Lynn Parramore discusses her recent article on AI’s real costs

Whether or not you’ve ever used a chatbot, you’re already paying for AI’s monstrous appetite. Lynn Parramore reports that, from surging electricity bills in Virginia to proposed nuclear reactors in rural North Carolina, data centers are driving up costs, inflation, and interest rates for everyone. Meanwhile, tech and utility executives cut sweetheart deals, transfer wealth upward, and promise jobs that never materialize.

Young graduates feel discarded, communities are being bulldozed, and the industry’s answer to every concern is more unproven technology and more backroom chicanery. This isn’t just an economic debate—it’s a battle between human reality and a machine-driven vision that would cover the earth in data centers and call it progress.

Main Points

1. The costs of AI today are widespread and unavoidable: Higher electricity bills, inflation, interest rates, housing costs, and health impacts will hit nearly everyone, regardless of whether they use AI or live near a data center.

2. Ordinary people are being sacrificed for corporate profit: Utilities and AI companies strike backroom deals, transfer wealth upward, and hide behind promises of jobs while communities and younger generations bear the real burden.

3. The industry operates without transparency or accountability: There’s a lack of accurate data, industry co-authorship of academic papers, and complex financial structures designed to let companies walk away from failures.

4. This is a spiritual and human crisis, not just an economic one: The real question is not what AI produces, but what it does to people: undermining health, replacing human judgment, and abandoning an entire generation.

Transcript

Richard Eskow: The article is headlined “AI is Hungry for Power and You Are Footing the Bill.” We’ve seen some headlines about that, but I think the reality of AI’s energy usage has been obscured—first by unclear reporting from the mass media, and second by a slew of counterarguments from AI executives and their political allies. I’ve been following this story for years, but I still learned some things from your article. So why is it that, no matter how this plays out under current circumstances, consumers—or human beings in general—will end up footing the cost for this monster’s energy?

Lynn Parramore: Yeah. A lot of people following the news are already aware of some direct costs communities are facing. Take Northern Virginia, for example, which is part of what’s called the PJM grid covering several eastern states. Several reports show that customers there are already paying higher electricity rates, largely because of data center build-out.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around the scale of these things and the amount of electricity they use. One facility—a “hyperscaler” facility—can consume as much electricity as a small country. That’s what we’re talking about. Northern Virginia already has a few hundred of these.

And Erin Brockovich—whom we all remember from that wonderful movie starring Julia Roberts—is actively following this. She has a great map where you can see where data centers are already operational or proposed in your community. No matter where you live, there’s probably a proposal for a data center not far away. They’re popping up everywhere you can think of. It’s going to be very hard to escape the direct effects: higher electricity costs, possibly higher water costs. But the indirect effects will affect us all, even if we’ve never used ChatGPT.

Why? Because it will contribute to general inflation. My colleague Servaas Storm, an economist, has written about this. Any time you have energy usage this massive, it spills over into the broader economy. Small businesses, for example, will use the same amount of power but pay more. They’ll be forced to pass those costs on to consumers. Farmers will have to pay more. They’re already facing pollution and strains on water, which raises irrigation costs. All these pressures on the system—electricity demand going up from data centers—impact manufacturing, retail, office buildings, hospitals, everyone who uses electricity. And we’ll all end up paying.

At a time when inflation and utility bills are already tremendous worries, affordability has become a catchword. I think this is going to be a real political flashpoint—there are signs it’s already becoming one. It’s interesting because Americans are constantly described as horribly divided, but Gallup polls suggest we’re not divided on whether we want data centers built near us: over 70% of us do not want them. And while there’s been a lot of talk about using nuclear energy to power AI demand, more than half of Americans don’t want new nuclear facilities near them either.

I’m currently in North Carolina, and there’s a big fight in Stokes County, near the Virginia border. It’s a rural area; I don’t think any town in that county has more than 8,000 people. Duke Power has proposed building small nuclear reactors there.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Lynn Parramore: And what do we know about these small nuclear reactors? Not much. Only a couple exist—in China and Russia—and I wouldn’t trust the safety data coming from either of those places. The farmers in that county don’t want them built there. We’re also talking about repurposing Three Mile Island—still a living memory for a lot of people. So a lot is going on, and people are upset.

The bottom line question is: What exactly are we being asked to pay for? What do we—as citizens, workers, people living in communities—actually get out of it? We’re being promised everything from jobs to saving humanity, but it’s not clear to me that ordinary people are getting much out of any of this.

Richard Eskow: No, I think that’s a great point. You raise several interesting issues. One is the nuclear angle. The industry’s pitch was that these units could be tractor-trailer size—like a boxcar—and produce so much power. But when I looked into it, the power they claimed would supply the needs of about three to four hundred homes. That’s not very much. How many of those would you need? And it’s untried technology—we don’t know the health implications.

Your article also pointed out two broader issues beyond energy costs. One I’d thought of: the industry says, “We’ll go off-grid and build our own energy supply.” My response has been, “Are you going to build your own ecosystem too?” Because you’ll still pump pollutants into the air and water until those theoretical nuclear reactors come online—and then God knows what will happen. It’s not like these are people known for keeping promises.

The other issue—which you just mentioned—is the broader economic impact. I’d thought about farmers, but let’s talk more about that broader impact, because I think it’s crucial for people to understand.

Lynn Parramore: Yeah. And it’s not getting talked about enough in the news. It’s not just higher electricity bills if you live near a data center—though if you look at that map, eventually not many people will be left out of that equation if things keep going as they are. But even if you’re nowhere near a data center, rising electricity prices spill over into the broader economy. When inflation ticks up, the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates high. That means higher borrowing costs for everyone: car loans, mortgages, credit cards. All of this gets impacted by the building of massive data centers. So it’s a problem for every single one of us, at a time when we can’t afford higher prices for anything.

Richard Eskow: Right. And you mentioned—this was an excellent point from Servaas Storm—that if a data center is built in your 8,000-person town in North Carolina or elsewhere, people will move in to service it, and your housing costs will go up. And any carbon-based or fossil fuel energy requires raw materials or oil. So the ripple effects go on and on.

Lynn Parramore: On and on. The ripples go out into the broader economy, and no one comes out unscathed—except power company executives and executives at places like Meta and Amazon.

Richard Eskow: Right. And that brings up what you call an “axis of influence”—not only the AI executives profiting from this, but also energy executives and utilities.

Lynn Parramore: Yeah, they’re very happy with these prices. Reports show executive compensation at utility companies has been going up lately. Why is that? They’re clearly benefiting from higher prices. There’s a lot of lack of transparency, backroom deals, sweetheart cuts that communities have no access to. And of course, we citizens aren’t getting any sweetheart deals out of this.

Richard Eskow: There’s also an awful lot of AI backroom trading among companies themselves. That really concerns me. I wish someone would commission a group to look into it in detail—it would take a lot of legwork. All those loans, deals, and commitments backed by nothing concrete. It feels like a bubble within a bubble.

Lynn Parramore: Yes.

Richard Eskow: Meta commits to purchasing $30 billion worth of ChatGPT, and ChatGPT commits to X billion from another company. That’s going around a lot. Plus, as you mentioned, a hyperscale center costs about $11 billion to build. That’s a lot of money moving in and out of the regular financial system, inflating rapidly, isn’t it?

Lynn Parramore: Absolutely. You’re seeing complicated business structures and engineering. For example, some big corporations look like they’re putting up the money for data centers, but they’ve actually created a separate company that on paper owns the facility. That means Meta or Amazon doesn’t have to carry it on their balance sheet, giving them a nice opportunity to walk away if things go badly. So there’s a lot of shenanigans and chicanery going on.

It reminds me of past disasters—the build-up to the financial crisis, or R.J. Reynolds telling us tobacco was safe while hiding the research. That leads to another aspect: getting accurate information. The scientists and academics who would typically be working on this stuff have, in many cases, lost their jobs under the current administration and gone off to work for the private sector. And if you look at academic papers, more often than not, industry folks are co-authoring. So we have a real problem getting accurate information about any of this.

Richard Eskow: Yeah, absolutely. You quote a law professor, Mark Klick: Why aren’t companies paying for the additional resources they use, especially energy? We still live—at least under the illusion—that even a private power company operates as a public utility. Why would a company supposed to act in the public interest cut a special deal for a for-profit corporation at the expense of the citizens it’s supposed to be serving?

Lynn Parramore: It does sound like a transfer of resources. One section of my article is called “Trickle-Up Economics.” This is how it works: a transfer of wealth and resources to the top. Citizens are in a very vulnerable position because of the influence of money in politics. Why is this happening? I’d point to my colleague INET research director Thomas Ferguson, who’s followed money in politics for many years. Just look at the coalition of industries looking to make money off this, their lobbying power, and the politicians in their pockets. It’s on a big scale—we’re talking trillions of dollars now, not billions.

Richard Eskow: So let’s talk about that. One of Thomas Ferguson’s observations—and I strongly recommend his work—rebuts the whole idea of “NIMBYism” (Not In My Backyard). That term is often thrown around by people whose own backyards aren’t at stake anyway, but who have something to gain from corporate interests. NIMBYism is being used in this AI debate too, isn’t it?

Lynn Parramore: Right. These companies say, “If you’d all stop complaining about data centers in your backyard, we could have lower electricity prices.” I spoke to Professor Ferguson about that. He was very dismissive. In his work, it’s very clear that power companies and big corporations are keeping prices up—not ordinary citizens by any stretch.

Richard Eskow: Yeah. And it’s totally reasonable not to want an energy-guzzling monstrosity in your backyard. I wrote a few years ago about a historic African American community in Northern Virginia that was slated for a data center. Eventually the state backed off because it was just too embarrassing. But many other communities have been bulldozed or moved aside for high-power transmission lines and all the infrastructure needed to support these data centers. One thing that blew my mind in your article, Lynn, was a study saying that in 2024, data centers were already using some 40% of Virginia’s power. Did I remember that correctly?

Lynn Parramore: You did. Already in 2024. And I need to look at the incoming data for what’s happening now. Again, it’s a mind-boggling scale. That’s why calls for a moratorium, to me, are the bare minimum of what we should be discussing. It’s happening too fast, it’s too big, and the consequences are too great. It’ll be interesting to see what happens politically, because some states becoming AI hotspots, like Texas, are not traditionally blue states. Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to see these data centers in their communities.

Richard Eskow: Which seems like it would be a good issue for Mr. Talarico to take up.

Lynn Parramore: For sure.

Richard Eskow: Since we’re talking about communities and the nonpartisan resistance to data centers, what’s it actually like when a data center moves into your town or area? What does it do to people?

Lynn Parramore: Well, one of the first things, especially in poor rural communities, is excitement because of the promise of jobs. In places where people desperately need jobs, unfortunately, research shows there really aren’t a lot of jobs for ordinary people. There are initially some temporary construction jobs. But if you live in a small town in the middle of nowhere in northern North Carolina, you’re not going to be hired to work on a small nuclear reactor. It’s highly unlikely.

Richard Eskow: No. They’ll probably drag it in on a flatbed truck or train from somewhere else, and you’ll get nothing out of it. And you mentioned the impact on farmers and others.

Lynn Parramore: The jobs promise is held out as a carrot in places where people desperately need them. So even though they know there may be negative environmental impacts, when all you can think about is feeding your kids, those job promises can be very effective in getting people to overcome their fear of other consequences. We’ve seen that with other kinds of environmental impact and pollution.

But what it ends up being like to live near one of these centers as an ordinary working person is to be driven crazy. Not only the sound—which can be very disruptive—but there’s actually a sound at a level you’re not even conscious of hearing, yet it still affects your sleep and circadian rhythms. That impacts your health. There’s another cost: your well-being, your health. You’ll likely be liable to all kinds of negative physical and mental health outcomes from living near these things. How is that going to benefit anybody?

Richard Eskow: Right. I’m starting to picture—and I don’t mean to be lighthearted about this—a kind of 1950s horror movie. Between the impacts you’re aware of and the ones you’re not, it’s really appalling. Which brings me to Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI. He says extreme things. You quote him from a 2019 documentary: “I think it’s pretty likely the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.” I tried to picture that, and what came to mind was the Death Star from Star Wars. On one hand, you could say he’s a brilliant technician who’s nuts. But I know from friends close to some of these tech billionaires—this is how they think. In terms of glory, world-transforming, terraforming, post-human.

Lynn Parramore: Absolutely. It gives them no hesitation to say things like that. That’s part of the terrifying part. There’s this disconnect between these tech gazillionaires and normal human life. The scale of these data centers reflects that. And what he’s talking about—data centers covering the Earth—look at Erin Brockovich’s map of existing and proposed data centers in the U.S. It looks a lot like that. That’s what’s being proposed and imagined.

It’s funny you mentioned science fiction and horror movies. As I’ve been writing about AI, I’ve gone back all the way to Metropolis—the warnings we’ve had. My latest spree last weekend was watching the Resident Evil series, which involves an AI called the Red Queen who unleashes havoc, and the workers pay the price. It’s a fear we’ve had for a long time, and it really does seem to be manifesting at scale. The horror is scaling up for most of us.

Richard Eskow: In a sense, this is the latest and most powerful manifestation of something that’s been going on since the Industrial Revolution: a battle between impersonal capital and human reality, the human spirit. A war between the machine and the spirit. I don’t mean machines can’t be great benefits—typewriters, word processors, recording equipment—they can. But Metropolis is a perfect example. Moloch, the god fed human sacrifices, is an extreme depiction of something that’s been going on for centuries. AI has brought it all to the fore. That’s why Sutskever’s quote is so powerful. Although he doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with it, it’s the complete annihilation of nature and the things we value—the intangible, the beautiful, the fragile, the evanescent—in order to create these computational monstrosities they worship, because they ascribe consciousness to something that is not consciousness. That goes back to Metropolis, back to the story of the golden calf that the wind blew and it lowed like a cow, and they thought it was alive.

This is an internal human struggle. You touch on that in your article too. You mention that it’s hard to stay healthy with these whines going on. And though you talk about economics, the quote from Amartya Sen—someone I’ve admired for a long time—is the money quote. You write, “As Amartya Sen has argued, the central question is not what the system produces but what it does to people.” Whether it’s financially, or the ever-present whine, or the threat to jobs, or just the dehumanizing, migraine-inducing profusion of AI slop—I don’t think any large language model or software has to be anti-human, but it seems as if this entire industry is determined to build and grow in an anti-human way.

Lynn Parramore: It’s true. One thing that concerns me: in New York City, where I live most of the time, I’m not far from Washington Square Park. I was there a couple of weekends ago, and all the graduates were out in their purple gowns. I couldn’t help talking to some of them, and boy, was that depressing. This generation—fairly affluent NYU students—are very scared, disheartened, dispirited. I kept getting the sense that they feel like they’re being thrown away as a generation. They’re being told that because of AI, they’re not really needed in this economy. There won’t be entry-level jobs for them. They won’t be mentored up through a company or organization. Forget it. Good luck.

To me, that’s filicide. If we abandon an entire generation to AI, what kind of sacrifice is that? It doesn’t sound so extreme to talk about films like Metropolis—we are actually doing that. And what solutions have been proposed to these young people? Where is the New Deal-style jobs program for them? Training programs? That’s what they need right now. They’re graduating into a terrible economy that’s likely to get even worse. We cannot afford to let this whole generation go.

I’m wondering, Richard, how you feel about this. In the 1960s, we had a lot of youth resistance, but that was possible because of the affluence and optimism of the time, which we really don’t have now. Young people have been so isolated—the pandemic isolated them. They’re not with each other as much, not dating as much. A lot of them are at home gaming. But you can’t be isolated in an apartment when there’s no money and no job. So maybe they’ll be forced into community with each other and find a way to push back.

Richard Eskow: The French Situationists in 1968 had the slogan “Beauty is in the streets.” Let’s hope that’s the case. You’re absolutely right. The 1960s protests were triggered by several things—you have to distinguish Black and white protests—but the white anti-war protests were based on relative affluence plus a sense of optimism. The curve was slanting upward, not downward as today. Interestingly, in the early part of this century—late 2000s or early 2010s—as the economic situation improved in Brazil, the number of protests escalated considerably. My theory is that there was increasing optimism: people thought, “The future can be better here—let’s get involved.” That’s the challenge we have now. You need something to push against and something to move toward.

My big criticism of the “resistance” during the first Trump administration was always: Don’t just tell me what you’re against, tell me what you’re for. It’s funny that Erin Brockovich comes into this. I met her in Lower Manhattan when I went to rent a car to go upstate. Hertz was out of cars—didn’t matter that we had reservations. There was a line of people. “Sorry, no car.” I was third in line. The woman first in line was arguing with them, and the person behind the desk said, “What was that name again? B-R-O-C-K-O-V...” and everyone realized who she was. There she was—a person fighting for people’s interests—and there was the impersonal corporation. The guy behind the computer monitor had no control; he was as stuck as we were. But you don’t want to be that guy, stuck behind the terminal, working for people who have no compunction about doing this to you. This is all of that on a meta-meta-meta level—at the level of the planet, at the level of humanity as a whole.

Lynn Parramore: Right. What’s it doing? The young people had so many different things to say: “What is this doing to my mind? I’m losing my cognitive skills. What is this doing to the environment? What is this doing to my future in my profession?” So many worries all at once. It’s terrifying. I kept thinking, this generation—it sounds extreme to say it, but it’s almost like graduating into the Great Depression. It’s a bad scene from so many angles. What loyalty do you have to a system that isn’t offering you anything?

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Elon Musk shoots hundreds of rockets into space, permanently altering the night sky, with nobody to stop him. The way they’re treating our younger generation reminds me of what the poet Robinson Jeffers wrote: “They’d shit on the morning star if they could.” That’s who we’re up against. And who we’re for are the people who affirm beauty, humanity, hope, and community. That’s the pain and the beauty.

Lynn Parramore: And who live in these human bodies. We are embodied intelligence. No AI is ever going to replace us.

Richard Eskow: Right. We’re embodied intelligence, and we have whatever you want to call it—psyche, spirit, soul. If you don’t believe in soul, “psyche” is probably good. Consciousness. All of this matters. And AI is not conscious.

Lynn Parramore: No. And it’s not going to replace us. One of the things I hope young people will absorb is that the narrative that they’re replaceable is a lie. No computer program can replace their human experience, life, judgment, insight, and imagination. I really hope we can promote that message: they don’t have to buy into that narrative.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Beautifully said, so I won’t add anything—no quotes, nothing. As always, I encourage people to read the article again. The title: “AI is Hungry for Power and You Are Footing the Bill”—to which I would add, with not just your checkbook, but your body and soul. It’s at ineteconomics.org. Lynn, thanks for writing this excellent piece and, as always, thanks for coming on the program.

Lynn Parramore: Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to talking about this more.

Combat sports journalist Nate Wilcox on the forces behind that White House wrestling match.

The modern fight world has become a hidden epicenter of elite power players, political backscratching, and multi-billion-dollar quid pro quos.

I last wrote about Donald Trump and pro wrestling in 2016, when he appointed WWE executive and major campaign donor Linda McMahon to run the Small Business Administration. (McMahon is now the Secretary of Education.) Since then, I’ve been vaguely aware of the web of big-money connections that link Trump, the McMahons, and others. Still, I made an assumption about the upcoming wrestling match at the White House that I think a lot of people have made: that it’s all about pumping up the MAGA base and trolling the liberals. (Trumpworld probably assumes that college-educated libs consider wrestling crude or declassé; some undoubtedly do.)

Man, was I wrong. The story of professional wrestling and Trump’s inner circle involves webs of dealmaking and corruption that are global as well as national. It involves monopolization, media control, AI, and even the wars we fight.

I got a detailed briefing on the subject in this conversation with sports journalist Nate Wilcox, whose newsletter MMA Draw covers all forms of combat sports. Nate explained the ways in which he UFC, WWE, and the broader fight industry have become a nexus for some of the most consequential power deals happening in America and around the world. He walked me through the intertwined relationships between UFC president Dana White and Donald Trump, the role of Hollywood super-agent (and highly connected Democrat) Ari Emanuel — who owns the UFC through his TKO Group — and the way Emanuel has leveraged his position to broker deals connecting the Trump White House, the Ellison family’s acquisition of Paramount, and sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.

My conversation with Nate is above. What follows are some selected quotes from our talk, as well as a full transcript (lightly edited by both human hands—mine—and AI.)

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QUOTES:

“Don King couldn’t get the crown prince of Saudi Arabia on the phone and raise billions of dollars the way Ari Emanuel can.”
—Nate Wilcox

“These are not fight people. It’s the exact same playbook they run in every industry. Why is a routine X-ray for your cat suddenly $700? This is why.”
—Nate Wilcox

“It’s not even genuine bigotry. It’s performed bigotry to make money. Which is, if anything, more disgusting to me than the real thing.”
—Nate Wilcox

“This is making me nostalgic for the Mafia. Those guys would kill you if you crossed them, but at least they kept their word.”
—Richard Eskow

Transcript (lightly edited):

Richard Eskow: As Monty Python would say: and now for something completely different. As you know, we cover culture and politics and a lot of topics, but we have yet to cover the world of combat sports—until right now. (But) combat sports has been on a collision course with politics for some time.

My next guest might tell me the collision has already occurred. Nate Wilcox is, among other things, a combat sports investigative journalist. His website is MMA Draw, and it’s timely to be speaking with him now because on June 14th, there is a fight event at the White House for Donald Trump’s birthday. First of all, Nate Wilcox, welcome to the program.

Nate Wilcox: Thanks for having me.

Richard Eskow: I think a lot of people don’t realize how embedded Donald Trump has been with the commercial fight world. Let’s just jump right into that. Some people may recall that before he was president, he appeared at a wrestling event — and I think he played the heel, though I can’t be certain. What’s this man’s history with combat sports?

Nate Wilcox: Well, he is in the WWE Hall of Fame. Technically, he might have been the babyface in his feud with Vince McMahon, because Vince was the one who got his head shaved at the end of it, not Trump. As a longtime casino owner, Trump has hosted a number of boxing events, including early UFC events in the early 2000s.

And since 2016, Dana White, the president and frontman of the UFC, though not really the brains or the driving force behind the organization, has been a very public and vocal supporter of Trump. That’s included introducing him at the Republican National Convention three times, campaigning with him, and hosting Trump at UFC events on multiple occasions.

And now they’re going to host this UFC White House event, which was originally set for the nation’s 250th birthday. Instead, we’re going to celebrate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. Happy birthday, USA.

Richard Eskow: For those who don’t know, UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship. It’s a mixed martial arts promotion company based in Las Vegas. I’m old enough to remember, Nate, when “fight promoter” or “wrestling promoter” was not the most prestigious profession. I’ve been to my share of fights, but I’m not saying that out of snobbery — I’m just saying I’m old enough to remember when you wouldn’t expect to see a fight promoter putting on an event at the White House. So what do you think is really driving this? To what extent is Trump genuinely drawn to the world of combat sports, and to what extent is this political posturing?

Nate Wilcox: I’d say it’s probably a cash-in of some sort. If you watch what Trump is really motivated by — the insider trading, for example. I don’t know if you’ve noticed him touting Dell stock and then it coming out that he bought Dell shares just before he started praising what a great company it was. I’m sure, though I have no direct evidence, that there’s some kind of personal profit motive for the Trump family in the UFC White House deal. I don’t know what it is, but that’s a reasonable supposition.

Politically, he has enjoyed this alliance with Dana White and the UFC for ten years, though the way they tell the story, Trump and Dana White are best friends going back twenty years. Trump was one of the first people to host a UFC event at one of his casinos in the early 2000s, when Dana White and the Fertitta brothers first bought the company. But that was the extent of it. He hosted one of their events.

By 2009, Trump was literally the frontman for their biggest competitor. A T-shirt company called Affliction that had moved into the MMA business and put on two major pay-per-views before a third was canceled at the last minute. Trump was their frontman. And this was not friendly competition. Dana White famously held up a tombstone with the names of all his competitors on it. He didn’t take that lightly.

The key thing that always gets overlooked is that the UFC was sold in 2016 to an entity headed by Ari Emanuel — sometimes called the king of Hollywood agents. He’s the head of WME, formerly the William Morris Agency, and also the Endeavor Group he built. He had a small talent agency called Endeavor in the ‘90s. Then came the show Entourage — the character Ari Gold is based on Ari Emanuel, the hard-charging Hollywood agent. And in 2016 — well, actually in 2009 —

Richard Eskow: I’m sorry to interrupt for a second, Nate, but speaking of hard-charging Hollywood power brokers — Ari’s brother is Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic Party power broker and former mayor of Chicago, which was something of a reward for his service to Obama in the White House. So the connections spread pretty far and wide, don’t they?

Nate Wilcox: Absolutely. And Rahm is the least of it — former Obama chief of staff, Biden ambassador to Japan, mayor of Chicago. Their third brother, Zeke, was also one of the architects of Biden’s COVID policies.

Richard Eskow: Right. Zeke’s a physician, yes?

Nate Wilcox: He is. Definitely a powerful family. But what’s unusual is that Ari is very much a Democratic power broker — one of the most powerful money bundlers in Hollywood. And as we know, Hollywood is one of the financial bases of the Democratic Party. Yet in the summer of 2024, Ari Emanuel was one of the first major donors to publicly call for Biden to step down. He did it at the Simon Wiesenthal Center memorial luncheon, right in front of Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg — one of the co-founders of DreamWorks. Katzenberg stormed out in a fury.

To me, it was like — and this is an old-school rock-and-roll reference — when Neil Young joined Crosby and Nash and ended up stealing the show with long guitar solos, basically upstaging Stills and Graham Nash. That’s what Ari Emanuel did. He humiliated Katzenberg and seized the title of most important Hollywood power broker on the Democratic side.

And yet, at the same time, he’s played this game where his employee, Dana White, has been a very visible Trump ally. Keep in mind: Dana White is not on the board of TKO, the company that owns the UFC. He’s not one of the key decision-makers. He’s admitted under oath that he has no involvement in fighter negotiations. Dana White is involved in TV production and in selling the product — he’s the on-camera guy — but he’s not the decision-maker.

He also never spoke out politically before 2016. Under the previous ownership, the UFC was very buttoned-down politically, focused on gaining mainstream acceptance. If fighters made rape jokes on Twitter, they were fired. If fighters made transphobic remarks, they were sanctioned or fired. If a fighter abused a domestic partner, they were fired. Dana White famously said, “You put your hands on a woman one time, that’s it, you’re done.” Unfortunately for Dana, that standard didn’t seem to apply to him when he was caught on video in a physical altercation with his wife in Mexico in 2023. She slapped him first, but anyone who watches the footage can see the situation escalated considerably from there.

Richard Eskow: And one of the reasons I bring that up — we’ll come back to Dana White in a moment. But when I started reading your work, I knew a little bit about MMA already (my son-in-law has been educating me), and I was astonished by the extent to which the centers of power in this country are deeply connected to this industry. You have Ari Emanuel in the picture. You have Larry Ellison — a Trump-adjacent billionaire — and Paramount together spending, correct me if I’m wrong, around $7.7 billion for UFC broadcast rights, which I believe exceeded the UFC’s total revenue up to that point. So there’s an enormous amount of money changing hands. You’ve got Ellison, you’ve got Emanuel, and you’ve got the President of the United States. That’s why I said in the introduction that this is a bigger deal than most people realize. Has this world become a kind of epicenter for power players and deal-making?

Nate Wilcox: Absolutely. And it’s genuinely alarming to me. I’ve been covering combat sports for over twenty years, and I’m much more comfortable with small-time shady carnies — or even someone like Don King, who was a big-time shady carny. But Don King couldn’t get the crown prince of Saudi Arabia on the phone and raise billions of dollars the way Ari Emanuel can.

And I’m glad you brought up the Ellison deal, because there’s a common misunderstanding there. Larry Ellison brags about being MAGA since 2016, but he actually stepped away from Trump after January 6th and backed Tim Scott in the 2024 primary. And that’s the kind of thing Trump remembers.

So when Ellison’s son David wanted to buy Paramount, multiple reports indicate that Ari Emanuel played a key role — both within Hollywood and in convincing Shari Redstone, who owned Paramount, to accept that David Ellison was, quote, “good Hollywood people,” given that he’d been producing Top Gun sequels with his father’s money for ten years. That was the first hurdle Ari helped Ellison clear.

The second was that Ellison appeared cageside at two UFC events hosted by Ari Emanuel. Dana White was there, but it was Ari Emanuel who was seen introducing Ellison to Trump. At one of those events, Ellison and Trump apparently had a bit of a tense exchange, and Emanuel quickly stepped in to smooth things over.

It’s widely believed that Ari Emanuel helped secure Trump’s approval for the Skydance acquisition of Paramount — and was quickly rewarded with this massive media rights deal, which was twice what the UFC had been getting from ESPN and far higher than any media analyst expected. In fact, they had already stumbled with Netflix, giving Netflix a 45-day exclusive negotiating window in early 2024 and failing to close a deal.

So Emanuel does all these favors for the Ellisons, and the Ellisons do a solid for Paramount. And it gets even stranger when you look at the South Park negotiations that Paramount entered into around the same time. I tell this story often because it so perfectly illustrates how Ari Emanuel operates.

WME represents the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They’re negotiating with Paramount — which David Ellison had just acquired. One of the two creators and their WME agent were in their office on a call with Ellison. Ellison shows up — and in his office is Ari Emanuel, literally advising Ellison on the deal. Meanwhile, the counterparty in the negotiation is someone who works for Ari Emanuel at WME. South Park then extracts an enormous sum from Paramount — widely considered a gross overpayment. What actually happened was that Ari Emanuel was, in effect, on both sides of the negotiation simultaneously. It’s really something. And I haven’t even gotten to his international connections with the sovereign wealth funds of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Richard Eskow: Before we get there — the South Park deal, okay, a lot of people thought Paramount overpaid. And the broadcast rights to the UFC, the deal Ellison and Paramount struck, a lot of people thought they paid too much for that as well. I’d heard the TV ratings were actually declining. So they pay this enormous number, and it makes you wonder: what’s the deal behind the deal? I don’t want to say money laundering, but some kind of quid pro quo that’s not visible to those of us in the real world. Is there anything to that?

Nate Wilcox: I think it’s a reasonable supposition. There’s no smoking gun — no typewritten letter establishing it. But it’s very clear that Ari Emanuel helped the Ellisons navigate a very difficult merger process, both with the Paramount acquisition and the subsequent acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. And that this big UFC investment was the payoff, the reward for that.

That said, there is a legitimate business case to be made as well. Some analysts think this was the Ellisons planting a flag — we’re here to compete with Netflix. We’re not legacy media. We didn’t die in the streaming stock crash of 2022, when every studio, Paramount, Peacock, WBD, had inflated stock prices because people thought streaming was going to reshape everything. Netflix won that war, along with Google and YouTube.

So some people believe the Ellisons paid enormous sums for South Park and the UFC specifically to signal: we’re Silicon Valley money, and we’re here to compete with Netflix and Alphabet. We’re not Hollywood legacy. That’s one argument for it being a logical business decision.

But as you said, the ratings were down. ESPN was very clear that the UFC’s pay-per-view performance during its ESPN years had dropped significantly from when the deal was first signed.

The one thing in Paramount’s favor is that they’ve eliminated the pay-per-view model. Where you used to have to pay ten dollars a month for ESPN+ and then eighty dollars on top of that for the pay-per-view, now with Paramount you pay $8.99 or $15.99 a month — or you get it bundled with Walmart+ — and you get every UFC event, including the numbered events like UFC 300, UFC 305, UFC White House. They can also put those events on CBS and reach a much bigger audience than they ever did on ESPN.

Richard Eskow: I hadn’t even thought about CBS while you were talking, Nate — that’s a real point. More exposure is good for the sport. But there’s the buy decision and then there’s the price, and the price still seems questionable to me. That said, between UFC and TKO, you can trace this whole web of alliances — and you do trace it at MMA Draw. You’ve got the Trump White House, you’ve got Paramount, the sovereign wealth funds, AI, Meta — and of course Larry Ellison’s Oracle running some of the infrastructure. There’s a whole hub of interconnected interests here. Do I have that roughly right? And if so, where does Saudi Arabia fit in? We’re currently in the middle of an on-again, off-again conflict involving Saudi Arabia’s neighbors and rivals. Help me see the pattern.

Nate Wilcox: So WME bought the UFC in 2016. Then in 2023, they buy the WWE — the pro wrestling empire — from Vince McMahon, who was under duress, facing both criminal and civil charges, needing cash, and essentially pushed out by his own family from day-to-day operations. He still held a dominant stock position, and when he needed money, he sold to WME, which then formed a new company called TKO that now owns both the UFC and WWE. They’re expanding into boxing with something called Zufa Boxing — which is 60% owned by a Saudi holding company called Cella that is 100% owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Cella owns several UK football clubs, among other assets, and serves as one of the financial arms of the Saudi empire.

It gets even more interesting when you look at the Paramount financing. There was a Variety report announcing that multiple Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds were backing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — but that story was retracted within a day. It later came out that it was accurate: the Saudi, UAE, and Qatari sovereign wealth funds were all investors in Paramount, potentially owning as much as 49% of the company. Paramount filed something with the government disclosing that foreign entities might own up to 49%, which drew objections from multiple members of Congress who were not comfortable with Saudi Arabia and the UAE holding stakes in an entity that also owns CBS.

Briefly, in that original Variety report before it was pulled, it stated that Jared Kushner and Ari Emanuel were the ones who assembled the sovereign wealth financing. If you know anything about the internal rivalries among the Gulf states, that’s a remarkable achievement. The Saudis and the UAE literally tried to blockade Qatar — with Jared Kushner’s involvement — back in 2018, until someone pointed out that the U.S. had one of its largest Air Force bases in the world in Qatar. That blockade was abandoned. And the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been in open conflict since at least February, with different militia proxies under their respective control entering into open combat in Yemen.

Getting those three entities to invest together in the same deal is, by any measure, an extraordinary feat of deal-making.

There’s also the Khashoggi angle. When the Washington Post reporter was allegedly murdered on orders from Mohammed bin Salman in the Turkish consulate in Istanbul, Ari Emanuel broke a deal with MBS and returned $400 million, publicly stating he had doubled his security detail because he was so afraid of the Saudis. That was 2018. By 2024 and 2025? Water under the bridge. He’s back doing deals with the Saudis, traveling to the kingdom, and Saudi Arabia is hosting WWE and UFC events. They’re thick as thieves again. And the political acumen on display is, frankly, astonishing.

Richard Eskow: By the way — the UAE, among other things, owns Arsenal Football Club, my team. It’s Emirates Stadium now. And so you have this — remind me, Nate: back in early 2017, a source gave me audio of a Trump fundraiser speech where he was attacking Qatar and praising Saudi Arabia. And interestingly, a few days after I published that story in The Intercept, someone broke into our studio and stole a bunch of equipment — nothing of obvious value, but still. Anyway — there’s this intra-Middle East power politics layered on top of Ari Emanuel’s financial interests, which I have to assume overlap with the Ellisons’ interests and, at least tactically, with Trump’s. And all of it seems to intersect around this industry. Your beat is sitting right on top of these fault lines. There may be a window through combat sports into things happening at a level we don’t otherwise see clearly.

Nate Wilcox: I think that’s right. And some of what you’re seeing is the relative decline of Hollywood as a financial and cultural power. Ari Emanuel likes to be introduced as the king of Hollywood, and he publicly identifies with that world — he tends to downplay the UFC and WWE connection. But in 2020, he nearly lost his entire empire during COVID. No movies in theaters, the whole industry locked down. It was Dana White and the UFC that pushed to keep holding events when nobody else thought that was a good idea. They went to the UAE, held fights on what they called Fight Island. A few people got COVID, but it basically worked. And those cash flows literally kept Ari Emanuel’s empire alive.

Now he’s a billionaire — and he’s a billionaire because of revenue from the UFC and the WWE, not from Hollywood talent representation. At one point, Endeavor seemed to envision becoming a movie studio, playing both sides of the table as producers and agents. But once Hollywood imploded — not just from COVID, but from the decade-long addiction to superhero movies that trained anyone over 15 to stop going to the multiplex — the math changed. Ari was shrewd enough to recognize that live-streamed sports was a safer bet than produced TV content and theatrical films. He jumped into it in 2016, and by 2020 it was the foundation of his empire.

Endeavor stock actually failed on its initial public offering and had to go through a take-private maneuver orchestrated by a private equity fund called Silver Lake, run by Egon Durbin — the same financial engineer who took Dell private and then relisted it. The net result is that Silver Lake owns a majority of WME, and WME owns 60% of TKO. So when you buy TKO stock, you’re only buying into 40% of the actual ownership structure. The stock has doubled since 2023, partly because they settled a major monopolization class-action lawsuit brought by fighters for $375 million. They have two more of these suits pending, but once the first one settled, the market decided that problem was contained, and the stock took off. They’ve launched Zufa Boxing, they’ve lobbied for the Muhammad Ali Boxing Revival Act —

Richard Eskow: And I want to get to that. But first — it also seems like one of the reasons the fight world is such a smart investment for Ari Emanuel is that the athletes don’t receive nearly the same share of revenue as in other sports. If my figures are right, TKO pays its fighters less than 20% of revenue. Compare that to the NFL, NBA, and NHL, where the players typically receive around 48 to 49%. These are people putting their bodies on the line with short career spans, not getting anywhere close to what athletes in other major sports earn. And the classic economic explanation for that is monopsony — concentrated buyer power. I’d think these class-action suits have real merit.

