Richard Wolff: The End of the US Empire and the Denial of the US, and the Rise of China and BRICS

did I want to get into the talk I have for you today but I want to begin by reminding you of a famous saying it goes like this please don't shoot the messenger just because you don't like the message I am not responsible for the conditions that we face as a nation today but I I am not going to sugarcoat what the situation is my guess is you already know it in your hearts and in the backs of your minds if not in the front and if you had any doubt the last week's election results

probably removed them so I thought it might be useful if we took stock of where we are here on the 10th of November 2024 and by taking stock I mean economics above all else I do that because I think that's a core part of our situation about which Americans are extraordinarily poorly informed I also do it because it's what I do for a living and it's what I study and I feel an obligation morally ethically to share with you what is going on to make sure that however difficult it may be to face it we

will because that's our best chance to work out out of it and to get Beyond it which surely we need to do okay let me get into it then and I'll try to make it as brief as such a task could possibly be I do believe we are at a major transition point in the history of the United States and probably of the whole whole world I know that sounds grandiose and I don't normally talk in grandiose terms but the situation calls for it and as I say I'm not going to shrink away from why

I think this so let me Begin by telling you why I think it's such an important moment in our history for most of the last 50 years roughly since 1970 the dominant economic reality of the global economy and of the United States as the major player and shaper of that global economy in the last 50 years that period can be characterized by many names but the one that economists use is the phrase neoliberal globalization and here's what it means that in an era that we remember with names like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher we turned

away from the legacy of the new deal we turned away as did many other countries from the notion that a catastrophe like the Great Depression of the 1930s required that government play a major role in keeping capitalism tolerable for the mass of people remember what we did in the 1930s we established Social Security that had never existed before in the United States we established a minimum wage that had never existed before in the United States we established unemployment insurance that had never existed before in the United States and the government hired and paid $5 million

people who were unemployed and nothing like that had ever happened in the United States either the government was called in to do all these things in the words of one clever thinker to give capitalism a human face and it was paid for because it was very expensive as you can imagine to give every elderly American a social security check every month for the rest of their lives to give unemployed people a check every week for a year or two to hire 15 million people and the money that paid for all of that were heavy taxes

placed on cour corporations and the rich it's an important reminder for those of you who do not think that here in the United States we can ever tax corporations and the rich it's an important reminder of course we can because we already did as the remembrance oh and footnote the politician who had the courage to tax corporations in the Rich Franklin Roosevelt was reelected president three consecutive times he has been and is to this moment the most successful popular president in the history of the United States starting with George Washington so not only can you

tax corporations and the rich but when we had a president who was forced From Below to do it he became the most popular politician we've ever had in the period starting 1970 as the memory of of the new deal as it was called faded Reagan and fer undertook to roll the New Deal back it had already begun before that but it really gathered Steam and the Mantra was the reverse of the New Deal instead of calling the government in to give capitalism a human face people stumbled over one another led by the Republicans but tragically

followed by the Democrats to roll the government back to get the government out of the economy to go back to a capitalism which if I may be allowed to continue the metaphor lacks a human face as the songs we just heard today document and over the last 50 years the government not only didn't regulate the way it once did didn't intervene the way it once did but it blessed the decision of corporate America to go where the prophets were the greatest which is what capitalism normally does and where were Prophets The Greatest answer China starting

in the 1970s we had a mammoth Exodus and not like the one in the Bible no this was an exodus of American corporate leaders they had graduated from business school where they had been taught parentheses I have taught in business Business Schools myself I know the curriculum they were taught if you want to succeed in business go to where the wages are low and the market is expanding the place where the wages were low and the Markus was expanding the most was in the land called The People's Republic of China and American corporations British and

French and German and Italian and Japanese they all went to China where they were welcomed where they were celebrated and over the last 40 to 50 years the Chinese economy grew about half the economy there is capitalist private companies working pretty much the way they do here the other half of the Chinese economy is government owned and operated Enterprises working the way they once did in places like the Soviet Union China is a hybrid between the US and the Soviet Union different from both because it's a mixed situation and it turns out that under the

leadership of the Chinese maong and the ones that have come since him it turns out this hybrid organization can grow faster than any other economic system the world has ever seen for the last 30 years China has grown its economy its GDP its gross domestic product between 6 and 9% per year during that time the United States GDP grew between two and 3% a year it doesn't take rocket science to understand that if you can manage that difference if China can grow two to three times faster than the United States for 30 years it can

do what it has now done namely it's caught up today the United United States has a competitor economically we haven't had one for a century World War II eliminated the potential competitors economically of the United States Britain France Italy Germany and Japan all destroyed in and by that war Russia too Russia never was an economic competitor it isn't now either the GDP of the United States right now is about 25 trillion dollar the GDP of Russia about now is three maybe four trillion no contest it never was it's part part of why the entire Cold

