some of the our piece of land and they may have been wars over it, etc. But it was there and this has been broken and we now take it for granted that you know if you open a factory that somehow people will come and work for you.
But this was not [00:33:00] necessarily a given. If people had access to alternative means of livelihood and you weren't offering them. A better one. Why should people come and work for you? So this compulsion to work for others is only created by this process of dispossession, as you may call it, and that was also, that was the purpose of secular colonialism.
NICK ESTES - HOST, THE RED NATION PODCAST: I've wrestled with this question a lot because I think, one of the more insightful texts that I've read and I teach is called empire's tracks and, It's by, Manu Karuga, who actually tracks westward expansion and uses Lenin's theory of imperialism to understand he's not just studying trains, but he's studying like railroad expat expansion and the investment that happens and it's a very modern, capitalist kind of enterprise.
it's not to say that the indigenous resistance to it is, somehow like they're, Bolsheviks, but, it does understand that this is a process of primitive accumulation and it's confronting capital and that's how indigenous nations are made in relation to.
The [00:34:00] United States and we're currently positioned and I think, I've heard you say this in other sort of interviews and podcasts. about how the sort of postmodern kind of focus on, just culture and the culture of settler colonialism, the culture of imperialism tends to miss this economic side.
And that goes, both ways in terms of how resources are extracted, but then also how people are put into and forced to sell their labor, within a capitalist system. I will say that. Some indigenous nations in the past and presently have tried to de link themselves from these kinds of economies with various success and failure.
the Navajo Nation tried to nationalize its. Natural resources, uranium, oil and gas and ended in a sort of Senate sponsored coup against the president at the time. So it was like a mini, opposing of, yeah very similar. And actually around that same time period, I think it happened in the early eighties.
So you do have these sort of alternative paths are being drawn out and attempted in these [00:35:00] projects. And I want to, talk a little bit. Oh, I guess the final point on that I want to say is in British Columbia, and this is where, worth studying is, there's British Columbia is not treated at all.
There's no Canada has no sort of legal like foundation in British Columbia. And indigenous nations have sought, alternative economic partnerships with countries like China. Or, we just did an interview with a native Hawaiian activists who, are saying. How dare the United States come in and say who are friends and enemies are our entire islands are militarized with military bases.
Expecting us to be the front lines of some kind of great powers conflict. And the same goes with Guam, which is seen as a, an island aircraft carrier betrussing or containing China. But I also wanted to ask you a little bit about how does that work in terms of.
Your theories of imperialism. When we think about the sort of contradiction of like [00:36:00] how the United States is so dependent on China in terms of its economy and other sort of imperialist powers are so dependent on, China for its economy, but yet have militarily surrounded it. And it's like, when they're policing ship lanes, when they're surveilling ship lanes with this Aukus agreement, it's What are these ships carrying? They're carrying goods to San Francisco. They're carrying goods to Vancouver. So how do you, how do we make sense of this? This sort of contradictory move where on one hand it's like we're anti China and we want to subvert the sort of Chinese economy and, we're going to militarize the shipping lanes build military bases completely surrounding and containing China while at the same time depending on it economically to produce the goods, the consumer goods that we need for our economies.
Yanis Varoufakis on Cloud Capital vs AI: DeepSeek, Technofeudalism, Capitalism and the New Cold War - DiEM25 - Air Date 1-26-24
YANIS VAROUFAKIS - HOST, DIEM 25: The gist of DeepSeek's arrival on the AI scene and the carnage in the American stock exchanges is a sudden transition from proprietary to open source technology. It is therefore no great wonder that the moment DeepSeek [00:37:00] became the most downloaded app on the Apple store, it pulverized the market capitalization of the hitherto overinflated US big tech stocks.
How did this happen exactly? How is it that a private commodified service is suddenly offered for free? And does this mean that techno federalism is in trouble to begin with? It's important to note that AI was never a proprietary technology in itself. The underlying code of all AI companies was always open source.
What made American AI a quasi private commodity? Was the way in which these models were trained using huge amounts of privatized data, where I say privatized, you should translate Stolen data. Your data. My data. There was a Google memo that was leaked in 2017 that was widely discussed and refuted but it was a harbinger of what happened with DeepSeek.
In that [00:38:00] memo we read the following words If an open source large language model, it said trained for a few million dollars, comes to outperform a proprietary model. Then there's going to be trouble. There will be no firewall, the memo continues, even to safeguard OpenAI. That's what happened. DeepSeek pierced the United States AI company's bubble by decommodifying the results of the model's training and doing it at a tiny, tiny cost to itself.
Shifting the results of AI trained models from behind a paywall to the public realm. Within days since the release of the latest version of DeepSeek, developers around the world started building their own models On top of deep seeks. This was the nightmare of american big tech ai service providers who have been offering the results of prompts as a commodity in the form of subscriptions You [00:39:00] see deep seek type applications can now produce high quality translations for free That's just an example.
And in so doing, they undermine the business model of companies like Deeple, the German company. In the broader scheme of things, this means that the morsels of cloud capital that Europe owned, like Deeple, essentially have lost their market value. Nevertheless, and this is a huge nevertheless, it is only AI as a commodity that has lost its grossly exaggerated market price or value.
In sharp contrast, cloud capital utilized as Amazon, Meta, Google, and so on have been utilizing it. That is not as a commodity producing piece of tech, but as a produced means of behavioral modification. That business model is not at all threatened by companies like DeepSeek. And since techno feudalism is powered by cloud capital working that way, rather [00:40:00] than commodity like AI services of the chat GPT 4 or 5 type, our techno feudal order is not threatened by competitors such as DeepSeek.
To help understand the difference between cloud capital and AI based commodified services, it helps to compare and contrast Alexa, take Amazon's Alexa, and OpenAI's Chat GPT. Alexa is not offering you a commodified service. It is your free, pretend slave. Unlike GPT 405, you do not pay a subscription to Amazon for the right to order Alexa, to order your milk, or to switch off your lights.
Rather, you train Alexa to train you, to train it, to know you, so that it wins you over, it wins your trust, with good recommendations. So that it can ultimately modify your behavior, so that it can encourage [00:41:00] you to buy a commodity from amazon. com with Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, retaining up to 40 percent of the price you pay for a book or an electric bicycle.
Money that will be retained as cloud rent by the owner of Amazon Jeff Bezos in short and this is very important The work that Alexa performs for you is not a commodity that you buy unlike chat gpt Which works to sell you a commodity even in a subscription form to put it in different words Once more chat gpt is subject to market competition and therefore vulnerable to companies like DeepSeek.
But Alexa is not. This is why OpenAI, ChatGPT's maker, is seriously damaged by the emergence of DeepSeek, but Amazon is not. That's my basic point. Cloud capital is in a league of its own, beyond market competition, from DeepSeek like [00:42:00] upstarts. Because its power lies in its capacity to modify our behavior and remove us from any market. For example, to shift us from real markets to cloud feeds like Amazon or Alibaba. To wrap this up, in conclusion, cloud's capital capacity to drive techno fidelism is not challenged by companies like DeepSeek. Only companies like OpenAI, which invested so much, and so foolishly I would add, in providing a commodified service, these companies stand to lose enormously.
This, I believe, is yet another sign that capitalism is dead at the hand of cloud capital, while techno feudalism is going from strength to strength. And as it does so, it fuels even further the new Cold War between the United States and China, which in my book, Techno Feudalism, What Killed Capitalism, I have explained away, I have explained this new Cold War as the almighty clash between these two huge concentrations of cloud capital, the American dollar [00:43:00] denominated super cloudalist power, and the Chinese one denominated super cloudalist power.
Now, speaking of this new Cold War, which I have argued is mostly fueled by the clash between American and Chinese cloud capital, I wonder what impact DeepSeek's success will have on the United States government, not just Trump, but the whole gamut of the American state and its government, Silicon Valley and Washington DC Until very recently and the deep sea arrival on the scene, they had convinced themselves that America had the huge AI lead over China.
Now that the tiny Chinese company has destroyed that confidence by producing on a shoestring better AI tech and services than Silicon Valley had imagined possible. I don't know about you, but I can almost hear the wearing of the cogs and wheels inside the heads of people in authority both on the east coast and the [00:44:00] west coast of the United States as they are thinking, trying to understand, to predict if the Chinese can do this out of the blue.
As DeepSeek did, only two days ago. What else can the Chinese do tomorrow? It is reminiscent, isn't it, of the Sputnik moment. So, it will be interesting to see how Donald Trump reacts to this threat to companies like OpenAI. Especially since Elon Musk understood some time ago, quite presently, I should say, and has spoken out against companies like OpenAI.
He seems to have understood the folly of commodifying AI services rather than going full on techno feudal. Goodness only knows what happens in a White House containing both the thoughts of Elon Musk and someone like Donald Trump. These are indeed turning out to be interesting times, of course, in the traditional Chinese proverbial [00:45:00] sense of the phrase.
Note from the Editor on soft landings vs crash landings
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Muckrake Political Podcast discussing the international competition through the lens of AI development. The New Statesman put the present in proper historical context. Al Jazeera English looked at various issues facing France and Germany. Times Radio speculated on the economic struggles facing Russia and the potential impact on Putin. The Red Nation Podcast discussed the colonial possessions of the US and Canada. And the Democracy In Europe Movement 2025 looked at the destabilizing impact of the release of the DeepSeek AI model from China. And those were just the Top Takes; there's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections.
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get access to bonus episodes and enjoy all of our shows without ads. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (there's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon [00:46:00] page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. And as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship and membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
And we're also trying something new and offering you the opportunity to submit your comments or questions on upcoming topics, so you can potentially join the conversation as it happens. Next up, we're doing an analysis of how the media is shifting and mostly capitulating to Trump, followed by a deep dive into the age of oligarchy that is rising right along with the right wing faux populist movements around the world. So get your comments or questions in now for those topics. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. We're also findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal with the handle BestoftheLeft.01. There's a link in the show notes for that. Or you can simply email me to [email protected].
Now as for today's [00:47:00] topic: I was strongly reminded of a piece in Vanity Fair by James Pogue titled, "Steve Bannon has called his army to do battle, no matter who wins in November," and this is something that we discussed in greater depth and detail on the bonus show for members. But in his article, the writer speaks with Obama's foreign policy advisor, Ben Rhodes. And, if you're not a foreign policy nerd, then you may not know Ben Rhodes, but he wrote a book titled After the Fall. So you don't have to worry that he might be some pollyannish, hope and change, a miracle, come out on top if we're just our best selves, kind of a person, right? He sees the same writing on the wall that we're talking about here today.
But he says something that I think sums up a big piece of the political realignment and the current state of the general debate. The right and left is getting a little bit mixed these days. I've been saying [00:48:00] it makes people seasick, myself included. And so this is part of that discussion.
And So Ben, talking about the differences between people like him and people like Steve Bannon, who both have very similar critical perspectives on some of the imperial structures of the US -- like I said, a little bit of a realignment makes you a little bit seasick that an Obama guy and a Trump guy would see eye to eye on anything, but that is the state of play these days. And so speaking about the differences between someone like him and someone like Bannon, Ben says, "the divide is between people who want to try to bring things down to a soft landing and people who want to blow it up. The challenge is that nobody has shown me you can blow it up absent a war and a mass disruptive event."
So the argument is to blow up one thing, but not have an idea of what to do instead, or not be honest with people [00:49:00] about the horrors of the transition period. When you put it that way, that doesn't sound very enticing, I don't think. However, in terms of campaigning and riling up energy from frustrated people who are frustrated for good reason, saying generally, "Well, the system is fucked, and it needs to be torn down." That's a much more powerful rallying cry than the alternative.
In the realm of international politics, Ben Rhodes assumes that the US is in decline, saying that he'd like to bring us down to a soft landing. And to a reasonable person, that sounds a whole lot better than blowing the system up and crashing.
But when you're rallying frustrated people who have good reason for their frustrations, saying the system is fucked and we need to tear it down makes for a much better campaign slogan. And [00:50:00] that sentiment, that basic divide copied and pasted again and again onto each policy issue, not just foreign policy and international economics, I think, goes a long way to explaining the political dynamics between, generally, left and right, MAGA Republicans and Democrats.
It's always easier to tear down than it is to build. And attempting to manage a decline, I mean, that may be one of the hardest things of all, because how does a party rally supporters and excite voters to keep them in power long enough to actually achieve that soft landing?
It is an absolute recipe for oppositional populism that will harness the inevitable frustration with either ridiculous promises of national resurgence, nihilistic "burn it all down" energy, or both, which seems to be what we've got.
SECTION A: AMERICAN DECLINE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on six topics [00:51:00] today. Next up, section A, American Decline, followed by section B, China, section C, Russia, section D, France, section E, Corporate Control, and section F, What Comes Next.
How Empires Fall and Why the US is Next - uncivilized - Air Date 12-28-24
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: Companies buying out the housing market, insurance companies making healthcare unaffordable, politicians taking money from lobbies to protect corporate interests and fill their own pockets. And the working class is well aware.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Affording wealth is so harmful, so unethical, so rage inducing. Billionaires should not exist.
So you talk about teacher salary, 2, 000 in rent, 400 car payment, you got insurance, you got groceries, electricity, like, I don't understand how people are affording life right now.
For five stitches,
3, 800. What?
Like, it's so freaking hard to live here.
North America is one big scam.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: And then there's the internal social and political decay.
People have become disenchanted with the illusion of American democracy, of [00:52:00] its promises of equality, of equal opportunity for all, as long as you pick yourself up by your bootstraps.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: You can see a sea of people all united under one banner. Cause they are protesting for racial equality. The murder of a healthcare executive has led to online popularity for the shooter.
Mangione has emerged in some circles as a sympathetic figure fighting the system.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: All this leads to political instability, economic trouble, and social unrest. Which weakens the empire at its core.
But an empire is bigger than its center. It's a network of vassal states serving the core's interests and keeping all those entities in check is done through both soft power and hard power. That brings us to symptom number two. To understand soft power and how it plays into imperial decline. Let's look at the Ottomans.
ARCHIVE DOCUMENTARY CLIP: It was a huge empire dominated by a Turkish dynasty that had its origins in Asia minor.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: The Ottoman Empire was one of the most [00:53:00] powerful and enduring empires in history, spanning three continents at its height. It was a hub of cultural and scientific innovation, producing advancements in medicine, astronomy, architecture, and engineering that changed the world.
ARCHIVE DOCUMENTARY CLIP: They ruled a
considerable mix of peoples and faiths. There was no great history of ethnic tension, even though there was a history of massively complicated ethnic and confessional coexistence.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: It lasted almost 600 years. One factor that contributed to its demise was its waning influence over the peoples and territories it had under its control, also known as the loss of soft power.
Soft power is about being more persuasive than coercive, about getting people to comply without using force. In the case of the Ottomans, it was a delicate balance of diplomacy and cultural influence, but over time, the empire's ability to foster loyalty among diverse groups was eroding. Aided by rising nationalism within [00:54:00] these communities.
ARCHIVE DOCUMENTARY CLIP: The Greeks were the first to rebel against the Ottoman shackles.
The minute you start getting a political world, this system is going to break down. And that is what happens in the 19th century. And that is the great conundrum for the empire.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: People stopped buying into the vision of the empire. and began to break off and pursue their own interests.
Now, the U. S. has been really good at soft power. It began after World War II, when the U. S. positioned itself as a global leader promoting democracy, economic growth, and cultural influence.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Joe's the king because he can buy more with his wages than any other worker on the globe.
It is the most important idea that the United States has contributed to the world.
Citizens of every rank can expect to have a better, richer, happier life.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: It helped rebuild war torn Europe. set up major global institutions where it continues to hold significant power, and has exported music, television, and pop culture across the world for decades. [00:55:00] And the messaging of this soft power has been consistent and clear.