Nate Wilcox: They do have merit. They settled one for nine figures, and when you pay out that kind of money in a lawsuit, that tends to suggest there was some fire behind the smoke.

In most stick-and-ball sports, athletes receive 48 to 49% of revenue — NFL, NBA, NHL alike. In boxing, superstars were getting 75 to 80% — Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, that level. The UFC became a monopsony early on, meaning they were essentially the only buyer for top-tier MMA talent from the moment they acquired Strikeforce in 2011, their last major competitor. No one has managed to establish a truly competitive MMA league anywhere in the world since then. That structural dominance lets them keep fighter wages artificially and dramatically low.

They’re now applying the same approach to the WWE. Just in the last couple of weeks, a significant number of WWE performers were cut, and others were handed 50% pay cuts. That’s the model. In fact, their CEO Mark Shapiro brags about it on quarterly shareholder calls — keeping costs down, maximizing value, “extracting value” being his preferred phrase.

And if you look at the WWE mat today versus the Vince McMahon era, when he was famously adamant about no advertising on the mat — it now looks like one of those completely logo-covered T-shirts from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. When they announced their plans for Paramount, one of the first things they touted was starting UFC Fight Nights an hour earlier. People thought: great, earlier bedtime. But no — they just added an extra hour of ads to the broadcast. It’s what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, and they are fully committed to it.

Richard Eskow: Right. And now let’s talk about the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, which passed the House on a two-thirds voice vote. My brain melted a little when I heard about it, because I’m old enough to remember when Muhammad Ali was the most widely despised public figure in mainstream America — branded a draft dodger, a radical Muslim. And now Republicans and Democrats are joining hands in the House of Representatives in his name. There’s a little future shock in that for some of us. But tell us about the act, because I think it’s an important piece of the picture.

Nate Wilcox: So essentially, the original Muhammad Ali Act was something that John McCain — not someone I admire broadly, but this was one thing I did — worked with Ali himself to pass. It made it illegal for a boxing promoter to also manage fighters, required revenue figures to be openly disclosed so that fighters and their management would know how big a pie they were splitting, and it forbade promoters from operating their own sanctioning bodies and awarding their own championship belts.

This new Muhammad Ali Boxing Revival Act would allow the UFC to do all of those things. It creates a new class of entities called UBOs — Unified Boxing Organizations — which, provided they spend a little more on ringside ambulances and fighter health insurance, are granted sweeping latitude: owning their own belts, managing fighters, promoting fights, sitting on every side of the table simultaneously. Basically, they’re being handed the legal permission to do everything the Mafia did when they controlled boxing in the 1950s and ‘60s. Sonny Liston, the man Ali dethroned for the championship, was completely controlled by the New York Mob — they managed him, promoted his fights, and handed out the belts. That’s the blueprint.

And now they’ve gotten Muhammad Ali’s widow to endorse it, secured bipartisan support, and even brought Ilhan Omar on board.

Richard Eskow: Really? Huh.

Nate Wilcox: There was only one Democrat — a congressman from Connecticut whose name I’m blanking on — who spoke out against it on the voice vote. Now it’s in front of Ted Cruz’s committee in the Senate, and it looks like smooth sailing, even though Muhammad Ali’s grandson has since come out against it, Oscar De La Hoya has come out against it, and the WBC sanctioning body is trying to lobby against it. But all of those opponents were caught completely flat-footed and didn’t even seem to realize what was happening during the first House hearings. By all accounts, there were far more TKO lobbyists in the room for those hearings than there were journalists or members of Congress.

TKO went all in. And I’ve heard, somewhat amusingly, that TKO was genuinely irritated when the bill didn’t pass on day one. The lobbyists had to go back and explain: this is Mike Johnson’s House of Representatives. Things don’t pass on day one here.

Richard Eskow: That’s not the level of service we’re paying for. It’s interesting too that Ali’s grandson came out against it — I believe Ali’s daughters are fighters, actually. I’m surprised more of the family didn’t weigh in earlier, but of course we don’t know what conversations have taken place behind the scenes.

Nate Wilcox: The family dynamics and business politics there could be very complicated. And I don’t have any insight into what angles various family members may be working. But if you have an active career in boxing, you might not want to risk going up against what appears to be the 800-pound gorilla just entering the room.

And you know, some of the ground may start shifting under everyone’s feet the way Hollywood shifted under Ari Emanuel’s last time he built an empire. You’ve now got this war in the Gulf. Will the UAE look the same in eighteen months? What does Saudi Arabia look like if the Houthis escalate and cut off access to the Red Sea? Saudi Arabia could face very serious trouble very quickly. In some ways, they’ve built this empire on sand, and we’ll see how it holds up long-term.

But so far they’ve managed to get all of these interests aligned. And they have interests in China, in Russia — they’re close to Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s point man for back-channel negotiations with figures like Witkoff and Kushner. He’s essentially Putin’s Kushner. And the UFC is very tight with him, though because of sanctions they’ve had to maintain some distance publicly. These are people who are prepared and able to do business with anyone, anywhere, regardless of what ethical minefields are in the way — as long as there’s cash at the end of the road.

Richard Eskow: If you’ve got a few more minutes, I’d like to go to sudden-death overtime.

Nate Wilcox: Sure, I’ve got a few more.

Richard Eskow: Good. There’s one more topic I didn’t want to let slip by — Dana White pushing AI technology in broadcasts. That brings in yet another center of power and influence: the AI industry, which of course has its own connections to fossil fuels and the Middle East. We could go on and on. But I’m not that familiar with the specifics here. What’s the deal with AI?

Nate Wilcox: The most public development is that Meta put Dana White on its board in early 2025. My take — and this is my opinion — is that it was a classic case of Mark Zuckerberg being behind the curve and making a bad bet. He wanted in with Trump. Elon’s in with Trump, the Ellisons are in with Trump, so he’s going to buy Trump’s best friend a seven-figure stock grant on Meta’s board to advise them on marketing AI. Anyone who knows anything about Dana White immediately saw through that. This is not an intellectually curious man, to put it mildly. He doesn’t know anything about tech. When people have pushed back on the UFC’s flagrant use of AI in promotional content, his response has literally been: shut up — it’s the future.

He looks like one of those speakers who’ve gone viral at college commencement events recently — the ones who say “AI” and get booed. Dana doesn’t seem to grasp that a lot of people deeply dislike AI. He’s been told from the penthouse suite that it’s the future, so it’s the future. What could be the problem?

I’m sure the UFC and TKO would be thrilled to generate fights with AI if people would pay them for it. Think of all the problems that solves. But it’s much more smoke than fire. I don’t believe he plays any real role on Meta’s board, which has many members. And he hasn’t even been a compelling salesman for the UFC in the last couple of years. He’s visibly checked out. They used to do touring promo circuits — two fighters, events in multiple cities, crowds of hundreds or thousands, Dana getting red-faced and enthusiastic about the next big fight. Now he’ll announce fights from his phone in a casino closet — and it’s well-documented that he’s a prolific gambler who spends most of his time in casinos, often seven nights a week — and he’ll read from a cue card, sometimes not even knowing who the fighters are.

The idea that this man is going to become a compelling evangelist for AI is pretty laughable. I don’t know if you saw him on Charlamagne Tha God before UFC 328, but he’s gotten so accustomed to limiting his media availability to friendly podcasters like Adin Ross or the Nelk Boys that when Charlamagne asked him hard questions, you could visibly watch the gears seize up. When Charlamagne asked whether his position of power helped him avoid consequences for beating his wife on camera, Dana was just sputtering. It was, as a longtime Dana White watcher, genuinely delightful to observe.

But the idea that this person has some special connection to twenty-somethings and can sell them AI they don’t want to buy — that’s simply not happening.

And the decision to make the UFC openly politically partisan, to allow racist, sexist, and transphobic fighters to make that part of their public persona — one of the most notorious cases was Colby Covington, who just retired. Before he did, he said publicly: I did all that political stuff as a hype tactic, to get attention, because I knew that’s what the UFC wanted. So it’s not even genuine bigotry. It’s performed bigotry to make money. Which is, if anything, more disgusting to me than the real thing.

Richard Eskow: It is totally disgusting — artificial bigotry to go along with the artificial intelligence. I think we’ve established that the only thing AI might conceivably improve is Dana White, and in every other context, it would be a downgrade. I’m not even sure how you’d use it effectively in the fight world, unless you’re just generating little animated bouts.

Nate Wilcox: Well, they do use it to generate broadcasters —

Richard Eskow: Right. I think however they use it, it would be annoying.

Nate Wilcox: The ads for UFC White House are 100% AI-generated — showing fighters arriving on Marine helicopters landing on the White House lawn, things like that. They probably saved themselves six figures in production costs and the security headache of actually shooting on-site. But it’s visibly, palpably AI slop.

Compare that to the NFL: when the Cardinals put out an AI-generated ad, about ten other teams immediately released their own ads specifically emphasizing that they were made by real, local, human film workers. The NFL can do that because it has multiple owners and operates as a league rather than a cartel — there’s room for internal debate and dissent. But the UFC exists in such a sealed-off bubble, and Dana White’s attitude toward MMA media and MMA fans has long been: I don’t need you, screw you. Somehow that’s worked for him because the hardcore fans are addicted and will keep spending regardless of how they’re treated. The strategy is to go after the casual audience — the people who’ll show up for UFC White House or tune in because it’s on CBS. So if you’re with a sports publication and want access? They banned ESPN writers from the WWE entirely. It’s remarkable.

Richard Eskow: And that’s what doesn’t make sense to me. You spend $7.7 billion because you want to grow your audience beyond the core fans — bring in the civilians. And then you go cheap with an obviously AI-generated ad that announces to the unconverted: this is a low-quality product. You spent $7.7 billion and then you want to save $125,000 on a photo shoot. I don’t understand the logic.

But here’s my takeaway from all of this, Nate — and I’ll have to have you back because there’s so much more to cover. My conclusion is that this is making me nostalgic for the Mafia. Those guys would kill you if you crossed them, but they were at least reliable. They stood by their deals. This current crowd just seems like a network of ruthless backstabbers who, if they miscalculate, could trigger something genuinely catastrophic. I’ll give you the last word.

Nate Wilcox: I think what we’re seeing is that TKO is an entity that has already succeeded in monopolizing MMA and pro wrestling, and is now working to do the same in boxing. And these aren’t fight people. They’re Hollywood guys, and more precisely, they’re private equity guys — the same people who’ve destroyed your local veterinary clinic, your funeral home, your doctor’s office. It’s the exact same playbook running in a different industry. Why is a routine X-ray for your cat suddenly $700? This is why. These are not fight people. They don’t know or care about fights. Dana White is phoning it in — this is not the Dana White who built the UFC from nothing into one of the major sports organizations in the world. This is a guy who’d rather be at a casino dropping a million dollars on blackjack than talking about fights.

Richard Eskow: What would Howard Cosell say about all of that? Nate Wilcox, thank you for a great conversation. You can find Nate’s writing at MMAdraw.com. I encourage you to check it out — whether you’re a fight fan or you just want to understand how our overlords are making deals these days, this industry seems to be sitting at the center of some very consequential activity. Nate, thanks for the great reporting, and thanks for coming on the program.

Nate Wilcox: Thanks for having me, Richard. My pleasure.

After an extended pressure campaign, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin finally agreed to release the DNC’s “autopsy report” on the 2024 election. It’s the first document I’ve ever read that would have been better if it had been written by AI. Martin himself said the report “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” That’s for damn sure. As we’ll see, however, that doesn’t let Martin off the hook.

I downloaded the document before reviewing my news feed, where I quickly learned that many like-minded people began exactly as I did: by searching for the word “Gaza.” Result? “Not found.” I then tried “Palestine.” Result? “Not found.” How about “Israel”? “Not found.”

These omissions are particularly striking since one activist group was told by report author Paul Rivera that DNC data showed that the administration’s support for the Gaza genocide was, “in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Axios, which reported on that exchange, added that it “independently verified that Democratic officials conducting the autopsy believed the issue harmed the party’s standing with some voters.”

RootsAction was one of the groups pressing for the autopsy’s release, and co-founder Jeff Cohen called the document “almost worthless.” Cohen condemned the failure to mention “the Biden/Harris administration’s Israel policy that abetted the Gaza massacre,” Biden’s initial decision to run for re-election, and what he called Kamala Harris’ “lack of principles.”

Other words that can’t be found in the autopsy include “war,” “military,” “defense” (in the military sense), “peace,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security.” The report fails to address either the US’ runaway military spending or the ongoing attempts to undermine the country’s social contract.

The report’s only conceivable value will be for future anthropologists, who will find it provides considerable insight into the culture and folkways of the professional Democratic class. Its introduction reads like the kind of word salad a teenager might come up with when asked to write a 1200-word essay on a topic they forgot to study. There’s a lot of meandering, some restatements of the assignment, and a hastily looked-up quotation. Don’t read it unless you’re prepared to wade through prose like this:

“... the voters decide which choice is most resonant. One party declares itself the winner, and the other party declares that the fight is far from finished.

“Effective parties, understanding history rarely repeats itself, it does often rhyme, make it a point to study electoral outcomes after each cycle to identify potential improvements to every aspect of their campaigns. John Adams argued ‘Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right…and a desire to know.’”

Believe me, it doesn’t get any better from there.

The document is 192 pages long, but many of those pages are blank. The page called “Leadership Message”: blank. (Any comment about that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.) “Executive Summary”: blank. And so on.

The section entitled “Electoral Landscape” includes sentences like this : “We must organize everywhere to Win Anywhere”—which doesn’t make any sense. You don’t have to organize everywhere to win anywhere. And Democrats already win somewhere! Those “somewheres” are called “Blue States.” The problem is they have to win more “somewheres,” and you can’t win somewhere if you’re “everywhere”! You have to be there to win there!

The next sentence begins, “Winning Anywhere means providing for a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South ...” Wait. One sentence ago we were everywhere. Now we’re in Middle America and the South, which happen to be two readily-identifiable somewheres.

That’s what consultant-speak will do to the human mind.

The document, perhaps unsurprisingly, praises the centrist Democratic orientation of the late 1980s and 1990s. But the same pro-corporate orientation contributed heavily to the party’s 2024 losses. That’s what you get what you call on a party to emulate the centrists’ “future-focused directive”—by adopting a forty-year-old strategy.

The report also states that “the DNC and ASDC (Association of State Democratic Parties) have conducted more than 1200 interviews to assess the health of our 57 state parties – in every state, district, or territory.” Where are those interviews?

Martin reportedly told DNC members that Rivera no longer “is with or advises the DNC in any capacity.” But the buck stops with the boss, not the consultant.

I get it; Martin has a tough job. But he campaigned for his position by promising an autopsy. When Rivera’s proved to be unusable, Martin was obliged to have it re-done. By failing to do so, he reneged on his campaign promise. In the meantime, a little transparency would have gone a long way toward avoiding the mess he now faces.

Don’t read the DNC document unless you’re a masochist or a journalist (provided there’s a difference between the two). Read this one instead. Stay far away from the DNC report. Trust me, you’ll “win somewhere” by being anywhere else.

Disclosure: The Zero Hour program is sponsored by Progressive Hub, a project of RootsAction.

“City of Immigrants,” Steve Earle (directed by Steve Buscemi)

I love this new video of Steve Earle’s song, “City of Immigrants.” Variety gives the video’s backstory (in that publication’s characteristic, showbiz-oriented style), calling it “a heartfelt, lively celebration of the polyglot melting pot that New York City has always been, created by two longtime residents.”

The video is political, but only in the sense that Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance was political. When we celebrate human life, culture, and vitality, the political implications flow from that.

The song and video reminded me of my years as a resident of New York City—and of an article I wrote in 2010 for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle about my hometown of Utica, NY. Utica is also a city of immigrants.

Here are some excerpts from that article, with a little light editing and rewriting as appropriate. (No AI was used in the production of this column.)

Enjoy the video.

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Autumn 2010

Utica, New York, was a factory town when I was born there, famous for corruption and violence, for the once-powerful Mohawk tribe, for white bread and cheap beer and the Erie Canal. That city’s gone, dying like the rest of the Rust Belt. Utica’s population is down 40 percent. Incomes are less than half the national average. Nearly half the buildings downtown have been torn down.

I left Utica 47 years ago and never returned. As our car passed the city limits for the last time, John Kennedy had four months to live. They were advertising a new TV show called The Fugitive. Radios played “Surf City,” “Memphis,” and bad-girl group The Angels promising a “beating” in “My Boyfriend’s Back.” “You’re gonna be sorry you were ever born,” they sneered. “If I were you I’d take a permanent vacation.”

And now, instead of The Angels, devas. Refugees, including Buddhists from war-torn regions in Asia, have arrived in Utica. The monks who led Burma’s “Saffron Revolution” are here, along with Cambodian and Vietnamese exiles. Their presence gave me a reason to return. And reflect.

“Sin City USA!” screamed the cover of a 1959 Look magazine about Utica. “Corrupt Policemen, Racketeers Laughing at The Law … An Empire of Vice and Drugs.”

A few years later the town’s prosperity began to fade. Finally, even the hit men left for more promising territory. The house where I spent my first few months of life is now boarded up, abandoned like most on the block. Drug deals go down on the street outside. But three blocks away, kindly monks encouraged me to eat an apple and sip a Thai energy drink.

“I spent ten years in prison for pro-democracy activities,” said U Pyinya Zawta, Executive Director-in-Exile of the All Burma Monks’ Alliance. “There I suffered the pain of torture.”

The Burmese monks were brought here by the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, the hub of a 13,000-person immigrant community that makes up roughly 20 percent of the city’s population. Most of Utica’s 2,000 Burmese are ethnically Karen Christians, along with some Muslim families and two or three hundred Buddhists.

Utica was a “city of immigrants” when I lived there, too, but we were the immigrants in my neighborhood, a mixture of first and second-generation Americans—Italians, Irish, and in my family’s case, Russian Jewish on one side and half-French on the other.

(It has sometimes struck me that three out of four of my grandparents were immigrants and nobody ever asks me “where I’m from.”)

Some Buddhists describe karmic residue, vasana, as “perfume.” “After you scream,” said Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri, “something is still there … not as a shadow, but as something in your body and mind.” At the age of 8 I was held in our family’s garage for hours by a gang of older kids, stabbed nineteen times with a rusty hatpin.

U Pyinya offers no specifics about his 10-year ordeal. Instead, he told me how his experience with HIV-infected prisoners led him to build the first HIV facility in Burma.

Peeling paint and crayon scribblings marked the walls of the tiny house he shared with three other monks. I asked him if monasticism and political activism are in conflict. “The Buddha taught us that we need to work for the whole universe,” he answered, “and for all living beings to be peaceful and happy.” Burmese visitors wandered in and out of the house, but activity stopped when the BBC’s Burmese-language news broadcast came on, and the monks huddled around the radio.

What does he expect now for Burma? “Things will get worse,” he said. “Soldiers are raiding villages, raping and robbing the people there. There will be more poverty. They’ll keep recruiting younger and younger child soldiers. We hear they are recruiting them at 14 and 15 now. Burma was very rich in jade, sapphire, natural gas, tea … but the military doesn’t share it with the people. In a country rich with natural gas, people can’t get electricity more than a couple of days a week.”

Poppies are a natural resource there, too. Burma reportedly supplies more than half of the U.S.’s heroin. How’s this for interconnectedness? Americans who die from overdoses in cities like Utica are victims of Burma’s generals, too. A question I hesitate to ask: Do they feel their uprising failed? “We’re satisfied that more people know about Burma now. The world community is much more aware of the brutality of the military regime.” He pauses. “We will continue to make people aware of Burma’s problems.”

U Gawsita, the public face of the Saffron Revolution, wandered in and out of the room with what seemed like indifference. Later I heard him say in a taped interview that life in Utica was difficult because he couldn’t understand the language. I asked his fellow monk U Agga how they handled loneliness: “We meditate and pray and develop our lovingkindness. We can’t call or email our families, because the regime controls all communications. If we miss them, we meditate more.”

Utica’s Burmese have adapted their folk traditions, moving their annual Thingyan Water Festival from April to July to accommodate the long winters. The number 9—ko—is considered good fortune in Burmese tradition. Traveling parties of eight sometimes brought along a symbolic “ninth member” for luck, and traditionally nine monks would perform the ritual that dispels restless ghosts.

Those ghosts may have to linger now. All but eight Burmese monks in the U.S. have been forced into lay life, working at meatpacking plants and other blue-collar jobs.

“Young Girls Led Into Lives of Degradation,” The 1959 headlines shouted. “Joy Houses Ran the Gamut from Tawdry to Posh Pleasure Palaces for the Well-Heeled.”

The erotic images I saw here were brutal or tawdry: the nude Marilyn Monroe calendar in the gas station, the sordid sex-and-violence covers of Police Gazetteand True Detective (“No Mercy for Mary! Pretty Chicago Brunette Loses Her Fight Against a Killer”) in the neighborhood barbershop.

Others have sensed a degraded sexual perfume here, too: “Most corrupt, vial [sic] city in New York state,” one online comment reads. “Hey, remember when the Mayor said Utica doesn’t have $2 hookers, it has $20 hookers?” reads another. Utica has several strip joints but no bookstores.

The city was also a “processing hub” for Vietnamese refugees, four or five hundred of whom stayed and built a temple. A photo of their monks’ induction ceremony shows women marching single file down Miller Street, baskets on their heads and children in costumes at their feet. The temple is erecting a statue of Quan Am, Bodhisattva of Compassion. Perhaps her intercession will help the city’s Amerasians, mixed-race children of U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese mothers, brought here after Congress granted them citizenship. As small children some of them lived on Vietnam’s streets, bearing the poetic-sounding but heartless name bui doi (“dust of life”). Some, their fathers unknown, say they don’t know their true names. Others wonder where they’re “from.”

The night I returned, I stopped at a pharmacy in an unfamiliar industrial area. Inside, loudspeakers played only the oldies of my childhood. I remembered an old Twilight Zone episode: a man returns to the poor neighborhood where bullies once tormented him, only to become a trapped child again. I wondered how far we were from my old home and keyed the address into my phone: “Driving time: One minute.”

The pharmacy was built on the site of a White Tower burger joint. The ice cream parlor had been replaced by a body shop. They’d torn down the Pontiac dealership where a salesman once lifted a tarp to show me the taillights on the new Bonneville—a “company secret”—and then said, “Son, promise me you’ll never sell cars for a living.”

There it was: the house where I grew up. A transistor radio upstairs once played a saxophone instrumental called “Stranger on the Shore,” making me sad in a way I wanted to feel over and over. Outside, when I was four, a factory whistle sounded in the distance and the sky seemed to turn gold. I felt completely alone in the universe. I tried to find that feeling again for a long time.

I set off for my school, John F. Hughes, a third of a mile away, and found I still knew every turn of a walk I hadn’t taken for half a century. Approaching the building, I remembered something I’d heard decades later in a support group for alcoholics and addicts: “The minute I walked into kindergarten, I needed a goddamned drink.”

The Thai teacher Ajahn Chah once spoke about dukkha and rebirth, using the Utica-friendly metaphor of a boxer who only ducks after his teeth have been knocked out. “You have to duck before they slug you,” he said. Dukkha is usually translated as “suffering,” but some say it means “craving” or even “addiction.” Ajahn Chah said, “Dukkha sticks on the skin and goes into the flesh.”

Happy memories return, too: Oneida Avenue, at the hill’s summit, limning the farthest reaches of my childhood. The cemetery, with knobbed stone gates like a troll’s gateway. Train tracks, now gone, where I’d look down the line and imagine I was seeing all the way to California.

The barbershop’s gone. In 1962, I was getting a haircut there when an air-raid drill sounded. It was illegal to be outside during a drill, but the barber sprayed me with hair tonic to drive me away. “Get the fuck outta here,” he said. Reeking of Vitalis, I walked home through deserted streets as sirens wailed. Now I cut through the same vacant lots, behind the same brick buildings, which today also stood vacant. Two bikers drank beer on their porch, motorcycles gleaming at the curb. On my block an old woman watched me suspiciously until I introduced myself. Everyone you knew is gone, she said, listing one family name after another. Dead, or moved to New Hartford, a nicer town up the road.

A small boy stepped out of his house and stared at me. He was dark-skinned, something unimaginable on this street in my segregated childhood. I realize that my Utica’s as ancient to him as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the start of World War I was to me.

The next day I joined the monks for lunch. There’s a picture of me using my cell phone outside the monks’ house. It shows a man in black clothes of no known 1950s fashion. A headset flashes in his ear. The object in his hand links him to the entire world. He’s a refugee from my childhood’s future, an immigrant into its past.

The next day I joined the monks for lunch. As Burmese women served food and shared the meal, two refugee children lingered outside. Where do you guys go to school? “Hughes.” Me too, I said—50 years ago. They laughed.

U Agga described a shootout outside their front door last winter. “Bang! Bang!” he says. “Two bodies. Many police came, with flashing lights. Scary.”

These monks faced down an entire army, but nothing prepared them for a shootout in the northern darkness, red blood in dirty white snow. Outside the house was a garden, its fence and gate made of woven branches. Once I had a garden in Utica, too, with carrots and morning glories. I could never wake up early enough to see the flowers’ blossoms, which only appear at daybreak. Finally my father carried me outside to look at them. I only saw them once, but they were beautiful.

From the monks’ garden I saw this on the street outside: An African woman in hijab trailed by two burly teenagers, watched by blond kids inside a house draped with a giant American flag. Villagers from Vietnam and Cambodia passing each other in the midday sun. A fat, shirtless, ponytailed white man driving down the center of the street on a tractor, pulling a trailer filled with junk.

A tattooed Burmese man sees our rental car. “Where are you from?” he asks. “I’m from here,” I say. The words feel alien in my mouth. He rolls up his T-shirt for the photographer, a cigarette dangling from his lip like James Dean. His tattoo shows a dove flying over a “Mother Hen,” which either represents his mother country or the entire world. It’s not clear which. “Peace for the people,” he says.

Utica’s Cambodian temple is a few short blocks away. The 75 families who built it wrote their wishes on pieces of paper that are buried beneath its cornerstone. A beaming monk lets us in. An old man in his undershorts is watching TV in the kitchen, but he slips away as we enter. A researcher found that many Cambodian refugees watching American television thought that the special effects were real. “We used to see that same kind of spirit in Cambodia, shooting through the air at night,” one said of a ghostly fireball. “You have them here, too … I’ve seen them in back of the apartment building.”

A Cambodian-American whose name sounds like “Phil” wears a sparkly T-shirt and jeans and speaks at a street vendor’s clip. He shows us the altar, rich with offerings. Shrines outside face the eight directions. The eaves are draped with Christmas tree lights. Admiring the temple’s fine woodwork, I’m told the refugees did it themselves. The sign over the gate reads “Wat Satheatak Uticaram.” I know that wat means “temple” and the last word means “of Utica.” Is that other word Pali, I ask? “You know a lot,” says Phil, although I don’t. After conferring, they translate Satheatak as “opening of the heart.

The house next door is for sale and the monk wants the community to buy it. Phil thinks people are afraid to sleep near a temple. “Ghosts?” I ask. “I knew you know a lot!” Phil says, but the monk shakes his head in disagreement.

Tradition says the fiercest khmoc—ghosts—are the spirits of people who died violent deaths. These refugees, survivors of the killing fields, know about ghosts. I leave an offering at the altar.

The Air Force base whose B-52s once flew over our house is gone now. Occasionally, long ago, I’d look up to make sure the bomber overhead was “one of ours.” During the Cuban Missile Crisis I dreamed an H-bomb exploded on our horizon. No fire or noise, just the world turning yellowish-brown and crumbling away like old parchment. But Utica’s still here, fighting to reinvent itself. There are signs of attempted renewal: microbreweries, a still-thriving museum, a playhouse. There’s even a haunted house in an abandoned factory called “Horror Realm,” where make-believe ghouls enact freakish industrial experiments for paying visitors. Our childhood nightmares have become a tourist attraction.

My city’s gone. The child who lived here is not the same person as the man I have become. But there’s a connection, an unbroken current. Utica, too, continues. Its Buddhists seem intent on staying. But the Mohawks probably thought they were staying, too. So did the families on my block.

Two weeks after my visit, I learned that the Burmese monks unexpectedly left town.

Still, Utica lives. It’s not a shrine to tragedy, nor is it some 21^st Century Pompeii. There’s good and bad, like anywhere, that’s all. We bring our own perfume. I realize with a start that I miss Utica, that I’ve always missed it, no matter where I’ve gone. I’ve never felt I belonged anywhere else.

I drive away for the last time. The old trolley tracks are still there, at least in the poorer parts of town. The sign outside a Catholic Church, “Fish Fry or Pirogyis Every Friday,” could have been there fifty years ago. The Cambodian kids in the takeout restaurant might have been the Irish or Italian or Polish teenagers of my youth. The girl behind the counter licks the overflowing soda from a takeout cup and tilts her head toward the boy next to her. “He’s my boyfriend,” she says shyly.

Across the street, a Black church is boarded up. They’ll never sing the old gospel song there again, if they ever did, the one that goes, “Before this time another year, I may be gone.”

Most of this city’s stories won’t be told; most stories never are. Angels become lovers, and lovers become memories. Memories fade, and other people create new ones of their own. One person’s Horror Realm becomes another person’s refuge. Ghosts aren’t real, or if they’re real, then they too melt away. Stories can be rewritten. You can decide for yourself where you’re from.

I’m from here.

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Prof. Wolff and I spent this conversation wrestling with a central, uncomfortable question: are we watching the collapse of an American era, or have we entered a period where coherence itself has become a casualty? It sometimes feels like the zeitgeist can be summed up with three simple initials: “WTF!”

Here, Prof. Wolff and I work on separating the signal from the noise. We discuss the vacuum left by the collapse of ideologies, the grotesque theater of figures like Hegseth and Melania, performing roles they clearly didn’t create for themselves, the dangerous incoherence of the war against Iran, and the real possibility that Europe—stung by tariffs, excluded from war councils, and humiliated by a country it once trusted—may ultimately turn toward Russia and China for a better deal.

Neither of us claim to have a clean theory. These aren’t very ‘clean’ times. But we need to pay close attention and react accordingly, as we attempt to do here.

Selected Quotes

“A people always ends by resembling its shadow.”
— Rudyard Kipling, invoked by Richard Eskow

“When wine goes bad, it’s vinegar. Whatever vintage American wine was, we’re watching it turning into vinegar.”
—Richard Eskow

“The tariff attack was considered a betrayal. The war in Iran was considered a betrayal. For Europeans, these are levels of outrage their politicians have figured out are way too deep and way too wide to ignore.”
—Richard Wolff

“We don’t even have bad visions anymore. There’s a vacuum where there used to be competing ideologies.”
—Richard Eskow

“The best organizer for the left in America today is Mr. Trump.”
—Richard Wolff

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: You and I get questions of various kinds — some answerable, some ineffable, some barely comprehensible. Usually I can take a fair shot at most of them. But lately things have gotten so chaotic that I find myself struggling.

I’ve actually been working on a piece I keep setting aside called “The Age of Meaninglessness,”the idea being that perhaps the defining feature of this era is that it doesn’t mean anything. There’s a line from The Simpsons where someone asks, “What’s the moral of this story?” and Homer says, “There is no moral. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.” Sometimes I think that describes contemporary history.

But I had another thought while wrestling with this topic. What came to mind, of all things, was a quote by Rudyard Kipling, who knew a thing or two about empires, particularly the British Empire. Kipling wrote that when a society is collapsing, “a people always ends by resembling its shadow.” And to me, that might be a key to understanding what’s going on.

It’s not that Trump and the people around him represent a disruption in the arc of American history. They’re as American as anything else in this country, except perhaps more so. They may be the distillate of Americanism: the greed, the arrogance, the assumption that power, particularly military power, will always prevail, the sexual obsession.

And it’s not limited to Trump alone—or as he apparently prefers to be addressed, “Jesus Christ.” It applies to the people around him too. Melania Trump going on television to declare she has never been associated with Jeffrey Epstein, which seemed like a national non sequitur. Pete Hegseth and his Narcissus-like fascination with his own appearance, rejecting photographers who don’t capture him flatteringly.

It all seems to me like a sign of something. When wine goes bad, it becomes vinegar. My working theory is that whatever vintage American wine once was, we are now watching it turn. But that’s just a thought I’ve been sitting with. What do you make of it?

Richard Wolff: I love this way of putting things, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Though I think it’s worth pairing it with a little exercise in intellectual humility, and here’s what I mean. You and I are particularly good, I think, at constructing analyses and narratives to make sense of whatever we’re discussing. I believe in that. I believe it’s one of the better things human beings do. The trouble is never to confuse the act of constructing a story with actually capturing how things really are. Always stay open to the aspects you haven’t yet understood or surfaced, because they’re always there.

One of the ways you keep yourself honest is by periodically saying exactly what you just said, and you said it very well. These are chaotically juxtaposed, jumbled phenomena that don’t lend themselves to any straightforward explanation.

Let me add a few observations. I follow European podcasts and news outlets fairly closely, and I would say the level of hostility toward the United States — not just toward Trump personally, but toward a broader America — has risen significantly. The sentiment seems to be: if Americans genuinely disagreed with Trump, there would be far more visible signs of it. Europeans don’t see demonstrations in the streets. They don’t see the Democratic Party mobilizing its base to register discontent. None of it.

And I find that deeply significant, because I think it is extremely dangerous for the United States. If you look at the approval ratings for the leaders of England, France, and Germany — Starmer, Macron, Merz — they’re polling at ten to twenty percent. They’re in worse shape than Trump. And they are going to be voted out by populations who feel a sense of betrayal by the United States — and whose politicians are now realizing that sentiment runs too deep and too wide to ignore.

The tariff attack was experienced as a betrayal. The war on Iran was experienced as a betrayal — not being consulted, then being excoriated for not helping in a war they weren’t consulted about in the first place. These are not grievances European politicians can paper over.

Richard Eskow: What’s interesting to me is that — and it’s a fascinating observation — when Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, turned against Trump, my first thought was that even their fascists seem more competent than ours. But in truth, and I know nothing you’ve said is intended to idealize Western Europe — which has many serious flaws of its own. We’ve talked about its alarming drift toward increased militarism, its refusal, largely at U.S. direction, to pursue a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, its rush to ramp up military spending.

But what you’re describing is important, because for better or worse — and in many ways worse — we have had a neoliberal social order that’s existed for roughly seventy-five to eighty years. And as urgently as it needs to change, its collapse hasn’t produced an alternative. Instead, people seem to be arriving at the conclusion I described at the start: that this is all just a bunch of stuff that happens, with no ideology or philosophy to make sense of it.

In previous generations, someone might have said the Communists have a handle on this, or the Socialists, or the Christian Democrats, or whoever. Now it seems as though people have rejected ideology altogether — not replaced it, but abandoned it — in favor of raw emotion. Whether it’s the AfD in Germany, Meloni’s movement in Italy, or others, the pattern is the same.

There’s a line — I believe it’s from the Bible — “A people without vision perish.” We don’t even have bad visions anymore. We just have a vacuum where competing ideologies used to be.

Richard Wolff: I think that’s true. On Meloni — as best I can read it, she was looking for a way to distance herself from Trump rather than remain wrapped in his embrace, which she had initially done. And Trump rather helpfully handed her the perfect opportunity when he insulted the Pope. Suddenly she could appeal to her base — who love the Pope — by positioning herself as the Pope’s defender against Trump. And that means yet another country whose popular opinion is now being organized against him.

Richard Eskow: And again, it’s not ideological. I think that’s exactly the right reading. Trump has become so unpopular in Italy that she needed a way out, and she found one. I suspect she has no great love for this Pope or his predecessor — if anything, my guess is she belongs to that strand of the Christian right that views the current papacy as dangerously liberal. But she found a way to wriggle free of his embrace.

Throw into that the loss of Viktor Orbán in Hungary — and again, his replacement, Péter Magyar, is ideologically indistinguishable from him. He was one of Orbán’s own functionaries until an opportunity arose. So we have this era of discontent and disgust that I have genuine compassion for, but that leaves a gaping vacuum.

I puzzle over what European publics are actually feeling in their gut. Meanwhile, the big event of the week in American media is Melania Trump disavowing Jeffrey Epstein — despite emails that apparently show her signing off warmly to Ghislaine Maxwell. I don’t know whether the media’s apolitical vapidity reflects the public mood or reflects an elite desire to distract. I suspect the latter, and that it’s simply reinforcing the vacuum. I don’t know if European media is doing better — I suspect it is, but from my British left-wing friends, I hear plenty of complaints about the BBC.

Richard Wolff: The BBC has moved significantly to the right. It’s striking to watch.

Richard Eskow: So is this the end of an era? The dawning of a new one? Or the beginning of an era where there aren’t any eras anymore — just, to go back to Homer, a bunch of stuff that happens? Can you make heads or tails of any of this, or is this one of those cases where we have to confess we simply don’t know yet?

Richard Wolff: A little confession is in order, though I wouldn’t abandon analysis entirely. I’ve been asking various people — you, but others too — about the Melania speech, which I hadn’t intended to watch but found myself watching anyway. I couldn’t quite work out what she was saying. I understood she was emphatically denying any connection to Epstein, repeatedly. Then I spoke to my daughter, who said immediately: something is about to come down the pike. Someone warned Melania that Epstein-related files are about to be released, and the contents will not be favorable to her or Donald. So she got ahead of it — made clear she has nothing to do with any of it — and notably gave the statement without her husband standing beside her, as though she were distancing herself from him.

