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LOGO DAEDALUS: Well, I just wanted to say thank you. First off, your books have been extremely important to me. I’ve done, I think, some good work in helping to popularize them on Twitter or X, I guess we’re calling it these days.

But when I first found your work, I was really coming from more of a literary studies sort of perspective. I studied Russian literature and Russian in college, and was mostly interested in literature, and then slowly became interested in economics, more from a literary perspective.

In your one of your interviews about your biography, you described going into musical composition, classical composition, and then finding a sort of aesthetic satisfaction in the study of economics.

I found that very inspiring personally, because I feel sort of the same way. The appeal to Marx and other political economists like Veblen and guys like that, guys like yourself, was that they gave me the same satisfaction of reading a great novel, especially like a great satirical novel. And that’s been sort of my interest in all of this… how economics is sort of an outgrowth of literary satire, and the genre of the anatomy that people like Northrop Frye would describe. So I think of you as like the greatest living satirist in the world – you make me laugh more than anyone in the whole world. So thank you.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you understand where my mentality is at.

LOGO DAEDALUS: If there’s any question I could start off with – I’m sure you’re going to cover this in the book you’re working on. I‘ve been a long time follower of your work. So I’m waiting patiently for the next book in the cycle on debt covering the crusades and onward, because that’s a particular interest of mine from a literary perspective on Christian hermeneutics. The translation of the Lord’s Prayer was a major thing for me – the “forgive us our debts” and whatnot. Tying this into material economics really opened all of this up for me.

So I believe you referred to a specific school of the Catholics, men who come up with the justification for charging interest on debts, but under a different name, so it doesn’t qualify as usury. I was wondering if you could go into detail about when specifically you would say this shift happened and under what dispensation?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, funny, you should put the question that way about literary

discussion, because most of the discussions about economics in the 13th and 14th Century – and that’s when the schoolmen were coming up with their justification of interest – the best discussions were all of a literary character, of course, by Dante. I mean Dante describes putting all the usurers back in the seventh circle of hell.

And there was a kind of theme of usurers being put together with the sodomites, in the sense that they said lending is sterile. Lending does not produce an economic return for the borrower. The borrower has pay the interest out of whatever they earn elsewhere.

If it’s the government borrowing money to go wage war, then it has to levy taxes, and this reduces the population. If it’s an individual who borrows from a usurer, then they have to cut back their consumption or lose their property, or lose their economic freedom and fall into debt bondage.

So it’s the literary people that describe this, just like in Greek and Roman history. It’s the literary writers that describe what was happening in the creditor landowning oligarchy that ended up stifling Rome. Also, in the 20th Century it was the literary historians that won the Nobel Literature Prize for writing about antiquity, or were nominated… people like Theodor Mommsen and Guglielmo Ferraro. They were viewed as literary historians.

Economists don’t talk about debt, they don’t talk about finance, they don’t talk about interest, or how it began at all, because it didn’t begin in the private sector. It was the Catholic Church that created and sponsored the first international banking in the 12th and 13th Century. And they sponsored it because the Roman church wanted to essentially take over all of Christianity, and the crusades were waged mainly against Christians.

The official crusade, the first real crusade, was in southern Italy and Sicily by Robert Guiscard. The Catholic Church asked, who are we going to get to kill the Christians that don’t agree with us? Who are we going to get to fight the Germans? The Germans wanted a decent, balanced church without all of the craziness and fighting against everybody who didn’t agree with you. How are we going to fight against the Muslim territories? But most of all, how are we going to fight against Orthodox Christianity, the majority of Christianity. There were five Patriarchates in the 12th Century. Rome was the least important. The most important was Constantinople, then, Antioch, then Alexandria, and then Jerusalem.

Rome was at the nadir in the 9th and 10th Century. The Catholic Church histories call it the pornocracy, because it was basically just the local families of a wealthy Roman suburb called Tusculum that sort of had controlled the church as their own personal set of sinecures for themselves, and they were so corrupt that you had Germans set out to try to reform it.