RONALD REAGAN: Shining city upon a hill. After 200 years, she's still a beacon. Still a magnet for all who must have freedom.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: But for soft power to work, for people to buy into the fantasy and want to participate, They need to see credibility and moral consistency. Now, just to be clear, the U. S. has violated the principles it preaches since its founding, not to mention since its emergence as a global hegemon.
It seems the majority of people were willing to overlook that and buy into the American dream. But the illusion is falling apart. At home, the land of democracy, liberty, and human rights hasn't kept up the best image in recent years.
And it's not any better abroad. The U. S. has spearheaded and overseen devastating wars, crippling debt, human rights violations, and environmental damage across the world, which has made it hard to take preaching of democracy and freedom [00:56:00] seriously.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: America no longer charts a course and therefore has lost all rights to set it and even more so to impose it on others.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: Disillusionment with American values is growing and in its panic the empire continues to thrash and bully to stay relevant. That's where hard power comes in. and brings us to the third symptom of the fall of an empire. This one is best illustrated by the Soviet Union.
Now, the USSR ideologically rejected the idea of imperialism, but the reality is that it looked and acted like an empire.
Speaker 262: The Soviet Communist Party has not faced a serious internal threat to its political rule since the 1920s.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: There was a centralized authority overseeing expansion and control of a collection of republics and satellite states, where movements for autonomy were suppressed.
What tethered these states together was a unified ideology, communism. But it was also hard power, military might. [00:57:00] And that costs money.
ARCHIVE DOCUMENTARY CLIP: It is here, in Red Square, that the superpower Soviet Union holds its military parades, displaying its might for all the world to see.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: At its strongest, the Soviet Union had five million soldiers stationed around the Union, and pursued wars and conquests to maintain and expand its reach.
Then there's all the money spent on an arms race during the Cold War. Money spent on propping up parties in proxy wars across the world. And money spent on wars like Afghanistan, a protracted 10 year long conflict that cost them 50 billion dollars.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The superpower from the north occupies Afghanistan with more than 100, 000 troops.
A modern mechanized army.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: Eventually, the The cost of keeping the empire in check became unmanageable, and the economy took a hit. By the late 80s, people within the Union were struggling with soaring poverty and a low quality of life, with no strategic wins to show for all that money spent. [00:58:00] Military and ideological overextension drained not only the economy, but public morale as well, until people got fed up.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lowered for the last time.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: Sounds familiar.
MICHAEL BERNIER: All estimates agree that the cost will be at least 1 trillion. The Bush administration never expected the war to drag on as long as it has.
The fall of Kabul to the Taliban marked an abrupt end to America's longest war. The war cost American taxpayers about 1 trillion.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: The U. S. carried out long, brutal, expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With nothing to show for it except instability, and devastation, and financial loss. Then there's the constant ideological wars. The war on communism, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on China and Russia. There's a constant boogeyman in the ether to justify U.
S. military spending. The U. S. maintains the most bases in the world at over [00:59:00] 700, and spends hundreds of billions of dollars on the military every year. More than the next 10 countries combined. It's funding Ukraine in its war against Russia. It might support Taiwan in a war against China. Billions of dollars spent, and we can't remember the last war the U.
S. has actually won. But last year, an undeniable awakening happened.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: This has been a senseless and a deliberate slaughter, a genocide, and it is happening on our dime.
TALA KADDOURA - HOST, UNCIVILIZED: For over a year, Americans and the rest of the world have watched U. S. politicians from both sides of the aisle cheer on and fund the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza to the tune of billions of dollars. It has shattered the idea that the U. S. is a beacon of justice and human rights and irreversibly cemented the hypocrisy of American moral exceptionalism. The empire has never been so exposed. And it's shown Americans, who [01:00:00] back in the imperial core, continue to struggle to live decent, dignified lives, where all their tax money is going. And where it's definitely not.
The U. S. has been an empire since its very conception. From colonizing Native American land, to conquering territories overseas, to dominating world politics through global institutions, military might, corporate interests,
Of all the empires that have risen and fallen, none have come close to having the reach and power of the U. S. So the idea of it losing its hold over the world seems inconceivable. But while all these symptoms are unfolding, and the U. S. empire erodes from within and without, it's not doing so in a vacuum.
It does so in the middle of a global shift in geopolitics, in a world that's becoming increasingly multipolar. With countries choosing new allies, new frameworks for collaboration, even new currencies. The aim of the alliance is to challenge the economic and political monopoly of the West. All of which is not [01:01:00] good for the U.
S. See, the way the global system is designed is, in many ways, for the benefit of America. From reliance on the dollar, U. S. aid, and U. S. debt, to fear of U. S. sanctions, vetoes, and foreign intervention, we live in a world full of systems and institutions designed to prop up the U. S. and keep the rest of the world in check.
But these systems aren't going to live forever, because they're inherently unsustainable. They rely on the exploitation of peoples across the world and within the imperial core, and bank on them buying into the bit that all this is necessary. Is better for them and protects them.
And as life becomes more unaffordable, countries, more destabilized governments, more autocratic and our environment, more unlivable. People eventually wake up and that's usually the beginning of the end.
Richard Wolff on the BRICS countries replacing the US dollar in international trade - Community Church of Boston - Air Date 11-16-24
RICHARD WOLFF: Over the last 20 years, and particularly over the last five, uh, the countries [01:02:00] in the BRICS, and by the way, some others as well, have reduced their reliance on their use of the dollar.
You know, the dollar as the global currency was one of the results of World War II. When I pointed out a few minutes ago that all the competitors of the United States were pretty much destroyed in that world, in that war, and that we came out kind of top dog in that situation, that's what translated into making the dollar, quote, as good as gold.
It was something that every central bank of every one of the 180 countries in the world kept on reserve in their bank, uh, in order to show the world that that their currency was safe to use, because in any extremity, they could honor their currency by giving you dollars, which the world accepted as, quote unquote, as good as gold.
So for example, 30 years ago, something like 80%, [01:03:00] maybe 85 percent of world central banks held dollars as reserves. They held dollars, literally gold. and maybe a small smattering of euros or Japanese yen. Now, the number is disputed, but it's around 50 to 60 percent, much, much lower in the form of dollars, because they don't need them so often.
What the BRICS have started to do, and they're having huge discussions. One of the major topics at the meeting of the BRICS in Kazan, Russia, three weeks ago, was all about replacing the dollar. They are now, for example, conducting huge parts of their trading exchange in other currencies. It used to be, up until three or four years ago.
That if country A [01:04:00] needed to buy oil, for example, from Saudi Arabia or country B, they paid for it with dollars. Everybody had to have dollars in their account because much of the world's trade was conducted in dollars. Neither the exporter nor the importer wanted to worry about exchange rates among many different currencies.
The dollar was safe. The dollar was secure. The dollar was backed by the United States. All of that is gone, and what you're seeing is the BRICS leading the way, and they're discussing whether to develop a more sophisticated regime using computers to allow countries to trade in their own currencies or to come up with a new global currency that will compete with the dollar.
And my guess is they're gonna go with one [01:05:00] of those two, and that those decisions, it'll take a little time. The United States is still a very important, big, rich country. But it, so it'll take, I don't know, five years, maybe more, uh, to get that in place. But already you should be aware that the dollar is less.
and less of an international, um, currency, and less and less secured. And it's not just a dollar. You know, I live in Manhattan. I'm speaking to you from Manhattan, New York City. If I walk along Fifth Avenue or another elegant avenue in New York City at night, most of the apartments are dark because they're not lived in.
They are, owned by foreigners who parked their money inside the United States by buying apartments. Three times a year, their wealthy children come to New York for a shopping [01:06:00] spree, and they live in that apartment. The rest of the time, it's an investment, and it's been a good one. Now, you see lights where you didn't before.
because they're selling their apartments. They don't want to be stuck in the United States. They don't know, for example, with Mr. Trump, whether being a Muslim and owning an apartment is going to become an issue. And maybe you better sell now, before that issue is resolved, rather than wait and see the price of your apartment collapse because no one is going to buy it from you for this or that reason of hostility from the United States government.
All these kinds of questions mean that dealing with the United States. Let me give you a couple of other examples. Part of the war against Russia involved the United States States using its international position to [01:07:00] steal, I mean there's no other word for it, to steal Russia's dollar holdings and gold holdings that Russia had kept in European banks because they need to do business with Europe all the time.
Well, that money in the European banks, the American banks, was seized by the United States government. The Europeans did that in Europe too. Three hundred billion dollars, an enormous amount of money. The Russians, by the way, you know what they've done? They've started seizing US and European assets inside Russia.
And there are a lot of those. But you see, if you were the dominant player, U. S., then all of these developments damage your situation. No matter how fast it goes, it's less for the U. S. economy, less for the U. S. dollar. That's what's going on
BRICS expands to 54.6% of world population by adding Nigeria, Africa's most populous country - Geopolitical Economy Report - Air Date 1-18-25
[01:08:00] The BRICS countries are now 4. 3 billion people. That means they represent 54. 6 percent of the entire world population. The addition of Nigeria into BRICS is also important because Nigeria has one of the fastest growing populations on earth. India, one of the founding members of BRICS, which has the world's largest population, has the fastest growing population from 2024 to 2037.
It's expected that there will be 147 million people born in India. But in second place is Nigeria with 65 million people born in Nigeria in the next decade and a half or so. And if you look at the list of the top 10 countries with the fastest growing populations, Not as a percentage, but as a gross number, half of those countries are now in BRICS.
India, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Egypt. So BRICS cannot be ignored. It represents the majority of the world population, and Nigeria in [01:09:00] particular is pretty symbolic because the largest city in Nigeria, Lagos, is expected to emerge as the world's top megacity by the end of the 21st century. In fact, by 2100, people in the African continent will represent 38 percent of the world population.
Whereas today, people in Africa represent 18 percent of the entire world population. And also today, people in Asia represent 60 percent of the world population. Their percentage of the world population is expected to fall to 45%. In 2100. So in other words, by the end of the 21st century, more than eight out of every 10 people in the world will live in Asia or Africa.
And BRICS as an organization represents these people who are the global majority. They already are today, the global majority, and their majority will continue to increase over time. [01:10:00] Yet, unfortunately, many Western governments and politicians and pundits and academics and intellectuals, they still think the entire world revolves around them.
Around the West, even though the West only represents about 13 or 14 percent of the world population. And it's not just the population. It's also the economy, because many of the BRICS countries have some of the fastest growing economies on earth. Of course, China is the world's number one economy when you measure its GDP at purchasing power parity, and China is the world's industrial superpower.
And if you combine together all of the 19 BRICS members and partners, Together, their GDP represents 42. 2 percent of the entire world economy. This is the updated version, including Nigeria now as a partner. So as BRICS continues to expand, they get closer and closer to representing half of the entire world economy.
[01:11:00] Nigeria is also a major economy in the world. It has the second largest economy on the African continent after Egypt, and Egypt is now a full member of BRICS. In fact, if you look at the five largest economies in Africa, all of them are either part of BRICS or are going to be part of BRICS. So Egypt is a full member, it's the largest economy.
Nigeria is now a partner. It's the second largest economy in Africa. South Africa is of course, a founding member of BRICS. It's the third largest economy in Africa. Algeria was invited to become a partner country of BRICS at the summit in the Russian city of Kazan in 2024, and it did not officially give a response, but it's likely going to accept the invitation.
And Ethiopia was admitted as a full member of BRICS in 2024. So Algeria is the fourth biggest economy in Africa and Ethiopia is the fifth biggest economy. And although yes, it is true that many countries in Africa are suffering from very high [01:12:00] rates of poverty and underdevelopment in no small part due to western colonialism, because they have such large populations, they still have very big economies.
So for instance, Egypt, which is the biggest economy, in Africa has a larger economy than Australia and Nigeria has a larger economy than the Netherlands. And of course, this is all using data that measures GDP at purchasing power parity, which instead of looking simply in nominal terms at exchange rates, which can make Western countries that have very overvalued currencies seem more economically powerful than they actually are.
PPP adjusts for the purchasing power of the currencies locally. And when you do so, you can see that Egypt and Nigeria, these, these BRICS countries are very big economies. Nigeria is also important because it's the larger producer of oil on the African continent. It's the number one producer. And the number two producer Algeria has also been [01:13:00] invited to become a BRICS partner.
And if you look at the top 10 largest oil producing countries on earth, half of them are in BRICS. That includes Russia, China, Iran, the UAE, and Brazil. And Nigeria is the 15th largest producer of oil on earth. So another very important part of Bricks expansion is seeing the overlap between Bricks and And OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, we've seen that now BRICS countries represent more than one third of global oil production, and that number is constantly increasing as BRICS expands.
This means that these countries can have an important role in the global oil market if they collaborate and decide Whether or not to increase production or decrease production. Now, the U. S. is now the world's largest oil producer since the shale boom. And that has complicated things with OPEC, despite the fact that OPEC has been informally expanded, becoming OPEC Plus, and Russia has been [01:14:00] participating.
“Both the US and Israel are delusional” w/ Jeffrey Sachs - Makdisi Street - Air Date 1-15-25
JEFFERY SACHS: The U. S. has been a militarized state pretty much nonstop since 1945 when the Soviet Union, uh, ended in 1991, the assumption of the U.
S. Security elites or state elites is, well, we won. Now, now we are the most powerful country in the world in history. We are, uh, not the new Rome. We have surpassed Rome. No one can stop us. We can take down anyone. And, uh, that was the mindset of crazy people like Richard Cheney, uh, Paul Wolfowitz and many others.
And every president that came in was. Basically instructed by them, but you are the leader of the most powerful machine of, uh, military force and coercion in world history. You are the center of the world, the financial system. You can turn on and off the financial [01:15:00] spigots to any part of the world. You are at the node of the world information system.
You can survey and intercept and disrupt, uh, information flows to any place in the world. You're at the center of the world energy system. You can turn on and off the taps. And if they don't like it, you can blow up the pipelines to do it. So this is the mindset. It is definitely the mindset of the incoming US administration, even if the means might be different.
There's no change in US mindset. It's not exactly a joke that Donald Trump tweets every day that Canada is the 51st state. It's partly taunting. It's partly a game, but I'm sure he has in his mind, why don't we own all that territory? Why is it the United States, the owner of Greenland, in fact, as he says every day, because the [01:16:00] Chinese and the Russians are going to have more control over the Northern sea route.
So we better literally expand the map. To my mind, these people are playing the game I used to play in my childhood, the game of Risk, which was a fun game where the idea was to have your piece on every part of the board. That's how you won. You took over the world, you'd roll the dice and, uh, eventually you'd, uh, wear it down through a war of attrition.
Yeah. Your neighbor, if you had more pieces on the board, but they play this with real lives and they play it with the brutality, cynicism, coercion, subterfuge. And they play it till today. I'm sorry to say it. It's just this is really the way the world is.
SAREE MAKDISI - HOST, MAKDISI STREET: But Jeff, some people are, including you, I think, are, have been talking about a phenomenon called de dollarization which we hear a lot about.
So [01:17:00] could you explain what de dollar, I mean, I think we're familiar with it, but just for our audience, could you explain what de dollarization is? And also, more importantly for this conversation, could you then say, well, what does that mean? Um, For U. S. power, U. S. hegemony, U. S. authority, even U. S.
prosperity itself, insofar as there is still prosperity in the U. S.
JEFFERY SACHS: Great. And as I was running on and on, I forgot to mention the main point, which is that this vision of the U. S. is delusional. That's the bottom line. I forgot to mention that. I did say The U. S. is 4. 1 percent of the world population.