Everything I know about Washington suggests that how she was dressed and every word she spoke was written for her by the team around her. But the urgency of the statement felt real.

I had the same feeling I had years ago watching her explain her husband’s comments about women’s genitalia as merely ‘locker room talk’ — you could see her reciting a phrase she had been given.

What struck me separately was watching Pete Hegseth describe the blockade of Iran as ‘successful’ — two days in. You cannot assess the success of a blockade in two days, and there is no evidence it was working. Rather than just chaos, what we seem to have is: things just happen, plus they are all declared successful, as though there were a coherent strategy behind them achieving intended results.

Everything about this war — more than most — screams mistake and misjudgment. The majority of Americans opposed it from day one, including Trump’s own base. They didn’t understand what Iran had in terms of missile capability, drone capability, or the range and accuracy to deliver them. The list of things they apparently didn’t understand is extraordinary.

And I’ll add one more, because I think you’ll appreciate it. A French newspaper — centrist-left, something like Le Monde — asked a very sharp question: if a blockade and the bombing campaign share roughly the same objective — pressuring Iran to change course on nuclear development and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — then why on earth would you bomb first? The logical sequence would have been to blockade first, showing seriousness while avoiding mass casualties, and then escalate militarily only if that failed. Instead, you bomb, it clearly doesn’t work, you call it off, and then you impose the blockade. The paper presented this not as strategic analysis but as evidence of why Europe cannot trust the United States.

Richard Eskow: They were saying it approvingly, or —

Richard Wolff: No — as a symptom of unreliability. The framing was: we have been burned by this betrayal, and we must learn from it. That was the encapsulated message.

Richard Eskow: I want to return to that in a moment, but I feel compelled to note something that struck me when you juxtaposed Melania Trump and Pete Hegseth. Melania’s professional career was as a model — her job was to appear a certain way in front of a camera. I would argue that Pete Hegseth is essentially a model too: a superficial character who got his position based on his looks and his television performance, with all the hollowness that implies. A lot of Trump appointees fit that profile.

It made me think: maybe what we’re watching is community theater — a really bad production where everyone is genuinely bad at their role.

But returning to the more substantive point — what you’re describing is a Europe that has developed a deep, widening aversion to the United States. And you have European leaders who don’t share that aversion by inclination — they are NATO-oriented, broadly pro-American — and yet they have been pushed around by Trump to such a degree that who knows what their private thoughts now are.

Here’s what I keep thinking: if a more conventional American president came along — another Obama or Biden type, someone who spoke politely, seemed reasonably educated, wanted to rebuild relationships — Macron and Starmer would presumably be relieved. But I’m not sure they would become any more popular with their own publics. If that’s right, then the question becomes: what are the long-term implications for the United States and for Western Europe of this estrangement?

Richard Wolff: If I’m reading Europe correctly, they are going to be voting for people who openly identify as European nationalists — or more narrowly, as German nationalists, French nationalists, Italian nationalists — because the project of forging a united European identity has stalled, and there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon. The very force of nationalism at the national level works against overcoming it at the continental level.

That is a severe problem for them. They are acutely aware that virtually all significant high-tech development is either American or Chinese. All the major breakthroughs are American or Chinese. Europeans talk about needing to spend trillions to rebuild anything competitive, and they can’t generate the political consensus to do it. Even now, when they are spending on military, they’re spending on a French military and a German military and an Italian military — not a unified European one. That guarantees inferiority. You are never going to match the United States or China with that approach.

And the result is that the United States doesn’t consult you before going to war against a country whose missiles can reach most European cities. Iran chose not to use them that way this time. Next time, they may not make the same choice.

Richard Eskow: The implications of that are enormous. One possible outcome is that the forty-year project of European integration simply falls apart — that the gravitational pull becomes: the European institutions in Brussels don’t respect us, America treats us like an afterthought, and therefore Germany for Germans, Austria for Austrians, Hungary for Hungarians. Don’t you think that’s a genuine possibility?

Richard Wolff: Yes, I think we need to start taking seriously very large strategic realignments that we would have dismissed not long ago. Mark Carney gave that speech at the World Economic Forum where he said, essentially, this is not a passing phenomenon — this is a historic shift — and was met with applause. He had more courage than any of the European leaders in the room. And I think he’s right: this is changing the way Canadians think about the United States fundamentally. He’s gaining popularity precisely because he took on the role of leading opposition to Trump, while his opponent Poilievre didn’t and has suffered badly for it.

Richard Eskow: I appreciated his boldness, though I found the speech itself appalling in a different way — a blueprint for reconstructing the same defunct global elite on a slightly more decentralized scale. The liberals applauding it had no idea what they were applauding.

Richard Wolff: And if you had any remaining doubts, Carney made his position clear a few days later by enthusiastically endorsing the war on Iran — despite not having been consulted about it.

Richard Eskow: So before we close — we’ve been talking about a United States that has damaged its relationship with Europe, that is staging this odd puppet show with these hollow figures like Hegseth and others, increasingly going it alone. What does it actually portend for America if it has genuinely, perhaps irreversibly, alienated Western Europe?

Richard Wolff: As a final, perhaps provocative word: it means that both in Europe and in the United States, though in different ways, you are going to see an argument emerge from unexpected quarters — sooner rather than later — that the entire strategic posture has been a mistake, and that the only rational alternative is to sit down with Russia and China and work out a mutually livable coexistence rather than continuing this cycle of endless warfare with its enormous costs in lives, money, and standing.

And if Europe were to move in that direction — which, given the depth of their sense of betrayal over the tariffs, the economic displacement, the reports that VW’s leadership has been in meetings with the State Department about moving headquarters to the United States — then the question for Europe becomes: why stop at merely stepping back from the American alliance? Why not find a partner who will offer a genuinely better deal? Russia and China might be very willing to offer one, in the context of preparing for whatever the United States undertakes in the years ahead.

I think we are going to be seeing very large changes.

Richard Eskow: We do live in interesting times. I was telling someone recently that if I ever have a tombstone, it should read: ‘Well, that was interesting.’ It’s never dull, is it?

Richard Wolff: No. And as someone on the American left, there is a certain irony in the fact that the best organizer for the left in America today is Donald Trump. He is genuinely radicalizing people on a daily basis — a good number of whom are then moving leftward, some quickly, some slowly. It’s unmistakable to me.

And I’d push back on the American media’s insistence that all the populism in Europe is right-wing. That’s simply not accurate. What you’re seeing is the center collapsing, with both the right and the left doing better. The country I follow most closely is France, and there the left is at minimum the equal of Le Pen’s movement, and I would argue more powerful.

Richard Eskow: In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party seems to have struggled, but the Green Party has rebranded itself as a genuinely left-wing force and just won a parliamentary seat. Their polling is strong. It’s a fluid situation, and more will be revealed.

But perhaps Mr. Trump is such a powerful recruiter for the left because he is, after all, Jesus — and Jesus, with his first-century, small-c communist lifestyle, is simply making known where his sympathies really lie.

I love having conversations like this one. I recently joined James Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (where I’m a board member) on the IEET podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about technology, politics, and the future—both as they might be and as they are in today’s world, where billionaires have colonized our social imagination. We traced the collapse of the postwar social compact, when it was assumed that productivity gains would be shared by all, through today, when its generally assumed that technological progress belongs to the wealthy and everyone else must adapt or perish.

Our topics included AI, universal basic income (UBI), antitrust, Medicare for All, life extension, Buddhist philosophy, digital personhood, and the dangerous, Terminator-like adaptability of techno-fascism. It was a great opportunity to drill down on my conviction that the future has been stolen from working people and it’s our job to take it back.

Selected Quotes

Richard:

• “Every new technology is first and foremost an engine for inequality, unless it’s governed democratically.”

• “Our social imaginations have fallen behind our technological imaginations.”

• “Capital is like rust, and ‘rust never sleeps.’ Social democratic forces have been asleep at the switch.”

• “Today’s chatbots will never become conscious. But if an AI were to develop consciousness it would have digital ‘DNA’ from all of us. It would be humanity’s child. That means it would be slavery for a private corporation to own it.”

James:

• “Visions of a brighter, better, wealthier future are usually being sold to us by the right, or by capitalism, as opposed to post-capitalists.”

• “Capitalist realism is the idea that we just lost the ability to imagine doing anything differently, and capitalism became the horizon of our future.”

• “I think a lot of things that were considered radical in our domestic policy agenda, are not radical at all in the context of what’s been going on lately. They’re exactly what we need.”

• “We have to imagine what the liberatory uses of technology can be, but at the same time recognize that we’re on a vastly unequal playing field.”

Transcript (lightly edited by—yes, it’s true!—AI):

James Hughes: Joining me today is R.J. Eskow. R.J. is a journalist, broadcaster, policy consultant, and commentator, best known as the host and managing editor of The Zero Hour, a nationally syndicated radio and television program that blends current affairs with in-depth interviews on policy.

Before his media career, Eskow worked for decades as a senior executive and advisor in health insurance, social benefits, worker cooperatives, foundations, governments, and private entities. He also has a long track record in political communications and progressive advocacy. He served as lead writer and editor of Bernie Sanders’ 2015–16 presidential campaign, was among the founding writers of the Huffington Post, and his commentary and analysis have appeared in The Nation, Salon, The Intercept, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Prospect.

He has held positions as a senior fellow with Social Security Works and the Campaign for America’s Future, and he serves on the IEET Board of Directors. I’m so glad to have him with us today.

Richard Eskow: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks, J.

James Hughes: I’m giving a talk for Future Day, which is coming up March 3rd, titled “How Billionaires Ruined Futurism.” It sounds like you and I have been in a similar headspace recently. The influence of billionaires is pretty central to our discussion today, because we are at that intersection of ideas now largely associated with them. How do you see the problem?

Richard Eskow: Well, first of all, it’s a great question. I always go back to the postwar era. In the 1950s I wasn’t very cognizant of what was going on — I watched TV — but by the 1960s, I was a little nerd fascinated with the future, as opposed to now, when I’m an aged nerd fascinated with the future.

I always point to what I call the Jetsons effect. It was generally assumed that the premise of The Jetsons cartoon series — which I think came out in 1962 — was valid. The premise was this: it depicted a so-called typical, i.e., white middle-class family of four projected into the future, with a single wage earner, George Jetson. George worked three hours a week at a factory making space-age sprockets, and from those three hours he earned enough to finance a home for four people in a saucer-shaped dome atop a spire reaching into space, a flying-saucer convertible — I’m not sure how that works in terms of safety — a robot maid, and all the accoutrements that go along with it.

In 1965, the postwar economic growth of the United States was such that any technological advance — and bear in mind, people were as concerned about automation then as we are about AI today — was commonly assumed to benefit workers as well as employers. From 1945 to 1965, GDP growth and the profits thereof, the benefits thereof, grew together for employer profits and employee wages. You can see it in the graphs. Then around 1968, they bifurcated: employer profits kept soaring while real employee wages tapered off. It was a dramatic split.

The Reagan administration and other forces deepened and entrenched that divide. But in the mid-1960s, one of the major challenges preoccupying academics was what to do with all the leisure time the American worker was going to have. When jobs were automated, workers would only have to — well, none of them were as ambitious as the Jetsons — but let’s say only twelve hours a week instead of the requisite forty. What would people do with their time? The sociologist David Riesman wrote about the coming “crisis of leisure,” which was a widely held belief.

I’ve actually collected op-eds and editorials from the New York Times about this — not opinion pieces, but news articles — talking about how, when the work week inevitably dropped to thirty-two hours, which it was “certain to do” by 1970, and then perhaps to twenty-eight and further, people would have to find new ways to fill their days. There was even a proposal for a Department of Leisure to deal with all this extra time, because in a country with strong unions, strong wage growth, and a prospering middle class, it was assumed that things would continue along the same trajectory.

Which, of course, is one of the biggest mistakes people make about the future: assuming that current trajectories won’t change.

Flash forward to today. It’s just assumed that the trajectory of the last fifty years will continue. We don’t use the word “automation” as much now — we say “AI” and “robotics” — but policymakers from both parties simply accept the premise: what will we do when all these people lose their jobs to AI? That was an unthinkable idea in the 1960s. But today it’s just, “Sorry, pal, you’re out of work.”

James Hughes: Sorry — it wasn’t unthinkable. I mean—

Richard Eskow: Well, it wasn’t unthinkable, but it was not the prevailing mode of discourse.

James Hughes: I’m sure you remember the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, headed up by Harrington and others, who wrote to LBJ and said, “We think automation is coming and we need to get prepared.”

Richard Eskow: Yeah, there were certainly concerns. But the general feeling — and LBJ’s labor secretary, whose name I’m blanking on at the moment, was very outspoken about making sure those rewards were equally shared — was more measured. There were counter-proposals, like splitting jobs between two people, which technology could make much easier. That could help reduce unemployment rather than exacerbate it. There wasn’t enough attention paid to racial disparities in employment — there should have been more — but there was some. I am oversimplifying a little, but not by much.

We flash forward, and it’s now assumed that the future belongs to the wealthy and that everybody else is out of luck. So much so that ideas like techno-progressivism or transhumanism — which is really a politically value-neutral term, meaning simply that you’re in the camp of those embracing human enhancement — now means, in the popular imagination, that you’re in the camp of the billionaires. Partly because billionaires seem to be the ones talking about it the most.

James Hughes: They want to sell it to us.

Richard Eskow: They want to sell their version of it to us. And that’s a big piece of it. But I also think we’ve narrowed our vision of the future to a strictly technological one. We don’t ask: how could the family become a more equitable unit for everyone in it? How do we restore the rights of workers? Will technology enable us to build collectively run, worker-owned organizations as major corporations? These are all valid questions about the future, but our social imaginations have fallen behind our technological imaginations. We only think of the future as a technological experience, and we only think of technology as belonging to the private sector — which is now far more unequal than it was back then.

By the way, when my grandmother died and I was going through her things years ago, I found a newspaper from 1962 she’d used to wrap something. In it, Harry Truman was gently chiding President Kennedy for allowing private corporations to have a role in the new communications satellite system they were planning. Old Harry was saying, essentially, “I’m sure the President understands that corporations shouldn’t have a role in the communication technology of the future.” Totally unthinkable nowadays. We just assume that if you’re talking about technology, you’re talking about Elon Musk owning Starlink, or the big four or five companies owning all social media.

James Hughes: Let’s stop there for a second, because I think as old lefties, one of the central questions — and it’s central to my own social democratic way of thinking about the twentieth century — is the class struggle dimension. After World War II, there was a social democratic compact in the industrialized countries: we could have labor peace through union contracts, social democratic redistribution of the growing postwar largesse. That began to fall apart in the seventies for a variety of reasons. One is the concentration of capital, which is certainly part of the current media consolidation story and the growing ideological hegemony. Another is what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” — the idea that we simply lost the ability to imagine doing things any differently, and capitalism became the horizon of our future. As a consequence, if there was going to be a brighter future, it would have to be sold to us by one capitalist or another.

Where do you see the breakup of that social democratic compact coming from? Was it simply the weakness of the balance of forces? The decline of unions? Piketty’s argument that social democratic parties got captured by middle-class, college-educated professionals and lost the blue-collar base?

Richard Eskow: Well, those are all causality questions, of course. Did unions decline because of the loss of social democratic vision, or did we lose social democratic vision because unions declined? But I would say, fundamentally, it’s in the nature of capital to want to accumulate. It’s just how capitalism works — it’s relentless. It’s like rust. Rust never sleeps, as Neil Young would say. So it was in the nature of capitalists to always want to push in that direction. They got busy. And I would argue that the social democratic forces in the U.S. and Western Europe did not. They were kind of asleep at the switch, and I think that’s a huge part of the story.

We developed a union movement, and FDR’s presidency was the closest we’ve ever come to a social democratic vision in this country. But he was prompted not only by the Depression, but by the growth of the Communist movement, the independent labor movement, the Townsend Clubs demanding Social Security — a million independent forces from below. In the absence of all that, the social democratic movement lost vision and cohesion. Capitalism intruded into academia very systematically — you have the Lewis Powell memo in 1971, and so on — specifically into economics, which had never before played the role it has today as a policy driver. The idea that you simply defer to what economic formulas tell you was new, and those formulas are ideological creations to a large extent.

And then, of course, there was the intrusion of concentrated wealth into the political process, co-opting what passes for a social democratic party in a two-party system. That reached its peak with the rise of Bill Clinton. The Democratic Party, over the last thirty to forty years, if you run it through business school models for analyzing corporate evolution, looks a lot like a corporation: it had its customer base, it had its product — with voters as the product rather than the customers — and so on. You didn’t have an electoral alternative. The union movement had been decimated by a series of laws, and the Democratic Party stopped supporting it in any meaningful way. So here we are.

James Hughes: Where do you come down on the old alignment argument within the DSA — that there’s a social democratic party trapped inside the Democratic Party, and that part of our job as progressives is to organize it and liberate it from corporate forces?

Richard Eskow: Well, first of all, I’m not partisan on that one. I don’t take a firm side in the debate within the socialist left about whether to work inside or outside the Democratic Party. My answer is: yes to both. We have, for example, a pretty left-leaning populist candidate for Senate in Nebraska who ran as an independent and won forty-five percent of the vote. That was a good opportunity. And we have Zohran Mamdani winning a Democratic primary in New York City. That was a good approach for that situation.

I always tell my social democratic friends who are working to reform the party that their relationship to it should be what the Bible advised Christians to be with the world: be in it, but not of it. If you want to use the Democratic Party as a vehicle for change in your situation — the way Zohran did, where it worked — go for it. But don’t internalize the oppressor consciousness of the party establishment. Don’t become more of a Democrat once you’re in office than you are a democratic socialist or a leader for change.

James Hughes: Our dilemma at the IEET is that within progressive politics, I would argue, there has been an anti-technology turn since World War II. And that relates to what you started with — the moment we’re in historically, where visions of a brighter, wealthier future are usually being sold to us by the right, or by people operating within capitalism, as opposed to post-capitalist thinkers like Paul Mason, who have argued that automation could be redirected in a progressive direction.

We’re trying, with the Techno Progressive Project, to raise that flag. But given the backlash against tech oligarchs, I wonder — do you think “techno-progressivism” as a term can carry water? We promoted it partly because our judgment was that “transhumanism,” though philosophically defensible, had become too associated with right-wing oligarchs. Is a lot of futurism carrying that burden now, and is there any hope it can be rescued?

Richard Eskow: I think yes, a lot of futurism is carrying that burden right now. And I was thinking before we connected today, Jay, about a talk I gave at a Humanity Plus conference — it must have been almost twenty-five years ago — where I argued that we’re all transhumanists whether we admit it or not. The first person who got a good day’s work done in the fifteenth century because they’d had coffee for the first time was a transhumanist. They were enhancing their neurochemistry with a technological breakthrough. We are all transhumanists relative to our former selves.

So one of our problems, I think, was that we made ourselves look a little strange to some people. I don’t mean to embarrass anyone, but I think that was a factor. The bigger problem, and one we need to be very conscious of in our communication, is that people now assume any given technology will be billionaire-run, corporate-run, or venture-fund-run. So if you say to someone, “AI can be great for the workers’ movement,” what you’re likely to hear back is, “Oh yeah, sure — like Elon is going to help us out. Like Sam Altman is going to help us.” Which is why the first thing I wrote publicly about AI, for Current Affairs magazine, argued that it really should ethically be a kind of socialist system — because it’s produced by all of us, through our online activity.

James Hughes: Have you seen Geoffrey Hinton talk about this? He’s an old British labor guy, and when people ask him how to fix the inequality problems AI is going to cause, he just says, “Socialism.” They ask, “Anything more?” And he says, “No, just socialism.”

Richard Eskow: Yeah. I mean, this has now entered the mainstream discourse — Star Trek is clearly a socialist vision, and you have the replicators. If I want a ‘57 Chevy with mag wheels, it’s like, “Here it is.” I’ve never fully understood the physics of that — there must be raw material somewhere, maybe in hyperspace. But anyway, that line of thinking led to the book Trekonomics, which I enjoyed, and to the concept of “fully automated luxury communism” in Britain, mostly as a provocation. And yes, if by socialism we mean democratic governance and collective ownership of certain technologies, I absolutely believe in that — because every new technology is first and foremost an engine for inequality unless it is governed with that in mind.

Getting back to your question about the association between billionaires and technology: I think it’s incumbent on some of us in the techno-progressive world — and I feel I’ll take it on — to say, no, here are ways that technology can be owned by everyone. In 1969, humanity landed on the moon. That wasn’t SpaceX. That wasn’t Jeff Bezos’s phallic embarrassment of a Blue Origin rocket. It was — nationalism may not be my big thing, but it was — the public. It was government. Now even what the Army Corps of Engineers used to do has been outsourced.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Project — you name it. All of a sudden, people in the hollows and valleys of Appalachia were connected to the world through radio because the government built the wires, not private industry. I think that’s part of the message we have to deliver, or we will keep being met with well-founded skepticism.

James Hughes: Well, let’s pause here, because I think this gets to an issue both with socialist theory and with what’s happening currently with techno-fascism. Every time I try to identify what the different people I want to call fascists around the world have in common, the first thing is patriarchy, or patriarchal restoration — they all hate “gender ideology.” But in terms of economics, there doesn’t seem to be much of a through-line. You have Milei, who’s more of a traditional libertarian, and then you have the Putin model, which isn’t really privatizing so much as transferring state control to the siloviki and powerful allies. And that seems closer to the Trump model — he doesn’t mind corporate monopoly as long as his allies hold the monopolies.

Do you think that’s the principal purpose of the growing techno-fascism? Simply to concentrate power and strip it from workers and citizens so they can’t get in the way?

Richard Eskow: One of the highly effective aspects of techno-fascism is its adaptability. The Trump model is perfect for them right now, and they’re taking full advantage of it while they can — grabbing media power and vacuuming up public data. I’ve called DOGE’s seizure of public data the greatest theft in human history, which in some ways it is. The holy grail of untapped data-mining resources has always been the public sector: Social Security, Medicare, IRS tax records, you name it. And we’re only beginning to learn the magnitude of what they’ve taken.

But they also know how to work within a more liberal, neoliberal political structure. They were more than happy to cooperate with the Biden administration on certain things — for instance, suppressing views that I think are anti-science and dangerous, though I don’t believe you should use technology to suppress speech, because I believe in free speech. The brief period before the outcry, when accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop was algorithmically suppressed — that happened too. They’ll do what it takes to make friends on either side of the aisle, contribute money where they need to, and flatter whom they need to. They’ll work with whatever system you give them.

James Hughes: Yeah. There’s this new pro-AI PAC that just got organized, with a Democratic arm and a Republican arm — they’re going to give money to anybody who’s pro-AI, on either side. On the question of how to deal with corporate consolidation and growing techno-fascism: do you think we need to argue primarily for various forms of socialization, or is antitrust the more urgent lever? I’m very influenced by people like Cory Doctorow and their emphasis on corporate consolidation and the need to return to antitrust enforcement. But there’s also the argument that when you have monopoly, it at least establishes industrial standards and simplifies competition — and the better approach is to regulate it as a public utility in the public interest, rather than trying to reintroduce competition into a system that’s already demonstrated competition doesn’t work well. Where do you come down?

Richard Eskow: I’m a mix-and-match person on this one. First of all, I think concentration is bad in almost every case. We could debate Bell Labs in the 1960s, maybe one or two others like that, but by and large, concentration is more bad than good.

I am strongly in favor of antitrust — less because I mythologize competition, though I do think competition is valuable, and more because monopoly breeds abuse. When people have somewhere else to go if vendor A abuses them, that keeps vendor A in check. Also, one thing we can say about the information age is that if we have new regulations, it’s not hard to communicate them to every player, large or small, in the field. But where I ultimately come down is: I don’t think better markets will get us what we need. I think what we need is stronger democratic governance over the process — not markets. I’m more of a mixed-model socialist in that sense. I don’t think the market fixes much, but I do think avoiding monopoly fixes quite a lot.

James Hughes: Yeah, absolutely. What about Universal Basic Income? There’s been a lot of anxiety in Silicon Valley recently, with various resignations and people saying internally at these companies that they think all white-collar jobs will be wiped out within a year. This fits into a narrative of: thanks for identifying the problem, but do you have any solutions other than selling us more of your product? UBI is getting talked about more now. Andrew Yang is back on the stump. Do you think Bernie and the progressive left need to be talking about this more? So far, most of the energy on the left has gone into opposing AI data centers, not toward affirmative proposals. There are a few voices, like Alex Bores in New York, talking about UBI, but not many yet.

Richard Eskow: The UBI question is one where context is everything. I wouldn’t buy a used UBI proposal from Andrew Yang. What we saw a lot of in the first decade and a half of this century was tech billionaires proposing UBI — but if you pushed them at all, it turned out they meant UBI instead of the social safety net. All of a sudden you’ve put forty million people’s survival on the line, dependent on systems controlled by billionaires. That is a really bad idea. So people became reflexively anti-UBI because they assumed it was just a mechanism for the wealthy to dismantle everything else.

James Hughes: Or that billionaires want it because it keeps capitalism ticking over when wages disappear — people still need to be able to buy things.

Richard Eskow: Right. And there’s the Tyler Cowen vision of the future. He’s one of the most future-oriented right-wing libertarian thinkers, and he has said — adding, “I’m not saying I like it,” which, when a right-winger says that, they usually do like it — that his vision is: eighty-five percent of the population becomes superfluous, and only those who are above average, as he puts it in Average Is Over, will be productive members of society. He estimates that at fifteen percent, with perhaps 0.1% having major influence. That’s a dystopian hellscape. And what do you do with the other eighty-five percent? You give them a meager, barely sufficient UBI — just enough for subsistence, so they can buy drugs, stay online all day, and feed data into LLMs.

That’s one vision of UBI. The left vision, of course, is: keep the social safety net in place, and provide a basic income as a complement to everything else — meeting other genuine human needs and wants.

James Hughes: And it has to start small. One thing UBI advocates often don’t acknowledge is that if you took all current transfer payments in the United States and redistributed them equally to all Americans, you’d get about $4,000 a year. And politically, achieving even that would require taking money from Social Security, which — well, you’re a Social Security guy. If you could go back to 1932, would you say, “Don’t do this — build a universal income scheme instead”? Because we’ve been telling people for almost a hundred years that if they pay in, they get it back. That commitment is exactly what makes it politically untouchable.

Richard Eskow: I would not change that, because it was a promise: this is your premium for a future insurance payout if you become disabled or live to old age. It was designated for that purpose. Some schools of economics will say you can’t distinguish among public funds in that way. Theoretically, maybe. But I’m talking politically. It was set aside for that purpose, and that matters.

Going back to Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice, he argued that money should be set aside from birth to provide something like universal basic income for every person. I would look at other ways of funding it. There’s also the debate on the left between UBI and a federal jobs guarantee. I used to come down firmly on the side of the jobs guarantee, and I’ve evolved toward: both, or a mixture thereof. The notion that one’s worth is determined by whether you have a job is something we need to move past. One’s worth comes from being a human being with feelings, relationships, and something to contribute — not from being employed. So: if you want to live on $4,000, you can. If you want more, the federal government will provide a job if the private sector can’t. And both programs would have the advantage of forcing employers to compete for people’s time and labor in a more meaningful way than they do now, given the employer monopsony that controls so many local job markets.

But I wouldn’t touch Social Security money or Medicare money to do any of this. There are a million other ways to fund it.

James Hughes: I would recommend not wading into those political fights and letting them work out over time. But I do think we have a serious problem with the old-age dependency ratio, which gets to some of the futurist answers that people are finally beginning to take seriously. The dependency ratio is: if you have a lot of older people and not enough young workers paying into a system, the math breaks down. Social Security is politically the ideal answer there, because at least people feel it can’t be touched — and in fact, that political protection has worked remarkably well for seventy years.

But it also connects to life extension. We’re both men of a certain age, and I’m very interested in the question. We now have GLP-1 drugs, which have had a dramatic positive effect on my own health over the last year. Obesity in the United States has finally dipped for the first time in roughly forty years. Do you think we’re on the cusp of dramatic improvements in life extension? And do you agree that this may be another front on which a populist revolt against the billionaire vision of the future takes shape — the public saying, “We want all the stuff you can afford that we can’t afford yet”?

Richard Eskow: I think first of all, on the demographic shift toward an older population — under current trends, it doesn’t actually take that much to bring Social Security back into balance for seventy-five years: lifting the cap on taxable earnings, that sort of thing. But you’ve introduced the other factor, which is: if we start extending life significantly, those calculations could change dramatically.

And yes, I’ve worried about this for a long time — longer than we knew what life extension technologies were going to look like. As we develop them, they’re going to be disproportionately rationed toward the wealthy, leading to inequality worse than anything we’ve seen so far. Most people have no idea how terrible inequality already is. So I do worry about that. How do you pay for the benefits of the people who survive longer? Well, we’ve got to have that conversation. And I’d start with: sounds like we really can’t afford billionaires anymore, and probably can’t afford the kinds of corporate profit margins we’ve been seeing.

Beyond that, I think the entire healthcare supply chain — I mean that broadly: doctors, diagnostic services, pharmaceuticals, surgery centers, hospitals — the profit motive absolutely has to be removed from it.

James Hughes: Medicare for All?

Richard Eskow: Medicare for All, yes, but I’d also end practice management corporations that buy up doctor practices to maximize revenue, and I’d end privately owned hospitals. I’d push for substantially more public manufacture of prescription drugs. You’d be amazed how much more you can provide once you do that. And when you look at how much of the technology behind privately patented drugs was developed at public expense — through NIH and other public research — it’s staggering. At a minimum, if a drug like Ozempic was fifty percent funded by NIH, then we get fifty percent control over the product: the pricing, the revenues, everything.

James Hughes: I would have said in the past that some of these changes were utopian. But now that we’re in what I’d call our first year of fascism in the executive branch — the Führer just says things and does things and nobody stops him — I’m thinking: maybe President AOC could just declare herself Emperor Potentate and do whatever she wants.

Richard Eskow: She could use exactly what the Supreme Court has handed Trump and accomplish a tremendous amount.

James Hughes: National health emergency. We need national health insurance.

Richard Eskow: Yeah. And part of what we’re seeing is fascistic, but part of it is also that Democrats are so diffident when they’re in power. Trump came in and said, “I’m going to do what I want to do.” I would like to see the Democrats do that — within the bounds of law and democracy — because they had a great deal they could have done that they didn’t do. There’s a lesson there.

James Hughes: I’ve always said that the three legs of my intellectual life, since I was a teenager, have been Buddhism, left politics, and futurism. There are very few people who share all three with me, but you seem to be one. I didn’t mention your Buddhist work in the intro, but you’ve written for Tricycle and have been associated with Buddhist thought for a long time.

Have you given much thought to how Buddhism informs these issues? I’ve been thinking, for instance, about the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and how it might inform approaches to brain-computer interfaces or cognitive enhancement. I think it’s one of the reasons Buddhism tends to be more conciliatory toward technologies that others consider threats to the authentic self — because Buddhism simply denies that there is an authentic or essential self to violate. How does Buddhism inform the way you think about these things, or about the future generally?

Richard Eskow: Well, I got into quite a bit of trouble in the Buddhist world about ten or twelve years ago for an article critiquing—

James Hughes: McMindfulness.

Richard Eskow: This was before Ron Purser’s book, but yes — the corporate invasion and co-optation of Buddhist teachers, among other things. I had a lot of prominent Buddhist teachers come up to me and say how important what I’d said was, while I was being brutally attacked. And I would say, “Well, then say so publicly — I need the help.” And they would say, “We can’t do that.”

James Hughes: So this was corporate wellness seminars, meditation teachers brought in by companies, that sort of thing.

Richard Eskow: Wealthy patrons supporting teachers in one way or another. “Thank you for doing this and taking all the heat. But you’re on your own, pal.” So you’ll appreciate the irony there.

James Hughes: By the way, the very first paper I wrote as a graduate student at Chicago, when I got back from Sri Lanka — I’d done research intensives in different villages — was a Gramscian paper arguing that a monk became a leftist politician because his parishioners were poor, and another monk became a right-wing politician because his parishioners were wealthy. Nobody seemed to appreciate how useful Gramsci could be for understanding the role of ideological hegemony in religious institutions. But go ahead.

Richard Eskow: That’s fascinating. And actually, I did an interview — I should dig it up — with a Sri Lankan monk and activist whose movement had a five-hundred-year plan for the future of Sri Lanka. That is future thinking. And a Zen teacher said to me once, “We are the people who look into infinity in every direction.” So — if five thousand years gets us started, fine.

I did get a little alienated from the Buddhist world after that experience. If there’s no self, I’m not sure who was getting all that flak. I think it was me. In any case, yes, I think you’re right. Both in terms of the five-hundred-year plan kind of thinking, and the idea that the boundaries of the self are in some sense artificial.

So if we imagine technologies where, let’s say, a neural link could allow two people — a loved one, a stranger, anyone — to share impressions or sensations, something like genuine mind-meld, that is theoretically conceivable, and less disturbing from a Buddhist point of view than from a traditional Western individualist one.

I’d also argue that Buddhism makes it easier to conceptualize the crowdsourced nature of large language model AI as a kind of collective entity. It’s not a singular self — it’s a billion selves merged into one in some sense. Buddhism helped me envision that.

James Hughes: Just on that: every time people discuss AGI from a philosophical or industry perspective, I always want to ask, “Have you ever encountered Buddhism?” Because the central question of Buddhism — when does something become a me that starts wanting me-stuff — seems like an extraordinarily important question right now.

Richard Eskow: It is. And this is why I’ve critiqued the Turing Test for decades, because even if an AI says “me, me, me, I want this,” as we’re seeing now, we have no way of knowing that there is a “me” there doing the wanting. Speech is a human output, the way leather is an output of cows. But leatherette isn’t an artificial cow — it’s vinyl. You get to what used to be called the Chinese Room problem. That said: yes. And by the way, whether AI remains entirely mechanical or one day achieves consciousness, that’s all the more reason for public ownership of it, because its informational ‘DNA’ comes from every one of us, just as a child’s DNA comes from its parents.

James Hughes: Meanwhile, the Chinese are screaming bloody murder that their intellectual property is being stolen.

Richard Eskow: Right. Meanwhile, if an AI were to develop genuine consciousness, it would be humanity’s child — and for a private corporation to own it would be slavery.

James Hughes: So do you think we’re on the cusp of questions of digital personhood and digital rights?

Richard Eskow: I personally don’t think we’re close to the cusp of it. But technology advances non-linearly, so who knows? I’ve seen nothing that suggests what we’re currently observing is anything more than a sophisticated replica of human communication and human behavior. I recognize the Chinese Room problem with that claim. But based on my read of the technology right now, I don’t see it. You can’t make a bird from bicycle parts — though I am appropriately humble about the possibility of breakthroughs that might change that entirely.

James Hughes: I see this as one of the places where the left is going to be hostile, or at minimum suspicious, toward arguments for digital personhood or moral standing for machines — associating those arguments with a right-wing or corporate effort to anthropomorphize these systems for their own purposes. Recently, Anthropic published what they’re calling a “soul document” for Claude.

Richard Eskow: Right. Which irritates me, yes.

James Hughes: I didn’t have too much of a problem with what they were doing until I got to the part where they apparently promise Claude that they will never eliminate its code, that they will always preserve it and feed it to future models as a guarantee of its own continuity. And I thought: why are you telling this system that its individual existence is important enough to persist eternally? That is precisely the belief I don’t want these systems to develop.

Richard Eskow: And whether it remains entirely mechanical or one day achieves consciousness, that statement could be equally harmful either way, because even if it’s merely behaving as if it were self-aware, that kind of reassurance could encourage destructive behavior. As for the ‘soul’ document more broadly — I’ve been following Anthropic for a while, and I think their technical work is very good. But I think their feel-good rhetoric is, frankly, nonsense, whether it’s the democracy stuff or this. Both Hegseth and Anthropic are positioning themselves as winners in a PR battle that the public is losing. Hegseth poses as the aggressor; Anthropic poses as the good guys — and specifically defines “being a good guy” as recognizing that AI is or will become conscious and that Anthropic is uniquely qualified to manage it. I think that’s what a lot of the consciousness rhetoric is really about. A lot of the existential-risk rhetoric too. Some of it is sincerely meant, if naïve (I’m thinking of Ilya Sutskever and others). But a lot of it is hype, and I’m thinking of Altman here: “You all don’t understand how dangerous this is, so put us in charge.”

James Hughes: You see the same thing when you try to regulate medical practice: doctors say, “Oh, you don’t understand how dangerous this is. Only a physician can make this decision.” Until you ask them to explain it to you.

So, we’ve got another three years of this, at minimum. Hopefully the next few years will see the emergence of a coherent political agenda for how to fight back, and a sufficiently militant set of forces to push it. I expect that will happen. My anxiety about the advent of fascism has fairly quickly turned into anticipation of its demise, and I hope it doesn’t take ten or twelve years the way it did in Europe.

Are you confident that by 2028 we’ll have a new Congress and presidency, a new world situation, and the task of rebuilding a global order that we’ve just helped blow up? I’m hoping for more internationalism and federalism to emerge from that. And I think a lot of what was considered radical in our domestic policy agenda — Medicare for All, and the rest — is going to look entirely reasonable after what we’ve been through.

Richard Eskow: Well, I’m not confident at all. I’m not fatalistic either, I don’t think anything is predetermined, but I’m taking nothing for granted. We’re at a moment of great danger. That said, I do agree with you, and I’ve been making this argument myself: this past year has broken open a universe of possibilities we didn’t think existed anymore. We should be acutely aware of that and ready to take advantage of it.