And then they said, how are we going to get rid of the nepotism and the fact that the Vatican is captured by churches? – basically, so they could find either young women or boys to screw… the utter corruption that you read about these families. They asked, how are we going to make some semblance of Christianity again? And they tried to reform.

Well after them came another reform that wanted to prevent an aristocracy from taking over the Catholic Church and making it a family business. They did not want to let the clergy and popes be married, because if they marry, they’re going to have kids, and if they have kids, they’re going to make them the Pope. That’s what happened from the 9th and the 10th Century in Tusculum. You can find it all on Wikipedia or in the Catholic Church histories. They’re sort of embarrassed.

So that made Western Christianity, Roman Christianity, different from all the other Christian churches that permitted priests to get married.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Yeah, that used to be something you had to do. That was a way of demonstrating that you were invested in the community that you were overseeing.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure, and the German reformers wanted to make the Christian church part of society, even playing a role in trade and in the military. They wanted, you know, to have a Christian community. That’s not what ended up happening.

And also, the Roman church wanted to introduce this theory of the the Trinity that basically said Jesus wasn’t the Son of God, he wasn’t a human being, and he nothing to do with being a political or social leader, or leading opposition to the creditor class. It was all about God.

And the Catholic Church basically had been poisoned in the 4th and 5th Century by two of the most evil theologians in history, Cyril of Alexandria, who based the Christian church on anti-semitism because he wanted to drive out all of the Christians who weren’t under his personal control. And most early Christians were Jewish. So he led pogroms against the Jews in addition to killing Hypatia, who was a mathematician, and he put in the Trinity idea and elevated the Virgin Mary to the Trinity, knowing that that’s the one thing the Jews were not going to go along with because they wouldn’t have a woman as part of the Trinity.

Donald Trump’s tariff policy has thrown markets into turmoil among his allies and enemies alike. This anarchy reflects the fact that his major aim was not really tariff policy, but simply to cut income taxes on the wealthy, by replacing them with tariffs as the main source of government revenue. Extracting economic concessions from other countries is part of his justification for this tax shift as offering a nationalistic benefit for the United States.

His cover story, and perhaps even his belief, is that tariffs by themselves can revive American industry. But he has no plans to deal with the problems that caused America’s deindustrialization in the first place. There is no recognition of what made the original U.S. industrial program and that of most other nations so successful.

That program was based on public infrastructure, rising private industrial investment and wages protected by tariffs, and strong government regulation. Trump’s slash and burn policy is the reverse – to downsize government, weaken public regulation and sell off public infrastructure to help pay for his income tax cuts on his Donor Class.

This is just the neoliberal program under another guise. Trump misrepresents it as supportive of industry, not its antithesis. His move is not an industrial plan at all, but a power play to extract economic concessions from other countries while slashing income taxes on the wealthy. The immediate result will be wide-spread layoffs, business closures and consumer price inflation.

Introduction

America’s remarkable industrial takeoff from the end of the Civil War through the outbreak of World War I has always embarrassed free-market economists. The United States’ success followed precisely the opposite policies from those that today’s economic orthodoxy advocates. The contrast is not only that between protectionist tariffs and free trade. The United States created a mixed public/private economy in which public infrastructure investment was developed as a “fourth factor of production,” not to be run as a profit-making business but to provide basic services at minimal prices so as to subsidize the private sector’s cost of living and doing business.

The logic underlying these policies was formulated already in the 1820s in Henry Clay’s American System of protective tariffs, internal improvements (public investment in transportation and other basic infrastructure), and national banking aimed at financing industrial development. An American School of Political Economy emerged to guide the nation’s industrialization based on the Economy of High Wages doctrine to promote labor productivity by raising living standards and public subsidy and support programs.

These are not the policies that today’s Republicans and Democrats advise. If Reaganomics, Thatcherism and Chicago’s free-market boys had guided American economic policy in the late nineteenth century, the United States would not have achieved its industrial dominance. So it hardly is surprising that the protectionist and public investment logic that guided American industrialization has been airbrushed out of U.S. history. It plays no role in Donald Trump’s false narrative to promote his abolition of progressive income taxes, downsizing of government and privatization sell-off of its assets.