War will have to be Revisited so Americans can finally learn what the truth about all of this is well here we are and what has happened has been that the United States now faces for the first time in a century an economic competitor big powerful highly developed and able to outcompete the United States across the board from the lowest to the highest technology which either side is capable of and the United States has not yet come to terms with this situation the American people are Eng engaged in what my psychotherapist wife explains to me is

called [Music] denial the pretense mostly to yourself that the reality around you isn't there it's best understood when glimpsing a toddler confronted by a scary barking dog and the toddler puts his or her her hands in front of her eyes comforted by the thought that if you can't see the dog it isn't there but we all know you grow up and at a certain point not many years later you come to understand you can put your hand there but it doesn't make the dog disappear China's going nowhere China is growing by the way lest you

think any of this is in the past let me give you right now what the rate of growth of economic output is for 2024 this year these I'm about to give you are the estimates of the IMF the international monetary fund which monitors all of this economic growth for the United States 2024 will be 2.8% right on target with what it's been on and off for a long time the economic growth of People's Republic of China this year will be 4.8% nearly double and the economic growth of India will be 7% the next time you

hear an American politician or you read in an American newspaper how the American economy is doing better than anyone in the world please remember the word denial that kind of statement which I encounter almost every day is the exact equivalent of a toddler putting fingers in front of her eyes or knows in hoping that the scary dog will go away not only have the Chinese outgrown us but they have built an alliance with other countries that are recognizing that what was true for the last 75 years a global economy dominated by the United States as

the country that came out of World War II with no bombs that fell on it other than Pearl Harbor and less damage than any other Syria developed country the Chinese have built an alliance called The Bricks BR I CS you don't hear as much about it as you ought to it started a few years ago Brazil Russia India China and South Africa five countries a year and a half ago six more joined and three weeks ago 13 more joined the bricks together is more than half the population of this planet the United States is 4

and a half% not 50% of this planet the total output of goods and services in the bricks is significantly larger already than the total output of the United States and its major allies known as the G7 the United States Canada Japan Britain France Germany and Italy so now every country in the world every company in the world is reassessing and redesigning its strategy for the future and what do I mean they're redesigning because the dominant player in the world of the last 70 years the United States isn't the dominant player anymore there is a bigger

player richer player in the bricks which means if you're going to build a railroad in your country you don't just go to Washington or London or Paris you may go to them but you're going to ask them what offer they can make and then you're going to compare it to what you can get from Beijing New Delhi and South Paulo and in case after case the choice is made to go with the bricks not the West so what do I mean I mean to tell you all that if you asked me to tell you what

is the biggest reality we now have to face it's the end of the American Empire what we inherited from the British because they had the last empire before this one is now over and there is zero chance it's coming back it ought to have been a central issue in the presidential election we just had instead the two candidates and their parties worked overtime to practice denial no such a thing the war in Ukraine just to take one of countless examples will show you how costly this denial is when the war begins in February of 2022

President Biden told us along with all of his officials Russia would be brought to its knees the Russian currency the ruble would collapse the entire West would side with Ukraine against the Russian invasion and would defeat the Russians none of that happened every part of that prediction proved false why because the way Russia was to be brought to its knees was by denying the market for Russian oil and gas whose export the Russians depend on it's a major industry for them and they exported all of that energy to Western Europe when the Western Europeans under

pressure from the United States closed their markets to Russia the expectation was that Russia would collapse instead Russia went to its allies in the bricks above all China and India and arranged to sell to them the oil and gas they no longer sold to the Europeans as a result Russia is growing faster this year than the United States and it has grown at a faster rate than the United States throughout the war you couldn't be more mistaken than this that's what it means If you deny a reality all right let me take tell you the

next step of this because it drives home the point what we know about the history of every other Empire that also grew was powerful and then died was that the ride up as you're growing is a lot more fun and pleasant than the ride down when when you're dying the ride up was the 20th century which many of you like me lived through we now have to figure out how we desend when our Empire is dying what the United States is doing is typical denial has always been there you can travel to Britain today and