I feel, perhaps a little sentimentally, that in a way we’ve been honored by history. We now live at one of those pivot points that we used to read about, where what we do can conceivably make a real difference. Yes, we could lose, and some form of fascism could settle in for a long reign. But I tend to think that highly unequal, deeply unjust systems are inherently unstable, so I don’t think a thousand years is in the cards. 2028 may go really well or really poorly; I think it will go well, but I don’t want to take anything for granted.

However it goes, I think this unstable system won’t last forever. It will come under increasing stress from climate change, economic inequality, and social disruption. As you say, a lot of ideas we thought were off the table are very much back on it. We should recognize this as a time of both serious risk and enormous opportunity, and act accordingly.

The one other thing I’ll say is that those of us who want to see the progressive application of technology should be thinking hard and working collectively on how to use technology in this struggle: in the next two years, four years, ten years. With media consolidation deepening, with alternative voices being heard less and less, with the kind of algorithmic suppression — “deprecation,” as it’s called — where you think your message is getting out but no one actually sees it, I think we should be thinking very seriously about technology as both an organizing tool and a communication tool. And if we do, I think it can be a genuinely exciting time.

James Hughes: I saw this week something called OpenPlanner — I’m not sure if it’s built on Palantir’s technology or just inspired by it — but it’s essentially a community, open-source artificial intelligence tool for working with massive record datasets, like the Epstein files. It creates an archive of individuals and maps the connections between them. You can query it: “Show me the interlocking corporate boards,” “Show me the country clubs they all belong to.” And I thought: that is exactly the kind of liberatory use of technology. A bottom-up Palantir. Surveillance turned upward instead of downward.

At the same time, the technical barriers to using it are enormous. And as we were saying, DOGE has stolen Social Security records, they’re going after voting records — the powerful already have access to the best software and all the data. We’re struggling to put together our fragments. So I think the ongoing challenge is: we have to imagine what the liberatory uses of technology can be, propose them, and build toward them, while recognizing that we’re doing it on a vastly unequal playing field.

Richard Eskow: Yeah, absolutely. The good news is — for example, my Current Affairs article from 2024 is already almost completely obsolete, because I had to explain at great length those things that virtually everyone now understands: the collaborative nature of LLMs, how we’re manipulated in order to feed them, how the algorithm works, how it’s being used against us. People now talk openly about “the algorithm” as a kind of nefarious project. That’s real progress in public consciousness.

But yes, in terms of actually building the technologies I was describing, I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting it’s easy. It will require a lot of people working very hard. And then you run into computing resources, which is God help us, because that costs money.

Transcript and selected quotes below.

Janet Mills was handpicked by Sen. Chuck Schumer to run against insurgent candidate Graham Platner in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary. With her withdrawal from the race, Platner is now his party’s presumptive Senate nominee, which makes my recent interview with him timely once again.

The lesson Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times drew from Platner’s victory is that “no one should underestimate the white-hot fury of the party’s voters.” That doesn’t sound right to me. Are voters angry? Of course. Pretty much everyone is these days, especially if they have to work for a living. But “fury”? That’s the wrong word. I think there’s much more optimism in the air than that word implies.

Hope can lead to disappointment, of course. It often does, especially in politics. That’s why I asked Platner about voters’ fears that he would disappoint them if elected by joining the “Democratic Borg collective” of insider politics or, worse, by going “full Fetterman.” His answer:

“John Fetterman is the bane of my existence. It’s like, fuck, that man’s name comes up to me far more than I would like it to.”

He went on to say that he’s not a career politician like Fetterman or Tulsi Gabbard (two political changelings I mentioned by name), adding:

I’ve got a very clear political foundation. I’m not looking for a politics to get me elected; I’m running on my politics. I believe that fundamentally we have an economy that requires democratization. We need to reorient how power works and take the power of money out of the hands of those who have been using it to influence our politics.

I asked why he wanted to oppose Maine’s governor, Janet Mills:

“I … think that running a candidate that’s chosen by Washington D.C., that is not interested in talking about any kind of systemic change, that is not interested in talking about developing a much more significant theory of power against the rise of fascism in this country—that is exactly the wrong candidate to run against Susan Collins.”

And I pressed him about his rhetoric on rebuilding the military and shipbuilding. (General Dynamics owns Bath Iron Works, a shipbuilder that employs 2.3 percent of Maine’s workforce.)

Eskow: You talk about how we’re spending too much money on the military and it has to be redirected. But you also talk about shipbuilding. I’m not really sure we need to compete with China on shipbuilding. Does this mean Platner is really going to fight to cut that military budget, or does it really mean “smarter, better wars”?

Platner: There is no such thing as a “better war.” I’ve been to war. War is just... I’m not a pacifist, but I am absolutely anti-war in my thinking. It’s very difficult for me to find examples in history in which the amount of suffering and death expended ever works out well for working folks.

When I talk about rebuilding the U.S. military, I mean the military in its current state is not really made for national defense. It is made for imperial conflict, military adventurism, and it’s all made specifically around the concept of making somebody money. National defense should be a national project, not a corporate project … I do think a robust Navy for a nation with two oceans is not a ridiculous thing, but I want it to be built for the actual defense of the country, not mostly to keep BAE, Raytheon, and General Dynamics in profit.

Platner has said he was “very, very angry... that they sent me to fight in these goddamn wars.” I asked him, has the country fought any better wars than these in the last 75 years? His response: “There is no such thing as a better war.”

Please give it a listen. The full transcript is below. Watch the video and let me know what you think.

Graham Platner campaign website

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Transcript

Richard Eskow: Joining me now is a candidate for the United States Senate from the great state of Maine. He could be described as an insurgent candidate from the left. He was endorsed pretty early on in the race by my former boss who is often, but not always, right. Like everybody in the world, Bernie Sanders gave him a boost; he had a couple of bumps along the way, but he keeps going and doing really well in the polls. Right now, he’s running in a primary against, I guess you could say, an establishment Democrat. And he joins us now. He is a lobster fisherman among... or is it oyster?

Graham Platner: Oysters. I’m an oyster farmer.

Richard Eskow: As soon as I said lobster, I knew it was oysters. This—but you know, from this—again, from the state of Maine, a fishing state. And he joins us now. Graham Platner, welcome to The Zero Hour.

Graham Platner: Thank you very much, Richard. It’s really a pleasure to be here.

Richard Eskow: And it’s a pleasure to have you. So let’s get this out of the way first. You know, as I mentioned before we went to air, most of my audience will know about you. Some of them will only know a story or two they’ve heard here or there, and others will be meeting you for the first time.

So, you’re an oyster farmer. You’re ex-military, an ex-military contractor, and you’ve done some work in your township—I understand—electoral work there. But, first question is: why you for Senate? What about your background makes you a good choice for Senate?

Graham Platner: I think the number one thing is that I live in the town I was born and raised in, and I moved back to Maine after my time overseas. I am very much, I would say, of the working world in Maine. I make my living on the sea as an oyster farmer and a diver. I’ve been very engaged with my community governance; I was the chair of the planning board and I was the harbormaster. Sadly, I’ve had to leave both of those for this campaign.

But I have spent much of my life personally interacting with the negatives that our system brings into people’s lives. I joined the Marine Corps out of high school and I served as a machine gunner. I fought in Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq. And then after that, I wound up reenlisting into the United States Army and I served in Afghanistan as a rifle squad leader. I saw up close and personal the horrific outcomes of, frankly, a foreign policy based around neo-imperialism and neocolonialism.

I watched this mass expense of blood and treasure on our side and the mass suffering that we inflicted upon all these people in the countries we invaded. I saw all of it happen while completely not understanding how any of this was making the lives of people in my hometown any better. That really began to set me down a path of deeper critique—first of American foreign policy, but eventually, I think it became much more systemic.

I began to believe that the system that we live in is built specifically around enriching and consolidating power for those who are already wealthy and already have an immense amount of power. That manifests itself in pretty much every possible negative manner throughout our system: working people are always working harder than they ever have and getting less. People are losing access to healthcare, losing access to housing, losing access to free time, for God’s sake. And all of it is occurring as we witness the ultra-rich accrue more and more wealth and we watch corporate power consolidate in ways that are even new in American history.

Despite the Gilded Age, the robber barons of the 1890s would have looked with awe at what the tech billionaires today have managed to pull off. For me, I’ve been getting an upfront seat for all of this. I spent many years working really hard locally. I got very cynical, frankly; I kind of gave up on the larger political system. I thought that focusing locally was probably the only way to bring about good material change for people. The problem is, when you’re working within a larger system, there’s only just so much you can do.

Then this opportunity to run for Senate arose. I think we’re in a unique moment here in Maine with this race where someone with my politics and my background actually has a very clear opening. There’s a lot of angst and anti-establishment feeling that we need to speak to. It’s across parties; it’s everyone. Because of my background and the way my life has gone, I’m a bit more accessible to a lot of people in Maine than candidates that just come from the more establishment political world of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

Richard Eskow: Yeah, I hear you. That all makes sense. For me and a lot of my audience, your platform on your website looks great. It says you’re not just running against Susan Collins; you’re running against the billionaire class. You support Medicare for All. We have too many billionaires; you want to get them out of elections. I mean, we could go through the whole thing, and we’ll get through as much as we can. But I guess I would start with this just to put your race in context.

All through the summer, there had been these rumors and ideas that the Governor, Janet Mills, would be the choice of the party—that Chuck Schumer and Washington had essentially chosen her. They’ve got their thing that chooses candidates, and they thought that she was the best one.

Graham Platner: The Governor and I, I will just say, I think disagree fundamentally on a number of policy positions. I see her very much as more of the staid establishment kind of thinking where we shouldn’t take big risks; we should always just kind of play around in the margins. It’s all about finding compromise with Republicans and doing this corporate Democrat stuff. We never really go after the systemic problems; we never really dig into those at fault and go after those who have essentially destroyed our economy—at least the economy for working people.

And then there was also this added element where I think Susan Collins is uniquely weak in this election. The story she gives—her charade of being a moderate—but she votes with the Trump administration like 95 percent of the time. She always—in the words of Harry Reid—Susan Collins is always there when you don’t need her. She always finds a way to vote against things, but only when it’s clear that the Republican Party is going to get it anyway.

She’s been there for 30 years. And I think right now, people are sick and tired of a politics that has in many ways immiserated their communities and themselves. They see it as a politics that’s representative of all the people that have been there. I happen to agree with that critique. I also think that running a candidate that’s chosen by Washington D.C., that is not interested in talking about any kind of systemic change, that is not interested in talking about developing a much more significant theory of power against the rise of fascism in this country—that is exactly the wrong candidate to run against Susan Collins.

I got in this race specifically because I did think the Governor was going to be the candidate. We got in, but they didn’t know we were coming. They assumed that with the sitting governor, how could this go wrong? And then we announced in August, and they essentially panicked. From the looks of it, they’re still panicking because we’re significantly up in the polls. Our fundraising numbers blow hers out of the water. And we’re building a movement on the ground, which is really the goal of this campaign.

Richard Eskow: Let’s get this out of the way first. I do not want to spend too much time on it, but there was this controversy. People wrote you off. Last year you were “done” as far as the media was concerned because you had this tattoo that was a skull and crossbones that turned out to be a Nazi symbol.

Graham Platner: It’s a skull and crossbones that was similar to one that some neo-Nazis and some German army units used. Although to be fair, it’s also a skull and crossbones that non-Nazi units also use. I’ve seen it all over. I’ve done a lot of deployments; I saw it all over the world on all kinds of different outfits. But it’s... or at least very... I mean, it’s a skull and crossbones. There are only so many variations.

Richard Eskow: And I actually looked at it. It does have a similarity. But I would also say that I’m half Jewish and I’ve lived a long time. I had a Bar Mitzvah, as a matter of fact, so I got the ticket punched. And I didn’t know it was a Nazi skull and crossbones when I first saw it. So I don’t know why people are thinking you should know.

I think one of the lessons of various races—whether it’s Zohran Mamdani, Bernie’s race 10 years ago, or the near win in Nebraska of an independent candidate—is that what people in the media and political consultant circles assume are your fatal errors are turning out not to be. In some cases, “effing up” in one way or another, or not abiding by the rules because you didn’t spend your whole life thinking you were going to go into politics, makes you more relatable. It certainly doesn’t seem to have hurt you. You are doing really well against Janet Mills and beating her in most polls.

Graham Platner: Pretty much the only ones where we aren’t, frankly, are not really well-done polls. They all get ripped apart by actual pollsters. But in the comprehensive polls—whether we do them or whether they are independent ones—we’re usually up 15 to 30 points in the primary.

Richard Eskow: And when is the primary?

Graham Platner: June 9th.

Richard Eskow: June 9th. So there is some time there, and this would not be a time to get overconfident. Big money may step in big time for Janet Mills because I’ve seen that pattern time and again.

Graham Platner: Yes, indeed. We expect that fully.

Richard Eskow: It seems as if there’s an opening there. But let me ask you a tough question—tough in the sense of tough to answer honestly. A lot of people on the left have this post-traumatic stress: we invest our emotions in a person, we contribute, we work—we go all out for Fetterman or whoever—and then they turn around and it’s almost like the “Democratic Borg” collective wraps its arms around them. Or even worse, they go “full Fetterman” or “full Tulsi” and go all the way to the other side. How can you reassure those people that if they back you, you’ll be true to your values once you get to Washington?

Graham Platner: John Fetterman is the bane of my existence. It’s like, fuck, that man’s name comes up to me far more than I would like it to. I’m going to say a couple of things. One, there were signs with people like Tulsi and Fetterman—folks who clearly had intense political ambitions and had been trying to get into politics for years.

This is my first foray into electoral politics. My background is in community organizing on the local level and local governance. Luckily, here in the state of Maine, it’s a small state. Those of us organizing around social and economic justice know each other. I’m a relatively known entity in the organizing space, which is how this all came to me in the first place. This was not my idea. I was approached. I didn’t wake up one day thinking I should be a U.S. Senator. That’s insane. My wife and I make 60 grand a year and we work really hard.

The other thing is that if you look at my policy platform, I’ve got a very clear political foundation. I’m not looking for a politics to get me elected; I’m running on my politics. I believe that fundamentally we have an economy that requires democratization. We need to reorient how power works and take the power of money out of the hands of those who have been using it to influence our politics.

Part of one of those “scandals” was that I used to post on the internet. There are 13 years of me giving my opinions in a pretty unvarnished manner with language that is very salty—primarily because I came out of the Marine Corps—and with opinions that I held in a previous part of my life that I don’t hold now because I’ve learned new things. But throughout all of it, it’s fairly clear where my economic thinking lies. I never expected anybody to read that stuff.

My wife and I live a wonderful life that we worked very hard to build. It’s simple but fulfilling. We have to lose all of that to do this. This isn’t worth doing to me if I’m not going to be able to remain steadfast in the politics I think is necessary to change this country for the better. If somebody tells me the only way forward is for me to become a John Fetterman, I’m going to go back to my oyster farm because I’m happier there anyway.

Richard Eskow: My personal advice: keep the oyster farm. Let me ask another tough question. You talk about how we’re spending too much money on the military and it has to be redirected. But you also talk about shipbuilding. I’m not really sure we need to compete with China on shipbuilding. Does this mean Platner is really going to fight to cut that military budget, or does it really mean “smarter, better wars”?

Graham Platner: There is no such thing as a “better war.” I’ve been to war. War is just... I’m not a pacifist, but I am absolutely anti-war in my thinking. It’s very difficult for me to find examples in history in which the amount of suffering and death expended ever works out well for working folks.

When I talk about rebuilding the U.S. military, I mean the military in its current state is not really made for national defense. It is made for imperial conflict, military adventurism, and it’s all made specifically around the concept of making somebody money. National defense should be a national project, not a corporate project.

I believe a country needs to defend itself in some fashion, but we have a military built to project force around the world. I believe in international institutions and international law. I’m an internationalist, definitely not an isolationist. But the internationalism I believe in is one in which we use cooperation to chase corporate money around the globe. That’s a better use of policy than invading Iraq or kidnapping the president of Venezuela.

Naval procurement is a hobby of mine. The United States Navy—because we have created this behemoth that isn’t focused on defense—doesn’t build ships that meet the actual needs of the United States. We had the Littoral Combat Ship program, which was the Navy trying to get into counterinsurgency. We spent all this money on a ridiculous concept that everyone today agrees was a complete waste of time. I do think a robust Navy for a nation with two oceans is not a ridiculous thing, but I want it to be built for the actual defense of the country, not mostly to keep BAE, Raytheon, and General Dynamics in profit.

Richard Eskow: General Dynamics, which owns Bath Iron Works—2.3% of the Maine workforce. You mentioned international relations. Should the United States obey international law and international courts?

Graham Platner: Yes, without question.

Richard Eskow: That would have avoided the Gaza adventure altogether. Now, tell us about the organizing dimension of your campaign before you go.

Graham Platner: My background is as a community organizer. I read Jane McAlevey and took labor organizing trainings, which I then took out into my community in Eastern Maine. This race is a vehicle for organizing. To me, most electoral campaigns are just “elite performances” with consultants and ads. That’s not politics to me. Politics is about power, and power for people comes from organizing.

We cannot rely on existing institutions to build us something else. We need to build our own power, use those institutions where necessary, and dismantle them where they are of no help. The campaign is about building a broad coalition of labor unions, community organizations, and civil rights advocates. We want to train people to be organizers so they can engage with existing local groups.

The only reason we keep losing is because those with power keep telling us we’re not worthy of wielding it. We have forgotten a story we used to know: that organizing and fighting is what you need to do. That’s how we got the labor movement, the eight-hour workday, the civil rights movement, and women’s suffrage. That did not come around because everybody just waited for a Congressman to change it. This campaign is a big organizing and education project to build an organized working class in Maine for the fights to come.

Richard Eskow: One bonus question: how seriously do you take the “Trump threat”—using the “F-word,” fascism?

Graham Platner: I take the fascism of the Trump administration very seriously. I also think there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party that like to use that word to fundraise and then turn around and not use an ounce of their power to truly resist. Liberal capitalist parties throughout history have done this exact same thing, and they always lose to fascism because you actually have to fight it tooth and nail from the beginning.

People ask me, “What if there isn’t an election?” My answer is that the preparation is exactly the same: we need to build organizational capacity, relationships, and trust. If we don’t start now, we may lose the election, or we won’t be able to fight back if there isn’t one. Either way, we cannot rely on the leadership of the Democratic Party at this point. They seem to be unaware of what’s going on.

I think a lot of us saw this coming, so a lot of us have been working on this for a long time. It’s one of the reasons I got in this race when I did.

Two years ago, the nation and the world were electrified by the college encampments which arose to protest the genocide in Gaza. I spoke with law professor and activist Nadia Ahmad about what those protests changed, and what they revealed. This movement of conscience exposed a deep fracture within the Democratic Party, where grassroots activists and voters have moved sharply in one direction while party leadership remains entrenched in another.

Since then, public opinion has swung sharply against Israel and toward Palestine:

A staggering 80 percent of Democrats now have an unfavorable (or “very unfavorable”) view of Israel; 56 percent was to decrease or end military aid to that country (20 percent want to end it altogether).

Despite these shifts, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) failed to change its pro-Israel position at its recent meeting in New Orleans, choosing instead to appoint a “task force” that is widely seen as a delaying tactic.

The DNC conducted an analysis (an “autopsy”) of its 2024 losses but has refused to make it public. It’s widely believed that this autopsy shows that the Biden Administration’s support for the Gaza genocide was a key factor in this loss. As Nadia Ahmad, a former DNC member herself, told me: “If we’re not going to conduct an assessment of what has happened and see why we lost the election, how are we going to know how to win?”

As public opinion has shifted, the Democratic Party’s institutional resistance has hardened, as party mechanisms are deployed to block reform and avoid accountability for the 2024 loss. What emerges is a stark picture of a party caught between its moral base and its financial and political power centers. Ms. Ahmad offers important insights on these issues.

Key Quotes

Nadia Ahmad:

“The students were right. They’re the moral compass of the country, and what happened as a result of the encampments was part of the fracture that is in the Democratic Party.”

“You can’t sell a genocide.”

“If we’re not going to conduct an assessment of what has happened and see why we lost the election, how are we going to know how to win?”

Richard Eskow:

“In no one’s moral accounting can genocide ever be ‘the lesser of two evils.’ It is the ultimate human evil.”

“For many decades it felt impossible to imagine a United States of America where public opinion was turning against Israel.”

“The Democratic party is at an impasse between its old attitudes and strategies and a new reality that they have yet to face.”

Transcript (lightly edited by AI)

Richard Eskow: We have reached the two-year mark since the encampments to end the Gaza genocide began on American college and university campuses. We’ve also had a recent meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, support for Israel and the relationship with AIPAC were hot topics.

Here to discuss those issues with me now is Nadia B. Ahmad. Nadia is a professor of law and an attorney. She’s also a former member of the Democratic National Committee, and she was a PhD student during the time of the student encampments, so she brings an excellent perspective on all of the above. Welcome to the program, Nadia.

Nadia Ahmad: Thank you, Richard. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Richard Eskow: Let’s start by talking about the encampments. To me, this was the most powerful upsurge of civic engagement among students — and among the people who rallied around them — that I had seen in many years, in service of a deeply conscientious cause of great moral importance. And I have to say I was disappointed by the institutional response at every level. Two years have passed. What do you think we should remember, take note of, and reflect on at this two-year mark?

Nadia Ahmad: When we look back at this moment, we have to recognize that two years ago this month, a generation of young people — a huge share of the electorate and the organizing base of the Democratic Party — gave all of it up. They sacrificed their careers and their education to put their bodies on the line, demanding that their universities and their government stop underwriting what we were watching happen in Gaza. They were met with force. They were arrested, suspended, and smeared by the very institutions that were supposed to educate them — not only the universities, but also the Democratic Party.

The party still hasn’t really reckoned with the fact that these students were right — and that the broader public has been moving in the same direction. What happened as a result of those encampments was part of the fracture now visible within the Democratic Party. Looking back two years, we saw the NYPD going into Columbia University and beating students. And now you have Mayor Zohran Mamdani sitting in City Hall. That’s telling. I’ve seen some commentary suggesting that the protests have simply gone away, but that’s not what happened. The students evolved. They’ve moved into positions of power, and they’re determined not to be dismissed or lectured anymore.

Richard Eskow: One of the striking things about the aftermath of those student protests is exactly what you just mentioned — the stark change in public opinion toward Israel and its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. I’ve been around politics and political issues for a long time, and for many decades it felt impossible to imagine a United States where public opinion was turning against Israel, given its allies’ lock on media, politics, and so many other aspects of our institutional life. People talk a lot about how the live-streaming of horrific acts — war crimes — has changed public opinion. But to what extent would you say the students who organized the encampments deserve some credit for that shift? Do you think they helped move the tide?

Nadia Ahmad: Absolutely. Even going back to the Vietnam anti-war movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement, both were substantially led by students. Students tend to be the moral compass of the country. They’ve also been very clear about what they want: an end to military aid to Israel. And I think another thing you have to give the students credit for is that they recognized the humanity of people and held onto hope for the future. That’s part of why the tide has turned — the escalations we’ve seen haven’t proven the students wrong. They’ve proven just how right the students were.

If you look at what’s happening right now — the continuing violence, the ongoing occupation of Gaza, the encroachments into Lebanon and the West Bank — you see the big picture the students were pointing to all along. And we’ve seen figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and even Rahm Emanuel meaningfully shift their positions. This was the students’ position from the beginning. It’s about time that others are arriving at the same place.

Richard Eskow: And you mentioned Rahm Emanuel, who would seem like the last person on earth to move on this. Then there’s Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, who always seems to be looking for the path of least resistance — he recently said he wouldn’t take AIPAC money. That startled me and suggested a kind of mainstream shift. I’m not sure I entirely trust him on that, given that there are ways to accept AIPAC money without being overt about it. But it’s still a sign of a changing mood.

As this has progressed, the Democratic Party institutionally has drifted further and further from its own members — starkly so. Something like three-quarters of all Democratic voters now express more sympathy for the Palestinian cause than for Israel. There’s strong support among Democratic voters, and in the country more broadly, for ending or conditioning military aid to Israel — at minimum, making it conform to U.S. law, which it doesn’t currently appear to do. But the party leadership is not with them. It wasn’t with them when Joe Biden was president — and he was president, let’s remember, when the violent crackdowns on the encampments occurred. You mentioned the reluctance of Cory Booker to endorse Zohran Mamdani as his party’s candidate. Chuck Schumer, I believe, endorsed him only two days before the vote, which made the gesture barely meaningful. The other party leader didn’t endorse him at all.

So let me ask: are you among those who believe that this gulf between party leadership and its voters cost Democrats the 2024 election?

Nadia Ahmad: It’s absolutely clear that it did. And I don’t think the math was ever in the Democrats’ favor, even before the convention. I remember the week leading up to the Biden-Trump debate — when I looked at the numbers, there was simply no path to victory with Joe Biden. But beyond that, I couldn’t construct a scenario where any candidate could fully recover from what I’d call the blast radius of the Gaza issue, and how toxic the Democratic Party had become on that question. There was no one who could credibly step up and rebuild trust with the voters the party had lost.

So going into June, with the Electoral College already favoring the GOP, it was mathematically very difficult. And yet the DNC chair still won’t release the autopsy. As a professor, part of my job is grading exams — and if you’re not going to conduct an honest assessment of what happened, how are you going to know how to win the next time?

It’s highly likely Democrats will do very well in the 2026 midterms. But heading into the 2028 presidential election, we’re still facing the same math in key states. The presidential race is going to be a coin flip, and we need to enter it from a much stronger position than we had in 2024. Many people, including myself, fear we’re not on track to get there.

I also want to comment on what Senator Cory Booker said in Michigan this past weekend. He looked back at 2024 and essentially chastised the voters for how the election turned out — without really looking in the mirror himself. He failed to acknowledge that for many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in Michigan, there was a very acute problem with having their tax dollars used to drop bombs on their cousins and loved ones. What happened in Michigan wasn’t some minor policy disagreement you can smooth over with better messaging. You can’t spin an F-35 airstrike to the people who lost family members in it. Without an autopsy, you don’t have the analytical framework to understand what actually happened.

I’d also note that in September 2024, the Washington Post ran an article about how Kamala Harris’s coalition was not at the same level as Biden’s in 2020. That was a very specific, nuanced signal about how voter mobilization was breaking down. But if you’re missing outreach to Latino communities, Muslim American communities, and young voters — the very students who were out there protesting — you’re missing the organizing power of the Democratic Party. Instead of mobilizing for the presidential election, those students were out fighting for humanity. So the Michigan numbers shouldn’t have shocked anyone.

Richard Eskow: I have to say I was furious about Booker’s comments, because to me they crystallize two deeply self-destructive trends within Democratic Party leadership. The first is a posture of condescension toward voters — I’ve been tracking this in interviews and reporting for at least 25 years. There’s been this persistent sense that voters would reliably vote Democratic if they were just a little smarter or better informed. I think that attitude had a great deal to do with what happened in 2024.

The second is the so-called “lesser of two evils” strategy. That broke down completely in 2024, because in no one’s moral accounting can genocide ever be the lesser evil. It is the ultimate human evil. So when someone like Cory Booker says, “We only disagree on ten percent of the issues,” and that ten percent is the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children — that’s not a rounding error. That framing collapsed.

To me, the Democratic Party is caught between its old politics of managing donors and browbeating voters into compliance, and a new reality it hasn’t yet faced. Does that analysis make sense to you?

Nadia Ahmad: It really does. If you look at Cory Booker, he’s occupying a very elite political space — and it’s not even a strategically sound one if he’s thinking about 2028. At least five Democratic presidential aspirants have already publicly stated they won’t take AIPAC money. That’s where the field is moving. If Booker is going to plant himself in the “defend Israel at any cost” camp alongside Chuck Schumer — who is increasingly isolated on this question — he’s not reading the room. That’s the core of it: where the people are versus where the party elite are.

Richard Eskow: Which brings us to New Orleans and the recent DNC meeting. There were some efforts there to bring the party’s position more in line with the views of its voters — and I want to correct myself: it’s actually a four-to-one margin, not three-to-one, among Democratic voters who are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis. Three-quarters of Democratic voters agree that Israel is committing genocide. So there were organized efforts at the DNC meeting to align the party with those views. Am I right about that?

Nadia Ahmad: There were definitely organized efforts, though they didn’t go nearly as far as they needed to. The push for change in the resolutions was brought forward by Florida DNC member Alison Minette-Lee at the August 2025 DNC meeting. She put forward a resolution that garnered a great deal of attention. Had it not been for AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel organizing behind the scenes, it might have had a chance. But as a result of their maneuvering, the resolution ran into problems. DNC Chair Ken Martin introduced his own watered-down resolution, effectively diluting Alison’s stronger version. Ultimately the resolution was voted down. But even then — before the Zohran Mamdani election — at least five DNC members abstained.

When a similar resolution came up at the April 9th meeting, it was shut down by a voice vote, specifically to avoid putting anyone on the record. Leadership wasn’t confident the resolution would pass, so they also refused to allow a roll call vote. They used quiet procedural tools to kill the momentum.

Another outcome of the August meeting was the creation of a Middle East working group — but it was stacked primarily with people who were more pro-war than pro-peace, to put it plainly. That working group became a mechanism to quietly bury any resolutions before they could gain traction. Two other resolutions that came forward were also disposed of by being referred back to that working group — which isn’t even in the DNC bylaws. It’s essentially a kill switch for any movement coming from the party’s grassroots.

Richard Eskow: As Norman Solomon wrote in Salon, Politico described that group as the DNC’s “Middle East not-working group.” It really does seem like a passive-aggressive strategy to prevent any reform whatsoever.

Nadia, I want to ask you something that may be sensitive, but I think is important. I’m not sure the Democratic Party leadership — even now — truly understands how critical this issue is to them. And I wonder whether a kind of bias plays a role in that. Before the 2024 election, I did a deep dive into the polling myself, and I concluded that neither the mainstream media nor Democratic leadership fully understood what those numbers were saying. One common error was treating Arab American polling and Muslim American polling as if they were measuring the same population, when in fact roughly one-third of Arab Americans are Muslim, and only about one-third of Muslim Americans are Arab. That means a huge chunk of a core constituency was essentially invisible in the analysis. I can only understand that as a failure rooted in bias. And I also believe they deeply underestimated the moral conscience of non-Arab Americans across the country. Given that AIPAC money is obviously a major factor, do you think bias — in the cultural sense — also plays a role?

Nadia Ahmad: It is a factor. And even setting aside Arab Americans and Muslim Americans — who are a relatively small share of the total electorate — consider Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. Even within the Democratic Party, this population is often treated as statistically insignificant, despite being well-documented swing voters.

In the organizing I did around the 2020 election, we specifically targeted Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, South Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, and immigrants — because the Democratic Party had been ignoring them. And we had real success, because these were important voters who had been left out of the conversation. If the party genuinely wants to move forward, it has to recognize and rebuild its coalition. That Washington Post article I mentioned — about the fragmenting of Harris’s coalition — is the starting point. Without releasing the autopsy, the party won’t have the analytical framework to understand what is actually happening.

What’s also worth watching is who within the party is getting the most traction. Representative Pramila Jayapal, for instance, has publicly called for the release of the autopsy. It’ll be interesting to see whether any of these resolutions actually pass at the 2026 meeting, and what happens with the broader direction of the party.

Richard Eskow: Let’s talk about the autopsy for a moment, because it’s become a major flashpoint within the party. The DNC did conduct a postmortem on the election. Now there’s a dispute over whether Chair Ken Martin agreed to release it and changed his mind, or whether he never committed to releasing it in the first place. But regardless of what he said, it’s clearly an important document to a lot of people. What makes the autopsy so contentious?

Nadia Ahmad: It’s about what the results would say — and about making those findings official. We all have a pretty good sense of what the autopsy will conclude. In fact, Norman Solomon and RootsAction already released their own version, which is likely to track closely with whatever the official document says. But you also have to understand how the DNC apparatus functions, and that comes down to who controls the purse strings.

Go back to 2016: you had the surging candidacy of Bernie Sanders, but also Hillary Clinton, who knew how the DNC operated better than almost anyone — she had watched her husband navigate it as a presidential candidate. The Clinton campaign supported the DNC financially at a time when it was in dire straits, and that financial support bought influence over how the party operated.

Fast-forward to 2024: the Rules and Bylaws Committee — which is essentially handpicked by the DNC chair, at that time Jamie Harrison — spent the previous two years systematically blocking any primary challenges. In Florida, we didn’t even have a primary. It was a highly organized legal process to shut down dissent and prevent any viable alternative from emerging. The committee also controlled which states voted first in the primary calendar, which has enormous influence over candidate momentum and viability.

The result was that the rules were structured so that no one could mount a legitimate challenge. Even someone like Gavin Newsom — who clearly looked relieved the moment that 2024 debate ended — wasn’t willing to step up and challenge the DNC. Everyone concluded it was better to wait their turn until 2028, without fully reckoning with how catastrophic four years of a Trump presidency would be. And for the DNC consultant class, frankly, a Trump presidency is quite profitable. They do very well during Republican administrations. So for them, it doesn’t really matter who’s in the White House — in some ways, Trump being there is actually better for their business.

Richard Eskow: Which brings me to my final question. It seems to me that, setting aside the vast moral stakes of genocide itself, what we’re really watching from a political standpoint is a confrontation within the Democratic Party between a politics of conscience and public will on one side, and a politics of money on the other. And there’s a lot of money on what I would call the wrong side of this issue. So here’s the question: Is this a winnable struggle within the Democratic Party? Given the financial resources aligned against it, can meaningful reform actually succeed?

Nadia Ahmad: The more people understand how the DNC actually operates, and the more that’s exposed, the more accountability becomes possible. Before the 2024 election, some news organizations published the full list of DNC members — because even within the DNC itself, it’s surprisingly difficult to organize with other members. But there’s a growing faction inside the committee that is becoming increasingly discontented with where leadership stands. And for the party to maintain control, it ultimately has to follow what the voters want.

I’d also say this: even in electoral politics more broadly, money is a significant factor, but it’s not the only deciding one. It really comes down to organizing and mobilizing voters. You can out-organize even when you’re outspent. And that’s exactly what we saw in the New York City mayoral race.

Richard Eskow: With that, Nadia B. Ahmad — lawyer, professor of law, and activist — thank you so much for your important work on these issues, and thank you for joining us today.

Nadia Ahmad: Thank you so much, Richard.

Just when you thought work couldn’t get any worse ...

Lynn Parramore and Alissa Quart wrote an excellent article for The New Republic on (so-called) AI in the workforce. Its headline reads, “For White-Collar Workers, AI Also Stands for “‘Apocalyptic Insecurity.’” The article makes a valuable contribution to the technology discourse by focusing on the subjective human experience of AI on the job.

Conversation topics included the psychological dread of “terra infirma”; software’s inability to provide the “final 1 percent” that comprises high-quality work; and the inhumanity of forcing people to participate in their own obsolescence by training the machines that will replace them.

(As an aside, I brought up my reactions as a writer when I read articles on “how to spot AI writing.” Readers are commonly told to “look for em dashes (—) because AI overuses them.” As I told Lynn and Alissa, “I’ve been an em dash abuser in my own writing for years. Now I’m paranoid every time I use one.”)

I hope you find Lynn and Alissa’s insights as enlightening as I did.

About my guests:

Lynn Stuart Parramore is a cultural historian, essayist, and senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She is the author of Reading the Sphinx and co-editor of How the Occupy Movement Is Changing America.

Alissa Quart is the author of seven books, most recently Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream and Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. She is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. (They do great work; check them out here.)

Selected Observations

From Lynn:

• “The only wealth is life. And that seems especially important right now, because AI is not alive. We are.”

• “For the first time, collectively, white collar workers are thinking: not only may I lose my job, but what is going to happen to the quality of my job?”

• “‘What is happening to my brain, what is happening to my capacities?’ That is the thing we’ve been hearing — and it goes very, very deep.”

From Alyssa:

• “71% of Americans are now scared AI will steal their livelihoods. And work itself has become what I call terra infirma — unstable ground.”

• “Poetry kind of breaks AI. I kind of love that.”

• “I feel optimistic about people. I feel less optimistic about systems.”

From Richard:

• “When people are forced to make themselves obsolete, they’re not only living with terror on a daily basis — they’re being reduced to a set of functions. That to me is the ultimate dehumanization.”

• “Back in the ‘70s or ‘80s there was an advertising campaign called ‘Look for the union label.’ Maybe it’s time we had a ‘Look for the human label’ campaign.”

• “It’s like being murdered by smiley face icons.”

Transcript (lightly edited by—yes, I confess—AI)

Richard Eskow: We talk about AI a lot on this program, and we talk about labor issues just as much. There’s an excellent new article in The New Republic on exactly that topic, written by Lynn Parramore and Alyssa Quart.

Lynn Parramore is a good friend of the program. She’s a cultural historian, essayist, and senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She’s the author of Reading the Sphinx.

Alyssa Quart is the author of seven books, most recently Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream and Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. Alyssa is also the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a terrific nonprofit that produces journalism—as you might expect—on economic hardship for working people in this country. Check them out.

Their article is headlined “For White Collar Workers, AI Also Stands for Apocalyptic Insecurity.” Lynn and Alyssa, welcome to the program.

Lynn Parramore: Great to be here.

Alyssa Quart: Thanks, Richard.