“What Trump singles out to admire in America’s nineteenth-century industrial policy is the absence of a progressive income tax and the funding of government primarily by tariff revenue.”

What Trump singles out to admire in America’s nineteenth-century industrial policy is the absence of a progressive income tax and the funding of government primarily by tariff revenue. This has given him the idea of replacing progressive income taxation falling on his own Donor Class – the One Percent that paid no income tax prior to its enactment in 1913 – with tariffs designed to fall only on consumers (that is, labor). A new Gilded Age indeed!

In admiring the absence of progressive income taxation in the era of his hero, William McKinley (elected president in 1896 and 1900), Trump is admiring the economic excess and inequality of the Gilded Age. That inequality was widely criticized as a distortion of economic efficiency and social progress. To counteract the corrosive and conspicuous wealth-seeking that caused the distortion, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Law in 1890, Teddy Roosevelt followed with his trust busting, and a remarkably progressive income tax was passed that fell almost entirely on rentier financial and real estate income and monopoly rents.

Trump thus is promoting a simplistic and outright false narrative of what made America’s nineteenth century policy of industrialization so successful. For him, what is great is the “gilded” part of the Gilded Age, not its state-led industrial and social-democratic takeoff. His panacea is for tariffs to replace income taxes, along with privatizing what remains of the government’s functions. That would give a new set of robber barons free reign to further enrich themselves by shrinking the government’s taxation and regulation of them, while reducing the budget deficit by selling off the remaining public domain, from national park lands to the post office and research labs.

Key policies that led to America’s successful industrial takeoff

Tariffs by themselves were not enough to create America’s industrial takeoff, nor that of Germany and other nations seeking to replace and overtake Britain’s industrial and financial monopoly. The key was to use the tariff revenues to subsidize public investment, combined with regulatory power and above all tax policy, to restructure the economy on many fronts and shape the way in which labor and capital were organized.

The main aim was to raise labor productivity. That required an increasingly skilled labor force, which required rising living standards, education, healthy working conditions, consumer protection and safe food regulation. The Economy of High Wages doctrine recognized that well educated, healthy and well fed labor could under-sell “pauper labor.”

The problem was that employers always have sought to increase their profits by fighting against labor’s demand for higher wages. America’s industrial takeoff solved this problem by recognizing that labor’s living standards are a result not only of wage levels but of the cost of living. To the extent that public investment financed by tariff revenues could pay the cost of supplying basic needs, living standards and labor productivity could rise without industrialists suffering a fall in profit.

The main basic needs were free education, public health support and kindred social services. Public infrastructure investment in transportation (canals and railroads), communications and other basic services that were natural monopolies was also undertaken to prevent them from being turned into private fiefdoms seeking monopoly rents at the expense of the economy at large. Simon Patten, America’s first professor of economics at its first business school (the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania), called public investment in infrastructure a “fourth factor of production.”* Unlike private-sector capital, its aim was not to make a profit, much less maximize its prices to what the market would bear. The aim was to provide public services either at cost or at a subsidized rate or even freely.

🚨🇺🇸🇨🇳 BREAKING: BRICS CAN FREE THE WORLD FROM GLOBALISTS

HUGE interview with MICHAEL HUDSON! https://t.co/zcSjCgVpvJ

— Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 (@jacksonhinklle) April 7, 2025

JH: Welcome back to Legitimate Targets, everybody. I hope you’re all having a great day. We have got a very special guest. I think probably the guest that I’ve been most excited to ever talk to on this show. Michael Hudson, the famed economist, is joining us today. Of course, many of you probably know his amazing book, Super Imperialism. He’s got many others that I suggest you check out if you want to learn about how the U.S. operates as a global hegemon and how they arrived at this position, and also the history of the global banking cartels, finance capital, the power of debt and how debt has been used. As well as the cancellation of debt as a form of liberation for people throughout history and much more. Michael Hudson, if you are not familiar with him, is a distinguished research professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He’s got a very, very long and interesting career you can read about. Michael has a relatively short autobiography you can read about on his website, he’s done private sector, consulting, economics, worked as a professor throughout his career, and even written skits for Saturday Night Live. So he’s a man of many talents, and I’m happy to have him here with me today. So without further adieu, Michael Hudson, thank you so much for joining me today.