encounter no small number of people who still imagine that the British Empire is still there witness the inauguration ceremonies for King Charles who's the king of nobody what is this here's how it works in the United States people who are rich and Powerful are offloading the costs of a declining Empire off of themselves they don't want to suffer which I understand but if the economy is going down which it is and the people at the top are keeping theirs which they are then the rest of us the middle class the lower classes the poor we're

going to be taking it on the chin more and more and let me give you just a few of the examples the inflation we just went through that's a way of lowering the standard of living of large numbers of people which they felt acutely as they went and paid six bucks for a g a dozen eggs or everything else they know they're suffering my guess no chance for Mr Trump without that inflation it gave him the Victory and it cost kamla Harris the loss but it's not the only thing let me give you other examples

which an economist stares at with astonishment the minimum wage at the federal level in the United States right now is $725 per hour a sum of money on which nobody can live when was the last time it was raised 2009 that's 15 years ago in every one of those 15 years inflation raised the prices here in the United States of food clothing shelter and everything else some years it went up a lot some years it went up only a little but it went up and what did we do to the people to whom we paid

the lowest salary $725 we we didn't raise it Republicans didn't raise it Democrats didn't raise it you know what that is that's cruel and unusual punishment given to people whose crime is that they're poorly paid in the first place what kind of a country does that a declining Empire whose rich and Powerful are busy offloading the costs of that decline onto everybody else here's another sign our real wages have been stagnant for 30 to 40 years in other words if you measure as we do in economics the average wage in dollars paid to American workers

and you adjust that to the prices they have to pay when they spend their wages it's been going up somewhere around 1 half of 1% a year that's called stagnation that mean your wage isn't going anywhere by the way in contrast the average real wages in the People's Republic of China have quadrupled over the same 30 years if you want to understand why the government in China is secure why it is powerful why economic growth there is celebrated I just gave you the statistic their average wage quadrupled the average wage in the United States went

nowhere that's not even close friends and if you didn't know that since everything I'm telling you is easily verifiable in a thous government statistics then you understand what I mean by denial we are therefore experiencing in this country an extraordinary deepening of inequality at the end of World War II the United States was less unequal than European countries today we are more unequal than every European country how did that happen well on the one hand when corporations went to China and took advantage of low wages and a growing Market it made a fortune for those

corporations and therefore for the top 10% of Americans who own shares just a footnote the top 10% richest American own 80% of the stocks and bonds they did well the rest of us we are experiencing a declining Empire which those at the top don't want you to think about they're managing it quite well we cannot that inequality together with the inflation gives you Mr Trump's Victory and the bitterness and divisiveness that is suffusing this economy and still nobody willing to face these realities or to speak about them let me conclude by telling you that it

this is important to understand not only as our our past and not even only as our present as in the election we just had but also in our future this denial this refusal to face the realities of the economy we have and that is shaping our lives and even more those of our children promises us frightening near future I'm only going to give you two examples because I don't want to overstay my welcome with you but I do want to leave you with useful information to navigate the immediate future Mr Trump won the election because

he positioned himself with dramatic gestures the sort favored by Madison Avenue advertisers and the the two gestures were I am the great protector Mr Trump understood far better than the Democrats that people feel attacked under mind Ed frightened scared worried for themselves and their children as well they should be they Glimpse fearfully where things are going they want to be protected from it all so he put himself forward as the great protector and his two images were walls the image of a protector he's going to put a steel wall at the southern border to protect

us against the invasion of the immigrants and then he's going to put another wall a tariff wall to protect us against the evil Chinese very powerful images very successful but in terms of economics total incoherent nonsense let me explain and then I will conclude we have 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants that's according to the Department of Homeland Security we are a population of 33 30 million Americans do the math 10 to 12 of the poorest people in the country those immigrants are not the explanation for the economic difficulties of this rich country of 330

million people the very idea of that is ridiculous an undergraduate who wrote such a thing would be called in by their teacher and told try to think through what you're saying before you say it the real economic problems and they are real of the United States have to do with what I just spent 20 minutes going over with you they don't depend on more more or less immigrants on the other hand if Mr Trump now deports five or 10 of these 10 to 12 million immigrants which he has threatened to do there will be consequences

why because undocumented immigrants are the most abused of our working class an undocumented immigrant who asks for his pay on Friday afternoon and is told by his employer sorry I don't have the money has no recourse he can't go to the police he's an undocumented immigrant he doesn't want to get anywhere near any office of the government he will not complain he he can't he's like a slave and that's how they're treated the construction industry in this country is a major employer if it doesn't have undocumented in uh employees it'll have to pay Americans and