We're about 335 million out of some 8 billion people. It's not enough to run the world. The U. S. is very proud of its military prowess and its technology, but Frankly, there are a lot of countries in the world that can blow up the U. S. and can blow up the world. So, it isn't hegemony, it isn't unipolarity, it isn't being the sole superpower, [01:18:00] but it is a lot of power.
I mean, no other country in the world even remotely comes close to this military archipelago of bases around the world. 80 countries, uh, estimated, they don't make formal lists, so we have to guess around 750 military bases. Britain still has a big network their nostalgia for Empire is impressive, let me say, little pathetic, but impressive.
But the United States really stands, uh, on its own. Now the state of affairs is, uh, that the U S has had several rude awakenings. It couldn't win back in Korea, there was a, an armistice, uh, that ended that conflict. It certainly didn't win in Vietnam. It didn't win in Afghanistan.
It didn't, quote, win anywhere, even though it beat the shit out of these other places. Uh, it couldn't actually [01:19:00] achieve its political goals or often its military goals even. So the idea of unipolarity is a kind of textbook idea of some, uh, second rate thinkers in my mind, but it is a prevailing idea.
Now, what are the bases of this? The core. basis is supposed to be size of the economy. Unfortunately for the U. S., it probably in best comparative terms is now a smaller economy to China. So this is A matter of tremendous frustration to uh, the American leaders and their self-proclaimed unipolarity.
Another feature of this is the role of the dollar which means that when Lebanon, , and, saudi Arabia make a transaction together make a trade. It's likely to be in US dollars, actually, rather than in the local [01:20:00] currency. Even when China trades, in the Middle East or other places up until recently, It has been in dollars.
What does it mean in dollars? It means through U. S. Based banks or banks that deal in U. S. Dollars, which mean that the banks hold dollar assets in the United States, either in counterpart banks or at the Federal Reserve. It also means that transactions pass through a U. S. Controlled electronic system.
The best known part of which is so called SWIFT system, which is an interbank notification system for transactions. This means that the U. S. has had a major ability to turn off financial transactions or to impose sanctions or to threaten countries that if they don't follow the U. S. [01:21:00] line, their banks will be cut off from international commerce.
In other words, countries doing business in other parts of the world that have nothing to do with the U. S. per se. But happened to settle the transactions, uh, through a U. S. based banking system. This is what the role of the dollar has meant. Now, as a monetary economist, I can tell you there's no intrinsic reason why, uh, Thailand and Brazil should settle a trade in dollars.
There are every other way to do that, but you need to create the institutional mechanisms for a non dollar settlement system. It could be in Taibab, it could be in Brazilian Reales, it could be in Chinese Renminbi. But you need institutions and technical mechanisms to make such a settlement and a policy framework to do it.
The dollar has been [01:22:00] convenient for everybody up until recently it became less convenient when the U S government started confiscating your dollars, if you got out of line. And so if you were the government of Venezuela or Iran or North Korea or Afghanistan and most recently Russia, if the U. S.
Treasury didn't like you, well, your money is now our money. And the U. S. froze 300 billion of financial balances that Russia held in dollar assets in a European Institution called Euroclear based in Belgium. The idea of the BRICS countries, which of course started with acronym, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
And then expanded to include Ethiopia, Egypt Iran and the United Arab Emirates, and now is [01:23:00] expanding to another nine countries in 2025, is that these are countries that don't want the U. S. to be able to turn on and off the spigot. So they are re engineering their financial transactions. So that their settlements are impervious to U. S. bluster.
SECTION B: CHINA
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B, China.
The end of America's global dominance Part 2 - The New Statesman - Air Date 1-8-25
KATE LAMBLE - HOST, NEW STATESMAN: Just before the new year, President Xi Jinping announced that China's economy was going to grow by five percent in twenty twenty five, that things are stable and progressing.
Is that a fair assessment of what the situation is like in China?
GEORGE MAGNUS: Partly. Um, so when Xi Jinping says the economy is going to grow by five percent, you can be sure that it will. I mean, certainly will according to official statistics, whether it does or not, in reality, I think is a moot point. They had the same target for 2020.
Uh, for, uh, it will have been met more or less, but actually probably growth in the economy [01:24:00] was not more than half that. So the growth is under pressure. The economy is doing very well. If you're kind of electric vehicle producer or solar panel producer, manufacturing is not doing too badly, but the wider macro economy is not stable.
The real estate's in a real, real problem and infrastructure spending is under pressure too. So it's, it's not as rosy as Xi Jinping might like to suggest.
KATE LAMBLE - HOST, NEW STATESMAN: I mean, that's interesting because from outside, we think of China as like, you know, the manufacturing hub of the world. Now, I think we've been talking for like, a decade now, about the day that China will take over from the U. S. as the largest economy in the world. Is that a realistic target anymore?
GEORGE MAGNUS: No, I don't think it is. I mean, I think in relative terms, I think peak China is already behind us. In other words, the contribution that China made to this global GDP, for example, I think peaked a couple of years ago.
China's size relative to the United [01:25:00] States dropped in 2023 and 2024, probably isn't going to recover, I don't think, uh, and may continue to drop. And I think that in many ways, the sort of the narrative about China is going to run the 21st century is just that it's a narrative that's propagated by Beijing and by people that believe the West is in terminal decline, which is not to say that the West is in great shape, but neither is China for that matter.
KATE LAMBLE - HOST, NEW STATESMAN: What's going wrong? I mean, if we can say that things are going wrong, just for the fact that it hasn't taken over from the US and hasn't dominated the world.
GEORGE MAGNUS: Well, I think the problem with China, it didn't all start with COVID, although COVID certainly was, um, it exacerbated what were pre existing problems, but basically China's development model is no longer fit for purpose.
So in other words, the model that they used, which is huge concentration on investment and manufacturing, which basically featured in the 1990s and the 2000s, 2010s, that's not really working [01:26:00] anymore. I mean, China is obviously very, very prominent, one third of global manufacturing, the center of global exports, et cetera, et cetera.
But it's very difficult now for China to follow that up with an encore, which is the same, because more and more countries are going to push back against Chinese encroachment on what they see as their own industrial bases and their own employment markets. So China is pursuing a policy that doesn't really have traction in the rest of the world or acceptability.
And it's not really focusing on the domestic. problems that it's got, which is too much debt, not enough jobs, big problems with graduates and migrant workers, and not enough consumption, too much investment. These are political problems which revolve around, you know, giving more people more political power, which is something the Chinese Communist Party is loathe to do.
KATE LAMBLE - HOST, NEW STATESMAN: We're talking in this program as though economics is [01:27:00] intrinsically linked with being a great global power. Is that a reasonable assumption that we're just making that link or could the two things be separate?
GEORGE MAGNUS: I think you're right to make that link. And I think China's ability to leverage power. in Asia and in the rest of the world is very, very closely allied to its economic heft.
So, in 1990, China was probably 3 or 4 percent of global GDP. You know, by 2010, 2015, it was about 18 percent of GDP. No other country has achieved that kind of quantum change. And I think what we see today is China as the world's second biggest economy, very powerful country economically, particularly in manufacturing.
But I think if China's economic heft is now being doubted, especially with regards to say, real estate and infrastructure, employment, if it's now kind of wilting a little [01:28:00] bit, then I think it's political leverage in the world will be affected to some degree. Hard to say how much of this juncture.
KATE LAMBLE - HOST, NEW STATESMAN: You've mentioned that there are some parts of the economy that are going really well.
It's dominance in EVs, in solar and other renewable, these big growing industries that Europe and other areas are going to really need. Is there any chance that China could become the dominant global power?
GEORGE MAGNUS: My view about that is no, based on those criteria. So, you know, we've had a Examples before of countries that excelled at technology and science and engineering, the Soviet Union did in the 50s and 60s, Japan did in the 80s, and yet they were surrounded, you know, these islands of technological excellence were surrounded by a sea of deep imbalances and macroeconomic troubles.
China is a more sophisticated version of both, but nevertheless suffers from the same problem. It has a small modern sector Transcribed which is probably less than 10 [01:29:00] percent of the economy, which is super efficient, global brands, EVs, climate change mitigation and all this. But actually it's not a big employer.
It won't give a ticket to graduates and migrant workers to prosper and get on. And so I think the bigger economy, which is Almost all of it, except for the modern sector, doesn't have the right sort of institutional characteristics to allow for the diffusion of efficiency and technology in the way that I think we have come to expect.
I'm not saying that the West has got the answer to this question either, but we're all in this desperate search for technological diffusion and higher productivity. And China certainly doesn't seem to show the right sort of exhibit the right kind of features that enable it to do that.
Why China's population is shrinking - Vox - Air Date 3-27-23
CHRISTINA THORNELL - HOST, VOX: In the 50s, under Mao, China experienced one of the most gruesome famines on record. 30 million people died. If we look at that on the birth and death rates chart, you'll see a big spike in deaths.
[01:30:00] At the same time, the birth rate dropped, causing the population to shrink. But as often happens with wars, famines, and other wars, other major crises immediately after there was a baby boom. Combined with global medical advances that decreased infant mortality rates, China's average family now had six children.
The birth rate had skyrocketed, which the government saw as a big problem.
WENG FANG: The Chinese leadership realized the population was growing too fast and something needs to be done. The government came up with a policy. They
CHRISTINA THORNELL - HOST, VOX: called it later, longer, fewer, later marriages, longer birth intervals, and fewer births.
As a result, China's birth rate started trending down. But it wasn't low enough for China's leaders. And in 1980, they implemented the extreme one child policy. policy, which limited most families to one child.
WENG FANG: That policy was also backed up by very harsh measures. There were campaigns of sterilization, IUD insertion and [01:31:00] induced abortions.
CHRISTINA THORNELL - HOST, VOX: And while these campaigns began during the later longer fewer era, they were at their worst under the one child policy, when China sterilized 20 million men and women and induced nearly 15 million abortions in a single year. But China had accomplished its goal. Population growth was under control.
Except, as China would soon realize, these restrictive policies worked a little too well. In order for any population to stay the same size in the long run, each couple needs to have, on average, 2. 1 children. This is called the replacement age. The idea is that one child replaces one parent, and that 0. 1 makes up for children who die before they become adults.
But China has had a fertility rate that's far below two for over three decades. To bring that up, in 2016, China finally ended the one child policy. And after briefly trying out a three child policy, in 2021, they finally let families have as [01:32:00] many children as they'd like. But it hasn't worked. One big reason is the unique family structure of China.
WENG FANG: We were looking at what's called a 4 2 1 family structure with a couple having four parents above them and a one child pillow.
CHRISTINA THORNELL - HOST, VOX: Most countries have diverse family structures, some with three kids, others with none. But with China's 4 2 1 model, millions of only children are under increasing pressure to care for their aging parents and elderly grandparents.
And this can make having multiple children even harder, especially as the cost of living keeps going up. A recent survey revealed that more than 50 percent of young people don't want more than one child because of financial and work pressures.
WENG FANG: We have seen cash subsidies for additional birth, longer maternal leaves, subsidizes for kindergarten, and all sorts of monetary support.
Well, the thing is, almost none of [01:33:00] them. Has worked because having a child is exceedingly expensive and it is a life lifelong commitment. And so it's not, it's really actually hard to put a price on this,
CHRISTINA THORNELL - HOST, VOX: but China's population crisis isn't just about babies. It's also about the balance between young and old.
If we look at population pyramids that show distribution by age, we see that countries like Kenya with rapid population growth look like this. Wide at the bottom, representing a lot of new, young people, and narrow at the top. Countries experiencing slower growth, like the Philippines, are still triangular, but the difference between top and bottom is less pronounced.
Now take a look at China, and notice the narrow bottom, so fewer babies, and the heavy top, a larger number of elderly people.
WENG FANG: Which is a happy outcome of our improvement in health and the standard of living, um, but combined with[01:34:00]
CHRISTINA THORNELL - HOST, VOX: In 2050, that pyramid is projected to look like this. And that will further drive down China's population, shrink its labor force, and put the whole country in a uniquely difficult position.
In the 80s, China became a hotspot for foreign investment, cheap manufacturing and exports. A generation later, it was shooting up the ranks and becoming one of the world's leading and fastest growing economies by GDP. But not only did that economic modernization drive birth rates down further, it also didn't translate to an equally strong economy for everyone.
If we look at the GDP per capita, the best indicator we have for standard of living, China is much lower than these high income countries. China became a major world economy nearly overnight. But it's still a middle income country. Many, especially in rural areas, haven't benefited much from China's economic boom.
And [01:35:00] China has yet to develop the necessary safety nets to support its aging population.
WENG FANG: To build the social infrastructure, like the social programs and health care. And in pension, uh, it takes time. And that's getting, uh, actually tougher with the economy that's slowing down.
CHRISTINA THORNELL - HOST, VOX: And a slower economy will inevitably redefine China's role in the world as a manufacturing superpower.
WENG FANG: What this means for China, for the world, is that the resource constraints from within would also constrain the Chinese ambition, uh, its global reach.
CHRISTINA THORNELL - HOST, VOX: In some ways, China isn't alone. A lot of Asian and European countries are experiencing population declines, too. What makes China different is how fast this all has happened.
It was only 40 years ago that China started leveraging its booming population to become an economic superpower. All while still trying to stem [01:36:00] population growth. Now that China's population growth is officially over, China may have to rethink its future, not just as a global superpower, but for its citizens at home, too.
Trump, China, and the New Cold War - Macrodose - Air Date 12-10-24
JAMES MEADWAY - HOST, MACRODOSE: Over the past couple of weeks, tensions in the simmering trade war between the world's two major powers have escalated still further. President Joe Biden's outgoing administration has added around 140 Chinese companies to its expanding list of banned entities.
In response, China has hit back with its own measures, including bans on the export of key minerals essential for modern semiconductors, with gallium being the most critical. Economist Prashant Garg and his team at Imperial College London have done some fascinating research highlighting just how vital gallium is to the entire semiconductor supply chain.
We'll link to that in the show notes, but the key takeaway is something we've covered before. Semiconductor manufacturing is arguably one of the most [01:37:00] complex machines humanity has ever built, and these chips power virtually every digital device we own. Any threat to that system comes with serious economic consequences.
It's almost miraculous, though now we take it completely for granted, that some of the most advanced pieces of equipment ever created, tiny silicon fragments with billions of transistors etched into place, are produced in such massive quantities that even the most cutting edge chips are affordable enough to end up in devices we casually lose on the bus or drop into a puddle.
But that complexity, stretching from obscure, often quite rare raw materials necessary for different stages of manufacturing, to the wildly sophisticated machines needed to etch purified silicon, to the distribution across a globe of billions of these devices, means that the supply chain also contains huge vulnerabilities.
A couple of months ago in the show, we talked about how Storm Helene [01:38:00] hit the US and temporarily shut down one of the very few mines producing high grade quartz, the kind needed to make the super pure silicon used in semiconductors. For a while, it seemed like the world's chip supply might face serious disruption a few months down the line, but in the end, the mine has reopened and is now operating at nearly full capacity.
The Imperial Report uses AI techniques to analyse thousands of standardised product records, mapping the connections between raw materials and the goods they're used in. Gallium, for example, is often substituted for silicon in some cheaper semiconductors, and serves as the light emitting component in LEDs.
This gives it a vast range of everyday applications. And here's the kicker, China produces 98 percent of the world's supply. Last year, even limited export controls by China caused the global price of gallium to double, and it's not [01:39:00] easy for manufacturers to simply swap one critical mineral for another.
So this new export ban will have a significant impact, rippling across the economy. Donald Trump has, of course, threatened a far broader trade war against China, claiming 100 percent tariffs on Chinese products. But, as we've suggested before, this looks more like the opening round in a negotiating position than a firm commitment.