MH: Well, thanks for having me.

JH: Yes. To start off with just to go big picture, who do you believe controls the world today? Do you think it is private capitalists or do you think it’s the United States, specifically the state apparatus itself?

MH: If only there was some central control over the market, it would be so easy to go to them and explain what to do.

But there are many, many different layers at work here. For instance, it used to be for almost a century that the role of the stock market, which you asked about, is to finance new companies. Banks don’t lend money to build factories or create capital. That’s supposed to be the job of the stock market issuing stocks. Well, for the last few decades, the number of stocks have shrunk because private capital has taken them over.

In other words, very wealthy firms have made so much money by un-taxing themselves and money in the stock market and real estate and capital gains, that they’ve said, well, we’re going to use our own money, and we’re going to borrow money from the banks to bail out firms. In other words, we’ll offer to buy out all of the stockholders.

We’ll make a tender offer. This began in the 1980’s and private capital firms, beginning with the junk bond movement of the 1980’s, have begun to buy out firms. So there are fewer and fewer stocks every year. Well, you have pension funds that are required by their articles of agreement that they have to buy stocks. So all of this money is sort of a carved out thing.

So there is one group of firms on Wall Street that manage buyers, that manage the stock market buying, especially now that you have indexed stocks. So you go to a firm and you say, I want to buy a stock – Vanguard, for instance, or any of the others. You say, “just give me an index for

the Standard & Poor’s 500, or for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.” And they don’t really pick. When I went to work on Wall Street in the 1960s, the whole idea of stock analysis was you pick the stocks that are going up. And of course, most people pick the military stocks because of the Vietnam War. And there’s one thing that you can make enormous profits on for the last 50 years: military stocks. So, they would go up. Aerodynamic stocks, technology stocks, you’d have a boom, then you’d have the smaller companies on Wall Street, they’re the pump and dump companies. They’d make new issues on, you know, very small offerings. They’d organize a kind of mafia, very much like what Trump organized a few months ago when he started his cryptocurrencies, Trump Currency and Melania currency.

They whole group of financial gangsters, would put up their money, bid up the stock. Then, people would think, “oh, whoa, some of this stock is going up!” They’d buy it, bid it up. And then the operators, the manipulators, would dump the stock and it would collapse. And all of the people who bought on the way up would collapse. So that’s one layer.

So, you have private capital, borrowing to buy firms, and they have done so with borrowed money from the banks. You have the investment banks that are deciding who to lend money to for who can make the most money in the financial markets. You have the stock brokerage firms. You can see there are many layers here and they’ve all sort of got together with the Federal Reserve.

And ever since the Obama junk mortgage crisis, the Federal Reserve says, “well, our loyalty is to the banking system.” The banks, in 2009, when Obama took the presidency, most of the big investment banks on Wall Street were broke because they’d made junk mortgages that all turned out to be junk. That’s why they were called junk mortgages. And the Federal Reserve spent the next few decades lowering interest rates in order to enable new speculators to buy stocks, buy companies and take them over at almost a 0.1% interest.

And if a company was paying dividends to 4%, 5%, you could borrow at 0.1% and make a huge profit. So you’ve had the most active people in the stock market, in the last decade or so, be the private capital companies that have gone deeply into debt to buy these firms with such high debt leverage that if the sales of these firms go down even a little bit, then all of a sudden they wiped out their equity and they don’t have any equity.

And they do what real estate owners did when the price of their property fell. Like what Trump did: you walk away from it and you leave the banks with the loss. So the banks are big players in this because the banks have been putting up the money for speculators to buy stocks. And the stocks prices have gone so far above the historic rates.

In other words, there’s a certain capitalization of earnings. It’s called the price to earnings ratio. You look at the earnings for a firm, and what is the price earnings ratio. Is it eight? nine? It’s gone way off the charts in the last year. So just at the point that Trump announced his tariffs last week, you had a vastly over-priced stock market.