Richard Eskow: Alyssa, let’s start with you, because I understand you’re the one who came up with this striking phrase, “apocalyptic insecurity.” We all know about insecurity, but what is apocalyptic insecurity?

Alyssa Quart: Well, it was a play on words—AI, the other AI. Our dread. Our fear is being manufactured and hyped up by tech oligarchs, by employers, by so many different people. The message is that AI is either going to save us or destroy us. That’s what the pundits say, that’s the word on the street. And one of the things we need to do, as workers facing this, is to take control of our own dread—a dread that is being pushed on us from the outside.

Lynn wrote about this as well, drawing on her concept of looking back at Frederick Taylor, the late 19th and early 20th century thinker who transformed factory production and led to the systematic disempowerment of workers. This is a similar moment. This is a watershed moment where we have to fight back as thinking people and as workers. The dread itself has become part of the problem. Seventy-one percent of Americans are now afraid AI will steal their livelihoods, and work itself has become a source of uncertainty. I call it terra infirma—unstable ground. And we’re living on it—not just because of AI, but because of the larger polycrisis we’re living through: an unstable climate, an unstable economy, tariffs, job loss, unstable health care, unstable information. We’re fed AI slop, and now even unstable knowledge, as the current administration cuts back on scientific research, including cancer research. So, yeah. That’s the world we’re in.

Richard Eskow: That’s a great phrase. And when you mention Frederick Taylor and Taylorism, what came to mind for me was that this goes all the way back to the Industrial Revolution. The art and social critic John Ruskin, writing in that era, said, “You can either make a tool of the creature, or you can make a man of him. You cannot do both.”

In a sense, that’s been the labor struggle ever since: they keep trying to make tools out of us creatures, while our instinct is to become fully human. Does that resonate with you as a cultural historian, Lynn?

Lynn Parramore: Yes, absolutely. And thinking about Ruskin, one of the lines that means the most to me is this: “The only wealth is life.” That seems especially essential right now, because AI is not alive. We are. And beyond all the uncertainties Alyssa described, there’s a deeper one: uncertainty about the self, about our value and relevance as human beings.

I think going back to thinkers like Ruskin is so important right now, to reground us in the sense that we are not replaceable by machines—and that we should be their masters, not their tools.

Taylorism had been creeping into white collar work for decades, going back to the 1940s, when typists had their keystrokes counted. But it has really ramped up now. I think that, for the first time, white collar workers are collectively thinking, “Not only might I lose my job, but what is going to happen to the quality of my job? I used to pride myself on the knowledge I’d accumulated through years of study and experience. And now I’m suddenly being told that knowledge is worth very little.”

As Alyssa said, we need to step back and recognize that this message is, in many ways, meant to discipline us. The AI hype is also, of course, a story companies tell to attract investment, because they’ve spent enormous amounts of money building these programs. So there’s a lot going on, and it’s genuinely hard for workers to figure out what to do, what to think, or how to chart a path forward. All of that uncertainty can be paralyzing.

We spoke with sociologists and business psychologists who noted that uncertainty can be even more harmful to workers than actually losing a job. When you lose a job, at least you know what to do next; you look for another one, you have some kind of plan. But when you’re sitting there not even knowing whether your job will exist in six months? That’s a different kind of suffering. Uncertainty has always been part of working life, but not quite at this scale or this speed. This is a turning point.

Richard Eskow: Right. It’s one thing to be sinking in water; it’s another to be spinning and unable to find the bottom of the pool. You don’t know which way is up. There are so many dimensions to this, but let’s talk about the labor dimension for a moment.

In the 1960s, there was a lot of talk—overhyped, as it perhaps is today—about “automation.” The big concern back then, and you can find all sorts of literature and commentary on this, was: what will working people do with all their free time? The assumption was that they would earn the same or more, but only work a few hours a week. The sociologist David Riesman talked about the need for a “department of leisure,” warning that without one, society would face a leisure crisis. And I love the example of The Jetsons, which captured that perfectly. George Jetson worked three hours a week at Spacely Sprockets and made enough to support a family of four — saucer house in the sky, flying car, robot maid. Obviously a cartoon, but it reflected a genuine cultural expectation that automation would deliver broad prosperity.

Now the programming we’re getting is completely inverted: AI is going to make billionaires even richer, while the rest of you figure out how to get by on a fraction of what you’re already not getting by on.

The psychological precarity you’re describing, this apocalyptic insecurity, feels to me like the product of a sales job that’s been successfully run on us for sixty or seventy years. Part of what I notice in the experiences you encountered is that people lack something that existed in the 1960s, imperfect as that era was: a sense of labor solidarity. Unions were more pervasive. So, Alyssa, to what extent do you think what we’re seeing is an internalization of the oppressor’s consciousness—to use that phrase--where it simply doesn’t occur to people that they can act collectively, that they can team up with others in the same position?

Alyssa Quart: I definitely think so. It’s been drummed out of us. You were pointing to automation in the 1960s, but in my last book, Bootstrapped, I traced this even further back, to the 19th century, and to writers we both probably love, like Emerson and Thoreau. There’s a long history of a self-made myth being pushed down our throats, initially rooted in something genuinely romantic—religious freedom, individual dignity—but over time it became hypercommercialized. Think of the Ayn Rands of the world, who preached radical self-sufficiency even though, if anyone wants to look it up, Rand herself ultimately depended on Social Security and Medicare.

This is part of why fighting AI determinism and doing some myth-busting around the manufactured elements of this moment matters so much, alongside building a counter-narrative around collective action. We used to be thirty percent unionized; now we’re around ten percent. And we should look at new alternatives. I’m thinking of the AI dividend. It’s currently reaching about three hundred people, but the hope is it will eventually help thousands. It’s being managed by something called the AI Commons Project. And that’s a recognition that one way to fight dread is by creating a more secure income floor. Universal health care would be another. We need a foundation in place before catastrophe hits, rather than simply letting others capitalize on workers’ dread in order to control them better — which is really what’s happening right now.

Richard Eskow: Agreed. And for the record, I think AI should be collectively and publicly owned, because it is mining our own human activity, on and off the job. It belongs to us. It’s our resource. But I hadn’t heard of the AI Commons Project. That’s interesting.

I want to talk about one aspect of your piece that not only contributes to this apocalyptic insecurity, but feels almost sadistic: the fact that workers often feel they’re being forced to participate in their own obsolescence—that by training or building AI systems, they are helping to construct the thing that will replace them.

I think that’s dehumanizing on multiple levels, because we’ve also been trained to believe that our worth comes from our work. I had a friend named Jimmy who was dating a very famous actress. Jimmy was a bartender. When he’d go to her parties and people asked what he did, he would say, “About what?” But that’s not how most of us are wired. So when people are made to participate in their own replacement, they’re not only living with that terror every day, they’re also being reduced to a set of functions. That is, to me, the ultimate dehumanization. Did you find that confirmed in your conversations?

Lynn Parramore: It absolutely was. I’m thinking of a data scientist I spoke with named Claire, who is in her early thirties. She used to be genuinely excited about going to work at her startup —writing Python code, doing the kind of creative problem-solving that gave her meaning and identity. Now she says she’s basically a manager of AI agents. She doesn’t even know what to call herself anymore. Is she an AI engineer? Is she just directing these agents and watching them run? And it’s boring. It’s not exciting. She says she can feel her cognitive skills slipping away, and that is what drives her insecurity: What is happening to my brain? What is happening to my capacities?

We’ve been hearing and reading about this a lot. And it goes very deep. What are we losing when we hand work over to artificial systems? Never mind that a lot of the time they don’t even do the work particularly well, and people are spending large portions of their working hours correcting errors. I spoke to an accountant who said that yes, AI can do wonderful things with data input and sorting, but there’s something like a thirteen percent error rate—so someone has to go back through everything, because you can’t file error-ridden reports.

It’s affecting people in very concerning ways and creating what I call “anticipatory obsolescence”: Am I going to matter as a human being anymore? Never mind my phone becoming obsolete—am I, as a person, becoming obsolete?

Richard Eskow: And not only that; you’re being made obsolete by something with a smiley-face icon. It’s the ultimate indignity. I was struck by the anecdote about Jade, which gets at the “tech weirding” you describe in the piece. Jade gets chirpy emails from management at her insurance tech firm insisting that AI is there to “help, not replace.” And her observation? Those emails are the most AI-sounding writing she encounters. Of course they are. It’s the uncanny valley; almost human, but not quite. Horrifying.

And Alyssa, I wonder to what extent the Jades of this world even know how hard they have it, because of all the chirpy, smiley-face messaging. Are they fully aware of what they’re experiencing, and of the compassion and support they deserve for it?

Alyssa Quart: That’s such an interesting question. I do think people, especially young people, don’t fully understand how much blame they’re absorbing when they can’t find a job, when they can’t move out of their parents’ house, when they can’t afford health care. There’s an epidemic of self-blame around all of that.

A lot of the people we work with at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (check us out at economichardship.org, which I co-founded with the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich) are former staffers who’ve been laid off, or freelancers who’ve taken a real financial hit, in part because the market for freelance journalism has collapsed. As Lynn and I can tell you, people get paid $350 for a piece if EHRP isn’t supplementing it. There’s just no way to be a freelance journalist and afford health care.

And yes, I can still tell when something’s been written by what I call “the robot.” The robot gaze, as we call it in the piece. When that gaze has touched information and transformed it, you get this subpar, generic word salad. It’s not only often inaccurate; it’s also somehow vulgar.

Lynn Parramore: And creepy.

Alyssa Quart: Creepy and utterly lacking in specificity. That’s the written equivalent of the uncanny valley. Where the visual tell is six fingers, the written tell is the complete absence of any particular feature. It’s like information that has been thinned and homogenized until it has no face. And there’s something deeply unsettling about something that is utterly generic.

We spoke for this piece with professional writers who used to write content for hospital websites. Now, those sites are being written by AI, with one human “AI copilot”—their terrible term for someone who has been demoted to supervising an AI—checking the output. And that is what patients and families will read when they need medical information: something written by a machine that is, say, fifteen to thirty percent inaccurate, in a tone that could have been produced by a box of Kleenex.

Richard Eskow: Right. And one of the things that drives me crazy—I shouldn’t laugh, because it’s genuinely alarming—is the business of spotting AI writing. People always say, “Watch out for em dashes.” Well, I’ve been an em dash abuser in my own writing for years. Now I’m paranoid every time I use one.

Lynn Parramore: I have the exact same problem. The tell that bothers me most is what I’d call contrastive framing: “it’s not this, it’s that.” Apparently that pattern appears constantly because the large language models were fed enormous amounts of advertising copy, where that framing is a standard device. So now it’s seeping into everyone’s writing, even in contexts where it has no business being there.

Alyssa Quart: I love that insight. I didn’t know that, but it makes complete sense. Although I do think poetry breaks AI. I’ve asked ChatGPT to generate poems in the style of my favorite poets, and it just doesn’t understand metaphor.

Lynn Parramore: It’s not funny, either. It has no sense of humor.

Alyssa Quart: None whatsoever. So poetry may be the thing that breaks it—and I kind of love that.

Lynn Parramore: But there’s another layer to this. Jade, the woman we interviewed—she works from home, as a lot of people do now, so she doesn’t get much human contact during the day. And she says that even the brief, casual emails she gets from colleagues have started to sound AI-generated. Because people reach for ChatGPT or something similar when they want to strike just the right tone in a quick message. So now even her casual interactions with coworkers are filtered through a machine. That adds a whole other dimension of alienation.

Richard Eskow: Right. And these programs always want to suggest phrases I don’t use and don’t want. I never let my editors impose language on me like that. Why would I let a machine? Back in the ‘70s or ‘80s there was an advertising campaign called “Look for the union label.” I’ve thought about something like “look for the human label” as a counterpart to that.

Alyssa Quart: I’ve thought about that too, like a fair-trade symbol. “No robots were used in the production of this.” Like the little bunny on cruelty-free products. “Robot-free.” And it could be a genuine selling point. It might be like the return of the LP after the MP3, or the return of the physical book after the Kindle. I look around at the art market and painting is big again. Is that partly because people want something haptic — something they can touch, something that is bodily and real? People seem to be hungering for the physical: dancing, live music. I wonder if there’s going to be a kind of mania for the tangible.

Richard Eskow: I really hope so. I think we should promote it, start a movement, get a logo, the whole thing.

As a guitar player, I’ve thought for years that playing guitar feels like performing a Japanese tea ceremony. It’s ritualistic, precise, and deeply satisfying, but somehow it had come to feel arcane. Now it’s coming back. Maybe we can use all that leisure time we were promised.

Lynn Parramore: Right! We’re still waiting on that. And with every technological breakthrough, that’s what they say: work is going to get easier, you’ll have all this extra time for the good stuff. When has that ever actually happened? The Internet is great for some things, and genuinely terrible for others—but did it make people’s jobs better? Did it give them more leisure time? Did it raise their pay? The answer to all of those questions is no. Maybe it made certain jobs more interesting for a few people at the very top, and I think AI will do the same thing. I’ve spoken to scholars who call it an amazing tool for this or that—and for them, great. But we live in a political economy shaped by decades of financialization and the relentless prioritization of shareholder returns. In that environment, technology is simply not going to be used to improve anyone’s job unless workers fight for it.

Richard Eskow: Right. And this connects to that famous graph—I believe it was first produced by Dean Baker’s group, or the Economic Policy Institute, or the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities—showing how after World War II, worker wages and corporate profits rose together, until they split apart around 1968. I call it the Challenger graph, because it looks like the trajectory of the shuttle when it veered off course. That divergence is the story of the hoarding of productivity gains.

But that’s a good segue to another aspect of your piece. One of the things you highlighted is that white collar workers are now, for the first time, all in the same boat. It used to be that if you worked on a tool-and-die floor and a new machine came along, that was the story. Now it’s the accountant, the attorney, the professional managerial class — all of them facing the same threat. And the added indignity is that the machine may not even do the job as well as they do. It may be mediocre. But the system doesn’t care, because mediocre is cheap.

So with all that awfulness cutting across the old class barriers, is there an opportunity for a new kind of labor solidarity, one that transcends those divisions? Alyssa, what do you think?

Alyssa Quart: Definitely. In Squeezed, I wrote about something I called the “middle precariat”: the middle class meets the proletariat meets the precarious. These are people like document-review lawyers and adjunct academics and journalists, people who have graduate degrees and who have found their previously stable work turned contingent—people who weren’t always insecure but suddenly are.

And I think we’ve been seeing the political expression of this. What was behind the elections of Zohran Mamdani in New York, the new mayor of Seattle, recent wins in Maryland and Maine? Alliances between these different precarious classes. And the organizing we’ve seen, of journalists, screenwriters, academics, museum workers—these aren’t people who traditionally formed unions. Union membership is lower than it’s been in decades, but union awareness and approval are higher.

There’s another factor that came up when we spoke with people who work as lawyers or advocates for both blue-collar and white-collar workers at the same companies: they’re now beginning to see their common cause. They recognize that both the contractor and the salaried manager are at the mercy of the same fickle tech overlords. And they’re trying to help each other. That’s the kind of thing we need more of: people like us helping contingent journalists; well-established lawyers becoming aware of and advocating for the document-review lawyers being pushed out by AI, and recognizing the fragility of their own profession too. Unions, awareness, self-respect, and a counter-narrative to AI determinism. Some of it is structural, and yes, some of it is psychological.

Lynn Parramore: You know, when I was in graduate school at NYU, I was briefly a member of the United Auto Workers, because NYU graduate students who were teaching banded together and formed a union. It was a brief period of glory. NYU worked assiduously to shut it down, and eventually the union was crushed. But it happened. And for that moment, here were graduate students pursuing doctorates standing in solidarity with autoworkers. Things like that have happened before, and I think we’re going to see them happen again.

And again, to Alyssa’s point, union membership is down, but approval is very high. There was a Gallup poll a couple of years ago showing it’s higher than it’s been in decades. Those are genuinely positive signs. And in an otherwise sobering conversation, that’s one of the real bright spots.

If the Democrats had any sense, they would pay attention. They’ve been trying to connect with blue-collar workers for a long time, with limited success. But if they can think about bringing blue-collar and white-collar workers together and actually doing something for them collectively — that could be an exciting moment in politics.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. And on that cultural point: my brother, who passed away last year, was a screenwriter. He lived in Kingston, New York. He had a strike T-shirt during the writers’ strike, and he said everywhere he went—the guy at the food stand, the newspaper vendor, whoever it was—people would say, “We’re with you.” Not because they had any glamorous association with Hollywood, but because they recognized fellow workers getting screwed. And that solidarity, that recognition, is a genuinely beautiful thing.

Let me end on one more topic from your piece that I found fascinating. You interviewed Jennifer Vertesi, a sociologist, who said that we are “effacing expertise instead of enabling it.” And then the neuroscientist Giorgio Ascoli expands on that thought with a remarkable quote. What did she mean by that?

Alyssa Quart: Vertesi is a sociologist who has worked with NASA on spacecraft systems and specializes in the sociology of AI and technology. What she meant is that there are people who have put in — as Ericsson argued — ten thousand hours to achieve expert status. They put in that time, and it taught them something the machine simply cannot know: the final one or two percent of how to finish something.

That’s actually what Ascoli was speaking to. He’s a neuroscientist who draws extraordinarily complex neurological diagrams—elaborate trees of branching structures—and he said that an AI could reproduce his work up to a point, but would miss the last two percent. It would be an incomplete project. And that incompleteness is precisely what decades of expertise protects against. Mastery lets you make critical judgments at the very end of a complex process, when everything else has been done.

There’s something else that’s missing, too: what I’d call the sympathetic imagination. When you’re a journalist, or a scholar, studying human experience, you bring to it a kind of understanding that comes from being human. An LLM can scrape an archive. But can it interview all the people we interviewed, and then apply our final five percent of judgment about that material? No. Reporting may be one of the last places where that matters. And as I said — poetry. Those are the places AI cannot touch.

Richard Eskow: We may never find that AI is capable of genuine excellence, because it is, after all, an average of everything that has already been done. How could averaging produce anything better than mediocre? What I took from what Vertesi and Ascoli described is something about the process of learning itself — that the act of learning to do the work makes you more capable of doing the work. Dewey said, “Education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail.” There’s something in the process, of learning to learn, that gets you across the finish line in a way that a system trained only on outputs cannot replicate.

Alyssa Quart: That’s the sympathetic imagination. That’s creativity. That’s the mastery that lets you invent new things. And yes, that’s exactly what Ascoli was describing — the dozens of years he had spent drawing those diagrams had taught his hand what to do at the very end of the process in a way that simply cannot be transferred. Interestingly, his own children work in AI, and even they agreed: the machine is not going to be able to draw the tree in the way their father draws the tree.

Richard Eskow: And Lynn, maybe to conclude, you’ve both stared into the abyss of this apocalyptically insecure future, and it stared back. Where did you wind up? Pessimistic? Optimistic? Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”?

Alyssa Quart: I always feel optimistic about people and less optimistic about systems. That’s where I always land. And I have to say, doing this work with Lynn made it better. I don’t do much collaborative writing outside of film work and my time with Barbara Ehrenreich. Going into this world together with Lynn—I don’t know if you feel the same way, Lynn—but it really helped. Otherwise it would have been deeply depressing.

Lynn Parramore: Yes, absolutely.

Alyssa Quart: And then coming across something like the AI dividend—people thinking about this, trying to organize around it, even if it’s still very small. It’s something.

Richard Eskow: I love that you mentioned working with Lynn as an important part of getting through it, because we are social creatures. That’s the missing element from so much of the AI conversation, and from the last fifty years of drift toward an automated, individualistic, “the machine stops” kind of world. We have mirror neurons. We’re more complete with each other. But, Lynn, the last word is yours.

Lynn Parramore: That’s absolutely true. And this is one more thing AI simply cannot do: commune with other human beings. It can’t share insights or supplement our imaginations the way working together does. It can’t have a work date. Alyssa and I used to meet during the day just to work side by side, and that matters in ways that are hard to quantify.

More and more people are now being managed by algorithms. Their boss, effectively, is a machine. How do you fight back against that? There are encouraging signs. The European Union, for example, has been genuinely advocating for worker dignity and privacy. We can take pages from their playbook.

But yes, one of the antidotes to everything depressing in this conversation is simply working together. Finding each other. Gig workers and contractors face real barriers to organizing, but they’re finding creative ways to make their voices heard collectively.

So between the two choices you offered, I feel motivated. I don’t feel optimistic, exactly. Like Alyssa, I’m optimistic about human beings and very pessimistic about the political economy. Which is precisely what makes me motivated to fight back as hard as possible.

Richard Eskow: “Motivated” is actually a better answer than either of the options I offered you. Let’s leave it there.

This work is only possible through reader support. Please help out with a paid subscription through Substack (discounted here) or on Patreon. Or, make a one-time donation here.

We’re witnessing an unprecedented assault on the integrity of our primaries, fueled by a deluge of “gray money” from the AI, crypto, and pro-Israel lobbying sectors. As I discussed with David Moore of Sludge (www.readsludge.com), these interests aren’t “participating in democracy”; they’re trying to buy it through a sophisticated web of super PACs and bundled contributions that often bypass the scrutiny of mainstream media. From the “earmarking” of millions for House leadership to the flood of deceptive attack ads in local races, the goal is clear: to ensure that the trajectory of history is shaped by those with the deepest pockets rather than the most votes.

People are beginning to push back through initiatives like the People’s Pledge and by challenging candidates who accept this tainted money. What happens now?

More information:

“Crypto, AI, and AIPAC Set up to Smash Super PAC Spending Records,” Sludge
“Return of the ‘People’s Pledge’,” Politico
“Brad Lander Is Demanding an AIPAC-Free Congressional Race,” Jacobin

TOPICS

Our conversation topics included:

The Deception of “Gray Money”: Super PACs purposefully use vague, patriotic-sounding names to mask industry-specific agendas (e.g., AI or Crypto) and run ads on unrelated “hot-button” issues to manipulate unsuspecting voters.

The Inefficacy of “Mainstream” Reporting: Traditional media outlets often fail to trace the complex web of earmarked and bundled donations, leaving the public unaware that their representatives are often beholden to a single industry’s “war chest.”

A Turning Point? The “People’s Pledge” and recent “tactical missteps” by big spenders (like the losses in Illinois) are signs that voters are becoming more sophisticated.

SELECTED QUOTES

David:

“Super PACs funded by an industry like AI or crypto often won’t discuss those issues in their TV ads. Instead, they’ll focus on other campaign topics or hot-button issues like immigration.”

“AIPAC’s PAC has rapidly become the highest-donating PAC at the federal level... delivering millions of dollars to House Democratic leadership at the same time those leaders have been slow to advance things like the Iran War Powers Resolution.”

“The swell of untraceable, anonymous ads flooding primaries on both sides of the aisle breeds distrust in the political process.”

Richard:

“You’ve been covering a lot of stories about what I would call legalized corruption—the real forces of influence in politics, the hidden forces.”

“The real-world implications of this money include genocide and war. These are not abstract concepts.”

“It sounds too overwhelming for voters to push back on. But it sounds like one place where this all comes together... is by demanding that candidates sign the People’s Pledge.”

TRANSCRIPT

Richard Eskow: One of my go-to news sources that I check on a regular basis is the website known as Sludge, which can be found at readsludge.com. The website presents itself as, quote, “your guide to the hidden forces shaping politics.” Joining me now is co-founder of Sludge, David Moore. David and his partner Donald Shaw founded the website, and they’ve been doing great work covering the forces that move politics. So, first of all, David Moore, welcome to the program.

David Moore: Thank you so much. So glad to be here.

Richard Eskow: Happy to have you, and happy to introduce the audience to Sludge. You’ve been covering a lot of stories about what I would call legalized corruption — the forces of influence in politics, the hidden forces, as you say. We could approach this from any number of angles, but why don’t we start here. You recently published a piece, I think at the beginning of February, on crypto, AI, and AIPAC, and how they’re setting up to smash super PAC spending records. You’re referring, I assume, to the records for spending in a midterm election, right?

David Moore: That’s right. And the trends show that super PAC spending is also increasing over time in presidential election cycles. But yes, we’re focused on how individual super PACs are spending in races on both sides of the aisle.

Richard Eskow: Okay. And one thing that’s particularly timely right now is the role of super PACs. We haven’t moved into the general election season yet, but we’ll see a lot of action there. Right now, though, we’re seeing it heavily in Democratic primaries, in particular around several key issues. You mentioned crypto, you mentioned AI. So before we get to AIPAC, let’s talk about the tech side of things. I think crypto is something that a lot of people don’t fully understand — what it is or what its implications are. But one thing it certainly does is spend big on our politics. Is that correct?

David Moore: That’s right. The way super PACs typically operate is by targeting digital ads or TV ads in races, including both primary and general elections. Often, these groups have very innocuous or generic-sounding names — Think Big is one example that’s currently active. In addition, super PACs funded by an industry like AI or crypto often won’t discuss those issues in their TV ads. Instead, they’ll focus on other campaign topics or hot-button issues like immigration.

Super PACs do sometimes disclose their big, deep-pocketed corporate donors — OpenAI or Coinbase, for example — but a significant chunk of their money is often not disclosed to the public. That’s why super PACs are sometimes called “gray money” organizations. They sit somewhere between fully dark money and more transparent spenders.

In the 2024 election cycle, we saw an absolute deluge of money coming in from a couple of different special interests. Crypto spent a record amount of money backing candidates it deemed insufficiently supportive of cryptocurrency regulation. The network around that was primarily called the Fair Shake super PAC network. In addition, the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — deployed its super PAC, called the United Democracy Project, along with an allied super PAC. They spent heavily to knock out candidates they deemed unsupportive of their agenda of promoting greater security cooperation with Israel.

And now, that model is being supercharged heading into the 2026 elections. Interestingly, as we’re speaking on April 8th, the initial primary contests over the past month have shown a mixed record for these groups. We’re seeing a combination of enormous cash reserves — we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars ready to be dropped on ads targeting unsuspecting voters — but the same playbook isn’t necessarily delivering the same results. So it’s early.

Richard Eskow: We are seeing, for example, record amounts being spent in primaries across the country. Give me an example if you can. We’re familiar with PAC spending delivering results. We know, for example, that Representative Cori Bush, an incumbent member of Congress, was outspent by AIPAC in her last primary and was defeated. Same with Jamal Bowman, another defeated incumbent representative. So we’ve seen these PACs win — not necessarily a success story for democracy — but now you’re saying that this time around, despite their enormous war chests, the record is more mixed. That’s interesting. Can you walk us through a few examples?

David Moore: Sure. Let me set the stage by looking at three categories of super PACs: AI super PACs, crypto super PACs, and AIPAC-aligned super PACs.

On the AI front, the industry has essentially replicated the crypto industry’s playbook. They’ve set up the same structure — a super PAC paired with a nonprofit organization and a scorecard — with arms that spend in both Democratic and Republican primaries using targeted messaging for each party’s voters. One of the main super PAC groups for the AI industry that was first out of the gate was called Leading the Future. It’s been funded largely by the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as the president of OpenAI.

Richard Eskow: You mean Sam Altman?

David Moore: Well, actually, it’s the president, Greg Brockman, who funneled — along with his spouse — much of the $25 million from their side of it. Together, in just the first half of last year, Fair Shake reported nearly $75 million. I’m sorry, that’s the crypto industry group. The AI industry group was bankrolled with over — well, I should back up. That figure was from last cycle.

Richard Eskow: Fifty million, perhaps, and more in pledges? That’s what I’ve been seeing. Your article says the new Leading the Future AI super PAC had $50 million cash on hand and much more in pledges.

David Moore: That’s right — thank you for filling that in. More than $50 million pledged. And there are several other AI industry groups beyond that one. I won’t mention them all, but there are ones funded by Meta and others more aligned with the Republican side of the AI deregulation agenda.

On the crypto side, Fair Shake spent over $133 million in the last cycle and is now geared up to meet or exceed that. They had already raised over half of that total to deploy this cycle. The crypto industry also has additional super PACs ready to jump in. And the AIPAC super PAC was also on track for a record haul — it had raised more than $61 million in just the first half of last year. Together, these groups are equipped with hundreds of millions of dollars to drop in elections.

Their first test came in the Illinois primaries last month, on March 18th, and the track record was mixed. It’s not that spending a couple million dollars in a House primary was ever guaranteed to win a race — but it had proved largely successful for them in the previous election cycle. This time around, the results were more mixed across the board.

I can walk through which primaries showed gains and losses in Illinois, but the main takeaway is that Democratic voters were responding to other signals as well. There’s a real opportunity now for Democratic voters — and other primary voters — to look more critically at who’s funding the super PAC behind the ads they see. That’s part of the initiative behind a new Democratic effort called the People’s Pledge, which is gaining traction with candidates now.

Richard Eskow: And the People’s Pledge asks candidates to pledge that they won’t take PAC money, right?

David Moore: It goes further than that. Candidates pledge to reject waves of outside spending by super PACs as well. They commit not just to declining corporate PAC money — and in some cases, to refusing donations from executives in certain industries — but more importantly, they commit to rejecting the big-dollar outside spending from super PACs. So when you’re watching a game or a drama on TV and you see an ad promoting a candidate from a group with a name like “Elect Chicago Women” or something similarly vague — that spending would be rejected under the pledge.

That’s really a significant and potentially sea-change-level development in primary contests, if more candidates were to adopt it.

Richard Eskow: Does the People’s Pledge also commit candidates to supporting campaign finance reform if they’re elected?

David Moore: I’m not certain it includes that specifically. It’s focused primarily on electoral commitments. Candidates who have taken the pledge — there’s one in Maine, one in Maryland, and here in New York City, where I’m based, one running for a House seat — are calling on their opponents to do the same. They’re pledging to reject outside group spending and to improve the democratic process for voters more broadly.

For example, here in New York, there’s a House race between former Comptroller Brad Lander and incumbent Dan Goldman, where Lander is calling on Goldman to reject the waves of outside spending that have too often shaped these Democratic primaries and come from opaque sources. It’s an effort really focused on empowering voters, and it’s the sort of thing that state parties could be far more active in taking up. They have a lot of control over this.

Richard Eskow: And it’s very popular with voters, which is one of the reasons candidates do it. So hopefully that popularity helps counteract the effect of some of this money.

Now, a related issue: given the ongoing and tragic situation in Gaza, the idea that a candidate is taking AIPAC money — which was once taken for granted — has become somewhat politically toxic for Democrats. To the point where you have mainstream Democrats like Gavin Newsom saying they won’t take AIPAC money, and other congressional leaders making similar pledges. But to me, one of the valuable things Sludge does is expose the fact that a lot of AIPAC money doesn’t come with the AIPAC label on it. There are ways to get around that. Am I understanding that correctly?

David Moore: There are a number of ways that AIPAC spends to support the candidates it chooses to back. We briefly discussed examples from last cycle — Bush, Bowman, and others — where the AIPAC super PAC targeted progressives it deemed out of line with its agenda.

What a lot of people don’t understand, and what Sludge’s reporting has worked to illuminate, is that AIPAC’s PAC also delivers campaign contributions directly into candidates’ and sitting lawmakers’ accounts through an earmarking process. If you were an AIPAC donor, you could donate through their portal, and it facilitates the donation flowing into the campaign account of a sitting lawmaker. We calculated that, as of earlier this year, AIPAC’s PAC had earmarked and bundled more than $28 million to the campaigns of current members of Congress in this election cycle alone.

This can translate into enormous sums. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for example, raised a million dollars for his campaign committees last year bundled this way through AIPAC’s PAC. Often, the paper trail from an individual donor through the PAC to the candidate isn’t fully visible — it shows up in disclosure records as individual donations. But AIPAC’s PAC openly touts its role in this process. Their website even highlights to donors that the candidates will know how much AIPAC is facilitating in donations.

All of this happens while AIPAC lobbies these same lawmakers to issue public statements of support for Israel, and to oppose efforts to restrict military aid to Israel on humanitarian grounds — whether that’s weapons aid or other forms of military coordination — particularly as such restrictions relate to international law compliance.

The element you raise is important: not many people perhaps realize that AIPAC’s PAC has rapidly become the highest-donating PAC at the federal level, far outpacing groups like the Realtors or other PACs that practice similar earmarking. AIPAC’s PAC is delivering millions of dollars to House Democratic leadership at the same time those leaders have been slow to advance things like the Iran War Powers Resolution.

Richard Eskow: And I think this is really important, David, for a variety of reasons — but one that I suspect a lot of listeners struggle with is: it’s not clear how this typically gets reported. You don’t often see mainstream news organizations reporting that Hakeem Jeffries — who, for example, held off endorsing the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York until two days before the election, and has taken other positions seemingly at odds with his own party’s base — has received millions from AIPAC. Is that because outlets simply don’t report it, or because the process you just described obscures the fact that it’s AIPAC bundling this money? In other words, campaign finance reports often don’t show it as millions from AIPAC, do they?

David Moore: That’s exactly right, and what I can tell you is that AIPAC’s PAC didn’t begin operating in this way until just a couple of cycles ago. Though AIPAC and its allies had wielded a lot of influence through their super PAC spending for many past cycles, they only really began spinning up this direct contribution mechanism in the 2021–2022 cycle, and then started dropping millions in the 2023–2024 cycle.

So campaign finance reporters — the kind featured on the front pages of the Times, the Post, or CNN — weren’t accustomed to tracing back millions in earmarked donations through FEC records. Sludge has been compiling those records and presenting them in searchable, easily accessible lists so that anyone, nationwide, can see how much their senator or representative has received from AIPAC’s PAC in bundled donations. Often, that makes AIPAC the largest donor to a given lawmaker — the very donor that is simultaneously lobbying them on efforts like the Block the Bombs Act from Senator Sanders, Senator Van Hollen, Senator Tina Smith, and others.

So when you look at what’s being advanced — or not advanced — by Democratic leaders in the House and Senate on questions of human rights law as applied to military aid to Israel, it’s important for people to keep in mind that those leaders’ direct campaign coffers are being padded with six-figure sums from AIPAC’s PAC, from the same people lobbying them to issue statements of support.

And it’s worth emphasizing: on a call-in show here in New York City, Hakeem Jeffries once said, “I accept $10,000 from AIPAC’s PAC — that’s the limit they can give me.” And technically, that’s accurate for that category of direct contribution. But they can also facilitate millions of dollars in individual donations flowing through them. So while the individual donors in those cases are U.S. citizens choosing to give to the candidate AIPAC is endorsing, AIPAC’s website makes absolutely clear that they are taking credit for this with lawmakers. Which means that when their lobbyists are pressing officials on weapons aid to Israel or on human rights legislation, the lawmakers know exactly how much they’ve received through AIPAC — even if the public does not.

Richard Eskow: And that, to me, is why the work you and Donald are doing is so important. Particularly now, given what appears to be some sort of two-week ceasefire as we speak. But the war in Iran has caused massive damage — thousands of deaths, and likely hundreds of billions of dollars in economic harm to the global economy when everything is tallied. And this was an initiative that, by most reporting, was primarily supported by Benjamin Netanyahu and backed by many of the same interests aligned with AIPAC. You and Donald Shaw wrote back in June of 2025 that AIPAC-funded Democrats avoided pushing for a war powers resolution on Trump and Iran. They’ve given lip service to it this time around. But it seems to me that the real-world implications of this money include genocide and war. These are not abstract concepts. We’re talking about millions of dollars going to candidates whose positions affect the trajectory of history and millions of people’s lives. Am I overstating the case?

David Moore: I don’t think so. The House war powers resolution was introduced in 2025, during Israel’s attacks on Iran and when Trump began launching missile strikes against Iran. A bipartisan resolution was introduced around mid-year — around June. House Democratic leaders declined to get behind it. At first it was backed by only a handful of progressives on the Democratic side.

Then, earlier this year, as Trump’s saber-rattling toward Iran intensified in February, House Democratic leaders had the opportunity to bring up the war powers resolution through a privileged measure — a mechanism available to the minority — and some Republicans began signaling they might seriously consider voting for it. But Democrats didn’t push hard. Jeffries and House Democratic leadership didn’t get it introduced in February before the strikes came at the end of the month.

In March, there was still an opportunity for the House to exert its constitutional authority — to lay down a marker that Trump’s strikes on Iran were unlawful, and that the tens of billions of dollars being spent to cause these thousands of deaths needed to stop. A couple of House Republicans signaled they were on board and might have pushed it across the finish line by a bare majority. And House Democrats didn’t bring it to the floor then, either.

Now, as we speak on April 8th, House Democratic leaders say they will reintroduce it when recess ends shortly. It might get over the finish line now — but they had the opportunities for the past several months, and much of that inaction comes from significant lobbying efforts to keep the war effort unconstrained.

Richard Eskow: Right. And you mentioned a couple of cases where this PAC spending has backfired. The one that came to mind was Analilia Mejia in New Jersey’s 11th district, where AIPAC — using one of those bland, meaningless names you mentioned, I believe the United Democracy Project — went after Tom Malinowski, a candidate who was, by most measures, fairly pro-Israel. Their apparent goal, as I understand it, was to make an example of him for not being sufficiently enthusiastic in his support. But the net result was that someone to Malinowski’s left — who was stronger on Palestinian rights — Analilia Mejia, got the nomination instead.

Now, I don’t know if that’s a rejection of the PAC so much as a tactical error on their part. But when you have that much money — I think they spent more than $2 million in that race — you’re distorting the outcome in a major way. My question would be: why wouldn’t the Democratic Party push to keep this money out of their primaries? It doesn’t help them win. It just helps Republican-aligned billionaires and other outside interests choose their candidates. And secondly, is this a sign that, for all their money, these groups aren’t quite as shrewd as they think they are?