His senior advisors, along with others closely connected to big business, have made it clear that Trump sees today's big threats as just the opening move in a negotiation that will really begin when he re enters office in January. China, for its part, has treated the Trump announcements with some public concern, understandably, stressing the likely cost to US consumers.
But the country's ambassador to Washington has, for example, been keen to underline that they know full well [01:40:00] Trump is intending to negotiate on final tariff positions. The broader strategy here is one that Trump's pick for treasury secretary, Scott Besant, outlined in a speech over the summer. If the international economic order is being reshaped, he argues, and it is, the US should use all the levers at its disposal to bend this reshaping to its own advantage.
One obvious move is leveraging the sheer size of the US economy, with its 350 million consumers and their dollar purchasing power. Trump has, for example, boasted for months about how he would raise tariffs on imports from China by 60 percent or more. Just last month, he said on social media that he would impose a 10 percent tariff above any additional tariffs on all products from China.
He's also talked about using the threat of tariffs to push China and Mexico to do more to help curb the U. S. opioid crisis, [01:41:00] since the two countries are the top sources of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals. Now, China insists it has no role in the U. S. drug crisis, but this is where we see how the threat of tariffs is being used to achieve a broader policy goal.
Much of this policymaking is likely to be fundamentally reactive, all under the broad banner of America First. It's about responding to a world that's seen as increasingly hostile to the interests, as the new administration sees them, of US capitalism. The two key interests here are military strength and, tied to that, technological leadership in critical high tech sectors.
China has moved with impressive speed over the last few decades, threatening to erode the US's edge in these areas. So from the first Trump administration, extended under President Biden, and now likely to deepen in a second Trump term, we're seeing increasingly aggressive trade [01:42:00] moves aimed at preventing China from gaining that technological advantage.
This may not work as intended. The evidence so far suggests that China has responded by putting more resources into its own domestic industries. As a result, Huawei, the high technology supplier heavily targeted by tariffs, can now build phones with homegrown semiconductors that are not far off the cutting edge of what TSMC in Taiwan is able to produce.
In other words, the restrictions and tariffs have created a kind of hothouse for Chinese innovation, exactly the opposite of what was intended by successive U. S. administrations. By pushing hard on what it sees as its own interests, the U. S. is actually undermining them. But this will likely only strengthen the case in Washington for even more tariff restrictions.
Obviously, none of this is particularly rational. In theory, there is a better way through [01:43:00] this. If America is concerned about China's trade practices undermining its own manufacturing, it could, for instance, use a threat of tariffs to secure a more favourable position in negotiations with China, like agreeing to a controlled devaluation of the dollar, which would make US exports more competitive worldwide.
This is something Vice President in Waiting J. D. Vance has argued for. Now, back in 1985, a similar deal was struck with Japan, the so called Plaza Accords, where, under the threat of increased tariffs on Japanese exports, Japan agreed to revalue the yen upwards. This made its own exports less competitive, but eased pressure on U.
S. manufacturers in particular. Cyan Vallet, from the German Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the Financial Times this week, argues that the U. S. under Trump could be about to achieve the [01:44:00] same deal in parallel circumstances with China. Vallet believes that the macroeconomic entanglements of China and the U. S. will force a kind of economic rationality to reassert itself. Both sides will recognize a mutual interest in backing down from dispute. If, as in 1985, the U. S. is prepared to use its capacity to threaten wisely and to set up, quote, a grand bargain with China, so the dollar is allowed to fall in value, China allows the yen to rise, and tariff restrictions are dialed back.
I think this is far too optimistic. One wrinkle is Vallee's call for spending cuts in the U. S., necessary in his global rebalancing to prevent the U. S. demanding to borrow more and more from the rest of the world. The first Trump administration was very careful not to touch most Americans welfare benefits, and Trump himself was associated with [01:45:00] significant, COVID.
Whatever the chatter about cutting the administrative state we hear now, Getting politically unpopular spending cuts past this President and this Congress will be incredibly difficult. The main difference between the 1985 deal and today is that whilst Japan was politically and militarily subordinated to the U. S., China most certainly is not. So while Japan eventually buckled and accepted a deal that, in hindsight, wasn't particularly beneficial to its own economy, China has no reason to do the same thing.
SECTION C: RUSSIA
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next, section C, Russia.
Vladimir Putin: What does the future hold for Russia's leader? - BBC News - Air Date 5-11-24
FIONA HILL: He's been in power for a quarter of a century. Um, I think all of us are well familiar with that axiom that absolute power corrupts, absolutely, and especially over time.
And the longer that Putin has been in office, obviously, uh, the longer he's moved away from, uh, those very first, uh, precepts. [01:46:00] In terms of democracy, uh, Putin has defined it in different ways over time. He started to talk about managed democracy, a kind of democracy, uh, initiated from the top down at various points in terms of creating political parties.
He moved himself out of, uh, the position of being underpinned by a political party or even a political movement. He presided over changes in the constitution that enshrined the president as the supreme leader, uh, with a vertical of power and him very much at the apex of it. He had his, uh, surrogate, Dmitry Medvedev, who was briefly, uh, president of Russia.
And I think most of us have forgotten this by this point. Extend the presidential terms out to Russia. By another couple of years. So now he looks like he'll be with us not just till 2030, but even further beyond till 2036.
STEVE ROSENBERG - HOST, BBC NEWS: How much of this transformation do you think was inevitable? And how much is it the fault of the West?
Did the [01:47:00] West make mistakes which pushed Putin in that direction?
FIONA HILL: I think an awful lot of it is the weight of the system itself and the way that it's evolved over time. And I think the external environment, you mentioned mistakes that have been made, has become increasingly permissive for Putin to make these kinds of changes because there's been an evolution of change elsewhere.
We've had the rise of strongmen leaders, not just in places like China or Turkey, for example, but inside of Europe as well. Uh, we had the presidency of Donald Trump, and perhaps even the return of Donald Trump to the president, who's styling himself in the same mode as Putin, as a strongman leader. I think the cardinal mistake has been taking our eyes off the ball about how, uh, Russia was evolving.
in that larger context, that Russia no longer wanted to be part of Europe in the kind of sense of joining in in European institutions. But a lot of the internal, uh, developments, those are developments that nobody from the outside could possibly, uh, [01:48:00] affect in any major way. And Putin has used lots of events, uh, for example, the war in Chechnya when he first, uh, came into office, uh, terrorist attacks, uh, and all kinds of other developments, uh, to basically strip away many of the checks and balances in the Russian system.
STEVE ROSENBERG - HOST, BBC NEWS: And now, in what direction is he taking Russia?
FIONA HILL: Well, in many respects, he's taking Russia in what, um, as historians would see as a very traditional, um, and typical way. Having been in power for so long, he seems to be styling himself, uh, as a modern day Tsar. He's talking about the regathering of Russian lands, of course, the, uh, annexation of Crimea.
followed by the full on invasion of Ukraine fits right into that. Everything now, in terms of the symbolism, uh, the way that he refers to himself. This Russia now forged in war for the future is taking us back to these past patterns in Russian and Soviet history. Putin thinks of himself now as Vladimir the Great, um, as a Russian [01:49:00] Tsar.
Um, he's been in power for a quarter of a century. He aims for much longer than that, maybe a third of this particular century and then beyond. And that's how he sees himself. He's even, I think, gauging himself in the terms of this longevity as well as in the deeds and the acts that he undertakes.
STEVE ROSENBERG - HOST, BBC NEWS: To what extent do you think Vladimir Putin is going to be defined, though, by the war in Ukraine and how that ends?
FIONA HILL: I think this is now going to be the definitional issue. I mean, again, if we took ourselves back to a different period, the first two presidential terms of Putin, for example, that took us up to the financial crisis, you know, back in 2008, 2009, before he stepped away to be prime minister, I think we'd have had a fairly favourable assessment of Putin because he really did many of the things that he set out to do, which was stabilise the country politically, He made the country solvent again.
And now the war in Ukraine, I would say going back to the annexation of Crimea, back 10 years ago, has really dramatically [01:50:00] changed that trajectory.
STEVE ROSENBERG - HOST, BBC NEWS: And is the Putin we see now, the Putin that, you know, we're going to get until the end? Uh, is there any way back for him?
FIONA HILL: It very much seems like he has crossed the Rubicon.
I mean, I wouldn't rule out completely, uh, the opportunities for change. It would have to come in a very special set of circumstances in which I think he would be able to claim some kind of victory, uh, and then try to retrench. Putin himself knows that loosening up has, of course, Gorbachev did and Yeltsin did could be very dangerous and is likely to be very dangerous for his own position.
And we have the, uh, Prigozhin, uh, insurgency, uh, you know, back a year or so ago as well, which for him is most likely a signal of what can go wrong when you're too permissive in your environment, we need to be prepared, you know, for dealing with more of the same and trying to shift those calculations over time by showing our own.
resilience and resolve to push back.
STEVE ROSENBERG - HOST, BBC NEWS: We never talked about [01:51:00] Brezhnevism, we never spoke about Gorbachevism or Yeltsinism, but people talk about Putinism. If you have an ism after your name, that kind of makes you special, doesn't it? Does that mean that Vladimir Putin has made a particular impression on his country and the world?
FIONA HILL: Yeltsin himself spent a lot of time trying to come up with a new ism. He even had task forces that you, Steve, probably remember given your own longevity, uh, in Russia. I certainly do from the 1990s. There was a search for a new Russian idea and Putin has actually presented himself as the result of that search for a new Russian idea saying, I'm it.
You know, it's, which is a very personalized, uh, charismatic, uh, presidency and the president being, uh, the, the, the pinnacle of, uh, the Russian, uh, power system. Now the question, uh, becomes if we have Putin styling himself as a Vladimir the Great, uh, as a, uh, the new embodiment of Russian czars or Joseph Stalin, because we had Stalinism, of course, under [01:52:00] Leninism before that, but Putin doesn't like Vladimir Lenin at all.
He doesn't like that kind of revolutionary bringing down the state, uh, approach. But the question becomes, just like after the death of Stalin, Whether the system, uh, can be maintained and will be sustained without Putin at the center of that. And I think that is a, actually a genuine question because there is nobody else with any kind of traction within the system, let alone name recognition internally and externally, Putin has become it.
And, you know, as they say, there can be no other at this particular point.
Russia's gas games - The Europeans | European news, politics and culture - Air Date 1-15-25
DOMINIC KRAEMER - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: The biggest eye opener thus far in 2025 is the fact that despite Russia and Ukraine having been in a full blown war since 2022, Ukraine has continued to transport Russian gas across its territory so that Russia could keep selling its gas to Europe.
KATY LEE - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Yeah, I have to confess, this is something that I was only quite dimly aware of until very recently, but, but it [01:53:00] seems kind of crazy.
DOMINIC KRAEMER - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: I mean, because the pipeline that goes across Poland was basically shut down. I thought that that was also the case for the Ukrainian pipeline, but it wasn't. So this pipeline was in operation for more than 50 years.
And throughout this time, it helped pump billions of cubic meters of so called cheap Russian gas into Europe. helping economies of countries such as Germany, Italy, Austria, or France grow exponentially.
KATY LEE - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Very convenient for everyone. Um, but how come this carried on even after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022?
DOMINIC KRAEMER - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Basically, it turns out that it was a contract that dated from before 2022, and simply everyone made money out of it. So we just carried on with the situation, even though it's completely weird. Also, So, some European recipients of this gas put a lot of pressure on Ukraine to continue the deal to prolong their time to look for other gas sources.
KATY LEE - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Okay. Makes sense, I guess. [01:54:00]
DOMINIC KRAEMER - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Yeah. However, the deal expired on January 1st and Ukraine cut off the pipeline saying it couldn't carry on taking this blood money for transporting Russian gas while Moscow is continuing to kill its people.
KATY LEE - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: That also makes sense.
DOMINIC KRAEMER - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Some European leaders, though, I think you'll easily guess which ones decided to make a huge fuss about it.
But is it really such a big deal? And what does it mean for Europe's energy security? Who's affected? How well is Germany doing? Europe doing in actually freeing itself from its dependency on Russian energy? We had the privilege of asking all these questions to Dr. Szymon Kardaś.
KATY LEE - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Szymon, thank you so much for joining us.
SZYMON KARDÁS: Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. It's a pleasure.
DOMINIC KRAEMER - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Let's start from the hysterical reactions to this pipeline closing from some of Europe's leaders. Namely, people like Slovakia's president, Robert Fico, Hungary's leader, Viktor Orban, or Austrian right wing politicians, who are most probably coming into power soon.
Were they really that unprepared for this? [01:55:00]
SZYMON KARDÁS: First of all, the termination of the transit deal was expected. I mean, the position of Kiev was quite clear in 2024 that they are not interested in extending the deal with Russia. So, EU member states, especially those that were still importing Russia's natural gas through Ukraine, had a pretty large amount of time, I mean, to prepare for this moment.
And actually they were doing preparations. I mean, Slovakia concluded deals related to natural gas import with Polish company Orlen, with many Western energy companies like BP, the same when it comes to Austria. In December, 2023, the level of dependence on Russia's natural gas in Austria was actually extremely high, 98%.
I mean, this was the level of dependence and they were also preparing for it. They were fueling the gas storages. They even terminated the contract with Gazprom when it comes to natural gas import. And when [01:56:00] the 1st of January 2025 came, actually, we did not observe any problems in terms of the security of supply of natural gas to countries like Slovakia and Austria, they managed quite smoothly to turn into alternative sources and there were no disruptions and no crisis on the EU side.
And Hungary, I mean, this is the most funny actually case, because Hungary is not getting Russia's natural gas through Ukraine anymore. According to deals that they are signed in 2021, they import Russia's natural gas mainly through the TurkStream pipeline. I mean, TurkStream, this is a pipeline that Russia constructed through the Black Sea.
So in case of Hungary, those harsh statements were actually quite strange and funny to some extent because they are not dependent on the Ukrainian route
KATY LEE - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: So even though Robert Fico had warned of absolute chaos if this [01:57:00] deal didn't continue. We largely haven't seen any of that chaos because Europe was actually fairly well prepared for this.
Everybody knew it was coming. What about the impact on the Russian economy though? Is this a big deal for Russia? How much of their exports and how much cash have they lost as a result of this pipeline closing?
SZYMON KARDÁS: Well, according to industry sources, The natural gas that was shipped through Ukraine was estimated at 6.
5 billion US dollars annually. But on the other hand, it's important to point out that revenues that were coming from natural gas export were not the most important ones. Around 80 percent of revenues that were coming from oil and gas in total were related to revenues from the oil sector and around 20 percent from gas.
But of course, I would not underestimate those billion of dollars that Russia [01:58:00] is spending. is losing since 2022 because it was an important source of revenues for the Russian ruling elite. The elite was gaining tremendous benefits from selling natural gas to the European Union, which was actually the crucial market for Gazprom.
And since they almost lost it, I believe that the elite itself is actually experiencing this loss in a more significant way than the Russian budget.
DOMINIC KRAEMER - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: Somehow I'm not so worried about Russian oligarchs. I think they'll be fine. However, this means that the only place really affected is Transnistria. This parastate breakaway region of Moldova Squeeze between Moldova and Ukraine their economy as well as the entire energy sector was almost entirely dependent on Russian gas Imports which they were getting for free by the way We've seen reports on this [01:59:00] region being hit by a massive crisis The industry came to a halt, there's very little gas to keep Transnistrian houses warm, or even cook meals.
Plus, this means that Moldova had to look for electricity elsewhere, as previously 80 percent of it was coming from a gas power plant in Transnistria. What's going on down there?
SZYMON KARDÁS: Uh, Transnistria was affected in the most significant way. And actually, this is a problem for Russia. Because it's now Russia that needs to decide whether they want to keep this crisis situation evolving in Transnistria or provide some support for this region.
And actually they have alternative routes that they can use if they want to supply Transnistria with natural gas after the termination of the deal with Ukraine.