And a lot of people like Warren Buffett said he’d sold out stocks completely. A lot of conspicuous big private investors with their own funds and companies sold out. They said, well, if there’s any kind of an economic downturn like a depression, then these companies are going to go broke. And if the companies are going to go broke, what’s going to happen to the banks that have lent these companies the money to buy stocks that now, no longer are worth enough to cover the amount of money they owe?

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, April 3rd, 2025, and our friends, Michael Hudson and Richard Wolfer back with us. Welcome back. Let’s talk about the Liberation Day and the new tariffs on each and every country on this planet. And here is what the press secretary, the White House press secretary said about the tariffs. They’re not going to be wrong. It is going to work.

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Speaker 2: And the president has a brilliant team of advisors who have been studying these issues for decades. And we are focused on restoring the golden age of America and making America a manufacturing superpower. And again, Peter, I would point you to the investments that have already trickled into this country.

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NIMA ALKHORSHID: And yeah, let’s let’s put the main question right now is what is the main economic fallacy that President Trump is perpetuating regarding the U.S. trade deficit? Michael, go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the fallacy is the way in which he’s calculated his statistics. And the fallacy is somehow that tariffs are going to re-industrialize the United States. The way that he’s structured them, he has not taken into account that a very large share of U.S. imports are from foreign affiliates of American firms. And these affiliates, all of a sudden, that have made foreign investments and not only in Canada and Mexico, but in Asia and Vietnam and other countries, are now going to have their costs very sharply increased. The result of the tariffs are actually going to be causing, as we’ve discussed before, vast instability and destabilization. I think Richard and I have talked in two of your shows about tariffs. And the fact is, I don’t think we expected this to happen. We thought that the United States, like other countries, were going to act in its self-interest. And, of course, you realize that this self-interest is that of the corporate elite and the big financial investors in Trump’s donor class. But they didn’t expect any of this either. And that’s the big surprise. The stock market yesterday actually rules throughout the day, as people thought, well, he can’t really mean it. And this plunge so quickly after a speech. And this morning, it continued to plunge. It opened with the Standard & Poor’s down 4%, and the Dow Jones losing, I’m sorry, 1,500 points by 3.5%. These are gigantic plunges, and Japan was hit even harder. So now we know why he timed his announcements to 4 p.m. That’s when the stock market closed. If TV viewers of his talk were able to see it during stock market hours, they’d see him talking on the one hand, and the split screen would show the stock market plunging. In other words, this is big capital. This is the corporate sector. This is what the bulk of investors think the effect is going to be on the stock market, and they think it’s a disaster. There’s been, I don’t know how much money’s been wiped out just in the first hour of trading, but it’s been gigantic. So this shows the degree to which corporations and investors thought, well, this is all bluster. And in a way, I think it is bluster. And we’ve seen that by what’s happened with what Trump has been talking about for the last month, and that’s the tariffs on Canada and Mexico. He, if you look at the tariffs, the threats that he had, 25% tariffs, he’s backed down on just about everything. He, the mainstream press, you know, is talking about a Mar-a-Lago accord of a new plaza accord, referring to the 1985 agreement with Japan that ended up pushing that economy into 30 years’ depression. But that was part of a negotiated G7 agreement, where the U.S. brought everybody together. But this is different. Trump is acting unilaterally, and his strategy is to divide and conquer. He’s going to negotiate with each country separately and agree to soften his tariff if they give America something of value. For instance, in China, I’m sure he wants to say, you’ve got to sell TikTok to U.S. investors. You’ve got to do whatever the neocons are insisting that he tells them to do. So the right to buy out any key industry or real estate is what other countries are doing. Basically, what Trump did yesterday is these disruptions that he’s threatening are so large that he’s going to destabilize other countries unless they give in to what turns out to be a shakedown. I just want to talk about the details of Canada because they’re not, they were not made clear yesterday. He’s left out, he’s already said, well, in terms, there’s not going to be a tariff on auto parts, at least until May 3rd. That’s a month from now. So, and there’s going to be a partial exemption for cars made in Mexico and Canada that meets the terms of the NAFTA agreement. After all, there’s been a huge breakdown in all of this on vehicles. He’s only going to try to tax the foreign made parts that are in these vehicles, but that’s still a threat. And the question is whether this is going to prevent General Motors, which has a very large proportion of its autos made in Mexico and Canada for the auto parts. Is this going to prevent them from making a profit? And suppose it looks like the head of General Motors may have called Trump in the last month and said, look, if you’re going to impose the tariffs the way you threaten to do, then we’re not going to be able to make a profit.