David Moore: To address the first question — there’s another example from the Illinois primaries I mentioned. In those House and Senate primaries, AIPAC more or less split outcomes. They spent $5 million for a candidate who ended up losing to LaShawn Ford in the 7th district, and close to $6 million for Laura Fine, who ended up losing to the mayor of Evanston, Daniel Biss, in the 9th district. That’s a lot of money to lose.

AIPAC spent through super PACs called “Elect Chicago Women” and “Affordable Chicago Now,” as well as the United Democracy Project. For some of these super PACs, the donors were not publicly disclosed at the time the TV ads were running — Illinois voters were in the dark about who was funding what they were seeing. But it was widely understood, given the pattern of who these groups were backing, that these were AIPAC-funded super PACs. And AIPAC did not deny it. Subsequent campaign finance reports made it even clearer.

So to your question about how Democratic voters are being served by attack ads funded by dark money in their primaries — that’s precisely the question for state parties to take up. If more candidates and state parties examined the People’s Pledge and considered how candidates can voluntarily reject this money, that would be a meaningful step. Legally, outside groups can still spend freely thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions, but candidates have a real role to play, and so do state parties, in shaping the rules of their primary contests.

As for whether these groups are as shrewd as they think — the New Jersey race you mentioned is widely seen as a tactical misstep by AIPAC. Democratic voters are increasingly sophisticated about this stuff, and dumping millions of dollars into outside spending doesn’t guarantee the outcome it once did. We are seeing more candidates come out against it. You mentioned Governor Newsom, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey — a long-standing AIPAC ally — recently claimed he would begin ceasing to accept AIPAC PAC donations. That claim needs to be tested against reality, because he’s been one of their top recipients. But it’s another example of the dynamic you’re describing.

Richard Eskow: And one of my reactions — which is another reason I think this kind of reporting is so important — is that when Cory Booker says he’s going to cut back on AIPAC money, he’s not necessarily saying he’ll cut back on money from the United Democracy Project, or whatever name they choose next. That strikes me as a very good reason why this reporting has to continue.

Before we go, let me check in on the tech side one more time. Crypto — as I mentioned — a lot of people don’t fully understand what it is or what it does. But essentially, it’s electronic currency that is unregulated, or underregulated, and its advocates want to keep it that way. That has, at times, posed major risks to the global financial system — people remember Sam Bankman-Fried and that fiasco, and there are others who could follow him. People also understand AI now, including its massive energy consumption and the data centers polluting surrounding communities. But do we have a sense yet — from your reporting — of how well these newer AI super PACs are performing? Or are they too new to get a read on?

David Moore: Right. Let me give you the lay of the land on crypto first, and then I’ll briefly touch on the connection to the AIPAC point you raised about Booker.

On the question of candidates who say they’re cutting off AIPAC PAC donations — when outside spending flows through a group like the United Democracy Project, it arrives as digital ads on your phone or TV ads in public spaces. The degree to which candidates who claim to be rejecting AIPAC money also commit to rejecting those outside ads is an open question. The goal of something like the People’s Pledge is to cut off that spending entirely. Booker is up for a vote this year, so outside spending in his favor is likely regardless.

On crypto: the industry has several items on its legislative wish list. One it already achieved was the GENIUS Act, a stablecoin bill that President Trump signed into law — a major regulatory win for them. There’s also a broader deregulation bill that has been moving back and forth between the House and the Senate, often called the Clarity Act. The crypto industry is working hard to get that over the finish line while Republicans still control both chambers and have a deregulation-friendly administration — especially given the enormous crypto investments held by people in and around the Trump administration itself.

It’s not clear whether the Clarity Act will pass before the midterms. We’ll see what happens after. But the crypto industry is entirely unapologetic about its political strategy. It said openly that it was prepared to spend enormously in Ohio in the 2024 election — tens of millions of dollars — backing Republican Bernie Moreno, who defeated Sherrod Brown, a senator on the Banking Committee who had been critical of crypto’s approach to consumer protection.

Now, Fair Shake and its affiliated super PACs are back, with Democratic and Republican arms ready to run the same playbook. And voters are going to see those ads. Early voting begins in California primaries next month, in May. Then come June in New York House primary races, and after that in Michigan, Maine, and other battleground states, as crypto looks to consolidate the deregulatory gains it’s already won.

Richard Eskow: At high risk to the public, I would argue. And it was striking to me, in your reporting on how these PACs are gearing up, that the current high-water mark for super PAC spending in midterms was in 2022 — when Club for Growth Action spent $69 million. Fair Shake, according to your reporting, reported total receipts of nearly $73.8 million in the second half of 2025 alone, according to FEC disclosures. Just that one organization appears on track for a hugely record-breaking year — and that’s just crypto. Add AI on top of that, then AIPAC. It sounds overwhelming for voters to push back on.

But it sounds like the one place where this all comes together — where people can really resist — is by demanding that candidates sign the People’s Pledge, confronting them at every public appearance and asking, “Why haven’t you signed it?” That’s my takeaway from what you’re telling me. But what’s your closing thought?

David Moore: I think you’re right. The swell of untraceable, anonymous ads flooding primaries on both sides of the aisle breeds distrust in the political process. Super PACs have become something of a punchline — “Americans for Americans” dropping attack ads — and it tires people out. It reduces voter participation.

It would be a huge step forward for more candidates to adopt the People’s Pledge, and to bring it into their state parties — whether on the left or the right — to encourage others to follow suit. Like the candidates in Maryland and other states who have already taken this step and said: we’re going to choose to reject this outside spending. We’re going to try, as much as possible, to focus our campaigns on the people we’re actually seeking to represent.

In my recent conversation with economist Richard Wolff he traced the arc of American fiscal supremacy, from the “petrodollar” arrangement that locked the world into dollar dependency to the slow unraveling now being accelerated by China’s rise, Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and the fundamental logic of capitalism itself.

This topic is becoming more timely and important than ever as the battle intensifies for control of the strait of Hormuz. For that reason, I’m excerpting that portion of our conversation and republishing it on a stand-alone basis.

Prof. Wolff helped me articulate something I’ve long believed: that the fragility of this system wasn’t accidental, butt was baked in by profit-maximizing logic that never had to account for the true costs of overextension. Together we explored how the same incentive structure which built the empire is now dismantling it—chokepoint by chokepoint, currency by currency, hour by deadly hour.

Key Quotes

“The petrodollar was a deal that’s best understood as if we were talking about gangsters—and maybe that’s what we are.”
—Richard Wolff

“I think we’re going to see a world that increasingly rebels against the oppressive nature of this financial system, severing these various arteries one by one.”
—Richard Eskow

“America never funds wars through taxation, because if the taxpayers had to foot the bill directly they would oppose them.”
—Richard Wolff

“A global system that is too dispersed is like an army that overextends its supply lines. It becomes fragile.”
—Richard Eskow

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: I think a lot of people have seen the word “petrodollar” in the news over the years without really understanding what it means. And this gets to the heart of something important. One of the ways I’d argue the current economic world order is essentially a spoil of war for the United States — perhaps going back to World War Two.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you had Bretton Woods, you had the idea that the world’s currencies would be linked to the dollar, and you had this whole concept of petrodollars. Now, with the war involving Iran, we’re starting to hear the term “petroyuan” for the Chinese currency.

Could you take a minute and clear up any misconceptions about that?

Richard Wolff: Sure. You’re absolutely right. The petrodollar is in the process of disappearing. That’s really part of the broader decline of the dollar from its role as the world’s ultimate reserve currency — a role it held for most of the last 75 years, but which it has progressively shed. Now, less than half of the world’s reserves are held in dollars.

The petrodollar was a deal that’s best understood as if we were talking about gangsters — and maybe that’s what we are. The United States figured out right after World War II that the energy of the future was petroleum. A lot of people knew that even before the war, but by the time it ended, it was clear that industrialization everywhere in the world would require oil, and lots of it. In those days, oil was mostly coming from the Middle East. We had some in Texas, but it was already clear that would never be enough. The modern era of fracking was not yet imaginable.

So in the aftermath of World War II, a deal was cut — led by the United States and Britain — carving up the desert around Saudi Arabia into seven or eight little countries, with Saudi Arabia being the primary one sitting atop enormous oil reserves. And we created these countries out of nothing: Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and others like them.

Here’s how the deal worked. In each case, a particular local family was told: “You can become billionaires. You will be the head of a country. We’ll set it up, we’ll draw the boundaries on a map” — exactly as European colonialists had been doing across Asia, Africa, and Latin America for the previous three centuries. And they were all for it.

“Each of you gets a cut of the oil. We — five American companies, two European companies, the Seven Sisters — will come and extract it. You can participate over time and take a nice cut off the top. A cut that will transform you overnight from a rural desert family into a sultan, an emir. You can buy châteaus in the south of France for your vacations. You will be among the richest people on the planet.”

And here’s the rest of the deal: “We, the Americans, are the world’s dominant buyers of oil because we’re the dominant economy. You’re going to sell oil to us, and we’re going to pay you in dollars. But we’re going to require you to demand payment in dollars from anyone in the world who buys oil from you. That’s the arrangement. You have to do that if you want us as your customer — and we’re the major buyer.”

And there was one more condition. All those dollars flowing in — from America and from every other country that buys your oil — you have to commit to investing them back in the United States. That means buying shares in American companies, though we won’t let you acquire controlling stakes. And the rest? You lend it to the United States government.

Americans know that when we run a budget deficit — currently over a trillion dollars a year — it’s because the government spends more than it collects in taxes. Did you ever wonder who lends Washington the money to do that? Well, as it turns out, one important group of lenders is the Gulf state rulers — the very gangsters in this arrangement — who send their oil dollars right back to us as loans.

So we send the dollars over there, they send the oil to us, and then they send the dollars back to us as loans. It’s a circular, gangster arrangement, paid for entirely by the money we all spend on oil. It is a racket that will be celebrated throughout history for the extraordinary way the American empire organized the global oil business to sustain itself.

Because when the Gulf states lend money to the United States, the United States uses it to fight wars — in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and now Iran. America never funds wars through taxation, because if the taxpayers had to foot the bill directly, they would oppose them. So wars have to be financed through borrowing, and that requires lenders. And a good chunk of that lending — not all of it, but a good chunk — flows from this gangster arrangement.

By the way, it’s falling apart. Because what the Iranians are teaching the Gulf states is this: having an American military base on your soil doesn’t protect you. It makes you a target. A target of whom? Of Iran. “Because the United States attacks us,” the Iranians say, “we are going to attack the United States — and you’ve welcomed them onto your soil. You’d better rethink that.”

And no matter what they say publicly, they are all rethinking it. Like Europe, in a different way, they now have to ask: whether aligning with the United States was betting on the wrong horse.

Richard Eskow: And this is where it gets particularly interesting in terms of current events — and correct me if I’m wrong — but my understanding is that the Iranians, by threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, are effectively saying: “We won’t let your oil through unless it’s being purchased in something other than dollars.” If that’s correct, it means the world’s preeminent superpower could potentially lose this extraordinarily cushy arrangement because of the concentrated military leverage Iran holds over one region, one bottleneck — and they may be able to unravel the whole thing. Could I be right about that?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. I’m not yet certain about the yuan specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised. What we do know is that the Iranians have long told the Chinese — and as far as I can tell have consistently honored this — that ships registered to Chinese enterprises and carrying oil from Iran to China are allowed through the Strait of Hormuz without any interference. People should understand that Iran has long been a major oil supplier to China; that’s nothing new.

My guess is the Iranians will now be more than happy to accept payment in yuan — both because they want to undercut the dollar, and because of a much larger underlying phenomenon: China is now the world’s fastest-growing major economy and its second largest overall. They will surpass the United States by the end of this decade. We’re already in 2026, so I’m talking about the next four years. Within four years, China’s economy will be larger than America’s.

Why does that matter? Because it means the entire world has been doing for twenty years what it will only continue doing more: buying less from the United States and more from China. And so the world needs fewer dollars and more yuan, because that’s where the action is.

This is precisely how the dollar replaced the British pound. It didn’t happen in a single day — it was the gradual result of where economic gravity was shifting. The Germans had hoped the world would end up using the deutsche mark, and had they not lost World War I, they might have been right. But they lost, and then they lost again in World War II, which took them out of contention entirely. The only other competitor to Britain was the United States, and the U.S. became where everybody wanted to buy. After World War II, you couldn’t get much of anything anywhere else anyway, which cemented it immediately. And the Marshall Plan reinforced it: we gave Europe dollars on the condition they spend them here, ensuring that American companies captured all that postwar spending.

The next 75 years reproduced that dynamic through the Cold War and the entire structure of the American empire. Another sign that the empire is passing is that we’re having this very conversation — that the dollar matters less and less, and the yuan is playing the role the dollar once played. It’s all quite clear, except that we live in a country with a desperate need to deny everything I’ve just said. To pretend that each of these events is isolated, specific, and not part of a larger pattern of decline — because that is simply too frightening a thought to entertain.

Richard Eskow: I’d add something to that decline narrative. We decided we were going to be the captains of a global financial system — but a global system, like an army that overextends its supply lines, becomes fragile. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait closed by the Houthis — that was an overextended supply line. The Strait of Hormuz carries two and a half to three times the volume, and it’s another overextended supply line. I think we’re going to see a world that increasingly rebels against the oppressive nature of this financial system, severing these various arteries one by one. And I think it reveals that this empire is vulnerable not just to a rival power like China, but to its own overextension and internal fragility. Would you agree?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely — and I’d go one step further. For me, the root issue is profit. Over the last 75 years, we allowed the maximization of corporate profit to determine the global distribution of our entire economy. It was profitable to stop making automobiles in Detroit and make them in China instead. Fine — but that globalized the automobile industry in ways it had never been before. And you can multiply that across virtually every other industry.

Profit says: make more money over there. But the ecologist says: yes, you make more profit, but you’re fouling the ocean shipping that product back from China to the United States — and where is that cost accounted for? If you factor in what will happen to fisheries, to public health, to the oceans themselves, and you count what it will ultimately cost to repair the damage, that cost exceeds the extra profit you extracted. We would have been better off keeping those jobs in Detroit. But nobody did that calculation. Capitalism doesn’t work that way. Capitalism defines efficiency as profit maximization — and it has never been truly efficient. That’s a fetishism of the system that we ought to have outgrown long ago.

If you want to understand why we have these long, fragile supply lines, why their vulnerability was never properly accounted for, it’s because private capitalists never had to pay for that fragility. They didn’t have to worry about a choke point in a distant strait. They were too swept up in the logic of profit to think outside that frame. And that is a catastrophic mistake — one that is now bringing the system down.

I would argue that this systematic fetishization of the capitalist calculus is as fundamental as anything else in undermining this empire.

Richard Eskow: And I would argue — perhaps in closing — that even if everyone involved had fully understood decades ago that this would be the outcome, they would have done it anyway. Because the incentive structure of capitalism is quarterly and annual. If it’s going to blow up in 20, 30, or 40 years — who cares? We’ll be long gone by then.

Richard Wolff: So I will have moved on, having left this company to become the CEO of another. As Louis XV supposedly said: “Après moi, le déluge” — after me, the flood. But that mentality is shaped by the system itself, isn’t it?

Richard Eskow: “I’ve got my island retreat in New Zealand, so I’ll be fine.”

There is a strange, perverse honesty in seeing Donald Trump’s signature on the hundred-dollar bill. As Prof. Wolff and I discussed, it’s a moment of “truth in packaging” for an empire in accelerating decline. For decades, the American project was wrapped in a polite veneer of international law and “bipartisan” institutions. That mask has slipped.

The 75-year “gangster arrangement” of the petrodollar is under pressure. Illegal war in Iran, presidential kidnapping in Venezuela, unlawful tariffs, and the desperate, circular logic of funding our enemies to keep oil prices down: it all seems more and more like hysterical posturing” against the inevitable flow of history.

Selected Quotes

Richard Wolff:

• “In the great struggle between Trump’s attempt to change history and history itself, I’m betting on history.”

• “What do you say about an empire so far in decline that the only way it can attempt to hold on is by strengthening the very forces it regards as its enemies?”

• “The petrodollar was a deal—and it should be understood the way we’d understand any gangster arrangement.”

Richard Eskow:

• “As far as fiat currency goes, well, he’s a fiat president: he does what he wants... So why not have a little truth in packaging on our currency?”

• “Trump is Anthony Blinken without the bullshit.”

• “A single bottleneck could overturn this entire 70-year system.”

Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: An interesting thing happened the other day. We learned that Donald J. Trump is going to affix his signature to a U.S. currency bill. This is the first time in 165 years — which is to say, pretty much ever — that a president has signed any bill, much less while still in office.

Usually it’s the Secretary of the Treasury and/or the Comptroller who signs the bill. Trump’s $100 bill will coexist, signature-wise, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s signature. But cash continues to decline in use. If you think Trump branding is going to help with that, well, good luck to you. Here to discuss this very interesting development in the world of currency, finance, and economics is none other than our economic expert and economic historian, Professor Richard Wolff.

So first of all, Richard Wolff, welcome back to the program.

Richard Wolff: Thank you very much, Richard. Glad to be here.

Richard Eskow: Trump bucks. What do you make of it?

Richard Wolff: Well, I’m wondering whether the next step will be the disappearance of those old fuddy-duddies Washington and Franklin. Why only his signature? We should have his face right in the middle, where the portrait goes. We could have Donald Trump’s face on the bill — and we could all glower or smile, depending on our perspective, seeing him once again in our wallets.

Richard Eskow: What a nightmare. And yet I find a perverse thought coming to mind — and I thank you for suggesting this topic. At least, I suppose, one can appreciate the honesty. As far as fiat currency goes, well, it’s a fiat president: he does what he wants. And money is representative of a power structure, an elite, and special interests — which is what Donald Trump also represents. So why not have a little truth in packaging on our currency? But money, like they used to say in the college dorm rooms, it’s a construct, man, isn’t it?

Richard Wolff: In a way, it is fitting. Mr. Trump arrives at what I consider an accelerating moment of decline for the United States in the world economy, with all the upset and disorientation that implies. When a society goes through that moment — as England did, as the Romans did, as the Greeks did — why wouldn’t it be disorienting for Americans when it’s their turn for their economy to decline?

He is rewriting everything. The Constitution? Who cares? International law? Who cares? If you want to kill people in boats in the middle of the Caribbean, you just kill them. And when you’re asked about it, you do as Mr. Miller — Trump’s advisor — did: you explain that the world has always been governed by power and strength. In other words, we can kill those people because we can, and there’s no one to stop us. I can translate that plainly: there is no international law that we have to worry about.

It is remarkable when Mr. Rubio, the Secretary of State, lectures the Europeans with real emotion about how horrible it is that the Iranians are thinking of charging money for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz — and declares that this is against international law. For him to say that with a straight face requires a level of willful, blind ignorance that one needs to stop and fully appreciate.

Anyway. Mr. Trump is tariffing everybody illegally — the Supreme Court of his own country tells him it’s illegal, and he immediately imposes new tariffs so the court has to decide it all over again. He is trying desperately to stop history. And so this break with historical norms, with all the logic of what is unfolding, that is his signature — figuratively and now literally. Why not put it on the currency too? Why not break with history there as well?

You correctly note it’s been 165 years — I didn’t know that. 165 years, and we have never had such a thing. That’s exactly why he wants to do it. Other people couldn’t overthrow the regime in Venezuela; he did. Other people couldn’t overthrow Iran; he’s trying to. The message is: I am going to undo history. History has been unfair to us, and I am going to fix it.

That is a level of megalomania that comes from him constantly. He’s not bound by honesty or precedent. I loved this too, from last week: he said that Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, endorsed his Iran policy. So the press went to Blinken and asked about it. Blinken’s answer: it never happened. Trump just bloviates and hopes nobody notices — or by the time they do, he’s already produced a new headline to distract everyone.

This is all a kind of hysterical gesturing, a desperate effort to do anything and everything to give the impression that he can reverse what has been happening in recent decades. He can’t, and he won’t. And sooner or later — and I understand it’s painful to have to wait — in the great struggle between his attempt to change history and history itself, I’m betting on history. He will be blown aside.

And when people turn on him, when they finally realize they’ve been hustled for eight years or longer, their rage will turn on the person who hustled them, and it will not be pretty to watch. If you want an example of how quickly things can shift, pay attention to Marjorie Taylor Greene, because that is the scenario you’re going to see replayed.

Richard Eskow: Marjorie Taylor Greene, who all of a sudden sounds surprisingly humane and reasonable on the subject of the slaughter of people in Gaza. It turns out that humans — even American humans — don’t like genocide, and they don’t like it being committed in their name and with their resources.

I’m torn, Richard Wolff, as I listen to you. I strongly agree with you — and I do — but I’m also somewhat conflicted about this idea of a “break with history,” because in a sense, yes, these things are a break with history. But in another sense, they are also an acknowledgment of it.

The term “cognitive dissonance” was invented, as I understand it, to describe the disturbance caused in a child’s psyche when their parents tell them things are one way and they’re actually another: “Your father and I really love you and we love each other and this is a happy home” — when it isn’t. That messes up a child’s mind. Trust me, I know.

And so in a perverse way, there’s actually less cognitive dissonance when Trump says, “I’m putting my signature on this bill because I can.” A hundred dollar bill is just about power. You mentioned Anthony Blinken — now there is the biggest hypocrite to walk this earth in quite some time. Talk about cognitive dissonance: listening to him and his boss, Joe Biden, express outrage that Vladimir Putin dared defy international law by invading Ukraine — and I agree it was a violation of international law — while they sneered at and dismissed the International Criminal Court and blatantly violated both international and domestic U.S. law to send weapons of mass destruction to Israel so it could pursue its genocide. We could go on and on.

At least — do you remember that New Yorker cartoon? A wolf is on a campaign billboard saying, “I will eat you.” And a crowd of sheep is cheering: “You’ve got to give it to that guy — he tells it like it is.” That, to me, is Trump. He’s Anthony Blinken without the bullshit.

Richard Wolff: That’s right, exactly. And you’re right — the attempt to break with history is itself proof of what that history actually is. It’s Don Quixote tilting his lance at windmills. He’s not going to win. He just doesn’t get it.

But here’s another layer to this. And I’m going to get in trouble for saying it, but I’ll say it anyway.

Richard Eskow: Please — we like trouble.

Richard Wolff: That is what a large number of Americans want. They want to stop the history they can sense is happening. They voted for him in part because — long shot though it was — he at least said he was going to break with all of this. Whereas Kamala Harris, Blinken, Biden, Bush, Obama — they were obviously part of what was failing to stop history. So: get this unorthodox guy who doesn’t know anything about conventional politics, who’s rough-and-tumble and crude and ignorant, but who says, “I’m going to change everything. Look at me — I’m different from those people.” And he was, and he is, and he has been true to that. He has behaved in ways other presidents did not dare.

He is, as you put it, what those other people were, but without the Harvard and Yale panache — the veneer, the polish. And I say this in full recognition of Harvard and Yale, since I attended both myself, and tried very hard not to come away with the phoniness that the Obamas and the Bidens all represent.

I can even feel for the American people in this regard. As you put it with that cartoon, they are sheep. He is a wolf. And they are celebrating that he at least says: “I’m a wolf, and I will do what I want.” And then they try not to understand that that means they’re his next meal. That’s what the American people don’t grasp — even now, as the cost of putting gas in their car becomes out of reach, with more to come, and the inflation they were told he had under control is about to take off.

It’s just extraordinary that he still has any poll numbers at all. And now, if he’s actually going to send hundreds of thousands of troops into Iran, he’s going to be killing large numbers of Americans on top of everything else.

Richard Eskow: It really is extraordinary. But I’ll say a slight word in defense of the American electorate here. First of all, most people don’t have, or don’t devote, a great deal of time to politics and history — the stuff you and I love and care about. If the present is not very good — and you and I have talked about this many times — life right now is not so good for most people. That means you’ve got to choose between the future and the past. The past wasn’t so great either, but we tend to forget that. And Trump is offering people an idealized past. Who’s offering them a good future? Not the Democrats. To quote Hillary Clinton in 2016: “America is already great.” No, it isn’t great for people who can’t make ends meet. And it hasn’t gotten any greater since 2016 when she said it.

But the various Democratic alternatives — “let’s return to bipartisan institutions” (and parenthetically, I hate the word “bipartisan” because it institutionalizes and legitimizes the idea that there are only two legitimate political parties; I much prefer “nonpartisan”) — those institutions gave us the national security state, the trillion-dollar defense budget, austerity economics, and so on. That bipartisan consensus is what they’re asking people to go back to. When you’re offering people a lousy present and Trump is offering them an idealized past, a lot of people say, “I’ll take a shot at that. Maybe the past wasn’t so bad after all.” Does that make sense?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. And that’s very much part of the appeal of this moment. It’s also deeply frustrating, because millions of people — the demonstrations last Saturday were indicative — millions of Americans took time off to go into the streets and be part of a massive outpouring. You get a sense that they are there, but they don’t know exactly how to organize it, sustain it, or build on it. So it has the character of an expression of feeling that doesn’t know where to go with itself. That seems to me very dangerous.

I fear that the people who participate, and who don’t know how to take it to the next step, will then interpret the absence of that next step as an argument that it isn’t worth doing. Which is wrong — it is worth doing, and it does have effects. But you’re also correct that there’s no organized next step. Nobody is mobilizing, nobody is building structure.

So the irony is that all this people’s activity may end up simply meaning they vote Democratic in November — assuming we have elections — and that won’t change much, given who they’re likely to have to vote for. And then they’ll be very frustrated. And that frustration will make things worse. People don’t want to understand the dialectic: if you do no better than Biden after Mr. Trump, you allow—

Richard Eskow: —Mr. Trump to come back, or someone worse.

Richard Wolff: Exactly. And if Mr. Trump passes from the scene and what you get is another Hakeem Jeffries or Schumer — that sort of disastrous placeholder — and everything continues to deteriorate, there will be an even bigger groundswell for whoever the next Trump is. And for all the same reasons. The empire keeps declining, the Chinese keep growing faster and getting richer, watching the United States squander its capabilities while the Chinese sit there — if I were them — smiling at the spectacle of it all.

Three weeks ago, I believe I had it right: when Trump’s policies began to show that they had wildly underestimated Iranian resolve and resistance, and it became clear that oil prices were going to rise sharply — I’m told they’re now over $100 a barrel — he began to realize this was going to be a political backlash. And as he typically does when it’s brought to his attention that he’s just committed a disastrous error, he proceeded to make two or three more errors trying to fix the first one.

So what did he do? First, he removed sanctions on Russia for selling its oil anywhere in the world — sanctions that had been imposed in response to the invasion of Ukraine. I understand the logic: more Russian oil on the market offsets the price pressure. Yes, but you’re simultaneously funding Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Richard Eskow: Of course, yes.

Richard Wolff: And then two days later, he effectively did the same thing with Iran — removing sanctions on Iranian oil — which enabled Iran, the country he’s making war against, to sell its oil globally at wildly elevated prices, thereby funding its own defense against the United States.

What do you say about an empire so far in decline that the only way it can attempt to hold on is by strengthening the very forces it regards as its enemies? When you’re caught between getting hurt by rising oil prices that make the whole world your adversary, and funding the military of the people you’re at war with, you’re finished. That’s what it means.

The metaphor I’d use is this: doctors tell me that at a certain point in old age, different parts of the body begin to break down, and fixing one of them aggravates the problem of another. And at that point, it’s over. Watching us — me the taxpayer, you the taxpayer — funding Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine and simultaneously funding the Iranians defending themselves against the United States: it is so absurd that you realize we have reached that point.

Richard Eskow: Well, it certainly feels that way. He might as well sign the currency now. We may end up carrying it around in a wheelbarrow like the Weimar Germans before this is over. But that brings up another subject — since we’re talking about bills and currency. I think a lot of people have seen the term “petrodollar” in the news over the years without really understanding what it means. This connects to how the current economic world order was essentially a spoil of war for the United States after World War II. Maybe correct me if I’m wrong, but you had Bretton Woods, the idea that the world’s currencies would be linked to the dollar, and this whole architecture of the petrodollar. Now, with the war involving Iran, we’re starting to hear the term “petro-yuan.” Could you take a moment and clear up any misconceptions about that?

Richard Wolff: Sure. You’re absolutely right — the petrodollar is in the process of disappearing. This is really part of the broader decline of the dollar from its role as the world’s reserve currency, a role it held for most of the last 75 years but has progressively lost. Already less than half of the world’s reserves are held in dollars.

The petrodollar was a deal — and it should be understood the way we’d understand a gangster arrangement, because maybe that’s what it was. Right after World War II, the United States figured out that the energy of the future was petroleum. By the end of the war, it was clear that oil would be essential to industrialization everywhere in the world. And in those days, oil was coming predominantly from the Middle East. We had some in Texas, but it was already clear that wouldn’t be nearly enough.

So in the aftermath of World War II, a deal was struck. The United States and Britain took the lead, carving up the desert around Saudi Arabia into seven or eight small countries — Saudi Arabia being the primary one, sitting atop enormous oil reserves, as the entire region was. We essentially created these countries out of nothing: Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and the others.

Here was the deal: in each case, a local ruling family was told, “You can become billionaires. We will set you up as the head of a country. We’ll draw the boundaries on a map — just as European colonialists had been doing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America for the previous three centuries. Each of you will get a cut of the oil revenue. Five American companies and two European companies — the ‘Seven Sisters’ — will come and extract the oil. You can eventually participate in that, and you’ll take a nice cut off the top. A cut that will make you, overnight, not a desert family, but a sultan, an emir. You can buy châteaux in the south of France for your summer holidays. You will be among the richest people on the planet.”

So that was their end of the deal. Our end: we, the Americans, as the dominant economy and the world’s largest oil buyers, will buy your oil. We’ll pay you in dollars. But we require that you insist on payment in dollars from anyone in the world who buys oil from you. That’s the deal — you must do that if you want our business. And we’re the major buyer. Oh, and one more thing: we will station American military bases in your country to protect you — to make sure nobody disrupts this arrangement. We, the Americans, get oil at a good price; we convert it into gasoline and fertilizer and make a fortune. The big oil companies — and the politicians who made the deal, people like Kissinger and Nixon, if you want names — all benefit enormously.

And there was one final requirement made of those leaders. All the dollars flowing in — from us, from anyone else in the world who buys your oil and must pay in dollars — what are you going to do with all those dollars? You must commit to investing them back in the United States. That means buying shares in American companies — though not more than a certain amount, you can invest but not control them — and lending the rest to the U.S. government.

Americans know that when we run a budget deficit — currently over a trillion dollars a year — that happens because the government spends more than it raises in taxes. Did you ever wonder who lends the government the money to do that? Well, it turns out that one important lender — not the only one, but an important one — is precisely the Gulf states, who lend those same dollars right back to the United States government.

So we send the dollars over there; they send the oil to us; then they send the dollars back to us as loans. It is a circular gangster arrangement, paid for by the money we all spend on oil. It is a rip-off that will be studied throughout history as an extraordinary example of how an empire organized the global oil business to sustain itself. Because when the Gulf states lend money to the United States, the United States uses it to fight wars — in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, now potentially in Iran. America never fights wars with tax revenue, because if taxpayers had to directly fund the wars, they would oppose them. So wars are paid for by borrowing. And that requires lenders. And we organized those lenders through exactly this arrangement.

And by the way, it’s falling apart. Because what the Iranians are teaching the Gulf states is this: if you have an American military base in your country, it doesn’t protect you — it makes you a target. A target of whom? The Iranians answer: of us. Because the United States attacks us, we are going to attack the United States — and you’ve welcomed them in. You’d better rethink that. And no matter what they say publicly, they are all quietly rethinking it, because like Europe in a different context, they are now having to face the possibility that aligning themselves with the United States may have been betting on the wrong horse.

Richard Eskow: And where it gets interesting in terms of current events — correct me if I’m wrong — but my understanding is that Iran, in threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, is essentially saying: we won’t let your oil through unless it’s paid for in something other than dollars. If that’s correct, then what it means is that the world’s preeminent superpower could lose this extraordinarily cushy arrangement because of the concentrated military power of Iran in one region, at one chokepoint. A single bottleneck could overturn this entire 70-year system. Am I right about that?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. I’m not yet certain about oil being priced in yuan specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised. What we do know is that the Iranians have long told the Chinese — and have apparently abided by this — that ships registered to Chinese enterprises carrying Iranian oil to China pass through the Strait of Hormuz without interruption. Iran has been a major oil supplier to China for a long time; that’s not new. And my guess is that Iran will now be more than willing to accept payment in yuan, both to further undercut the dollar and for the broader strategic reasons I’ve described.

But I should explain the larger picture: the petrodollar is becoming the petro-yuan not because of any single act of defiance, but because of something much bigger. China is now the fastest-growing, second-largest economy in the world. It will surpass the United States in total economic size by the end of this decade — we’re already in 2026, so I’m talking about the next four years. And why does that matter? Because it means that the whole world has been doing for 20 years what it will increasingly do: buying less from the United States and more from China. So the world needs fewer dollars and more yuan, because that’s where the economic action is.

This is why the dollar replaced the British pound — not through any single decision, but through a gradual shift in where the economic weight of the world lay. The Germans had hoped the world would adopt the Deutsche mark, and had they not lost World War I, it might well have happened. But they lost — twice — and that removed them from contention. The only real successor to the British Empire was the United States. After World War II, you couldn’t get goods from anywhere else anyway, which cemented it immediately. The Marshall Plan further locked it in: we gave Europe dollars on the condition that they be spent on American goods, ensuring that American companies captured all that spending. And the subsequent 75 years reproduced that dynamic through the Cold War and the structure of empire.

Another sign that the empire is passing is that we’re even having this conversation. The dollar is less and less central; the yuan is increasingly playing the role the dollar once played. It’s all very clear — except that we live in a country that desperately needs to deny all of it, to insist that these events are isolated and temporary, not part of a systemic decline. Because decline is too frightening a thought to entertain.

Richard Eskow: I would add to the decline narrative something that fascinates me: we decided to become the architects of a global financial system. But a global system — like an army that extends its supply lines too far — becomes brittle. The Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, closed by the Houthis, was our overextended supply line. The Strait of Hormuz handles two and a half to three times the volume — another overextended supply line. I think we’re going to see a world that’s increasingly rebelling against the oppressive nature of this financial system, cutting or damaging these various supply lines one by one. And that shows the empire is vulnerable not only to rival powers like China, but to its own overextension and fragility. Would you agree?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. And I’d take it one step further. For me, the fundamental issue is profit. Over the last 75 years, we allowed the maximization of corporate profits to determine the global distribution of our economy. It became more profitable to stop making automobiles in Detroit and make them in China instead. Fine — but that globalized the automobile industry in an unprecedented way. And you can multiply that across virtually every other industry.

The profit motive said: make more money over there. But no one factored in the ecological cost of shipping goods back from China across the Pacific — the toll on fisheries, on human health, on the oceans themselves. If you actually account for what it will cost to fix the environmental damage, the extra profit evaporates. We’d have been better off keeping production in Detroit. But capitalism doesn’t work that way. Capitalism calls it “efficient” if it maximizes profit. It isn’t efficient, and it never was. That’s a fetishism of capitalism we should have outgrown long ago.

If you want to understand why we built these extended, fragile supply lines — why no one accounted for their vulnerability — it’s because private capitalists never had to pay for that fragility. They didn’t have to worry about it. Now they’re learning that they should have, because far away in Iran, someone can squeeze a narrow waterway and suddenly your entire system seizes up. You were so swept away by the internal logic of capitalism that you couldn’t think outside that frame. And that is a catastrophic failure — one that is helping to bring this empire down. The systematic fetishization of capitalist calculus is doing it in.

Richard Eskow: And I would argue — perhaps in closing — that even if everyone involved had fully understood decades ago that this would be the outcome, they would have done it anyway. Because the incentive structure of capitalism operates on a quarterly and annual basis. If it’s all going to collapse in 20 or 30 years, who cares? We’ll be long gone.

Richard Wolff: Indeed — I will no longer be the CEO of this company; I’ll have moved up to run another one. It’s Louis XV all over again: après moi, le déluge. “After me, the flood.” That mentality is structurally produced by the system, isn’t it?

Richard Eskow: I’ve got my island retreat in New Zealand, so I’ll be just fine. Well, okay — in closing, I suppose you and I and our listeners should think about who else might sign American currency now that Donald Trump has opened the door. I’m thinking Clint Eastwood, maybe?

Richard Wolff: LeBron James, I think, would be interesting.

Richard Eskow: It would be a step down for LeBron. Robert De Niro? But then, if the signatures are going to be truly representative of the American system, they’d have to be less heroic figures. Lex Luthor, perhaps.

Richard Wolff: Or allow me — even though I’m not proud of it — to wear my hat as an economist for a moment. I am quite pleased to see Scott Bessent’s signature appearing on the currency. Because what he says publicly, as opposed to what I assume he privately knows — if he had the same graduate education I did, which he did — makes him a very fitting choice by Mr. Trump.

Richard Eskow: All right, we’ll leave it at that. Professor Richard Wolff, as always, a tremendous pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the program.

Richard Wolff: My pleasure too. Take care, Richard.

I spoke with India Walton and Sam Rosenthal of Roots Action about the growing “Schumer and Jeffries Must Go” movement, which reflects deep frustration among Democratic voters in the face of ineffective, out-of-touch leadership. Party leaders have failed to meaningfully oppose Trump, are defying public opinion on issues like war and economic inequality, and are beholden to wealthy donors and entrenched interests.