KATY LEE - HOST, THE EUROPEANS: And is there any sign on how Russia is thinking about this, which direction they might go on. I mean, in the meantime, people in this region are freezing.
It's a [02:00:00] terrible situation.
SZYMON KARDÁS: Well, basically Russia has two options. One option is to keep things as they are right now, to put more pressure on the government in Moldova or maybe the EU. to put pressure on Ukraine and maybe at the end of the day, force Ukraine to conclude some kind of a new transit deal through the Ukrainian territory, or simply play on the evolving crisis situation that would lead to some political problems in Moldova itself.
And since we, uh, we are ahead of parliamentary elections in Moldova. If this economic situation in Moldova is getting worse, that might play in favor of Russia, which is interested, clearly interested, in actually having some internal turbulence in Moldova ahead of the elections, expecting that maybe some pro Russian forces will come back to power and it will change the situation in Moldova, which Russia is clearly interested in.
And the second option is that, well, [02:01:00] Russia agrees to supply the natural gas to Transnistria using the alternative route, and this alternative route is Turk Stream. The gas is there, the electricity is produced, but maybe not at the volumes that would allow Moldova to restore the mechanism that was enforced previously, which might create, again, some tensions inside because Moldova would still be forced to buy electricity from the EU, which is more expensive and stuff like that.
This is a big question, which scenario Russia might be interested in implementing, but we can always bet that they will use the worst scenario for us. And well, the challenge for us is to respond in a way that would neutralize their calculations.
Why Putin might not be so worried about Russia's economy - The Bunker - Air Date 1-9-25
CHRIS JONES - HOST, THE BUNKER: I think last time we spoke actually, the Russian economy had grown and was expecting to grow last year as well.
And I think one of the things you said to me was that Russia's problem is not a lack of growth, it's a lack of people to fill the roles that are created by that growth. [02:02:00] Is that still the case, especially when you consider, you know, this war in Ukraine has been prolonged and there are Even more casualties day by day.
Is it still the case that growth isn't necessarily the problem, it's a lack of people, it's a lack of workforce to fill the roles?
DR. RICHARD CONNOLLY: That's right. So far, Russia's problem is excess demand relative to supply. The government's spending a lot of money on the war, it's spending a lot of money on supporting the economy.
Businesses, whether they're states owned or privately owned or investing, at a much higher rate than before the war. So, you know, on that side, in terms of consumers are spending. Um, a lot more money than they did before the war. So seeing people go out and generate a lot of economic demand, the problem, as you say, is on the supply side is keeping up with that demand.
If you don't have enough labor resources to, to, uh, to respond, um, to all of this demand, then it can result not in growth, but in inflation. We're certainly seeing some, some evidence of that last year, but to [02:03:00] answer your question about growth, and I think if we go back to when we last spoke, the Russian economy has surprised many in 2023 by growing at 3.
6 percent annually. And where at the beginning of the year, a lot of people suggested that it would just bump along the bottom. It'd be lucky if it grew over 1%. If we were to go back a year ago, the IMF thought that Russian economy would grow. In 2024 by around about 1 to 1. 5%. In the end, and the final, uh, figures are yet to come in, it looks like it's going to have grown by closer to 4 percent because of this, you know, this demand that I've spoken about a moment ago.
So certainly over the last two years, The economy has outperformed nearly all growth expectations. Now, whether or not it can keep that up is a different question. I think it's likely that the economy will slow this year. I said the same a year ago and I was wrong. Accelerated slightly. But because of those supply side constraints that you mentioned, I do really this time, [02:04:00] I think it's unlikely it's going to grow anything like 4%.
But. Most outside organizations, the World Bank, the IMF, they foresee growth of anywhere between one and a half and two and a half percent this year. And I think if that was to happen, the Russian government will be pretty content.
CHRIS JONES - HOST, THE BUNKER: What is it then that is causing the Russian economy to outperform people's expectations?
DR. RICHARD CONNOLLY: Well, the first thing to look at is the elevated government spending that I've mentioned. There's a lot of money spent on defense, which perhaps we'll talk about shortly. And that's boosted the incomes of a lot of people, not just in the defense sector, but when those people are being paid more in the military and they go and spend money, that drives prices up elsewhere.
So real incomes last year grew significantly as they did in 2023. If we look at nominal incomes, that's. putting inflation to one side, uh, incomes rose by over 20 percent last year. That's on average for some sectors, it grew by 40 or 50%. Um, and that's of course put a lot more money in people's pockets and [02:05:00] they've gone out and spent more.
So government spending is one. The second really important point as well. And I think this is key to Russia's resilience since the war began is that they continue to sell oil abroad. And it really is an oil story because gas sales have gone down significantly because Europe's, uh, nearly ceased buying Russian gas.
Not quite, but it has cut it down quite significantly, but Russia has continued to find buyers for its oil and for other minerals and metals. And as a result, it's been able to record. Very healthy trade surpluses every year. And in very simple terms, that means that there's more money in the economy than, than is going as, and they also run a current account surplus.
Again, what that means in simple terms is that they're investing less than they're saving. That means there's a pool of surplus money washing around the Russian economy. And for as long as that remains the case, then it seems to me that it's likely that the economy will continue to grow.
CHRIS JONES - HOST, THE BUNKER: And then just before we get onto [02:06:00] the, the defense budget and, and the hope for Russia in, in 2025, I just wanna ask how much infighting is there within, within Russia over how the economy is being run at the moment?
For example, I saw that Andrea Coston, who's the CEO of, uh, VTB Bank blamed the raising of interest rates on the fact that the central bank is, is run by a woman. How many issues like that are there at the moment? in Russia in terms of pinning reasons onto why the economy perhaps isn't doing as well as some people would hope that it would be doing.
DR. RICHARD CONNOLLY: Well, I think some of the infighting that you're talking about is more a battle over the price of borrowing, as you've mentioned, their high interest rates, Russia's key rate was put up to 21 percent in October, which is a post Soviet high. And that has meant that for those who are reliant on credit in the Russian economy.
Then actually going to be paying a lot in [02:07:00] servicing their desk, because, of course, if you borrow from a bank, then usually you'll pay more than the key rate. You might be paying closer to 30 or 40%. So some of the infighting that we're seeing is between if we're going to simplify between some industrialists on the one hand.
Who might be borrowing and then the central bank on the other, who is formulating a monetary policy. That's a real simplification because, um, it's not all the reality is a lot more complicated than that, but certainly there is some. evidence of some infighting. I wouldn't say it's anything more than what we'd normally see in Russia.
They have these types of debates and disagreements before the war, and I've certainly not seen anything to suggest that this is in any way getting out of hand. Um, and one of the reasons for that, and I think it's worth making this point is because a lot of people look at the key rate 21 percent and say, well, that must mean the economy's, you know, in danger of imminent collapse.
But there's a couple of factors that need to be taken into account. Number one is the rate of inflation is probably higher. than the official [02:08:00] data, which suggests it's around about nine or 10%. So if inflation is actually closer to 20 percent and we've got a real interest rate, that is the key rate minus the rate of inflation, it might be two or 3%, it might be 5%, but that's not as destructive as we might think of having it when you've got a 21 percent key rate.
in a 10 percent inflation rate. Um, so that's the first point. The second point is that a lot of Russian firms and parts of Russian society are able to access subsidized loans. And these loans are much cheaper and available at a much lower rate than the 21 percent key rate that most people focus on. Um, and so because of that, people aren't as effective.
And by these elevated interest rates, and that's partially explains why companies keep spending and consumers keep spending.
CHRIS JONES - HOST, THE BUNKER: Let's do some more numbers than the defense budget for 2025. Because this is this is pretty big. Russia has increased its national defense budget [02:09:00] to I think just over 100 billion pounds for 2025, which is around about 32 percent of our GDP.
the governmental spending. What can we realistically learn from those figures? What, what does that show that Putin's planning for 2025?
DR. RICHARD CONNOLLY: Well, I think the key points to make here are defense spending for obvious reasons soared from 2022 onwards. It's grown every year. Um, and each year it's hit a post Soviet high.
And for 2025, it's going to hit another post Soviet high. And it looks as though total defense spending is going to be about 25 percent higher than it was in 2024. Total defense spending accounts for about 40 percent of the federal budget, which sounds very high. We have to bear in mind is Russia is a federation.
And so a lot of, um, public spending and tax takes place at the local level. So if we take the consolidated Budget total military expenditure [02:10:00] will probably account for around about 20 percent of government total consolidated government spending. So that's why as I watering as a lot of the headline figures would suggest it is still high, though it's still higher than most countries in the world because Russia is fighting this very intense, large scale war in Ukraine terms of what it tells us.
It tells us that they're prepared to continue fighting that war. That they continued to not only fight the war, but also reconstitute, that is, rebuild its military. Russia's military now is larger than it was before the war began. It's got more of some things than it had before the war began. So things like drones, long range cruise missiles, uh, things like this didn't exist in the same, uh, Uh, number as they do today.
Some things exist in a lower number, armored vehicles and tanks, which have been destroyed on the battlefield in large numbers, um, but Russian factories are racing to produce as many of those as they can, they're struggling to keep up because so many have been lost. Um, but nevertheless, there's [02:11:00] The Russian defense industry at the moment, he's working around the clock as it has for two and a half years now.
And I think what the budget is saying is it's signaling that they're prepared to commit to this for the long run. I don't think that the Kremlin is expecting that Trump is going to come in and come up with a, um, a peace proposal that suits the Kremlin. And so therefore they're prepared to continue to stay in this fight for as long as they need to.
SECTION D: FRANCE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: This is section D, France.
Frances Government Collapses: What Next? - TLDR News EU - Air Date 12-5-24
GEORGINA FINDLAY - HOST, TLDR NEWS EU: After the European Parliament elections in June, which were won decisively by Marine Le Pen's national rally, Macron called a snap legislative election and challenged the French to quote, make the right choice for themselves and future generations.
His thinking was that by going to parliamentary elections early, France would be forced into deciding they didn't want the far right running the country, and instead would rally around his own centrist ensemble alliance. But things didn't go quite as planned. Ensemble fared poorly in the first round, and while tactical coalitions between Ensemble and the left wing [02:12:00] New Popular Front, or NFP alliance, did mean that the National Rally won less seats in the second round than they were expected to, no party won an outright majority, and the NFP actually won the most seats.
This seemed to support the idea that voters truly had had enough of Macron, and France's parliament, the National Assembly, ended up split awkwardly into three blocks, left, center, and right, with no clear option for a governing majority. Subsequently, there was further disagreement over the appointment of France's prime minister.
The NFP argued that, because it had won the legislative election, it had the right to form a government and to propose a left wing prime minister. However, Macron didn't like that, and said, ironically enough, that the NFP's lack of parliamentary majority meant they'd be immediately toppled by a no confidence vote.
So he then decided to appoint Michel Barnier as Prime Minister. Outside of France, Barnier is perhaps best known as the EU's former chief Brexit negotiator, but he comes from the centre right Les Républicains party in France. And he actually put himself forward [02:13:00] as their presidential candidate for the 2022 election, running on a surprisingly hardline anti immigration law and order platform.
Barnier ultimately lost to Valéry Pécresse, who went on to become Les Républicains candidate, but his tack to the right earned him some credibility with Le Pen Co, which is one of the reasons they tacitly accepted his nomination as prime minister. But even though the left still weren't happy with Barnier's appointment, with the support of the National Rally and Ensemble, Barnier effectively had the go ahead to begin his program to fix France's debt crisis.
For context, France's deficit equates to more than 6 percent of its GDP, exceeding the 3 percent maximum set out by the EU. Barnier accordingly pledged to get this down to 5 percent of GDP in 2025 and 3 percent by 2029. And to reach it, in October, he proposed a 2025 budget consisting of 20 billion euros in tax increases and 40 billion euros in spending cuts.
But neither the NFP nor the National Rally supported this, as both had fought the election on platforms that would have increased [02:14:00] France's debt even further. Barnier did make some last minute concessions to the National Rally though, including on electricity taxes and healthcare spending, but this still wasn't enough.
And on Monday, Barnier resorted to Article 49. 3 of France's constitution. Allowing him to force the budget through without a vote. Predictably, both the NFP and the National Rally immediately tabled votes of no confidence, which happened on Wednesday. So what happened on Wednesday? Well, after 48 grueling hours from Monday to Wednesday, during which the no confidence motions were examined, the vote went ahead on Wednesday evening, and passed with 331 votes in the 577 seat National Assembly, forcing Barnier to resign.
Accordingly, Barnier's minority government was toppled by a combination of the left and far right. This makes 73 year old Barnier the shortest serving French Prime Minister since 1958, and plunges France right back into political chaos. After his defeat in the no confidence vote, Barnier said it had been an honour to have served France and the French [02:15:00] people with dignity, but that the vote would make everything more serious and more difficult.
However, we should point out that the no confidence vote is better viewed as an expression of frustration at Macron's leadership, rather than with Barnier himself. An EFOP survey conducted in mid November showed that Macron's popularity as president had hit an all time low of just 22%, while Barnier's popularity sat more comfortably at 36%, down from 40 percent in October.
Moreover, when we compare both their approval ratings from September, 25 percent for Macron versus 45 percent for Barnier, we find a 20 percentage point gap, the largest ever between a sitting president and prime minister. So what does this all mean for France now? Well, there have already been plenty of calls for Macron to resign, from both the left and the right.
La France Insoumise's Clémence Guetté said in a post on X that the resignation of Emmanuel Macron is the only way out of this political crisis. And the party's former leader, Jean Luc Mélenchon, said Macron must go to restore the voice of the French people's [02:16:00] votes. Similarly, Bardella and Le Pen took aim at Macron and Les Macronistes.
With Bardella posting on X, there is no way out for a government that takes up the thread of Macronism. However, Macron has made clear that he has no intention of resigning from the presidency. Moreover, France can't have another legislative election until at least next summer, as there has to be a year in between, meaning the parliamentary chaos is likely to continue for a good while longer.
With Barnier gone, Macron will now have to appoint another new PM, who might have to be from the left. But this would be bad news for France's bond markets and for its debt crisis.
Macron faces criticism for defending French troops being in Africa - DW News -Air Date 1-7-25
DW HOST: Well, French President Emmanuel Macron is facing criticism for his recent comments defending the presence of French troops in Africa. France is in the process of withdrawing troops from Chad and several other countries. Macron sparked a backlash from several African leaders accusing them of failing to say to French troops battling Islamist insurgencies.
EMMANUEL MACRON: [02:17:00] We had a secure relationship. In truth, it was in two parts. One part was our commitment to fighting terrorism since 2013. We were right. I think some have forgotten to say thank you, but that's okay, it'll come in time. I'm in a good position to know that ingratitude is a disease that cannot be transmitted to humans.
But I say this for all the African governments who've not had the courage in the face of public opinion to bear it. That none of them would be in a sovereign country today if the French army had not been deployed in this region.
DW HOST: French President Macron is getting a lot of pushback for his statement suggesting a lack of gratitude for France's military involvement in Africa.
Chad's top diplomat says Macron has to learn to respect Africans. So does he have a point there? I asked Beverly Ochiang. Security analyst in Dhaka.
BEVERLY OCHIENG: I mean, yes, there have been very strong reactions. And even from Senegal, when the prime minister said that there were no talks [02:18:00] with France, and he also evoked the memory of West African forces who did fight with France during the world war. So it does feel that they are returning Macron's comments back at him, that African forces also did make significant sacrifices during the world war.
And France was merely giving in. Similar support to the African countries that had called on it to come in. Some of the things that Macron has been saying over the years are partly what have fueled anti French commentators, for instance. They've used comments such as that to reinforce ideas that France continues to have what is seen as a paternalistic attitude.