And if we’re not able to make a profit, what are we going to do? Are we going to lay off the labor force? Suppose Mr. Trump, that I, head of GM, went to and threatened to make a public announcement, we’re putting GM up for sale. There’s no way we can make a profit any longer under the way in which Trump did the profit, the tariffs. We’re going to tell our labor, we may have to lay you off.

Maybe a foreign auto company will want to buy us, but we’re being prevented from making a profit unless we raise the price of American cars so high that Americans can’t afford it as the economy is moving into the depression that Trump is driving it into. We’ll have no recourse to do that, and other industries may follow suit. Look at Apple in China. It’s another multinational company importing the parts for its iPhones and computers. One hundred percent of U.S. oil imports are made by U.S. oil companies. The same is true of much of the mineral trade. So the question is, why aren’t U.S. corporate leaders speaking up more verbally than they have? You remember back in the 60s, General Motors famous head Charlie Wilson said, what’s good for General Motors is good for the country. Well, the new motto is, what Donald Trump says is good for the country is bad for General Motors. It’s still going to be one of the hardest auto companies hit because of its proportion abroad. So where is the power elite in all of this?

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, it seems that Donald Trump believes that the deficit is the outcome of unfair trade practices. But in your opinion, does trade deficit reflect a country spending more than it produces or saving less than it invests?

RICHARD WOLFF: Okay, there’s so much noise and chaos around this that we are in danger. And that may be Mr. Trump’s area of wisdom, manipulating the noise level and distractions and claims. You know, you made a joke, and I understand it, about Liberation Day. But that’s a very important part of the story he wants us to come away with.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: So we can go at it in a number of ways.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, March 13, 2025, and our friends, Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff, are back with us. Welcome back.

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RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you. Glad to be here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let’s get started with the negotiations between, the first round of negotiations, between the Trump team, the Trump administration, and the Ukrainians. The conclusion of this discussion were a 30-day ceasefire proposed by the United States to the Russians.

Michael, how do you find the way that Donald Trump is trying to manage the situation, considering Ukraine?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it looks on the surface like a complete about-face by Trump. The whole proposal for a ceasefire seems so bizarre and so out of place that it doesn’t make any sense on the surface.

A ceasefire enables armies to retreat. And England and France have said they’re going to send in peacekeepers. And Lavrov had said peacekeepers are from the country that says Russia is our existential enemy and wants to destroy it. Their kind of peacekeepers is to fight Russia to move up to the current line so as to prevent Russia, after the one-month ceasefire is over, from continuing its movement to settle the whole peace agreement on the battlefield. That’s what wars do. They settle the problems on the battlefield.

And there’s no need for a ceasefire to have negotiations. During World War II, during every war, as the war is coming to an end, there are six months, maybe a year, of negotiations. What are we going to do? How do we prepare for the peace?

Somehow, the newspapers have followed something that seems to be orchestrated, as if there can’t be any solution to the war without a ceasefire, and negotiations and discussions go together. And that’s just silly. That’s not what happens.

And what does a month mean for a ceasefire? Maybe Putin can say, well, give us a month. Well, all right, maybe four months and we’ll achieve peace. We’ll finish the military operation. It’ll all be over in four months. So we’re going to give you peace. But a ceasefire would simply stretch out the fighting. We want to end it. Let our army just go on. And we will arrange a kind of peace that will really be lasting, not just setting up Europe versus Russia kind of antagonism.

And Lavrov had a long discussion with Napolitano’s group that’s been all over the internet. And Lavrov said, Why should we agree to a peacemaking force of some kind of peacemaking group if they want such a force to consist of countries that have declared us as an enemy? Well, will they really come as peacekeepers?