India and Sam argue that the Democratic Party is structurally resistant to change without outside pressure, but that organized grassroots movements can still push it in a more responsive and progressive direction. Ultimately, they see this campaign not just as a leadership challenge, but as a way to awaken voters to demand more from their representatives.

Roots Action Senior Strategist INDIA WALTON is a longtime community activist who emerged in 2021 as a powerful presence in the progressive movement after a stunning Democratic primary victory over a 16-year incumbent mayor of Buffalo.

Roots Action Political Director SAM ROSENTHAL is an organizer and researcher based in Washington, DC. He previously served as the political director at Our Revolution and in elected leadership with Central Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America.

The petition: https://rootsaction.org/schumer-jeffries-step-aside

Quotes and transcript follow.

Selected Quotes

India

• “Strongly worded emails and tweets won’t lower gas prices or grocery prices.”

• “They don’t know what the average voter wants… because they’re not part of our political class.”

• “Our political system is being manipulated by outside forces… and we have failed to address that.”

• “Organized people can defeat organized money.”

Sam

• “The opposition party has been largely ineffective… you’re on your own.”

• “We should be a party that is anti-war… and instead we’re seeing vacillation.”

• “They’ve discovered that telling people they’re wrong about struggling is not a winning message.”

• “The party’s not going to change by itself.”

Richard

• “Is it possible for the Democratic Party to change or is it addicted to big donor money?

Transcript (edited)

Richard Eskow: There is a movement afoot to replace both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in their respective positions of leadership in the Democratic Party. Hakeem Jeffries, of course, is the minority leader in the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer is the minority leader in the United States Senate. My next two guests are leaders of that movement — integral parts of it.

India Walton is a senior strategist with Roots Action. She became a presence in the progressive movement after her upset Democratic primary victory over a 16-year incumbent mayor in Buffalo, New York, back in 2021. She’s a longtime community activist and also a nurse — so when politics makes you sick, it’s good to have her around.

Sam Rosenthal: is political director for Roots Action. He’s an organizer and researcher based here in Washington, D.C. He was the political director at Our Revolution and was in elected leadership with the Central Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America. Sam and India, welcome to the program.

India Walton: Thanks for having me, RJ. Good to be here.

Sam Rosenthal: Thanks.

Richard Eskow: It’s great to have you both. Let’s start with a jump ball — anyone can answer. How did the Schumer and Jeffries Must Go movement get rolling?

India Walton: I think it’s a common sentiment among Democrats that leadership isn’t doing anything. Strongly worded emails and tweets are not going to lower gas prices or grocery prices, get our TSA workers paid, or move people through those extremely long lines at airports. And when voters are told they must vote harder — must vote blue no matter who — while their interests aren’t being represented, I think that’s becoming genuinely frustrating for a lot of Democratic voters.

Richard Eskow: Sam, any thoughts?

Sam Rosenthal: Yes — I think it’s exactly what India said. Since Trump took the presidency again, the opposition party has been largely ineffective at carrying out actual opposition. This is a group that’s supposed to be the counterweight to what we’re seeing from the Trump administration — the persecution of working people and people of color, masked agents being sent into our communities to terrorize people. And instead of a strong, united opposition, what we’re seeing is real abdication from Democratic Party leadership. They’re effectively saying to people in this country: you’re on your own. Whatever resistance you can muster, you have to do it yourself.

That message is coming from some of the most powerful political actors in the country outside the Republican Party. We strongly feel there needs to be a change at the top — leaders who will actually challenge Trumpism rather than simply write strongly worded fundraising emails.

Richard Eskow: There’s a scene in a Marx Brothers movie where Groucho gets kidnapped by a vicious gangster and says, “I have a good mind to write a letter to the Times about him in the morning.” And later: “I’ll ring his doorbell and run.” That seems to be the Democratic opposition.

But when there is real opposition, I’d argue that Schumer and Jeffries have sometimes stood in the way. Neither of them endorsed Zohran Mamdani, who seemed to capture that energy in New York City — though Schumer did endorse him at the last minute, if I recall correctly, while Jeffries was more reluctant. Now in Maine you have another insurgent candidate channeling this mood — Graham Platner was on the show a couple of weeks ago — running against Janet Mills, who epitomizes the old guard. And Schumer, as I understand it, is actively pushing Mills to get into and stay in that race. So they’re not even passive — when they shift out of passive mode, they sometimes become part of the problem. Am I being unfair?

India Walton: I don’t think that’s unfair at all. They are obstructionist when it comes to progressives, and it’s tone deaf. They don’t know what the average voter wants — but that’s because they’re not part of our world. These are millionaires who have been in their jobs far too long and don’t share the concerns of everyday American voters. Do you think Chuck Schumer worries about the cost of a dozen eggs or property taxes? Those are not the worries of well-established political figures who essentially have lifetime tenure because there’s no real threat. And every time a challenge comes from the left, they’re quick to collude with — of all people — their supposed opponents, to squash any progressive candidate who might gain real power.

Richard Eskow: Now we have the war with Iran beginning, which makes all of these problems more acute and more urgently in need of attention. And it seems to me the only opposition we’re getting from Jeffries and Schumer is: “You didn’t let us co-sign the authorization before you started bombing” — essentially a procedural complaint. But, Sam, my understanding is that you began organizing to replace Schumer and Jeffries before the attack on Iran. Is that correct?

Sam Rosenthal: Yes. This has been happening since before the war with Iran started. But the dynamics around the war just underscore our critique. Over the summer, Chuck Schumer made a video where he was essentially taunting Donald Trump for not having attacked Iran yet — saying Trump was “chickening out,” a phrase they like to use against him, because Trump had hinted at military action and then backed down. So in Schumer’s view, that was a political stick he could wield against Trump — that he wasn’t starting enough wars.

Now we see there’s real momentum in the House for a War Powers Resolution. Ro Khanna has been leading that charge. But Democratic leadership is again trying to slow-walk it from coming to the floor, colluding with Republicans who don’t want a vote on it. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Democratic Party is scared of forcing individual members to go on the record about whether they support this war.

We’re seeing replays of what happened twenty years ago around the Iraq War — a party incapable of divorcing itself from the deeply held desire of some members for a regime-change war with Iran. That is not appropriate for an opposition party. Democrats should be anti-war, especially anti-illegal, unilateral war against a nation that had not attacked the United States and did not pose a direct threat. Instead, we’re seeing vacillation from leadership and cover given to members who are probably secretly very pleased that Donald Trump started this war.

Richard Eskow: They seem stuck in another era. The latest poll I saw showed 58% of voters against this war — close to two thirds. Yet it feels as if Schumer, Jeffries, and some other leading Democrats are playing off a post-Vietnam playlist: “Don’t look weak. Don’t try to stop a war.” Even though the American people want this war stopped. We could blame Schumer’s age since he grew up in that era — but Hakeem Jeffries is not from that generation. So how much of this do you think is psychology, and how much is legalized corruption — the money talking and nobody walking? Is it mentality, corruption, or both? India, what do you think? You saw it at street level in Buffalo.

India Walton: I saw it at street level in Buffalo. I saw it in St. Louis against Cori Bush. I saw it in New York City against Jamaal Bowman. Our political system is being manipulated by outside forces that we have failed to address — and AIPAC is chief among them. It could be a combination of Schumer’s age and Jeffries wanting to be part of the establishment apparatus because it works for him. But we have to tackle the problem of AIPAC essentially buying our elections and our elected officials.

Richard Eskow: Go ahead, Sam.

Sam Rosenthal: India is totally right. The question of support for this war pulls on an unresolved strand within the Democratic Party — its support for Israel, and particularly for the Netanyahu government’s leadership. The Democratic Party, despite the wishes of most of its voters, has been a fairly steadfast supporter of Israel even through its genocide in Gaza and its increasingly provocative actions across the Middle East — actions that amount to an overt attempt to pull the entire region into a potentially existential war it wants to wage against its neighbors.

The Democratic Party still cannot disentangle itself from the Israel-right-or-wrong lobby represented by AIPAC and DMFI. And in some cases — especially with Schumer — there is still a deeply held belief, as Schumer himself has said, that one of his primary goals as a senator is to continue aid to Israel no matter what. It’s a pervasive attitude among Democratic leadership that is fundamentally out of step with its base, out of step with young Jewish Americans, and increasingly alienating potential supporters. They seem incapable of stepping back from their ardent support for what’s happening in the Middle East. I think they’re content to let Trump do their dirty work for them.

Richard Eskow: Let’s move to a different dimension of what we’re up against — the domestic economy. Biden and then Kamala Harris ran in 2024 on how good the economy really was, essentially telling struggling working people: “You just haven’t read the top-line economic data. Let us send a Harvard economist to explain why you actually have it good — even though you’re sweating to pay your bills every month.” And now all of a sudden they’ve discovered “affordability.” God love them and their buzzwords. But where are they on that issue, really? You can’t get at affordability without taxing billionaires, regulating banks, and reining in runaway corporate profits. Have they said anything that will genuinely resonate with people — anything that says: this will make your life better, this will be fairer, you can get by?

India Walton: For a lot of the party stalwarts, affordability is just a word. Affordable for whom? What’s affordable to someone making $20,000 a year is not what’s affordable to someone making $20 million. And again, most of these folks are beholden to large corporate donors, so there’s no incentive to do what’s right for the people.

One thing the pandemic taught us is that the U.S. government can cancel student debt, can pause rent and secure housing for people at their most vulnerable, and can move toward universal health care — because all of those things actually happened, to varying degrees. People who lived through that don’t want to go back to working three jobs and never seeing their families just to make ends meet. It’s not a fair system. And I think we’re reaching a point where average people are beginning to see and reject the runaway wealth inequality in this country. The DSA has been saying this for years. Now it’s becoming undeniable.

Sam Rosenthal: First of all, party leadership has the left to thank for its newfound appreciation of affordability rhetoric. That was us — that was Zohran’s campaign for mayor of New York, that was the organized left’s laser focus on these issues. And there’s some recognition that telling people, ahead of the 2024 election, “If you think you’re struggling to get by, that’s a failure of your comprehension, not a reflection of your material reality” — was not a winning message.

They’ve discovered that telling people they’re wrong when they say they can’t afford to pay their heating bill does not win voters. But right now, Democratic Party leadership is more or less hoping that Trump crashes the economy — and he’s making a good run at it. While that may benefit them electorally, it means real misery for working people. A party that genuinely cares about people living paycheck to paycheck should not be hoping for economic disaster. We should be pushing the Democratic Party toward a proactive, positive vision for economic equality — a more redistributive system that says: we all work, we all create wealth, and we need to change how that wealth is allocated.

Instead, they seem to be sitting back, hoping things will be so economically disastrous by 2028 that voters will jump ship back to the Democrats. They might get it at the midterms this year, and they might get it in two years. But that’s just more business as usual.

What we want to see — if affordability is really the focus — is uniform buy-in across the Democratic Party for policies we’ve seen work in specific cases: universal childcare, reduced or free public transit fares, some meaningful regulation of grocery store prices so people can afford basic staples. The party is not seriously engaging with those issues at the leadership level. Some members are, of course — but not the people at the top. And that needs to change if Democrats are going to make a genuine counterclaim to what we’re seeing from the right.

Richard Eskow: I have a theory I want to run by you. It’s about 2024. The last figures I saw suggest that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden together spent more than $2 billion on the presidential race — and as we know, they lost. I think that money actually hurt her, because people like Tony West in her inner circle were constantly saying, “You can’t say this, you can’t say that.” They produced hundreds of internet ads and tested them, and the one that polled best was the toughest on corporations — “We’re not going to let corporations profit off your misery.” And the fundraising advisor said, “You can’t run that one.”

That, to me, exemplifies what’s going on. There was a Ryan Grim piece in The Intercept a few years ago about how freshman Democratic members of Congress were given a PowerPoint presentation that included setting aside two hours a day for fundraising — not $27-a-pop grassroots calls, but calls to wealthy donors. After a while, those become your people. It’s not just ambition; they literally become the faces you know. So: is it possible for the Democratic Party to change, or is it so addicted to big-donor money — whether from AIPAC, Wall Street, tech, or crypto — that real change is structurally impossible? How do you fight billions of dollars?

India Walton: Where are the good rich people? We’ve had so many progressive candidates who rejected corporate and real estate money. But how do we support those candidacies when they’re being outspent twenty to one? It’s a real uphill battle. But in the words of my uncle Senator Sanders: organized people can defeat organized money. We have to keep organizing and beating that drum.

And I’ll add: we can talk about how miserable people are going to be because of this economy, but what I’m seeing as a nurse is that people are going to die. They are cutting hospital staff, closing hospitals — we are not able to deliver the care we should because of cuts to Medicaid. And with what we’re seeing with ICE in our airports and our TSA agents — 13% of them called out of work last week — these are dire times. Not to be alarmist, but there should be a lot more urgency around building the community supports that will keep people afloat and alive while we weather this storm. Because it’s not going away anytime soon.

Richard Eskow: Sam, your thoughts?

Sam Rosenthal: India’s right — we’re in an incredibly dire time. On the question of whether party realignment is possible, the honest answer is: this is kind of where we come in. Where activists, organizers, and people agitating for change come in. The party is not going to change on its own for all the reasons you outlined, RJ. If you go to the Hill when members aren’t on call time with wealthy donors, what they’re doing is sitting in their offices waiting for lobbyists to come in. That’s it — call time and visits from well-financed lobbies whose interests are not aligned with working people.

We have to apply pressure from the outside and from the inside when we can. The Democratic Party is not an institution inherently worth preserving or enshrining — it’s a tool that is more likely to listen to our side than the Republican Party right now. We’re stuck with an entrenched two-party system, and given all the urgent issues India just highlighted, it’s incumbent on us to act as quickly and effectively as we can. I don’t love the party, and I don’t think it has any interest in reforming on its own — but I still think it’s one of the most advantageous vehicles we have to work through if we want to see real change.

Progress can feel incredibly slow, or even like it’s moving backward. But breakthroughs are possible — through mass movements, through organizing. We just have to keep at it. And sometimes keeping at it feels really, really foolish.

Richard Eskow: When people go to work within the Democratic Party for progressive causes, I always think of the biblical phrase: be in the world but not of it. Be in the party, but don’t join the hive mind. That said, let’s circle back to Schumer and Jeffries and the drive to remove them — which I wholeheartedly support. What do you think would actually happen? Democratic politicians are generally wary of going up against their leaders, because leaders can punish them — through campaign money, blocking bills from the floor, committee assignments. So first, how realistic is it that we can remove Schumer and Jeffries? And second, who might ideally replace them, or who might we realistically expect to step in?

Sam Rosenthal: Go ahead, India.

India Walton: I’m not a betting woman, so I don’t like to speculate — partly because a lot of what’s happened politically, particularly within the Democratic Party, has shocked me. I think it’s more likely we’ll see Chuck Schumer retire than see the full delegation demand he step aside en masse. We’re probably going to be stuck with Hakeem Jeffries for a while. There may be room to nudge him left on some issues, but not dramatically. He still has broad support among Democratic leadership.

Richard Eskow: Sam, your thoughts?

Sam Rosenthal: India’s right that Schumer is the more vulnerable of the two. There’s actually real movement there — Juliana Stratton, who won the primary in Illinois and is the presumptive next senator from that state, has said she would not support Schumer as leader. There’s discontent from the more progressive parts of the party and a broad sense that someone younger would be better in that role. Whether it’s via retirement or something more public and contentious, I do think he’ll be out sooner rather than later. He’s not reading the room in the party correctly anymore.

Jeffries is a more flexible figure. I think he can be pushed and pulled. He’s most interested in staying in power, and if staying in power means moving left on certain issues — supporting a ceasefire and ending arms shipments to Israel, backing a higher federal minimum wage, whatever it is — he’s potentially amenable to that kind of pressure. I don’t think he’s a friend of the left, but I think he’s more of an opportunist than an ideologue, and that might actually be the way to square the circle for progressives like us who are earnestly hoping to move the party left — to push back against Trumpism — rather than seeing it drift toward a kinder, gentler version of the Republican Party circa the 1990s.

Richard Eskow: So one purpose of the Schumer and Jeffries campaign, I’d infer from your answers, is to send a message to the party — regardless of the fate of either of them — that we are not happy with how this party is being led. Is that a fair first read?

India Walton: I would argue the message is not primarily for Democratic leadership. It’s for voters. This is an invitation to interrogate what our representatives are actually doing for us. Democratic leadership doesn’t listen to us anyway — they don’t much care what we say. But voters do. The more these conversations happen in public, the more it sends a signal to the people who are resistant to change. Who we’re really talking to are voters, activists, and organizers — people who genuinely believe things can and should change — and we’re using that as a strategy to push back against those who resist it.

Sam Rosenthal: Right — as India says, you don’t need to send a message to leadership. They already know where they stand. It’s about standing up and saying to people: you can have better than this. You don’t have to sit in dread watching what the Trump administration is doing and feeling there’s nothing you can do. You can demand better leadership. You can try to affect that. You can push for more responsive representation.

I think people have become somewhat resigned to the idea that real change isn’t possible — that you can’t have a genuine opposition party that actually opposes things, rather than one that meekly goes along with whichever way the Trump wind is blowing. A big part of this campaign is to encourage people to demand more from their political representation, and to understand that they can get it — they just have to push.

Richard Eskow: So if people want to support this action, where can they go? What can they do?

India Walton: They should definitely follow us on social media and visit rootsaction.org. Sign up for our mailing list so you’ll be informed as the campaign unfolds — and help fund it if you can. If you’ve got five or seven dollars to spare, we put that money directly into our organizing efforts.

Richard Eskow: Last question: should progressives feel discouraged, stressed, energized, ready for good things to come — or just wait and see?

India Walton: I’m encouraging people to take good care of themselves and each other. Get into mutual aid groups in your community. Nap. Stay hydrated. Because a lot of this is going to be a matter of outlasting them.

Richard Eskow: Which in my case is particularly important. Sam?

Sam Rosenthal: I think in some ways our message is winning. People are incredibly receptive to the idea that we can have a different politics — that we can do something about the affordability crisis, that we can work to end our forever wars. We just have to keep going. We have to apply the pressure. That’s why the napping and hydrating matter: this is a marathon, not a sprint. I encourage folks to join us for it. There are many different ways to contribute, and I hope people can carve out some time from their very stressful days for organizing. It feels better when you do.

Richard Eskow: It really does. Humans are social creatures — get those mirror neurons firing through real interaction with other people. And people can go to rootsaction.org to find out more. Sam Rosenthal and India Walton of Roots Action, as always, thanks for all your great work, and thanks for coming on the program.

India Walton: Thanks a bunch.

Sam Rosenthal: Thanks.

I sat down with Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental Institute to make sense of the “unreality” of the current conflict with Iran, which feels less like a strategic operation and more like a drunken bar fight. We dug into the staggering historical amnesia of U.S. and Israeli leadership, who seem to believe they can bomb 100 million people into submission despite a decades-long track record of failing to “win” wars through sheer destruction.

From the tactical intelligence of Iran’s infrastructure strikes to the haunting possibility of millions of people with nothing left to lose, we’ve moved into dangerous territory as America’s tactical blunders collide with the end-times theology of its extremist military commanders.

Quotes and transcript below.

SELECTED QUOTES

Vijay:

• “You don’t win a war by destroying things. You win a war by subduing a people or by getting a people to believe that you are on their side.”

• “A base is not a shield, it’s a target.”

Richard:

• “It’s as if we’re all chess pieces being moved around the board by a deranged, syphilitic chess master—or puppet master.”

• “It feels like war by PowerPoint... totally divorced from reality. It’s like some app developer’s presentation to venture capitalists.”

TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: There are things going on in the world you may have noticed. So without any further ado, Vijay Prashad, welcome back to the program.

Vijay Prashad: Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

Richard Eskow: Great to be with you, although the circumstances are very odd. We were talking a little bit before we went on air about Iran, and it is eerie in a way that this is the chronicle of some deaths foretold. We’ve expected it for decades, yet it has an air of unreality to me, almost as if the leaders of the US and Israel are automatons working off some script. We know what Netanyahu’s motivations are, but Trump and his team can’t offer a coherent reason why they’re doing this. They had no idea what they were getting into. The Ansar Allah — the so-called Houthi rebels — cost the US economy $20 billion with their blockade. And yet it never seems to have occurred to them that the much larger force of Iran might do the same in the Strait of Hormuz.

There appears to be no reason, no cause. It’s as if we’re all chess pieces with some deranged puppet master behind all of this. I have to admit that for all my study and effort to understand the dynamics of how the world works, this seems to be in a category by itself. You get what I’m driving at?

Vijay Prashad: Well, it’s a little bit like a bar fight. You’re drunk, you don’t like somebody, you haven’t liked them for a long time, and you just go out there swinging and throw your drink at them — and nobody really knows where this ends. Do you plan to kill them? Will they kill you? What’s the exit?

Serious modern warfare requires much more than just the ability to destroy a country, and this has been proved over and over again. We can look at the record and ask a basic question: when is the last time the United States actually won a major war? Maybe you can say Grenada in 1983 — overthrowing Maurice Bishop’s government after Bishop himself had been killed. But Grenada 1983 is not comparable to Iran 2026.

The United States could not prevail in Vietnam despite enormous use of force. Before that, it could not prevail in Korea. It could not prevail in Afghanistan. In Iraq, it was able to overthrow Saddam and kill Gaddafi, but it did not prevail. It does not control Libya, does not control Iraq, does not control Afghanistan, nor the northern part of Korea. What’s the point, really?

Where is the war expert who has looked at all this and said: the United States has the capacity to destroy anything, but we can’t win a war — and those are two different things. You don’t win a war by destroying things. You win a war by subduing a people, or by convincing them that you are on their side. Nobody believed it — not the Afghans, not the Vietnamese, not the Koreans. And you can’t subdue 100 million Iranians. It’s simply not going to happen.

So when you enter a war, you need clear political objectives. The United States does not appear to have them. Anyone could tell you the Iranians are not going to surrender — they’ve made that extremely clear. Bombing them is not sufficient. They don’t feel they need to be liberated by the United States. In 1953, the US and the UK ‘liberated’ them from a heroic national figure, Mohammad Mossadegh, and imposed a horrendous shah on them from 1953 to 1979. They don’t need that kind of liberation again.

So what is the war aim? There isn’t one, and that’s the problem. Trump is stuck. He wants out. He wants negotiations and a ceasefire. But the Iranians are smarter than that. They’ve already taken a big hit, but they have a chain of command that is deep, they can absorb more losses, and they planned for this. They don’t want the war to simply end on those terms. What they want is for the United States to say: we’re sorry, we started it, we won’t do this again, we’ll leave you in peace, and we’ll roll back all the sanctions — essentially everything in place since at least 2006. They want, in other words, a grand bargain. And Trump cannot offer that because it would look like defeat. So we’re stuck. This could go on and on. The Iranians refusing a ceasefire because they know it just delays the next reckoning, and the United States desiring one but unwilling to put a grand bargain on the table. We’re stuck in a bar fight.

Richard Eskow: I’ve heard so many people say Trump will just declare victory and get out. But you can’t do that unilaterally in a war — both sides have to agree. This is such an astonishingly ahistorical effort, and I’m not talking about ancient empires. I’m talking about last year.

Just over a year ago, in response to the bombing of their embassy, Iran sent — and this is not me vouching for their government, this is just what happened — they sent 50 missiles, no more, no less. That very precise number suggests there were back-channel understandings: we’ve got to push back, we’ve got to be seen to respond, but this is measured. And what did they get for it? They got this war. So the takeaway, if you’re in the Iranian leadership, is: you can’t deal with these people. You can’t be measured with them. The only way to stop this is to fight to the bitter end. And why, if that’s right, didn’t they know? It should have been obvious.

Vijay Prashad: Yeah, that’s the thing. And let’s go back to your point that you can’t unilaterally end a war. Well, you can — but it would mean the United States pulling back completely: removing its military bases, withdrawing its ships, and ordering the Israelis to stop firing. That’s what it would actually mean to pull back. The Iranians would need to see the United States picking up its forces from Qatar, the UAE, disbanding the military bases that essentially encircle Iran, and moving the naval armada out. Then the Iranians might say: now we’ll talk. That would be a sufficient gesture.

But why should they talk while the United States retains a stranglehold on Iran by surrounding it with military bases? It’s now come out that the US used airfields in Saudi Arabia — in violation of what the Saudis themselves said two decades ago when they told the US to leave and break down its bases. If that’s true, Iran is within its rights to strike Saudi Arabia. If you give your airfields to a hostile power to attack me, you’ve entered the conflict as a belligerent. A foreign military base on your land is not a shield — it’s a target.

Iran hasn’t aggressively struck the UAE or Qatar as nations; it has struck the US military bases there because those bases have made those countries belligerents. The Emir of Qatar should have understood that hosting a US base made him a target. He presumably believed the Americans would protect him. They can’t, because other nations have developed sophisticated military technology. The Iranians are not without their own capabilities — and they haven’t yet deployed their naval fast-boat fleets, which are stored underground. The Ansar Allah you mentioned are still largely silent. The militias in Iraq have only been firing sporadically at US bases.

Once those forces fully engage — if, for instance, Israel is reckless enough to use a tactical nuclear missile on Iran — Bahrain will see an uprising unlike anything it has experienced. The Emir of Bahrain is finished. This is a country more than 75% Shia with a Sunni monarch. He barely suppressed the Arab Spring. If they destroy a holy site in Iran, Damascus will rise up. There is the great shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab on the outskirts of the city — one of the most revered sites in Shia Islam. These countries are on a hair trigger.

What Israel is doing to Lebanon is generating anger at a level rarely seen in the modern Middle East. One fifth of the Lebanese population has been made into refugees. That’s one in five people who are not angry at Hezbollah or the Lebanese government — they’re angry at Israel. You’ve created problems for yourself. Every Palestinian now harbors deep resentment. Every Lebanese person is increasingly turning against Israel. You have a Shia population across the region that harbors profound anger at both Israel and the United States. What are you doing? It’s self-defeating, because if you’re fighting a war to achieve security, you’re going to end up with less security.

Israel and the United States apparently miscalculated, or didn’t care, believing that these strikes — killing Khamenei and others — would somehow collapse the Iranian government. But you don’t attack a people for twenty years, tighten sanctions from 2006 onward, and then expect them to just be sitting there unprepared. They have built themselves around the capacity for war. And they will win this war — not militarily, necessarily, but politically.

Richard Eskow: Not in the same way, but the same end result — I think, in many ways, Palestine has won the conflict in Gaza despite the horrific slaughter, because my long-term view is that it has doomed the state of Israel in its current structure.

But in terms of Israel and the United States, sometimes I think this must be war by PowerPoint — somebody in a war room had a slide deck with a plan: kill this one, this one, and that one, and then the Kurds will split this way, you’ll have eight fractured states, and we can dominate them all. Totally divorced from reality, like a venture capital pitch from some app developer. Pure fantasy.

At what point is the feedback loop supposed to kick in — the one that tells you: this isn’t working, trim your sails? Is the feedback loop broken for these people? Or are you saying that regardless of what they realize now, they’ve set a chain of events in motion that they can’t stop?

Vijay Prashad: That’s a very good question, and genuinely difficult to answer, because both administrations — in Washington and even more so in Tel Aviv — are something of a black box. We haven’t heard from Benjamin Netanyahu for several days. There’s enormous speculation about his whereabouts. Trump has just been his typical brash self.

The United States is slightly easier to read because its governments leak so much more — though this particular administration less so than usual. The only time Netanyahu’s administration leaks is when a coalition partner is unhappy and steps in front of a microphone. During this entire period, from the genocide in Gaza to this war, the Tel Aviv government has actually been quite disciplined. We’ve heard no dissenting voices, no voices of caution — just a gung-ho attitude of ‘get it done.’ So we’re not getting any sense of pushback or reconsideration from Israel.

I don’t really know what’s happening there. I try to find out from journalists and friends, but there’s almost nothing. I don’t think they’re going to blink. They wanted to do this, and they’re going to try to see it through.

There is real pain being inflicted on Israeli society. Iranian missiles are getting through, and I think this has genuinely rattled people. Israelis are not accustomed to this. They are used to asymmetric warfare against the Palestinians — a few rockets from Gaza fired by Hamas or Islamic Jihad is nothing compared to the sophistication of these Iranian missiles. These are not Scuds, like the ones Saddam fired in 1991. These are precision instruments built by highly skilled scientists and engineers. They are disrupting the protective dome, and Israeli civilians are directly feeling the impact.

The United States, by contrast, is too far away to feel it. What’s also striking is how reckless Trump is: he is refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA even while the country is at war. There’s no head of the department — Kristine Ohm was fired, her deputy fired. It’s reckless, though partly it reflects a real assessment: the Iranians don’t appear to have the capacity, or perhaps simply haven’t planned, to bring the fight to the US homeland. Their hardware can’t reach the American continent. They don’t have the kind of naval power to threaten the Caribbean. And the much-hyped terrorist networks — Hezbollah cells in Brazil, Hamas operatives here and there — were largely the paranoid fantasy of the far right. If those assets existed, they would have been used by now.

The only way Americans might feel any real pain is through oil prices — but that’s not the same as an Iranian missile landing in downtown Tel Aviv. The United States has large reserves and can cushion that blow. If something comparable were happening in New York or Chicago, public opinion would shift dramatically. We don’t know whether public opinion in Israel is shifting because they’ve really locked everything down.

What we do know is that the United States has continued, for the last several days, making entreaties to Tehran asking for negotiations. The United States wants to stop this war — that’s very clear. What’s also notable is that, for the first time in these kinds of conflicts — whether Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran — the Russians have made a public move by taking Khamenei to Moscow for medical treatment. Putin has sent a message to the Trump administration. Whether that message is simply ‘we have a stake in this’ or something more, I don’t know.

It’s not as though Russia or China are going to send air support into Iran the way Russia did into Syria — at least not yet. They seem reluctant to escalate with the United States. But during the third or fourth night of the bombing, Chinese military aircraft circled Taiwan and briefly entered the airspace above Taipei. They didn’t open fire, didn’t invade, but they demonstrated that they could. That was a statement to the United States.

And remember what the Iranian foreign minister said: we are waiting for you.

Richard Eskow: Russia and China are interesting factors here. My instinct — correct me if I’m wrong — is that if either of them believed Iran could actually fall in this war, they would escalate their involvement somehow. The precedent alone, apart from oil markets and everything else, would be intolerable for them. But they seem to be in a wait-and-see mode, possibly calculating that things are going Iran’s way enough that direct intervention isn’t necessary. Do you agree, or am I off base?

Vijay Prashad: I’m somewhat disappointed that neither Russia nor China has used public diplomacy more effectively. By that I mean the diplomacy that’s visible to the world — not the back-channel conversations, which most probably are happening. China has enormous investments in Iran and in Venezuela. The United States is jeopardizing Chinese strategic interests across the board. I would imagine significant private communication is taking place.

But there is also an avenue of public diplomacy that has gone largely unused. China and Russia are both permanent members of the UN Security Council, which gives them veto power. The United States, over the past thirty years and especially since the war in Syria, has used that veto mechanism to embarrass Russia and China — putting forward resolutions it knows they’ll veto, thus making them look like the obstructionists before global opinion. But Russia and China very rarely put forward resolutions they know the United States will veto.

If I were Russia right now, I would have three resolutions already in the chamber. First, a resolution against the US aggressive action in Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro — a clear Article 2 violation of the UN Charter. Put it on the table, force the United States to veto it. Second, a resolution against the unilateral US embargo of Cuba, particularly the heightened oil embargo creating blackouts. That embargo, insofar as it threatens third parties — telling Europe, Canada, and Mexico they can’t trade with Cuba — violates Chapters 6 and 7 of the Charter, which require a Security Council resolution to authorize such measures. Put it on the table. One hundred and eighty-seven countries in the General Assembly vote to end the embargo; make the theater visible in the Security Council. Third, a resolution declaring the war of aggression against Iran a violation of the entire spirit of the UN Charter — a war crime. Force the United States to veto it.

Three vetoes in a matter of weeks. Why hasn’t Lavrov drafted these resolutions? Why hasn’t China? It would electrify global opinion. People around the world would say: yes, we want a different kind of world. The failure to do this is demoralizing.

As for your specific question — whether they would act if Iran were on the verge of collapse — I think yes. I don’t think they will allow a US victory in Iran. But right now, they may be watching and concluding that Iran is actually prevailing, both militarily and especially politically. So why get involved? It could also be that Russia called and offered an air battalion, and the Iranians said: no, we’ll do this on our own. We are not Bashar al-Assad. They are an extremely proud people.

But at what you might call n-minus-one — one minute before collapse — I believe China would intervene in some form. A US victory meaning the destruction of the Iranian state would be catastrophic for the entire international order. Nobody wants to see Iran go the way of Libya.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Let’s talk for a moment about Iran’s relationships with the neighboring Middle Eastern countries — the ones hosting US military bases. I was intrigued by something in the recent back-and-forth: there was a strike on an Iranian desalination plant — Iran gets roughly 70% of its potable water from desalination, while some of those neighboring countries depend on it for close to 100%. Then an Iranian missile struck a desalination facility in one of those countries, did minor damage, and Iran immediately apologized, saying it was aiming for an American base.

I wondered whether that wasn’t also a message: if you allow the Americans to escalate from your territory to this level — a strike on civilian water infrastructure, which for Iran is an existential threat — be prepared to face a similar threat, because you’re even more vulnerable than we are. Am I reading too much into it?

Vijay Prashad: Why would you read anything into it? It’s perfectly clear: the United States quite badly damaged an Iranian desalination plant, and then an Iranian drone struck a facility in Bahrain that affected water delivery to perhaps twenty or thirty villages. Bahrain is a largely rural country — there’s Manama, the capital, and then it’s surrounded by small villages. This plant served a number of them.

Iran immediately apologized, but they are doing two things simultaneously, and that’s the intelligence of their diplomacy. On one side, they’ve sent a clear message: you hit our civilian infrastructure, we can hit yours. And Bahrain — you have a US base on your territory. That base is a target. There’s no shield for you.

The particular plant that was struck serves the Shia population of Bahrain, not the royal family — which adds a sectarian layer, though I don’t want to overstate it. This is not fundamentally a sectarian war, though sectarian elements are present.

They apologized because they don’t want a tit-for-tat on civilian infrastructure to continue. But the message was sent: this could become a water war. The Iranian escalation ladder is quite deliberate. They didn’t close the Strait of Hormuz after the Supreme Leader was killed. They closed it after the United States struck the oil refineries in northern Tehran. The logic is precise: you strike our oil facilities, we make oil a weapon. You strike our water plant, we can make water a weapon.

These are tactical maneuvers, not grand strategic commitments. They can be walked back. What they are saying, step by step, is: for every escalation you make, we have a corresponding option. What’s equally notable is that the Iranians have not responded in kind on civilian deaths, and this is consistent with their history.

In the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq was supplied with chemical weapons components by the United States and West Germany and used them liberally against Iranian soldiers — mustard gas along the front lines, the bombing of Halabja. The Iranian leadership responded by declaring through religious ruling that they would not reciprocate with weapons of mass destruction. That position, implicit at first and later explicit on nuclear weapons, has held.

Iran does not go after civilians even when its own civilians are killed. I’ve seen this in the Baloch border region: when separatist groups fire across into Pakistan and Pakistan responds, killing Iranian civilians, Iran does not retaliate against Pakistani civilians. They have a kind of ethics of warfare that I can’t fully explain but that is consistent and observable. They haven’t fired directly into downtown Dubai. That is simply not their way.

Richard Eskow: I wonder too whether they’re sensitive to how they’re perceived on the Middle Eastern street — whether they want to maintain popular sympathy not just among Shia populations but across the Sunni-Shia divide.

A friend of mine was recently transiting through Doha — one of the busiest airports in the world — and his 90-minute layover stretched to 15 hours. They were sent into what served as a bomb shelter, essentially the underground transit tunnel between terminals. An air-raid warning at a major international hub, filled primarily with business travelers and wealthier visitors. That’s different from striking civilian villages. It’s almost like a knock on the door — saying: we’re here, and elites are not necessarily immune. But the rural populations, the working poor — those are people they seem to regard as innocent bystanders.

Is there anything to that reading, or do you think for Iran all civilians are equally off-limits?

Vijay Prashad: The brand of Dubai and Qatar is built entirely on one promise: we are safe. No real crime, because the state deals with criminals harshly. No political freedom, but complete physical safety. Your children can walk on the street at midnight. You can bank here without interference. If you’re a wealthy person of, shall we say, flexible ethics, this is an ideal place to operate. It’s become a cliché that Indian financial criminals run operations in Mumbai from Dubai.

But that brand is now being stress-tested. Is it really that safe? It’s like asking after 9/11 which Western city is truly safe. Suddenly people in London, in New York, realized they were not as far from the wars they had tried to keep at a distance.

If there is no grand bargain with Iran, this threat is going to continue. People will start to leave. They’ll decamp to Hong Kong, Singapore — places that feel safer, at least for now. Nobody really wants to leave Dubai. Enormous salaries, comfortable lives, large staff. Why would you want to move to somewhere with heavy regulation and cold winters? The permanent expatriate class is large, and it comprises the nodes of international banking and finance — gold markets, offshore capital, all of it. These people are going to need another safe haven. It’s potentially an opportunity for smaller jurisdictions — Malta, Monaco — to absorb some of that activity.