Towards Africans and African leaders who have made some sovereign choices, as we have seen in statements by Cote d'Ivoire recently, Chad, Senegal and even the Sahel, despite the acrimony behind it.
DW HOST: Now, French soldiers have been deployed to help fight against jihadists in the Sahel region. How do you see their withdrawal impacting security in the [02:19:00] region?
BEVERLY OCHIENG: The three countries have embarked on their own separate campaigns to recruit into their security forces. They're also forming what is called the Alliance of Sahel States to partly combat the insurgency, but violence has continued to spread.
A few anecdotes that just reflect this is in the last year there's been a resurgence of attacks in Benin and Togo. These are countries that years before did not experience militant insurgencies and these are near the border with Niger and Burkina Faso. Last September, Mali's capital Bamako came under attack and this was after a progressive two year period where al Qaeda militants have been moving towards the city.
South. So the Sahel armies are quite stretched and the withdrawal of French forces was quite sudden and acrimonious, which meant that there wasn't a clear handover of services, intelligence or training and support.
DW HOST: Okay. In some countries in Africa though, uh, where France had a military presence, um, they, these countries still maintain relations with Paris.
It was less acrimonious. [02:20:00] The, uh, departure of French troops talking Ivory Coast, Senegal, Chad, for example, how does the departure of French troops Fit into their geopolitical calculations.
BEVERLY OCHIENG: I mean for Senegal, it's been very clear. They are promoting nationalist policies Fire the president said in november last year that the presence of french forces does not sit well alongside sovereignty and nationalism With court devoy, it's a bit more.
Um, it's the implications are much more they're having an election this year Um Alassane Watara has in many instances been seen as being too close to France. Him making that announcement asserts that Cote d'Ivoire is in a good position to take over its security, despite the fact that there has been an insurgency in the Sahel.
It's a vote of confidence. Relations will probably continue to be quite warm, particularly with Cote d'Ivoire and France, commercial, security, and even diplomatic. With Senegal, there might be some tensions, given the statements that came from both SONCO and [02:21:00] FAE, With Chad, less so because we have seen the statement from the foreign minister was quite stern and the incremental statements from the government have shown that there might be some strange relations which might lead to some challenges, especially for French commercial operators.
We're looking to stay or operate in Chad.
DW HOST: Now, some countries in the West, uh, some in the United States, Europe, uh, have concerns that other international players like China or Russia particularly could end up filling the gaps left by France's withdrawal. What do you make of that?
BEVERLY OCHIENG: I mean, as it stands, various countries in the region are already building new partnerships.
Senegal's President Fay said that he will be working across East, West, China, Turkey, Russia, Chad. Establishing very strong ties with the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Hungary will be sending forces to the region. Devoye is also hoping for support [02:22:00] from the U. S., so there will be a diversification. Russia will take advantage, definitely, not just in security, but even commercially, but we'll see a broad range of partners emerging in the region over the coming years.
Why are more Francophone countries cutting ties with France? - Focus on Africa - Air Date 1-2-25
AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: France was one of the major colonizers of the continent over several decades, reaching a high point in the 19th century. The relationship was brutal involving slavery and resistance. Two major wars in Europe. Brought about massive changes, including an end to direct domination. Independence followed 1960 was a particularly pivotal year in which many former French and British colonies began to govern themselves, but the colonial links continued with language, culture, economic, and political ties of varying strengths.
France maintained a particularly strong grip to the extent of controlling monetary policy, political direction, and. Retaining a military presence, France also [02:23:00] maintained direct control of some territories like Réunion and Mayotte, which has been in the news recently because of a devastating cyclone.
We'll be hearing about visceral anger directed at French President Macron, who was visiting the island earlier this week. But let's get back to French speaking West Africa, where there was always resistance to French control, with some countries more vocal about it than others. We'll In recent months, there's been a major shift.
Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have ordered French troops off their soil. Observers saw that coming. But now, unexpectedly, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Chad are doing the same. I've been hearing from Adama Gay, an African analyst, that there's a deep well of anger and resentment behind these moves. I began our conversation by asking why France had a military presence in all these countries in the first place.
ADAMA GAYE: [02:24:00] Oh, because France negotiated what is called the colonial pact. When France left its former colonies, He had agreed with all of them to do certain things in a form of continuation of the French presence in those countries. And this is exactly one of them. Both are the level of military, monetary, and other sectors, including in the selection of African leaders of those countries.
France maintained that he had a say. On those crucial issues, and that's what is unravelling at the moment.
AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: So was it much more powerful than in the other former colonial powers? Because the influence certainly remained amongst the British colonies, for instance. But was France more specific and more powerful than that?
ADAMA GAYE: Absolutely. France Maintained what is called the France, Africa. It was an osmosis [02:25:00] relationship between France and it's a former colonies. So it left the continent without truly leaving the continent. And in many of these countries, France. Was the factor ruler. And we knew for many years that under, for instance, the leadership of Jacques Foucault, France really was the true owner of these countries.
But now we are witnessing a new wind blowing in many of the francophone countries with the youngsters. Influenced by the internet and other sources of information beyond the traditional classic governmental source of information. Those youngsters claiming for sovereignty for their countries and they are learning from what is happening elsewhere.
And they are selecting their type of leaders. They want to emulate the likes of Lumbumba of the DRC, the likes of Thomas Sankara and other nationalist [02:26:00] leaders. That's the model that they want to copy, and that's what they are following through. And now we are witnessing this sentiment of anti French against all over the francophone area with what we used to call the precarious.
It's no longer the same. Valid people want to gain truly their independence, and they're asking for it.
AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: Thomas Sankara was from what's now known as Burkina Faso, and Patrice Lumumba was the first post independence leader of Zaire, as it was at the time, rather than the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those leaders were quite strongly independent.
Sankara, especially in this, in the 80s. Was it similar? To what is happening now, this resistance to French influence in the politics of individual and regional African countries?
ADAMA GAYE: To a large extent, yes. Personally, I met Thomas Sankara a few months before his death. He died, killed [02:27:00] on October 15, 1987. I met him in February at his home, and I could find in him a fierce nationalist who wanted his country to be free.
To cut every tie with the French, and I saw him challenging the former French president, uh, Mr Francois Mitterrand. What is happening now is really something that is, uh, offspring of the, uh, globalization movement of the technological revolution that is happening. So these new leaders. They are in a position where they can build ties with other type minded people like the chemists and other people like them.
You name it. Many across Africa want their leaders to To leave power because they have seen that their ties with the French government have not yielded anything in terms of economic [02:28:00] development, in terms of freedom, in terms of even the chance of being tied with France, including traveling to France.
They are denied visa, they are expelled, they feel racism when they go to Europe, especially in this time of populism across Europe. So at the end of the day, the reality is that. Many African, not just those nationalistic people, but also the ordinary Africans are realizing that, by the way, we are not gaining anything in this relationship with France.
And they are seeing that France itself is a country that is decaying. We see it on a regular basis. The economy is down. The politics is in shambles. So the African people are saying, By the way, we have our resources. We have the intellect. We have everything to manage ourselves and we can learn from other nations of the global south from Malaysia to China.
And so why can't you cut the tide with the French and try to build our relationship? This self [02:29:00] conscience that is happening is changing the situation in many of these countries.
AUDREY BROWN - HOST, FOCUS ON AFRICA: So is it driven from the streets? Or is it driven from the corridors of power? Because just looking at it, the countries that are kicking the French out militarily because we need to come on to exactly the extent to which these ties are being severed.
But Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso have recently experienced coups. So that's a very particular form of government. Ivory Coast and Senegal are different forms of government. So I'm just wondering, is this impulse being driven by the same kinds of forces or are there different things at play?
ADAMA GAYE: Mainly the street is behind this move, but the social media, the internet played a key role in it.
And the mistakes by the French leaders, the types of Emmanuel Macron, Francois Hollande, they've been saying that France would stop. It's the France Africa policies, but in reality, they were playing [02:30:00] tricks and not practicing what they preach. So in many of the countries, people are saying, Let's call this bluff off and really address the challenge in earnest with whoever is in place in France.
In addition, you have also the rise of the far right in France with Marine Le Pen and other nationalistic and also from the left with Melenchon saying that, okay, we need to change our ties with the African countries. Furthermore, what is happening also, the leadership itself in many of those countries, they realize that if they don't make a move, they will be cut off from the street.
So they have been negotiating with the French authorities a way of exiting in a tactful manner. Some did it. In a brutal manner, like the military of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. In the case of Cote d'Ivoire, the president, Mr. Ouattara, said clearly that it was an [02:31:00] orderly and negotiated way of cutting this tie, exiting the French military.
In the case of Senegal, to a large extent, that is what is happening also. But they could not do but follow the street. Mainly, the street is calling for it, and the intelligentsia also is opportunistically following suit.
SECTION E: CORPORATE CONTROL
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section E, Corporate Control.
DeepSeek AI Exposes Tech Oligarchy's Multi-Billion Dollar Scam - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 1-28-25
EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It's a, just another tech bubble, right? It's another, it is our tech industry, which had like buoyed our economy really from the nineties on.
There was obviously a, uh, uh, uh, But since then, honestly, both parties have been complicit, uh, in, uh, Elevating this industry because it's one of, like, since the United States has outsourced manufacturing in the back half of the 20th century, this is essentially what the American economy is built on. And it's just such a, uh, it's a shot across the bow from [02:32:00] China, but it also is a very revealing indicator of the charlatans on that side.
Sam Altman in this open AI model, um, it says open in the name, but they do not. Uh, they are not transparent. They have basically privatized their AI model and not made public.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: DeepSeek is actually open, uh, source.
EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: DeepSeek is open source and anybody can download it on their, uh, on their iPhone. And it was one of the most downloaded apps, I think, over the past few days.
Because of that very reason. It's a superior model because it's actually open and not just there to inflate the stock value of these tech companies and to get more money for investment. And so you can see how the efficiency model is just such a false premise. It's just there to get more money for these tech oligarchs.
And this would be I guess just something to laugh at if these oligarchs weren't a part of the Trump administration. And if we didn't see things like this, which [02:33:00] is Chuck Schumer basically saying, Oh, we're going to get on top of this. Chuck Schumer tweeted the deep seek announcement from China has been called by some AI Sputnik moment for America.
It's precisely why I made AI a top priority in the last Congress and we'll keep at it. And you know who he's echoing there? One Mark Andreessen, who, when I was researching this, found out has a. Uh, blocked me, which is great. Uh, Mark Andreessen said on January 26th, so two days ago, DeepSeek R1 is AI's Sputnik moment.
What? I mean, of course Andreessen wants. More U. S. taxpayer dollars poured into AI and analogizing it to Sputnik and to the space race because that is exactly what all these tech oligarchs want. They want more and more billions of dollars funneled into their project even though they've shown how inefficient they are.
And we have the leader of the Democrats in the Senate more than happy to go along with this very notion. And
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I want to [02:34:00] be clear, you know, uh, Sputnik moment refers to when The Russians sent the first satellite into space and everybody in America was like, hey, wait, what what's going on here? you can do that and So at that point was it Truman or Eisenhower that gets on Television and basically says hey guys We're gonna start up a We're gonna start up our own basically space program And we're gonna do the, um, uh, we're, we're gonna start NASA at that point and understand that in that moment, the first Sputnik moment, , Eisenhower is like, um, we're gonna, that's basically the start of nasa. And the reason why I say this is that when. Chuck Schumer and Mark Andreessen say, uh, this is [02:35:00] our Sputnik moment. When they say that in 2025, what they're saying is, we should give a lot of cash to private companies.
As opposed to the actual Sputnik moment, which was, we as a government are going to meet this moment. And develop this technology. Now, of course, a lot of that technology ended up being used by private enterprise. Uh, having essentially socialized the cost of developing these things and then privatizing the profits on which they built on.
Nevertheless, just be careful when they use Sputnik Moment and it's almost like a shell game. It's a Sputnik moment. And what's the whole thing then with giving the money to private enterprise?
EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Also, we are Sputnik. I, the, the, the, we were the first to get on the moon in this space race, right? Like [02:36:00] that's considered.
The, the, the thing we beat the Russians at, or the Soviets at.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, they beat us into space now.
EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But they beat us into space, but our AI, you know, say, like, it's so advanced, like we, in theory, we beat them on AI and getting ahead of it, or at least that's what we were being told. But they've clearly created a superior product, and they're going to get there more quickly because of the open source model, because they are not enclosing it in such a way.
And. because everybody's going to be able to download it. So I'm making a prediction right now, and I'll expand this to Democrats as well, but Republicans are going to be saying that this is a national security threat in 48 hours. I'm sure that the Democrats will follow suit, a deep seek Chinese bioweapon leaked from a lab or something like that in order to pervert the minds of the American public, just like that communist TikTok.
Yep.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Countdown clock.
EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But these are the people running our government, right? Like when we talk about oligarchy, Isn't it incredible [02:37:00] how little we're mentioning these Republican politicians and we're just talking about these tech freaks? Because they're running the show. Yep. It's as obvious as anything.
Yep. And it happened almost overnight.
Will Trump Crash Economy On Purpose- Historian Explains DANGEROUS MAGA Plot - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 1-28-25
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM : Democrats are pointing out that Trump's threats to increase our national debt by as much as 7 trillion, that is the cost of another round of tax cuts for billionaires, Shift billions of treasury dollars into crypto and impose tariffs on imported goods. Any one of those three things could cause an economic crash.
All three of them might be a perfect storm. And Trump seems unconcerned. And the Republicans. They're meeting down at Doral, at his shabby Doral Golf Club down in Florida today. Right now to, you know, plot what they're going to do. They don't seem to worry either. Now, to the average person, the idea of a recession is pretty grim.
I mean, you know, millions of people lose their jobs. People have to sell their 401ks at a loss out of desperation just to pay the rent and [02:38:00] buy food. Uh, you know, it's, it's a horror show for average people, particularly in a country where 54 percent of Americans right now live paycheck to paycheck. So why isn't Trump worried about this?
Why are Republicans not worried about this? Why are the billionaires who put Trump and the Republicans in power not worried about this? Well, the reason is very simple. There's three. big benefits to billionaires to having an economic crash. It's why Reagan had a crash. It's why Bush had a crash. It's, there's actually a benefit to it.
First, it's a great excuse to cut government services to, to, you know, and, and, and also to cut taxes on billionaires. You just say, hey, we need to cut taxes to stimulate the economy, we need to cut government services because there's no money to pay for them. I mean, Reagan did this in 81, George W. Bush did this in, in 2003, 2002, second, the second [02:39:00] reason is the time, times of economic crisis increased the tolerance for strongman governments.
FDR ran a strongman government, now it was one that everybody liked, but he was just You know, stomping all over Congress and doing things with executive orders that Republicans were screaming were unconstitutional. People were freaked out. They wanted a strong government. In Europe, Hitler used the Great Depression to, to, as the rationale for, for his enabling acts, which, you know, gave him rule by decree.
And it appears now that Trump IGs in violation of the law, these inspector generals. I'll get into that more later on in the program. But Uh, he's, he's defying the law or refusing to enforce the law in other cases right now, right in front of us, right in front of God and the world, and nobody is doing anything about it.
And he's getting away with it. And that promises that more will come and it'll get worse and worse and worse as time goes on. Secondly, [02:40:00] times of economic crisis, uh, you know, increase the need or the demand for strong man government. And in fact, this is where it's getting wild, um, 58%. of young people, generation Z people in the United States, say they trust social media more than traditional news.
45 percent now believe women have gained too many rights. The number of young men who believe that women have too much power in the United States has increased from 32 to 45 percent in just five years, while 52 percent say they trust what they, readers say, see on social media. And then third, and this is the big reason, billionaires love economic crashes.