So even the facts are unclear. I don’t know whether Trump really stopped sending arms to Ukraine. Because a few days ago, yesterday, Russia sent new missiles to bomb a second ship that was delivering new arms to Odessa, and blew it up. So somebody’s sending arms.

And then when you have the drone attack on Moscow, somebody must have been steering the drones from the satellite. And Trump says, Well, we’ve turned off the satellite information. We’re not giving it to Ukraine.

But then if America’s part of the Five Eyes and England is into the Five Eyes, not to mention Canada, maybe England is sending the information to Ukraine.

So the question is, any agreement that is made with Trump somehow leaves Europe out and Trump can say, Oh, okay, the Russians stopped fighting, but the Europeans, oh, that’s a separate thing. We can’t control them. They’re doing what we want.

So the question is, what is really happening? What is Trump’s strategy?

Well, Alistair Crook thinks that Trump really hates war and wants to create a world without war and free for big business to do what Richard and I talked last week about, to establish a right-wing government, business government, throughout the world in making money in peace.

But there’s no indication of whether Trump really wants peace or not. I’m sure that Trump wants to fight against the CIA and the neocons who were fighting him in 2016 and in 2020 and even in this last 2024 election.

I’m sure he wants to get rid of his enemies in the deep state, and that means stopping the war.

So why would he have made a proposal to Russia that Russia cannot possibly accept, except on terms of surrender? That’s the question that we have to ask, and it just doesn’t make sense.

Didn’t Tulsi or some other advisors tell him this is a no-go? The Russians want to defuse the Cold War, but not let Ukraine just rearm and keep it going.

And the subsequent follow-up by Trump and Rubio shows that, well, what they want, peace, and peace is preventing Russia from re-invading Europe like it did in 1945. Peace is this fantasy that somehow Europe has to defend itself against Russia invading Europe.

As we’ve discussed before, Russia has no motivation to do that, and the cost of any country invading another is so great that no country can afford it and survive any kind of election.

So maybe we’ve all been had, if we take Trump’s word, his word. It turns out that his sort of grandstand promised to bring peace in Ukraine, well, it turns out there are different kinds of peace. There’s a belligerent peace of defeating Russia, and there’s the Russian peace of defeating Nazism in Ukraine. Which is it going to be?

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I noticed, I won’t repeat what Michael said, there’s no need. Let me point to a few other things I find remarkable here. Number one, will a ceasefire, even if you have one? I noticed that in the same statements that Rubio, Waltz and the others made coming out of the negotiation, in the same statement about a ceasefire, was the statement that they are resuming providing them with intelligence and arms and everything that was suspended. Well, what kind of a ceasefire would that even be then? Would they continue? They didn’t even say that in the event of a ceasefire, they would continue to, not at all. They said, we want a ceasefire, and we have resumed. What? You know, and that’s not a minor matter to be negotiated later.

If you mean a ceasefire, then you would require, A) that the United States commit to not providing more material during the period of the ceasefire, and you would probably make a demand on the Europeans, à la what Mark, Michael was saying, to do the same. Otherwise, this is a shell game. This is, this is foolery. This is not serious. And that’s a lapsus that makes me very suspicious, also, about what exactly, what is showing here, what is a theater, and what is a reality. Second, this is a bizarre situation. There’s a war between Ukraine and Russia. A negotiation would then be between Ukraine and Russia. We now have a three-way. This is like going on a really important date with your beloved and somebody else. It’s not a question of who the other one is. It’s a question about either this is a date or it isn’t, but it isn’t three, unless what you have in mind is quite different from what I have in mind, you know, etc, etc. So the United States is playing a very bizarre role.

And then the final thing for me is, it’s even more bizarre, because both of the others, Mr. Zelensky, fifty times in the last two years, has said he doesn’t want [a] ceasefire. And Lavrov and Putin, and Peskov, their spokesperson, have said the same thing. They don’t want a ceasefire. And they said it repeatedly over the last… so we have two sides committed to no ceasefire being brought together by the United States, which wants a ceasefire. They’re, very bizarre situation. At least, I’m no historian of negotiations, but I find all of this very, very bizarre.