you know what it'll have to pay them a hell of a lot more than they're paying the terrified undocumented immigrant and that will mean the cost of construction will zoom up and you know what that does it worsens our uhhuh inflation Mr Trump either can't do it for that reason or he will produce an inflation that will overnight turn him from savior to demon in the eyes of his own followers then there's the second wall the Tariff wall let me remind everyone what a tariff is it's just a tax it's the name given to a

particular kind of tax namely the tax charged to an American importer when that person brings something produced overseas into the United States to be sold it means Mr Trump a republican who is against taxes is proposing an enormous tax increase and while he keeps saying he's hitting the Chinese with a tariff it's not the Chinese who pay for tariffs it's Americans the American importer will pay much more that person will then charge more to the consumer you and me and you know what that means an inflation which he can't have yet he proposes these counting

on the American people to be into denial not to interrogate any of this to sit there and have debates as if there's something to debate the debate is a distraction it's a way of not dealing with your problem because you're too frightened of letting it be debated lest it go where it might bite you and we are we are run by a community of businessmen and women in charge of our corporations in including our mass media who are not going to do it Mr Trump's economic proposals whatever else you think of them are economically incoherent

it's great advertising I'm protecting you with my walls it's wonderful but when it comes now to governing it's impossible and it's a bad joke and the whole whole world is watching and while it's watching this bad joke unfold the gap between the United States and the G7 on one hand and the People's Republic of China and the bricks on the other deepens the United States's effort to stop block undercut China have failed been doing it now for 15 years started big time under Obama it doesn't work it doesn't work and so the question is what

do you keep doing it let me conclude by reminding all of us of the early history of the United States in which your city Boston was such an important player when the United States's people wanted to become independent of George III the dominant King of the Great British Empire it ended up in a war the war of 1774 5 and six our independence war and to the surprise of everybody the British lost in 1812 they tried again again and they lost again after that the British decided okay we'll have to work out an arrangement and

the United States Arrangement was you're independent you can take Latin America that was the Monroe Doctrine that happened a few years after that and Britain took the rest Asia AA Africa was theirs they avoided a war after that for a century what will the United States do continue its denial of what's going on threaten as they have China with war despite the fact that China has nuclear weapons and the Russians do too and they are now Allied in good part because of the United States or are we going to sit down and work something out

are we going to tell the American people honestly our Empire is declining the next one looks to be Chinese or if it isn't Chinese it's going to be a multinational replacement or the kind of dominance that the Persians or the Dutch or the British or the Americans operated the world is changing very fundamentally we are living as I said a half hour ago at a time of enormously profound change and our job as Americans is to stop behaving childishly in this game of thinking that the problems I've barely sketched don't have to be worried about

because we can continue to act as if we were in charge in the way we were in the 1960s and 70s we aren't nothing like that we we are the war in Ukraine is lost for those of you who don't keep track is over except for signing the documents Russia won Ukraine and the West lost the war in Gaza isolates the United States indeed what historians will say when they look back on this time will be that the United States undertook to isolate and neutralize the dangers after World War II first in the Soviet Union

then in China then in the global socialist world nowadays in what are you euphemistically called authoritarian societies but the end result of the plan to isolate the rest of the world going through through these efforts was to isolate the United States itself we and Israel are standing all alone in that part of the world and the Europeans whose world is collapsed they're economically a basket case and you know why what the ba major reason is that Europe is gone as a player because they relied on two things exporting to China which the Chinese don't need

and cheap energy from Russia which they have turned away from so the energy costs make European production un uncompetitive they have to pay too much for energy and they can't sell in China the way they once did they're done Germany which used to be the engine of European growth is now the lagger dragging it down it really is extraordinary folks that what you have thought about and assumed is now over and it takes courage but also a sense of realism to say now we are going to talk honestly about our situation and try to find

a livable Way Forward the alternative well I don't want to spell it out you can figure it out for yourself but I hope you will not hold against me that I have told you how this situation really is rather than comforting you with more denial but if I have failed which I understand I may well have then I have good news for you if you want to wallow in denial just turn on the radio and the television and this evening it will all go away as you get told that the great issues of our time

are those carefully excluding everything I have told you thank you very much for your attention I really admire what the Community Church in Boston stands for what it always has I'm proud to have been invited the list of folks on those cassettes uh that Dean showed us a few minutes ago puts me in extraordinarily revered company and with the songs that Rob started us with I feel very much at home and I hope this has been of some interest to [Applause] you Richard wolf folks thank you so so much