I remember sitting in Gloria Swanson's apartment back in the 1980s having dinner with her and, uh, she was on the board of our, uh, children's village and, you know, every six months or so I'd go down to New York and we'd have dinner together in her apartment and she would just tell me these wild stories.[02:41:00]
And she told me this story, she was a vegetarian and I was a vegetarian and the program we ran was vegetarian, so we had this commonality. So anyhow, she told me this story about, uh, Joe Kennedy. John F. Kennedy's father, and he was her manager for a while, he was her lover for a while, and he robbed her blind, he ripped her off terribly.
But her story about him was that when the Great Depression started, he had bailed out of the market just a week or two before the crash happened, and that during the crash, as the market was going down, down, down, down, down, Joe Kennedy, who was really, really rich, was buying stocks. Why? Because it's a buying opportunity.
If you're really rich when the stock market crashes and all the little people are desperately selling all their stock just to pay for their rent and their food, you can buy that stock at a discount and suddenly you're the richest person on earth. Joe Kennedy made a fortune doing this. As did J. Paul [02:42:00] Getty.
He left his parents golden anniversary In 1929 to run down to Wall Street to buy stocks during the collapse and ended up one of the richest men in the world. In fact, the richest man in the world. He said it was the opportunity of a lifetime to get oil companies for practically nothing, which is exactly what he did.
And this is what we saw this during the Bush crash. During the Bush crash in 2007, home prices dropped 21%. This was when, you know, there's millions of homes now owned by big corporations, hedge funds and big corporations out of New York, investment vehicles. This was when most of them were purchased, or many of them.
Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to predators like Steve Mnuchin. The stock market lost over 50%. During the Bush crash, its all time peak was on October 9th, 2007 at 14, 164. It collapsed to 6, [02:43:00] 594. While 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out, the billionaires came in and started buying stocks that were being unloaded by working class people from their 401Ks, even though they had to pay a penalty.
Between 2009 and 2012, the bottom of the Bush crash and the beginning of the real recovery, The top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31%, 95 percent of all income gains during that period were the top 1%. If you, the S& P went up 462 percent by 2020. If you had invested in 2009 a billion dollars, just 11 years later, you would have 4.
6 billion dollars. And then they did it again 10 years later during the Trump COVID crash. And this was, you know, again, the, the billionaires, became insanely wealthy. And they don't have to pay taxes on this money. I mean, the, the, just that one year, 2020, the world's [02:44:00] billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%.
So here you've got Republicans down at Doral planning what they're going to do economically, governmentally, whatever, and how they're not going to hold Trump accountable for impounding money. I'll get to that in violation of the 1974 impoundment act. Um, and the They're planning to crash the economy. You got the debt ceiling coming, you got all this wild stuff, another tax cut.
They want to crash the economy. I'm telling you, hang on to your seat, it's going to get wild.
Trump's billionaires will accelerate American decline. Dr. Richard Wolff explains how. - The Real News Network - Air Date 1-28-25
RICHARD WOLFF: . When an economy is going up. The people at the top can afford to be generous. They're making a ton of money. They're becoming wealthy. Sure, they can pay an extra 4 5 percent a year to their workers. Keep them happy, avoid a strike, and there's so much money in the growth period that you can afford it.
But when the economy goes down, what the people at the [02:45:00] top have always done and are doing now in America is those at the top. The CEOs, the people who we all know who they are, they choose their wealth and power, shouldn't surprise you, to hold on. And because they have wealth and power, they can do that.
They can hold on, which means the costs of the downturn, we, the rest of us, it's offloaded onto us. So what you're seeing is that the inequality in the United States gets worse. And look at the irony. I'll give you a statistic. Earlier this week, the most important research outfit in the world, Oxfam, located in Britain, keeps track of this, gave their annual report, and it added up the experience of the roughly 3, 000 billionaires that exist in the world today.
And as you rightly said, [02:46:00] Many of them are American, not all by a long shot, but many of them. And here's the statistic it gave. Across the year 2024 just ended, the collective wealth of the 300 billionaires rose by over six billion dollars per day. Oh my god. That's incredible. Okay, so look what I'm telling you.
That's beautiful. Yeah. Capitalism as a global system is making those already super wealthy even more super wealthy.
STEPHEN JANIS - HOST, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK: Right, but what's amazing about it, extraordinary, is that you're saying as our economy declines, Lives get worse, their wealth gets more concentrated and higher. I mean, that's like really seems to me, uh, a horrible prescription for people.
Hmm.
RICHARD WOLFF: Unfortunately, if we had better leaders, they would be talking to us about it. [02:47:00] What are we going to do as a nation, the road we are on, of a declining empire, becoming more and more unequal. Look, you don't need rocket science to understand that's not sustainable. That situation is going to blow up and it's not gonna be pretty.
Not even in a country that didn't have everybody with a gun. We are a very strong and that's what our leaders should be talking about. What do we do about it? Instead, and I have to say this in all honesty. Instead, what I'm watching at the inauguration and in the days since. is a kind of lunatic theater.
It's a theater in which the lead actor, Mr. Trump, pretends to be the world's tough guy. I'm gonna take back the Panama Canal. What? [02:48:00] What? You're saying he's not? I'm gonna snatch Greenland for a golf course. I'm gonna make Canada the 51st state. And I'm gonna stick it to the Mexicans. My God. Every one of those issues, whether it's drug traffic or anything else, the war on drugs is at least 65, 70 years old.
Every president has announced he's going to fight it. And every single president has lost that fight. We are with drugs today. Every bit as much as when I was 10 years younger, 20 years younger. 30 years younger. I'm not fooled and I don't think anyone in America is. The biggest change in drugs is that we, the Sackler family, which just made a settlement, produced enough opioids to kill 700, 000 people over the last few years.
We don't even need Mexico. We've got a drug problem in which Mexico doesn't figure. And as the new president of Mexico [02:49:00] said, and she's quite right, The drug problem is a problem of supply and demand. Part of it is the supply that comes up in parts through Mexico, but an enormous part of it is the demand.
There is no drug trade unless America is the single largest buyer of that crap. We weren't doing it. I mean, what are you doing? He's trying to suggest. To a frightened America that the problem is over there. You're bad. Panamanian the bad canadian This is childish This is gestures of desperation You know, there's an old Scene that comes to my mind to explain this.
It's in the cowboy movies. We all saw when we were younger It's when the sheriff can't prevent the bad guys from riding into town and robbing the bank. And there he looks, useless sheriff, didn't stop it. So he says with great bravado, [02:50:00] Round up the usual suspects. He wants to look like he stopped. Because that's better than looking like the failure he was.
That's a really good point. Has been the president before let me assure you during his time as president Inequality in the united states by all its measures Got worse Now, I don't want to be unfair. They got worse under biden, too And they got worse under obama, too. So he's not outstanding. But did he stop it?
Not at all the tax cut that he gave in december of 2017.
STEPHEN JANIS - HOST, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK: Right.
RICHARD WOLFF: First year of his office was the worst blow to equality We could have had made the under made the government bankrupt because it didn't have all the revenue that Corporations and the rich no longer had to pay so the government had to borrow go in the deficit and who did it borrow from?
The corporations and the rich, [02:51:00] the money they didn't have to pay in taxes, they turned around and went to the government instead, which means we, the people are on the hook to repay all that money plus interest because our leader, Mr. Trump gave them that tax
cut.
But instead of being shamed, He goes around celebrating it, and we live in a country, and this scares me.
This is what scares me. It's pretty weird. It's pretty weird. Okay, you had a question? We live in a country of denial, and that, that is a very big danger we have to face.
TAYA GRAHAM - HOST, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK: Professor Wolf, I really appreciate that you brought up the historical context, talking about that perhaps we are in an age of decline.
When we were last on the show, we were talking about how we might be living in a second Gilded Age, but now what I'm hearing from you is that we are in Well, just like with the Gilded Age, that didn't end well. What does it look like for America to be an empire in decline? [02:52:00] Like, on the ground, for us regular folks trying to hold on to our jobs, what does the decline of empire actually look like for us?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I'm afraid it means that we are now governed by those people you saw up on the dais during the inauguration. The only dynamic center of the American capitalist system today is high tech, Silicon Valley. Those people now are the ones that are still making money. Everything else is either better done, or more cheaply done, or both.
Elsewhere. Indeed, the United States corporations moved ever since the 1970s in huge numbers. Look, half the cars produced in China now are produced by subsidiaries of American companies. The abandonment of America is something led by the corporations. You might, Mr. Trump likes to [02:53:00] point to the Chinese, but they didn't do it.
They couldn't make the corporations go there. Those corporations went there. Because it was profitable. Here's my fear. The United States's mass of working class people are being prepared to function the way the poor of the rest of the world function. They are the backwater. They are the hinterland.
They're what you see when you leave the capital city and you go to where the Mass of people are much, much poorer. Look at it. This government wants to attack Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. It wants to take away the few remaining supports. Look at us another way. When my fellow economists from around the world ask me.
They ask me about the minimum wage. [02:54:00] The federal minimum wage in this country is 7. 25 per hour. It has been at that level since 2009. Every year since then, prices have gone up. Some years only 1 or 2 percent, other years 9 or 10 percent. Okay, that means for the last 16 years, 2009 to now, the poorest of the poor amongst us, people living on 7.
25 an hour, have been savagely abused. Because every year, with rising prices, that 7. 25 buys you less. What kind of a society goes to people with 7. 25 and does that, to them. We are seeing levels of cruelty. [02:55:00]
SECTION F: WHAT COMES NEXT
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, section F, what comes next?
Goodnight, Pax Americana: Neoliberalism and the decline of the US Empire w/ Radhika Desai Part 2 - The Red Nation Podcast - Air Date 9-22-23
NICK ESTES - HOST, THE RED NATION PODCAST: One of the sort of the way this, this manifests isn't just like in debates between, uh, you know, economists, it actually, you know, this is the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup and the overthrow of Allende, Allende.
And you and I were both in Caracas and we went to, you know, the foreign ministry and we saw, you know, Allende's glasses on display, and it was a reminder. To Hugo Chavez that they're not going to do, uh, to the Bolivarian project, what they did to, uh, the Chilean project. And so can you talk a little bit about that?
Because I think, uh, most people have this conception of imperialism as when, yeah, when one country invades another country, or there's sort of military competition, or, you know, they, we just don't like. Communists or we just don't like left projects. Um, or that these, these people are dictators. What is the, you know, you said it, you said a neoliberalism is an ideology and how does [02:56:00] that ideology manifest in, uh, sort of foreign intervention?
RADHIKA DESAI: I actually, that's a really brilliant question because what it does is it focuses attention both on how Chile because one of the, in fact, well, first. Uh, kind of experimented neoliberalism, but also why it was so. So let's begin with the first. So your neoliberalism of the post Second World War period, it was sort of straight line because the dominant, uh, persuasion was Keynesianism and governments thought that You know, they could use Keynesian, uh, uh, uh, economics and, and, and so on.
And it was not that governments, you know, they did this out of the kindness of their heart. The fact of the matter is that in the post Second World War period, working class movements were very strong. They had mobilized over a whole century. Uh, they had acquired the most exceptional power during the wars, because if you want to ask people to go and fight for you, you have to promise them something.
So in that sense, you know, that was that empowerment. But neoliberalism sort of continued its existence in a subterranean [02:57:00] level in these marginalized think tanks and so on. And in particular, uh, by the early 70s, people like Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago were beginning to push it more and more energetically, particularly because the crisis of capitalism was upon the world, uh, and so this was the opening which, through which they would sort of come through.
Um, so, uh, The coup against Allende in Chile was, of course, it was against a social democratic, some would say socialist government. Uh, so that makes sense. You know, the United States is fighting communism everywhere, and we'll come back to that in a second. But the coup in Chile was essentially, as everybody now knows, as People like John Pilger have recorded in wonderful documentaries that the U.
S. A. was definitely behind it. They encouraged the coup. And it wasn't just that they wanted a government to take power, but they wanted the Pinochet government to implement neoliberal policies. Now, why do they want to implement neoliberal policies? Was it because Allende was a communist? I think really in order to understand the Cold War.
The opposition to [02:58:00] communism, you really have to put it in the larger history of imperialism. What do I mean by that? So basically, you know, uh, and by the way, some version of free markets and free trade has been the dominant ideology of most countries. So in the mid, in the 19th century, when Britain was the most powerful country, they advocated free trade to everybody.
Right. Now, why is that? It's not that Britain always scrupulously practice free trade. That is not it. It wants other countries to practice free trade. Why? Because essentially what imperialism needs and wants, apart from controlling societies and so on, what is the purpose of that? And so it is really to open up these societies to the interest, to capitalist interests from first world countries, from the imperialists.
And this is very important to understand. You want to open up these societies. You don't want them to do what is really necessary, which is to, uh, Practice various forms of [02:59:00] protection and state direction in order to develop your economies, because in the history of capitalism, we know that actually contrary to the idea of free trade, the only way in which countries have developed is by actually not opening up, but at least selectively closing.
We're not talking about autarky, but selectively closing your national economy, regulating the inflow and outflow of trade. Inflow and outflow of capital, uh, in order that you can develop your economy. Because if you simply open up your economy, what happens is that, uh, goods from elsewhere, which are produced more cheaply, simply front your markets.
Your own enterprises don't get a chance to to to to produce and so on and in the end it doesn't work really for everybody but the imperialism always wants to open up economies which is why some version of free trade has always been the dominant ideology and this is why they wanted to impose that on uh on Chile because I, the Ahinti government had other ideas.
They had the, uh, the [03:00:00] temerity to think that they could run the Chilean economy in the interest of ordinary Chilean people, and to try to develop their productive capacity and so on and so forth. So in that sense, you know, uh, the purpose of neoliberalism, so, so, so the cornwall, Anticommunism. So, so to understand that is where you have to understand that if governments must always intervene to, uh, to develop their economies, as was seen, for example, in the development of countries like Germany or Japan, or even the United States in its early days, right, just massive state intervention in order to develop because If they had not, the dominant country of that time was Britain and British goods would have simply flooded all markets and not allowed those currencies to develop.
But by the early 20th century, you also began to see the emergence with the Bolshevik revolution. of communist attempts to develop the economy so that, you know, in Russia, it was not possible to allow capitalism to do it as it was in Germany or on the final thing. [03:01:00] So you now saw an alternative way of development, which also involved massive state intervention, and which, by the way, was tremendously successful.
By the end of the 1930s, Russia had already become the second most industrial country in the world. So imagine that, you know, what, uh, and this was done. without the privilege of imperialism. This was done even though most of the capitalist countries were trying to oppose Russia's industrialization. And of course, today we see that in the case of China.
So, uh, so I would say that, uh, the whole purpose of it. So, so, so essentially the anti communism of the Cold War was also a form of imperialism. The point was that And we should not try to develop in this way. The examples of Russia and China should not be imitated by other countries. So the Cold War itself should be seen as a chapter in the long work history of imperialism.
Globalization Is Fracturing. So What Comes Next? - Bloomberg Originals - Air Date 11-9-23
ENDA CURRAN: So right now the world economy is said to be at something of an inflection point.
STEPHANIE FLANDERS: It's a rethinking of globalization and to some extent of regionalization [03:02:00] and it changes everything.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis.
ENDA CURRAN: So in the years after the financial crisis, the conventional western economic capitalist led model came under a lot of scrutiny given the impact that that crisis had on ordinary people.
SHAWN DONNAN: And in 2016, we saw a vote for Brexit, an exit from the European Union.
In the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the U. S.
ENDA CURRAN: That, in extension, triggered a big trade war between China and the U. S.
SHAWN DONNAN: We've seen a global pandemic that has tested those global supply chains and that has led a lot of countries to rethink offshoring production. We're seeing war in the Middle East.
