Richard D. Wolff Quotes

The underlying reality of most people, which is reflected in our politics, is one of bitterness and anger and resentment that they are not participating in this so-called recovery. And now the rich are also facing the falling apart of this house of cards as the market tumbles down. And poor Mr. Trump, having staked his reputation on a rising market, is now confronted with a declining one and is looking for a scapegoat, which Mr. Powell, his own appointee, is providing to him.

The second reason I focus on capitalism is that the responses to today's economic collapse by Trump, the GOP and most Democrats carefully avoid any criticism of capitalism. They all debate the virus, China, foreigners, other politicians, but never the system they all serve. When Trump and others press people to return to churches and jobs—despite risking their and others' lives—they place reviving a collapsed capitalism ahead of public health.

Let me give you an example: simply the People's Republic of China. They're having a bad year, they're only growing...ready? 6.5%. Which is lower than what they've been able to do for most of the last 15 or 20 years. The Chinese economy has become the second most important in the world because they systematically grow, you got it, faster than the United States. The real wages of Chinese workers, the average amount of money they get adjusted for inflation, has quadrupled in the last 12, 15 years. What happened to the average wage in America, adjusted for inflation? It hardly budged. It went up single digits, not 3-4 times. The experience of the economies in these two countries could not be more different. Excluding that from the conversation - prancing around as if the economy here is the envy of the world - that's not just nonsense. That's straight out lying; and it is meant to position himself as the special person.

Companies around the world cannot make plans, cannot make investments, cannot make assumptions about what’s going to happen, because we don’t know what he’s going to do, we don’t know what the Chinese are going to do. But, you know, there’s a more deep historical problem here. And it’s really American history. When we became an independent nation, it was partly because we were held back—tea party, remember?—by the British. They had a rule: They wanted the colony to be subordinate. We didn’t want to do that as Americans, and we ended up pushing back against the control, the effort to hold back American development. We went to two wars: the Revolutionary War and, again, the War of 1812. The history records are not good about trying to squelch an upcoming economic power. China is today’s upcoming economic power. The effort to squelch and stop it is both likely to fail and extremely dangerous, because these trade wars have a nasty habit of becoming military.

We’ve had an economy that never really escaped the crash of 2008. In a way, the last 10 years have been an economy on life support: vast amounts of money pumped into the economy; record drops in s, inviting everybody—business, individuals, governments—to borrow money—a debt-sustained situation. And after a while, you can’t mount up the debt on the basis of an economy that hasn’t really gotten going. And we’re seeing the eventual break. You know, the capitalist system has a downturn every four to seven years. It’s had that for centuries. And the last big downturn was 2008 and '09. So, if you do four and seven, and you add it to nine, we're due for one. And every major stock market observer, bank and so on predicts that we’re having a downturn. So it’s really only a question of exactly when. And the stock market anticipates this. And so we’re having, in a way, economic chickens coming home to roost. And the notion that it’s just the Fed’s policy that explains this is really the kind of remark that would get a student a very low grade in any economics course.

The wealth gap between rich and poor is the result of a board of directors dividing up the profits and keeping the lion’s share for themselves.

The problem of policies aimed to return the economy to what it was before the virus hit is this: Global capitalism, by 2019, was itself a major cause of the collapse in 2020. Capitalism's scars from the crashes of 2000 and 2008-2009 had not healed. Years of low interest rates had enabled corporations and governments to "solve" all their problems by borrowing limitlessly at almost zero interest rate cost. All the new money pumped into economies by s had indeed caused the feared inflation, but chiefly in stock markets whose prices consequently spiraled dangerously far away from underlying economic values and realities. Inequalities of and wealth reached historic highs. ​In short, capitalism had built up vulnerabilities to another crash that any number of possible triggers could unleash. The trigger this time was not the dot.com meltdown of 2000 or the sub-prime meltdown of 2008/9; it was a virus. And of course, mainstream ideology requires focusing on the trigger, not the vulnerability. Thus mainstream policies aim to reestablish pre-virus capitalism. Even if they succeed, that will return us to a capitalist system whose accumulated vulnerabilities will soon again collapse from yet another trigger.

When workers make the decisions, you stop outsourcing jobs, you stop the wealth gap, you stop inequality.

Workers must form worker-run cooperatives. Then we can buy goods and services only from worker-run cooperatives, and that would end global sweatshop slavery.

A country that promises it is committed to democracy has never faced the fact that in the enterprise we don’t have democracy. We have a tiny group of people making all the decisions. And that’s not a good idea. And maybe now we can face that the decisions they’ve made, individually and collectively, have plunged us into a situation where we cannot afford the luxury of not facing basic questions about how our economy is organized. We should have done it for the last 50 years. Maybe this new generation of young people coming into the Congress will begin that conversation and, hopefully, bring us along into a national debate on these subjects, which is long overdue.

Well, you know, easiest way to summarize it: We have been following—and, unfortunately, Democrats, too—something called trickle-down economics. We do economic policy where we help the folks at the top—we bail out the big banks, we give a tariff benefit—and we hope it trickles down, which it rarely does. First thing they can do, reverse it. Let’s do trickle-up economics. You help the people at the bottom, in all the different ways that we know how to do because the FDR regime back in the ’30s did a lot of that. So we know how to do it. [...] Do it—well, put people to work. Put people to work doing socially useful things at a decent income, not working in a fast-food restaurant under unbearable personal situations. Here’s another one: this greening of America. There’s a project that could help millions of people in a direct way. Let’s kind of do that.

Now, do you think workers would vote to unequally redistribute profits? Of course not. They would vote for equitable distribution.

We did them before. The minimum wage should be raised, and dramatically. We should be helping all the kinds of people who have been denied help. We should be making sure that jobs are secure, that jobs have proper benefits, that we’re enhancing the benefits—all the things that could help the folks at the bottom have the money to spend, that will trickle up into the profits and revenues of business. That’s a more humane system. And, you know, even if it doesn’t work as much as we want it to, at least we will have helped the majority of people. What we have now is trickle-down, that helps those of the top, and then, when it doesn’t trickle down, what have we got? We’ve helped those at the top—again. The focus on trickle-up would be an alternation in our policy that’s long overdue.

The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at the economies collapsed in response to the coronavirus threat. s create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks "to get them through the crisis." Government treasuries borrow vast sums to get the collapsed economy back into what they imagine is "the normal, pre-virus economy." Capitalism's leaders are rushing into policy failures because of their ideological blinders.

And here's the third and most important point about this president's bizarre speech: not one word was uttered about inequality. It is the starkest feature of American economic life in the last 40 years. It has gotten worse literally every year, and with the tax cut of 2017, Mr. Trump added his extra to making the inequality even greater than it had been before. Corporations would give an enormous amount of money; back they used it to speculate in the stock market; buy back the shares of their own companies, boosting the amount of money that executives and shareholders get; widening the inequality.