We are seeing coups in Africa. And those conflicts are leading people to question even more the benefits of globalization.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: It was unprovoked, but this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed on Ukraine.
Explosions [03:03:00] rocking several cities, including the capital of Kiev. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was a sort of crystallizing moment for people on both sides of this emerging divide in the global economy.
SHAWN DONNAN: In 2022 at the United Nations, we had a series of votes over condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
BOB RAE: This is illegal invasion. It is illegal occupation. It is a legal annexation, all at gunpoint.
SHAWN DONNAN: Roughly two thirds of the global economy, led by the United States, voted to condemn Russia. The remaining third, we saw countries either abstain or vote to reject any condemnation.
We're seeing billions of dollars in investment in new factories that is now being guided by geopolitics rather than simply economics. And that is really seen when you dig down into the United Nations vote. In 2022, we saw 1. 2 trillion in foreign direct investment in the world. We also [03:04:00] saw 180 billion of that shift from the bloc that refused to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine to the US led bloc condemning Russia's invasion.
The International Monetary Fund found that if you had a full fracturing of the global economy, you would eliminate 7 percent of global GDP. That doesn't sound like much, but it is equivalent to wiping out the French and German economies together.
ENDA CURRAN: China remains, of course, the world's factory floor. It offers scale that no one else does.
Sentiment towards investing there has turned quite negative in recent years.
STEPHANIE FLANDERS: But there's a whole network of global trade that is resting on the interrelationships that have developed between the US and China over the last 20 or 30 years. Many people refer to it as, you know, I'm making the omelette. If you're an American company, you're still going to be very reliant on many things made in China for many years to come.
ENDA CURRAN: There is a [03:05:00] group of economies who are navigating the middle of this geopolitical divide. You can call them the connector economies. They're not in the game of choosing sides. They're attracting factories from the US, factories from China, often located close by or in the same industrial park. They're importing from China, they're selling to the West or vice versa.
STEPHANIE FLANDERS: They can take advantage of their neutrality to get benefits from both sides in this emerging rivalry.
SHAWN DONNAN: In northern Vietnam, you can drive an hour from the Chinese border and into what was once a farm field with water buffaloes and banana trees, you're seeing big factories go up.
Over the last five years, we've seen exports from Vietnam to the United States double. But at the same time, we've seen imports from China into Vietnam double as well.
Places like Poland are now getting huge investment from China and South Korea. And [03:06:00] even U. S. chip makers, as they set themselves up as a link between Europe and the rest of the world.
We're also seeing places like Indonesia, which has vast natural resources, bring together Ford, the U. S. automaker, and Chinese companies, and Brazilian miners. to exploit nickel mines to sell into China or to sell into the United States.
STEPHANIE FLANDERS: If you're a country like Morocco that has a free trade agreement with America, and you already have also quite good relations with China, well then obviously you're in a position to play both sides.
ENDA CURRAN: Mexico is perfectly placed to cash in on this so called fragmentation sitting right on the U. S. border. It's a textbook example of nearshoring but Mexico is also attracting a lot of Chinese investment and that's why it's able to straddle both sides of this divide.
MEXICAN BUSINESS OWNER: Plenty of people talking about what's the sales made in China can sell in the future made in Mexico.
And, uh, right now
we've got the potential. If we get our act [03:07:00] together to get all those consumer goods, electronic consumer goods that went into China to be manufactured in Mexico.
ENDA CURRAN: To be clear, these connector economies in some cases have a long way to go before they have the necessary infrastructure in place.
Motorways, ports, electricity networks. These are all key features that global manufacturers want and need. China, of course, has excelled at that for decades. These other economies are now trying to catch up.
SHAWN DONNAN: We're at the very beginning of this story. The reality is we're not seeing the end of globalization, but we are seeing a reshaping of the global economy. It's an incredibly interlinked global economy that we live in.
ENDA CURRAN: Business will continue to be done. Money will continue to flow around the world. And even though there will be tensions at a government to government level, companies will look for a way around those political divides.
SHAWN DONNAN: But how this happens and the direction we go in the years to come is really going to shape all of our lives.
Decolonization as Advocacy, Pt. 2 w/ Lydia Walker - American Prestige - Air Date 1-28-25
LYDIA WALKER: States in [03:08:00] waiting is my term, but it's a term that many of my interlocutors have found resonant, that they find it, uh, kind of a useful frame, uh, for thinking about their own movements.
And when people who work on other states in waiting, you know, particularly, uh, you know, Kurds, or, um, you know, people working on Biafra, uh, And there's so many others you could it's kind of an endless category If when they find it resonant, then that's excellent. Uh, but these histories are also quite particular Um elsewhere i've written about tibet and tibetan's use of advocacy uh and how um Transnational advocacy emanating from india and the united states ends up turning the tibetan nationalist claim into a humanitarian commodity Um, so that this is you know The, the, the relationship between advocacy and claims making [03:09:00] transform is mutually transformative and it can also be mutually undermining.
So states and waiting really shows how it can be mutually undermining, uh, whereby the end, it's kind of the, uh, inherent weakness of the n claim that makes them reliant on. Advocacy for so long, while movements that become states like Zambia, they, you know, cut their ties with their former advocates, um, when they're no longer useful.
And then, of course, that no longer, lack of utility then means that the advocates have to move on to other things. Other projects. Um, so, you know, but at the same time, I mean, we see there remain lots of states in waiting. Uh, they use transnational advocacy networks. They call them other things in the political science literature often is referred to as rebel diplomacy.
Uh, so then this actual engagement [03:10:00] continues. And, um, I think that it's, We need to think about the relationship between the two because they're not the same thing and they don't necessarily have the same aim. Uh, but then who is, who has the upper hand? They also change over time, though generally it's the advocates, uh, not the claimants.
DANIEL BESSNER - HOST, AMERICAN PRESTIGE: And then just a final question, obviously decolonization is a process that is ongoing, but I think it's fair to say it's major moments past. What is the state of this process in the 2020s? Where does it stand today? And what, what could we quote unquote learn not in a lesson sense, but in terms of understanding the world from your research?
LYDIA WALKER: So I end, uh, States in Waiting with, um, indigenous claims making. And how some Nagas, not all, but some have turned to [03:11:00] a language of global indigeneity to make claims in international politics. The UN has a, uh, 2007. uh, declaration on the rights of indigenous populate, uh, indigenous peoples. And in some ways you can chart a kind of an interesting trajectory from the declaration of grant on the granting of independence in 1960 through the friendly nations, uh, declaration that kind of really limits.
Uh, the kinds of peoples that can claim independence, uh, through, uh, the UN, uh, Declaration on Indigenous Peoples, which I argue really separates self determination from sovereignty. Because what it does, it says that now the United Nations can recognize all these kinds of non state self determinations.
But they're not sovereignty. And that's separate. So that's kind of a huge change, [03:12:00] uh, from, uh, the world of the 1960s. Uh, but also that these claimants are really practical. Uh, they are going to, you know, they're going to make claims based on nationalism, human rights, humanitarianism, uh, indigeneity that they can get traction with in international politics.
Uh, and these are claims of autonomy. These are, uh, claims of, um, self determination. Uh, but who is the political self in question that gets to determine that? And, uh, and most importantly for my own work as an international historian, what is the international context in which they're doing it? Uh, and how that does change over time.
Pretty radically, but the claims themselves often do not.
Why Oligarchy Falls (And How to Speed It Up) - Legendary Lore - Air Date 1-13-25
HOST, LEGENDARY LORE: Think about what happens when any group or individual becomes too comfortable in a position of power.
At first, they try to justify their privileges, their job creators. They do it [03:13:00] for the people. They are saving the economy. Think of the children, and so on. But gradually, something shifts. The justifications become thinner, more perfunctory. Eventually, they stop bothering to justify at all. Public resources become their personal piggy bank, public institutions their private tool set, and public concerns are barely worth acknowledging.
This is exactly when they look strongest on the surface. They've got everything under their control. The money, the power, everything. Look at how the Thirty Tyrants controlled Athens. They had all the weapons, all the wealth, total formal authority. They thought they were showing strength by ruthlessly eliminating critics, hoarding wealth, and crushing dissent.
Yet they were creating the perfect conditions for their own overthrow. What makes this pattern so important is how it reveals the paradox of power. Strength becoming weakness. Control breeding its own instability. When those in charge respond to challenges by becoming more controlling, they often [03:14:00] accelerate their own decline.
Their harsh policies alienate potential allies. Their visible excesses create silent resentment. Their internal rivalries fracture their unity. Think of it like holding sand. The tighter you squeeze, the more it slips through your fingers. The more they crush descent, the more they create the conditions for their own undoing.
They lose touch with reality. Lose critical feedback. Lose the legitimate authority that originally let them govern. It's not that they become weak. They still have all the surface power. But they become brittle. And that brittleness, more than any external enemy, is what ultimately threatens their rule.
But perhaps most importantly for those watching closely, this pattern reveals moments of opportunity for the oppressed. Because understanding these phases is not just about predicting decline, it's about recognizing opportunities. Each phase has its own vulnerabilities, its own pressure points, and its own possibilities for transformation.
And this brings us to the crucial question. How do you recognize when [03:15:00] a system is entering its vulnerable phases? What subtle signs signal that change might be possible? Because, as Aristotle observed, timing often matters more than strength. So how do we know when change is nigh for oligarchy, specifically?
Aristotle observed several critical indicators that often converge to create what we could call a perfect storm. The first sign is perhaps the most obvious, yet often misunderstood. When public dissatisfaction flares up, it's not really the volume of complaints that matters. It's their nature. The oligarchs can handle protests against a new tax on farmland.
They can manage complaints about inflation. And they love when isolated issues like minimum wages or subsidies release some pent up steam. But Aristotle observed that while a state can handle many types of protests, the real danger comes when people stop believing the state serves its proper end, the good life and virtue of its citizens.[03:16:00]
So, when protests shift from specific grievances to fundamental questions of justice, not just, is this fair, but is our whole system serving its purpose? That's when things are about to boil over. This total erosion of legitimacy typically happens in three distinct but interconnected ways. First, while Aristotle recognized the importance of private property, he warned against the wealthy treating common things as their own.
Like when public spaces become effectively private, when shared infrastructure serves only elite interests, when common goods like water, and in our times, airwaves and digital networks, become de facto personal property of the economic political class. Second, Aristotle was particularly concerned when the laws and customs that the oligarchs themselves established start being ignored whenever convenient.
They impose austerity on the masses while they themselves live in luxury. They praise competition until they need to crush rivals. They talk about innovation while [03:17:00] blocking new ideas that might threaten their position. As Aristotle noted, this hypocrisy undermines the very foundation of law which should apply equally to all.
Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, when rulers become disconnected from the virtues and values they're supposed to exemplify. Aristotle believed that legitimate rule required not just wealth or power, but moral excellence. If oligarchs from their isolated positions push radical social transformations while being entirely disconnected from their impacts on ordinary communities, if they advocate for fundamental changes to how people live, work, and live.
All while being insulated from the consequences of these changes, they hold in contempt the very cultural traditions and social bonds that most communities consider essential to their way of life. The gap becomes no longer just economic, but moral and cultural. This triple erosion of public resources, of rules for thee, not for me, and of shared cultural values [03:18:00] creates a fundamental crisis of legitimacy.
But the thing is, Aristotle observed that public dissatisfaction alone rarely triggers change. What makes a moment truly critical is when it combines with internal division among the ruling class itself. While studying different city states, he noticed that oligarchies often fall, not from external pressure, But from disputes among those in power.
For example, between different business interests, preventing them from presenting a united front. When oligarchs start infighting over market regulations or resource control, they create openings they'd never allow if united. And the final crucial sign of changing winds is the emergence of new leaders and voices.
But not always where you'd expect. The crucial voices often don't come from traditional opposition. They come from entrepreneurs who've built independent economic power, from respected professionals who've stayed above factional disputes, and from people who can bridge different social [03:19:00] classes and interest groups.
Crucially, Aristotle observed that change leading to a more just system, rather than change to some other oligarchy or tyranny, must involve the middle class. Positive change has to come through those who occupy a middle position between extremes of wealth and poverty, those who have enough property to be independent, but not so much as to be corrupted by luxury.
What makes the middle class effective is their ability to combine virtue with practical wisdom. They aren't typically the most radical voices calling for revolution, nor are they part of the established oligarchy. Instead, they are ordinary people who understand both what is good and what is possible, a combination Aristotle saw as essential for any meaningful political change.
Most importantly, leaders representing the middle class succeed because they understand what Aristotle considered the true purpose of the state. Not just stability or wealth, but the good life that comes through the practice of virtue. [03:20:00] So how does this help us understand when and how to act?
Interpreting Aristotle's observations suggests a few crucial approaches. First, build alternative sources of power. They don't need to, and probably shouldn't, be direct confrontations with oligarchic authority. Instead, focus on creating independent economic networks, developing new technologies, or establishing cultural institutions that operate outside traditional power structures.
Think of it as building a parallel system, rather than directly confronting the existing one. This is exactly what emerging merchant classes did in many Greek cities, gradually accumulating influence through trade networks that the traditional power base couldn't control as easily. Second, form intentional coalitions but not the kind you might imagine.
Successful challenges to entrenched power rarely come from single interest groups. Instead, effective transformations happen when different people find common cause. Consider [03:21:00] how in many Greek city states, the emerging commercial class often allied with small farmers against the traditional landed upper class.
Today, this could, for example, mean bringing together tech innovators frustrated by monopolistic practices, traditional businesses, and middle class citizens seeking economic stability and a normal life. Third, understand and exploit system weaknesses. When oligarchies abuse their power, they create openings.
Think about it this way, every time oligarchs break their own stated principles, they create what we might call legitimacy gaps, or a discrepancy between the expectations of how leaders should act and how they actually act. The key is matching your response to their specific contradictions. When they champion meritocracy while practising nepotism, document and publicise clear cases of unearned privilege.
When they compromise courts, utilise dispute resolution systems. When they preach free markets but [03:22:00] practise monopoly, rally the natural coalition of small business owners crushed by unfair competition and consumers tired of inflated prices. Your responses should not only challenge existing power, but demonstrate a better way forward.
Turn their contradictions into stepping stones toward positive change. Each of these compensating moves creates new vulnerabilities, new contradictions, and new potential points of leverage. As Archimedes said, Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world.
Fourth, and this is crucial, develop political virtue. It's not just about personal morality, it's about building the capacity for effective action. An oligarchy's greatest weakness often lies in its inability to generate genuine loyalty or collective purpose. They rule through power rather than legitimate authority.
Your advantage is the ability to create genuine communities of interest and purpose. Last but perhaps most important, cultivate what we [03:23:00] might call strategic patience. It's easy to swallow the proverbial black pill when things seem hopeless. But remember, oligarchies often appear strongest just before they begin to crack.
Their very efforts to maintain absolute control frequently generate the conditions for their own transformation.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or our upcoming topics. We're going to be looking at the shifting landscape of the media as corporations attempt to position themselves to avoid attacks from Trump, and the suddenly obvious emergence of oligarchy both at home and abroad. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. You can now reach us on the privacy-focused messaging app, Signal, at the username BestoftheLeft.01. There's a link in the show notes for that. Or simply email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show today included clips from [03:24:00] Uncivilized, Community Church of Boston, Geopolitical Economy Report, MacDecey Street, The New Statesman, Vox, Macrodose, BBC News, The Europeans, The Bunker, TLDR News EU, DW News, Focus on Africa, The Majority Report, The Thom Hartmann Program, The Real News Network, The Red Nation Podcast, Bloomberg Originals, and American Prestige. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Dion Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting.
And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple [03:25:00] Podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms you might be joining these days.
So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.Com.