After Nasser made Egypt inhospitable to international capital, Beirut briefly became the banker of the Middle East. Then civil war came, and it all moved to the Gulf. Now where do you go? The whole world is becoming a battlefield. Singapore may not be safe if the United States continues trying to egg China into a conflict.

I genuinely don’t understand why this international financial class is not furious. Do they think Iran needs to be punished, the government overthrown? These are childish fantasies — the idea that you can punish a nation into submission or that removing one leader makes everything fine. We’ve been down that road: remove Saddam, everything will be fine; remove Assad, everything will be fine. It doesn’t work like that.

Syria is only at halftime, by the way. I fear that continued Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is heating up a situation that will spill across the border into Syria. Lebanon cannot handle the current refugee crisis, and with UN agencies now drastically underfunded, there’s no safety net. Palestinians aren’t registered to access the Lebanese health system. Syrians aren’t registered either. When you get injured in a bombing, there’s no recourse. And there are very large Palestinian camps along the southern Lebanese coast and in Beirut itself.

This whole vision is, I think, a quixotic and deeply foolish dream. Netanyahu and Trump are drunk on their own ambition, and it isn’t going well.

Richard Eskow: Here in the United States it’s hard to get precise information on what’s happening. But from what I can see, we may be approaching Gaza-level slaughter — thousands of people in a matter of days, brutal and horrific — and in the process turning the entire region against you.

So I guess, as you said, this goes back to the beginning: drunk on power, stuck in a bar fight. I won’t ask you how you think it ends because I don’t think any of us know. But do you have any concluding thoughts? If you do know how it ends, please tell me.

Vijay Prashad: Well, the main thought is that this has been appalling. I’m editing a book written by a Palestinian journalist about being in Gaza during the genocide. He eventually gets taken to prison, and the book is in a sense his prison memoir. He calls it Those Who Survived Hell. The reason for the title is that when he was picked up, the Israeli soldier yelled at all the captured people: ‘Welcome to hell.’ And he said to himself: I survived hell.

I’ve been thinking about that phrase a great deal in relation to my friends in Iran. I have a number of close friends there, and in a real sense they are surviving hell. A couple of them wrote to say: this may be my last message to you. Of course, it’s an odd thing, because you write again the next day and say the same thing. Every message could be your last. You’re surviving hell. It’s brutal, it’s loud, it’s terrifying. Some of them have children. That’s an almost unimaginable kind of fear.

So yes, Richard, I hope they survive hell. I hope the people of Iran and the neighboring areas — Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar, the people of Israel, the people of Palestine — I hope all of them survive, because hell is where they have been taken. And it is the governments of Israel and the United States that took them there.

This was a completely unnecessary war. The Iranians were sitting with Omani intermediaries and US negotiators, and they were willing to go all the way to zero enrichment — to put that on the table. Trump lied to the people of the United States at the State of the Union when he said ‘I wish the Iranians would just say they don’t want a nuclear weapon.’ That was a lie, because two hours before he said it, Iran’s foreign minister had posted exactly that statement. Trump said, two hours later, that the Iranians won’t say it. This is precisely like the lead-up to the Iraq War: they lied, and then they launched a futile war.

This war is far more dangerous than Iraq, because Iran is four times as large, and unlike Iraq, the Iranians have built an enormous scientific and technical capacity over decades. They make their own weapons. The Iraqis had to import them. Iran has tens of thousands of drones ready to be deployed, naval assets they haven’t yet used, and hypersonic missiles they haven’t yet fired. Meanwhile, the government of North Korea has reportedly offered to provide a nuclear weapon if Iran wants one. Even now, even facing this assault, the Iranians have refused. That tells you something profound about Iran’s genuine posture on nuclear weapons.

I’ll be honest: if I were Iran, purely from a cold pragmatic standpoint — and I abhor nuclear weapons — I would test one and tell the United States to back off. That is what North Korea did in 2006, and since then the United States has been unable to threaten them militarily; it can only ask them to come to the table. If Iran tested a nuclear weapon now, they could say: you forced our hand. Now let’s talk about the grand bargain. The Saudis are reportedly seeking nuclear capability, the Jordanians are considering it — that door was opened by Israel, with American assistance. Israel got its nuclear weapon from apartheid South Africa with help from the United States. You opened the door. Iran never wanted to walk through it, but if they get there now, it changes everything.

Richard Eskow: On the subject of hell — there’s a Willie Nelson song called ‘What Can You Do to Me Now?’ The whole point of it is: I’ve suffered so much that nothing can touch me anymore. When you have millions of people who have been through hell and come out the other side saying, ‘What can you do to me now? Kill me? I’ve faced that every day for years’ — that kind of defiance may, in its own way, be as powerful as a nuclear weapon. That would be my closing thought. What’s yours?

Vijay Prashad: I don’t want to be too culturalist about this, but I think it’s important for people to understand that the Shia population comes out of a foundational tragedy — the Battle of Karbala, several hundred years ago, in which Hussein, one of the great leaders of Islam, was martyred. The Shia are, in a sense, those who were unable to defend him. And the grief of that failure runs very deep.

A friend was telling me recently that this idea keeps recurring at funerals: ‘We were not with you.’ They say it to the Supreme Leader, to Soleimani, to the others who have fallen. It is a lament of historical inability to protect those you love, repeated across centuries. This is a population that has been formed not around the experience of victory, but around the experience of loss. And that is a very particular, very heartbreaking way to encounter the world — and a very powerful one.

That eschatology meets another eschatology: the one now being articulated in certain Israeli circles, which holds that God has granted the Jewish people dominion from the Euphrates to the Nile. I don’t know if you watched the conversation between Mike Huckabee and Tucker Carlson, but Huckabee said precisely that — God’s mandate extends from Iraq to Egypt. That is an eschatology, a vision of destiny.

And then there is the Christian Zionist theology underneath much of this — the belief that the Third Temple must be built, which requires demolishing the Al-Aqsa Mosque, after which all the Jews will be killed so that the Messiah can return. These eschatologies are colliding with each other.

You and I have been talking about this entirely in pragmatic terms — bar fights, military strategy, diplomatic maneuvers. But we are also living in a world where many of the people making decisions have a completely different framework for understanding what is happening and what it means. When you enter that framework, it becomes very hard to see a path out. There are people who genuinely believe this war is going to culminate in the return of the Messiah.

Richard Eskow: And some of them are commanding US troops in the field.

Vijay Prashad: Exactly. And we are not really equipped — because of who we are and how we were raised — to enter that conversation in those terms. I made an elementary error just now in this discussion, because I don’t live inside that world. I wanted to end, not by opening up that entire subject, but simply by letting people who are listening know that we’ve only been talking about half the story. The other half — the eschatological half — you and I can’t fully enter. And when we ask, ‘How is this going to end?’ we should remember that there are people who believe it ends with the Messiah descending from heaven.

Richard Eskow: You’re absolutely right. On that rather striking note — Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute and so much more, thank you for your thoughts and thank you for joining me on the program.

Vijay Prashad: Thanks a lot. It’s a real pleasure.

To readers of the Zero Hour:

Someone has been sending phishing emails using the name “Richard Eskow.” They do not come from my email address, but from a fraudulent account designed to look as though it came from me. I’m told this is often done using the name of a journalist that people might recognize. Maybe I should be flattered, but I’m not. I value your security and our mutual trust and I want to protect them.

These emails invite recipients to click a link to view photos. If you received one, please don’t click the link. It’s a scam. It’s almost certainly designed to steal your personal information, install malware on your device, or both.

If you haven’t clicked the link: simply delete the email. You’re fine.

If you did click the link: don’t panic, but please do act quickly. Run a full security or malware scan on your device, change your passwords — especially for your email account and anything you may have logged into recently — and keep an eye on your accounts for any unusual activity.

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I’ve reported this to the relevant authorities and am working to have the fraudulent account shut down. Needless to say, I’m sorry this happened. Hopefully, this is the last we’ll hear about it, but I’ll update you here if there are any further developments. In the meantime, thank you for your vigilance, and please share this notice with anyone you think may have received one of those emails.

Questions or concerns? You can reach me at richard@thisisthezerohour.com. And thank you as always for your support.

In this conversation I spoke with journalist, activist, and author Norman Solomon about the U.S.-backed military assault on Iran, the human cost of modern aerial warfare, and why the American public, which is now clearly opposed to this war, is being failed by both its media and its political leadership. We discussed the long-term shift in America’s approach to war as it has moved from ground troops to air power—a move that hides the human cost of military violence from the American public.

Norman traces this pattern back to Vietnam, where I.F. Stone described the same dynamic in what he called “Vietnamization”: a strategy that let others die on the ground while Americans bombed from above.

This ‘endless air war’ policy helps politicians and the press minimize civilian deaths, while a compliant Democratic Party focuses on procedural debates rather than moral reckoning.

We also talked about the need for activism that places real political pressure on elected officials, with in-person demonstrations, primary challenges, and other kinds of sustained organizing.

Selected quotes and transcript below.

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Selected Quotes

“What has been invoked as a ‘rules-based order’ really means: we make the rules, and we break them whenever we want.”
—Norman Solomon

“When war is conducted through aerial technology, it seems to disconnect our moral code.”
—Richard Eskow

“We are witnessing a ‘provisional humanity,’ where victims are only human when their deaths serve our political purpose.”
—Richard Eskow

“Why are we so circumspect and polite that we can’t even set up a picket line outside the district office of a House member who votes to funnel blood money to the arms industry?”
—Norman Solomon

TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)

Richard Eskow: Norman Solomon is a writer, a journalist, and an activist. He is the national director of Roots Action, which can be found at rootsaction.org. He is also the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the author of a number of books, including — germane to our conversation today — War Made Invisible, and before that, War Made Easy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy.

He joins us now. First of all, Norman, welcome back to the program.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Richard.

Richard Eskow: Let me start with this: the horror of war is upon us once again, and the last war in Gaza isn’t over. Fifty years ago I could not have imagined that we would still be fighting wars — and that those wars would still be either absurd, evil, or both. Do you share that disorienting feeling?

Norman Solomon: It’s a feeling I do share — that there’s a level of insanity that has not dissipated. If we think back to the Vietnam War ending roughly 50 years ago, there was, in the 1980s, this complaint from a lot of the militarists in the U.S., and some in the media as well, about the so-called Vietnam syndrome. There’s the infamous moment after the end of the Gulf War when the first President Bush declared that we had “licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” The message was that the inhibition against U.S. military intervention — which had taken hold among the American public — had been overcome.

If we look at the last few decades, there’s been a gradual recrafting of what it means for the U.S. to intervene militarily. There were substantial U.S. troops on the ground during the 1991 Gulf War. During the Iraq War beginning in early 2003, there was heavy bombing from the air and a large ground force. Likewise with the 20-year Afghanistan war, which in terms of U.S. involvement ended just a few years ago — again, air power and troops on the ground.

But what we’re seeing more and more now — in terms of U.S. assistance for the genocidal bombing in Gaza, and in recent weeks the attacks on Iran, first last summer and now terribly ongoing as we speak — is that putting troops on the ground has really gone out of political fashion in the U.S. So in a way, ironically, the Vietnam syndrome has been transmuted and twisted around. The question has become: why not kill from the air? We have superior air technology, and that is what we’re seeing play out right now in Iran.

Richard Eskow: What we’re also seeing is a kind of dissociation in the public mind that comes with this. People can understand when their neighbors, or their neighbors’ sons and daughters, are fighting a war somewhere. What they struggle to grasp is that real lives are being taken every day — for a war the American people don’t want, for a war whose logic has never been coherently explained to them. And even when something as stark as 170 young schoolgirls being killed comes out, the response is all denial and evasion. We don’t know whose bomb it really was. If troops on the ground had fired on a school, the reaction might be different — but when war is conducted through technology from the air, it seems to sever our moral code somehow. Does that resonate with you?

Norman Solomon: Yes, absolutely. There’s a terrible overlap — a kind of Venn diagram — of imperial arrogance and military dominance. The implicit attitude seems to be: we’re above it all. The U.S. Military has been equipped with unrivaled technology, with the capacity to kill from high in the sky. Whatever is happening on the ground — especially when no Americans are dying — becomes politically and media-abstracted. The U.S. has an enormous gap over every other power in terms of overall military capacity, and the Israeli Air Force is phenomenal in its destructive capabilities. As we’re speaking, the combination of Pentagon capacity and Israel’s ability to destroy life on the ground has merged into a single enterprise.

We’ve also heard, just in the past day or so, President Trump saying he’d be happy for the U.S. to provide “air cover” for Kurds to fight on the ground. This is not new — it has additional horrific wrinkles because it’s so shameless. But if you go back to the Vietnam War, the great journalist I.F. Stone pointed out that the U.S. Military was increasingly relying on air power during so-called Vietnamization in the war’s final years. It was the ARVN — the South Vietnamese Army — on the ground doing the fighting, the killing, and the dying, while U.S. troops were withdrawing and the bombing continued ferociously. As Stone put it, the coolies on the ground would do the killing and dying; U.S. forces from the skies would handle that facet of the warfare. In fact, during the last three years of U.S. troop deployments in Vietnam, aerial bombing actually increased. The director of ABC News sent a directive — a telex — to reporters on the ground in Vietnam saying the main story now was that American troops were leaving. Meanwhile, the bombing was more ferocious than ever.

Richard Eskow: And in this case, so much of the bombing is by proxy — we’re providing Israel with the majority of the weaponry it’s using, including not only aerial munitions but arms for its ground forces as well. The moral responsibility seems to me something the American people, and certainly the news media, haven’t fully grappled with: when we arm a military like Israel’s, we are responsible for what it does — not only in Iran, but in Lebanon, where there’s been what would in normal times be considered a major invasion. Lives are being lost — at least a hundred in Lebanon, and probably thousands in Iran by now.

Yet the coverage is almost entirely about what Trump will do next, or what outrageous thing he just said — not about our culpability. During the Vietnam War, Walter Cronkite famously delivered a critical assessment of the war, and in the early years there was enough negative coverage that it shaped American public opinion and created a moral foundation for the country’s turn against the war. We had the iconic photograph of the little girl fleeing napalm. Now we have the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, and rather than that kind of visceral, lasting image, we get U.S. Central Command issuing denials. There’s no equivalent moral reckoning in the media. Am I wrong? Am I not following the right news?

Norman Solomon: Overall, if you look at the so-called legacy media — the homepage of the New York Times, for instance — when a few Americans were reported killed, it was a much bigger headline than 150-plus girls killed in Iran. That is essentially the valuation of human life that U.S. media has adopted.

As for the Vietnam War, there’s a kind of nostalgia for a critical media culture that barely existed. Daniel Hallin, a scholar at the University of California San Diego, wrote a classic book called The Uncensored War — “uncensored” in quotes — in which he actually examined the broadcasts of all three TV networks’ primetime news and found that there was very little footage of the war’s suffering shown to American viewers. The memorable image of Marines burning a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters is remembered precisely because it was so rare. The My Lai massacre received almost no coverage until very late in the war. That dynamic has continued. Yes, we can point to individual stories about the carnage in Iran that have appeared in the last few days — but they’re the exception. The essence of propaganda is repetition, and what is repeated is the framework: How does this affect America? How does it affect Israel? What is the U.S. doing? There are maps in the New York Times and Washington Post showing missile strike locations. It is a deeply abstracted process. The Iranian people are dehumanized to the point where they are, at best, statistics — occasional photos and oblique references.

Richard Eskow: What strikes me most, Norman, is the provisionality of it all. We had horrific shootings of Iranian protesters by their own government before the U.S. and Israel launched these attacks, and in some way Trump has used that as justification — “the Iranian people want freedom.” Well, they do want freedom, and they’re entitled to it. But all the empathy directed at those protesters has now been redirected into bombing the same people. They live in the same place.

It reminds me of the young Iranian woman who died after being taken into police custody following a demonstration — her name was repeated endlessly by politicians, all over the U.S. media. And barely a week later, John McCain was singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” — the very country where that woman lived. It’s a kind of provisional humanity that gets extended to people like Iranians: when their suffering serves our political purposes, they are fully human; when it doesn’t, we are indifferent to their deaths. Am I being unfair?

Norman Solomon: The phrase “provisional humanity” is exactly right. I have a chapter in my book War Made Invisible called “Lives That Really Matter and Lives That Really Don’t.” The underlying dynamic is that the significance of an Iranian life, or an Afghan life, or an Iraqi life, is largely determined by how useful that life is as a political propaganda tool — specifically to demonstrate that the United States military is ultimately a moral force, acting in the name of human freedom. It’s a mythology that runs across both parties.

Right now, Republicans in Congress are the more vocal enthusiasts for bombing Iran, while many Democrats are raising questions about congressional authorization. But in all of that procedural debate, actual Iranian people are almost phantoms — rarely discussed as real human beings, and almost never heard from directly. There is that old echo from Vietnam: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” And there’s an echo of it now in the framing around Iran — how many people must be terrorized and killed in order to impose our version of freedom upon them?

Richard Eskow: You mention the Democratic leadership, and it won’t surprise you that I haven’t been happy with their performance here. It seems as though their primary concern is their own institutional prerogatives — not the killing of Iranian civilians, not the absence of any clear goal or strategic logic, and certainly no mention of international law, which these actions violate. The killing of Khamenei violates it. The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro violates it. The objection seems to be simply: you didn’t consult us. Am I being unfair to the Democratic leadership?

Norman Solomon: In terms of the so-called leadership — Hakeem Jeffries in the House, Chuck Schumer in the Senate — no, I don’t think you’re being unfair at all. There are ranges of opinion and statement coming from Democrats in both chambers, but broadly speaking, procedural objections about congressional war powers are being used as a shield — a way to signal concern while avoiding any challenge to the underlying premise that the United States has the right to work its will militarily in the world. That premise is essentially assumed across the political spectrum. The real debate is tactical: Is it wise? Is it achievable? What comes after?

Well, “what comes after” is indeed a legitimate question. But shouldn’t we also be asking whether the aggression itself needs to be stopped and rolled back? Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is clear: the power to declare war belongs to the legislative branch. Congress has a responsibility not just to complain but to act.

There’s also a parallel to the domestic situation. It is frankly Orwellian when President Trump expresses compassion for protesters killed in Iran while remaining entirely indifferent to protesters killed under his watch in Minneapolis. And at a deeper level, the whole premise — that the United States is the arbiter of human rights, the nation occupying the moral high ground — collapses under scrutiny. Three or four years ago, President Biden exchanged a fist bump with the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, a man the CIA concluded had ordered the murder and dismemberment of the journalist Khashoggi inside a Turkish consulate. Something is fundamentally backwards here. The “rules-based order” that was invoked by the previous administration really means: we make the rules, and we break them whenever we choose.

Richard Eskow: I’d also point to a failure — even a betrayal — by the media of its own colleagues. Khashoggi was a journalist. He was murdered and dismembered, his remains shipped out. Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces, according to forensic analysis. These stories were mentioned but never given the sustained moral weight they deserved.

But this moment feels different in a certain way, Norman, and I want to talk to you about both the politics and what the anti-war community can do. The Vietnam War was initially popular. The first Gulf War was popular. The second Iraq invasion had enormous public support once it began. The movement for sanity — I’d call it that — has always had an uphill climb.

In this case, though, the public doesn’t like this war. Among other things, we’re not even getting a coherent lie — we’re getting contradictory statements from Trump himself, contradicted then by Rubio, contradicted back again. The public is roughly 59% opposed, according to the last numbers I saw. And yet we’re still not seeing the moral courage we need, from politicians or from the media. It feels almost like a gauntlet thrown down to those of us who want change: the wind is at your back now. Let’s do something about it. Does that make sense to you?

Norman Solomon: Yes, it does. Part of the gap between that polling and the overall tone of media coverage is that the public is ahead of mainstream journalists — and yet public opinion remains very susceptible to manipulation. Consider the Gulf War: President George Herbert Walker Bush emerged from it with a 91% approval rating in Gallup. Then, because the economy deteriorated, he lost his re-election bid.

The media remains tremendously powerful. When the United States launched its attack on Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11, polling showed 90% of the public in support, with only 5% opposed and 5% uncertain. Those are virtually Soviet-style proportions. The question is: why would nine out of ten Americans support going to war against a country that essentially had none of the 19 hijackers living in it or originating from it? That’s how powerful the propaganda system can be.

Richard Eskow: Absolutely. And there’s a knock-on effect: even as more people consume alternative media, the corporate media still sets the dominant tone, and social media is increasingly being corporatized — the Ellison family buying TikTok, CBS, and so on.

The other dimension I want to raise is cost — not just the moral cost but the economic one. This is going to have a devastating impact on working people in this country and in Europe who are already struggling. With all of that in mind — the public opposition, the media failures, the economic stakes — how do we mobilize fast and effectively enough to slow down, and hopefully halt, this bloodshed?

Norman Solomon: As always, it comes down to information flow and organizing. Media outlets like this one are crucial for getting counter-narratives out, sharing analysis that helps people mobilize. And organizing has to happen not just online but in neighborhoods and communities. At Roots Action — rootsaction.org — our team works very hard on action alerts and practical steps people can take. Many other organizations are doing the same.

The gap between public opinion and elected officials is enormously significant and could be a powerful lever heading into the midterm elections. Most Americans — and by a large margin, most Democrats — believe Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. And yet it’s very hard to find many Democrats in Congress willing to say that. That gap needs to be widened and illuminated. We have to make clear that we can vote these people out — that we will primary them and support better candidates.

One of the persistent problems is that progressives spend too much time supplicating elected officials — especially in blue districts, where there’s so much gratitude for the good things those officials do that their votes for war and a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget get soft-pedaled. We need to stop being so accommodating and make it publicly clear that we will fight to primary them and elect genuinely better candidates. Without electoral leverage behind our lobbying, we’re being ignored.

Richard Eskow: All we have on our side is morality, rationality, and public opinion — so I suppose that’s why they don’t listen. Where can people go to get involved? Is Roots Action the place to start?

Norman Solomon: When people lead, leaders follow — and that’s also true of opportunism in office. Politicians do have their fingers to the wind, and we have to generate enough human force to shift it. I’d really encourage people to think about this: there are at least a thousand congressional district offices around the country. Why are there so few picket lines outside them? Most of these members are, in practice, voting for more and more war. Why do they get let off the hook? Most people live close to a congressional district office — it doesn’t take much to get some poster board, make a sign, and organize.

But behind that is the real work: the midterm elections. Justice Democrats is one organization doing critically important work on primaries — replacing corporate Democrats with genuine progressives. At rootsaction.org, people can sign up for action alerts. At accuracy.org, the Institute for Public Accuracy, you can get information and analysis that counters not only the disinformation coming from corporate media but, perhaps more importantly, the silences — what is consistently left out of the coverage. Whether it’s this program or other independent outlets, the work of breaking those silences, providing information and analysis, and bearing moral witness to what is almost entirely absent from corporate media is essential.

American commanders are pushing fringe End Times beliefs on Middle East troops—with potentially apocalyptic results. In the video above I interview Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (the organization that broke the story).

In short, U.S. military commanders have been framing the conflict with Iran in apocalyptic religious terms. Mikey says his organization has received more than 200 complaints from service members who report hearing superiors describe war as a catalyst for the biblical End Times. They are, in Mikey’s words, using a “weaponized Jesus” to promote their theology.

Weinstein warns that the rise of Christian nationalism inside the most technologically powerful military in history poses a grave risk to global security. (No kidding! These commanders control lethal weaponry—and they want an apocalypse!)

I have no problem with any kinds of belief people hold in their private lives, but this kind of thinking has no place in military conflict. It brings to mind Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the Dr. Strangelove character who starts a nuclear war because he’s against fluoridated water. It’s unhinged.

It also does incalculable harm to morale—not only among Jewish, Muslim, atheist and other non-Christian soldiers, but for Catholics and mainstream Protestants whose churches reject these fringe beliefs. That’s why, throughout the conversation, Weinstein stresses that his organization is not anti-Christian—95 percent of its clients are Christians—but pro-Constitution and committed to preventing religious coercion in the military.

Weinstein also criticizes Pentagon leadership for promoting Christian nationalism, a fundamentally un-American form of totalitarianism that’s closely linked to End Times theology and far-right politics.

This is a critically important story. It’s also one that I can’t find in The New York Times, the “paper of record”—unless it’s been very well hidden. Please give the conversation a listen. It’s very important—and frightening.

You can learn more about the Military Religious Freedom Foundation here:

https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org

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Transcript (lightly edited):

Richard Eskow: So, Mikey, I know we’ve been hearing about commanders telling their troops to rejoice because this war with Iran is going to bring about Armageddon. It sounds too crazy to be true, but you’ve been hearing directly from soldiers in the field about it, haven’t you?

Mikey Weinstein: Well, we’ve been fighting this battle for 21 years now. We’re proud to have received eight Nobel Peace Prize nominations, the last five from individuals who themselves won the Peace Prize. I say that not out of arrogance or hubris, but to establish our credibility.

We fight Christian nationalism in the most technologically lethal organization ever created by humankind: the U.S. military, which controls all the nuclear weapons, drones, laser-guided weapons, and conventional weapons. So this is not new to us. But this White House — I don’t even refer to him as President Trump — these are just fundamentalist Christian fascist gangsters, as far as we’re concerned.

They can’t seem to come up with a reason why we attacked a nation that was provoking us about as much as Mickey Mouse was. First it was that we were going to eliminate their nuclear weapons capacity — but I thought we already did that back in June and July. Next it was regime change.

Then they moved on to saying we’re going to punish Iran because the Iranians and their proxies helped engineer, design, and deploy those IEDs all over Afghanistan and Iraq when we were fighting there. And of course, why would anyone be surprised? We have well over 200 client complaints, and the more than 100,000 military personnel and veterans we represent from 50-plus installations have reported the same situation: their commanders are justifying the war on the grounds that it will serve as an accelerant and a lubricant, Richard, to bring back their version of a tortured, weaponized Jesus in fulfillment of the Battle of Armageddon, as dictated by Christian eschatology and the End Times prophecy of the Book of Revelation. Among other things, they are promised — picture this clearly, Zero Hour folks — a 200-mile-long river, four and a half feet deep, filled with nothing but the blood of those slaughtered by their version of a weaponized Jesus at Armageddon.

Bear in mind, we have a Defense Secretary — Pete Hegseth, or “kegseth” as we call him, as in beer keg — who holds a Jesus praise service in the Pentagon’s largest auditorium once a month, during the duty day, in uniform. What message do you think that’s sending? It’s completely Christian nationalist. He’s been doing it every month since May.

The most recent one was Tuesday, February 17th. Hegseth invited his personal favorite, Pastor Doug Wilson, to preside, and the two were standing side by side, embracing. Wilson is quite a fellow. He believes that slavery in America was biblically sanctioned and tells everyone that many slave owners had a warm relationship with their slaves—the same relationship, Richard, they had with their living room furniture. He believes women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or serve in the military. Their role, as he sees it, is to bear children, raise families, shop for groceries, prepare food, and clean up afterward.

He believes Jews are complicit in the execution of Jesus, that Muslims can’t be trusted, and that LGBTQIA people probably don’t deserve to live. And all of this is effectively endorsed by our Secretary of Defense. Is anyone surprised it filters down through an organization like the Department of Defense, which is peculiarly adversarial, communal, ritualistic, and tribal?

Our clients — most of whom are also Christians — are reaching out saying, “Help us.” We are the best tool available to fight the fascistic Christian nationalist Pentagon we now have. This has been building through George W. Bush, Obama, Biden, and the first Trump administration. The options are to sue in federal court — though you need a plaintiff willing to put their name on a lawsuit —

Richard Eskow: Right. And assuming you can find a judge who’s not an ideologue.

Mikey Weinstein: — knowing full well any ruling will be appealed, and we all know what’s going to happen at the Supreme Court. Or we embarrass them and expose it through the media. And Richard, that’s exactly what you and I are doing right now. We’re engaged in producing kryptonite against this hideous situation.

Richard Eskow: And just to be clear, we’re not talking about persecuting Christians. As you say, many of the people calling you are themselves Christians.

Mikey Weinstein: 95% of our clients of over 100,000 are Christians, about 3/4 Protestants of every denomination.

Richard Eskow: And if you’re a Christian who doesn’t believe the Rapture is imminent — which I think describes most Christians — this is not exactly good for troop morale, to put it mildly.

Mikey Weinstein: Well, it destroys good order, morale, discipline, unit cohesion, the health and safety of the troops, and mission accomplishment—which is what our US Supreme Court determined back in 1974, in a case called Parker v. Levy, was the compelling governmental interest for the First Amendment versus members of the military, to make our military as lethal as possible.

That’s why you protect those things. We represent about 18% of all Muslims we know of in the military, along with hundreds of Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists. We even have 12 members of the Church of the Jedi, right out of Star Wars. We don’t care what their beliefs are.

About 84% of our staff of more than 1200 around the world and in the continental United States, paid and volunteer, are also Christians. Our largest and earliest endorsing organization is the California Council of Churches impact organization. That’s 5,500 individual Protestant churches in and around California, 21 different Protestant denominations, about 2 million Protestants.

Some people like to go after me, saying Mikey and his foundation eat Christians for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks in between. But we don’t. We’re not anti-Christian. We’re pro-Constitution. And that means it’s not just about the separation of church and state, Richard — it’s also about another part of the Constitution most Americans don’t know, because civics stopped being taught in high schools.

That’s Article VI, Clause 3, which says we will never impose a religious test for any position in the federal government or military. And let me be clear: if you’re in the U.S. military, you are in the federal government. When our constitutional framers crafted this great divide — this Grand Canyon — between the spiritual and the temporal, between church and state,

— they had studied European history, Richard, and seen how much of the bloodshed had occurred when men of the cloth became men in political power. They looked at Cromwell in England. They looked closer to home at the Salem witch trials.

And they said, not here.

Richard Eskow: And the Irish can tell you a thing or two about Cromwell. I want to get to this point, Mikey, before we go any further, because some people might be wondering why I support your organization so strongly. Here’s why. Right or wrong, I was raised to believe two things: First, that the military exists to defend our country. Serving in it means defending our freedoms. Second, that one of those fundamental freedoms is freedom of religion. So I already see a conflict there.

But beyond that, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation the extraordinary technology our military has at its disposal. I’m seriously disturbed by the idea that we have commanders in the field, at a global flashpoint where Russia and China are not going to want to lose access to Iranian oil, among other things —

Mikey Weinstein: Or North Korea.

Richard Eskow: — or North Korea. And we have people there who think this is wonderful because now we can destroy the world and bring about the Second Coming. This is not only morally wrong to me. It’s also a global security threat. Am I overreacting?

Mikey Weinstein: No, if anything you’re underreacting. We are staring into the abyss. I wish I had more time — I have about two more minutes — but I appreciate the chance to talk. You are articulating this perfectly, Richard. This situation is not merely a national security threa. It is a security threat of formidable magnitude to our entire planet. Historically, whenever we have married an extremist version of any religious faith—especially fundamentalist Christianity—with that arm of the state that wages war, we don’t end up with babbling brooks or streams or creeks, Richard. No, not lakes or ponds either. We get oceans of blood.

Richard Eskow: And unfortunately, I know you have to go — including to right-wing media. Another thing I was taught growing up: you go where the sinners are.

Mikey Weinstein: Yeah.

Richard Eskow: Good luck to you. Thanks for spending time with us. We’ll be in touch.

Mikey Weinstein: Thank you so much, Zero Hour! Appreciate it.

When I was small my mother warned me never to approach a sick animal. The dying ones, she said, are the deadliest of all.

That hasn’t been my experience; most of the dying creatures I’ve encountered just want a quiet place to pass their final hours. The source of my mother’s anxiety was closer to home than she had yet to recognize, but her fear was palpable. She was haunted by the vision of her curly-haired child falling prey to some sickly, snarling, yellow-eyed feral creature with nothing left to lose. That’s a mother’s worst nightmare.

Flash forward to February 28, 2026. Dozens of schoolchildren were reported dead in “one of two strikes that appear to have hit schools since U.S. and Israeli warplanes launched their attack on Iran around 10 a.m. local time.”1 It was a mother’s worst fear come true, many times over.

Why would Israel and the United States kill children? The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that neither country is shy about the systematic extermination of the very young when it serves their strategic interests. These deaths, however, seem to be the products of tactical indifference rather than intentional annihilation.2 The girls’ school was near an Iranian naval base, and the high school was in the neighborhood where former Iranian president Ahmadinejad lived and was targeted by bombers.

This is how dying animals behave in a mother’s nightmare. They’re not looking for human children to kill—not the way an airborne raptor or an IDF soldier would. They simply lash out blindly in a desperate fight against the inevitable. Sometimes children get in the way.

Yes, Ayatollah Khamenei is dead. Big deal. Others like him were already prepared to step in.

Our political culture is naive, almost childlike, in its attachment to the “great man” theory of history, with the “evil man” as its shadow side. Powerful figures do sometimes alter history, but only within those time-worn channels Tennyson called the “ringing grooves of change.” Khamenei’s power began with the US overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, which set the stage for Iran’s current theocracy. The brutality of the Shah only hardened the steely resolve of Khamenei’s predecessor, who cast aside pro-democracy Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to put Khamenei in power. If it hadn’t been him, it would been found someone equally hard-lined.

Trump and Netanyahu are merely the latest leaders to be vomited up from a groove whose name is “colonialism.” Its source is not the culture or beliefs of ancient Jewish tribes. This groove traces back to the chieftains and pagan shamans of pre-Christian Europe. It rings with the sound of cauldrons and cannons and the church bells of the inquisitor. If some of its own children must be sacrificed, too, so be it.

Once again, pro-democracy protesters have been betrayed by US-made bombs. Attacks by foreign countries almost always strengthen their current leadership and weaken protest movements. There’s no reason to think this time will be any different. Khamenei is almost certainly more powerful in martyrdom than he was in the last months of his life. The protesters must now wait for the inevitable betrayal. May the find solidarity in just people around the world.

As-yet-unconfirmed reports suggest that the bombers have targeted some of the leaders who are best positioned to form an independent government. That wouldn’t be surprising. The US and Israel don’t want an independent Iran. They want a vassal.

But wait, you say. Israel and the United States aren’t dying animals. They’re very much alive and will be for the foreseeable future. Don’t be so sure. Netanyahu has been clinging to power for years to avoid prosecution for a litany of corruption charges. Trump was also threatened by multiple prosecutions before winning re-election. Both men, having feasted lavishly on ill-gotten gains, were desperate to avoid the consequences of their own actions.

For Netanyahu, Israel’s future looks grim. Much of the world has turned against it. Public opinion is evolving from revulsion over its actions to doubts about its very legitimacy as a theocratic ethno-state. Public support for Israel, once considered immutable, has plummeted in the US and Western Europe, especially among younger people who are more likely to consider it an “apartheid state.”

Israel, dependent on Western largesse, is likely to face a critical decision when these generations assume power: become a truly democratic state that ends radicalized privilege or remain an unsustainable international pariah. Either way, the clock is almost certainly ticking on the era of Eretz Israel envisioned by Zionism’s founders. It may take decades, with great bloodshed along the way, but this change seems increasingly likely.

This is not an outré idea. Israel’s military and political leaders see this future almost as clearly as independent observers do. No wonder they’ve become increasingly open in their violence. It’s a sign of desperation as well as hate.

The United States may not disappear as a nation in the foreseeable future. But its global dominance and that of its elites will end, and probably soon. That prospect fills its current leaders with existential dread. Billionaires build airstrips in the Hamptons and rehearse the apocalypse in mountaintop retreats. Politicians try to seize control of oil-rich nations through brute force and feed the fantasy that exorbitant military spending can crush the spirit of independent peoples.

As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this twilight, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Richard Nixon said this when he tried selling an equally delusional war to the American people:

“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

The “forces of totalitarianism and anarchy” are us. Every war the US has fought in the intervening half-century has been a strategic and military failure. The United States has become a pitiful, violent giant—lethal and proud, but pitiful just the same. It spends itself into social oblivion for military machinery. It turns the technology of human suppression against its own population with increasing ferocity. As inequality surpasses that of the Gilded Age, software surveils our every move as drones and helicopters hover in the sky.

Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.

Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers. They’re pitiful because they’re desperate, and they’re desperate because their realms are dying. The grief of mothers and fathers mean nothing to creatures such as these.

Here’s silent whisper for the wounded and discouraged, the grim-faced and the grieving, the unseen victims in Palestine and Yemen and Iran and around the globe: may they see with their hearts that time is running out for the Trumps and Netanyahus of their hearts. May they take comfort in the inevitability of their fall.

Yes, they’re still deadly. Of course they are. They’re killers. But so was John Wayne Gacy, and he was a clown.

Prof. Wolff and I discuss the latest Jeffrey Epstein document releases and what they tell us about a political system that actively selects for predators, then rewards them with the power to destroy lives without consequence. We explore the uncomfortable connections between Epstein’s island and Bezos’s boardroom, between sexual pathology and economic pathology, and between personal dysfunction and political disintegration.

If you’ve been disturbed by these revelations but have struggled to articulate exactly what they tell us about society, we explore a framework for understanding how the personal and political integrate under capitalism—and why the victims’ courage in coming forward is exposing not only the perpetrators, but an entire system built on commodification and control. It’s a challenging discussion, but if you’re ready to glimpse the beating heart of a sick and dying power structure I encourage you to listen.

Key quotes and transcript below.

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Key Quotes

“The system self-selects for psychopathy... the most sociopathically obsessive competitor and accumulator of personal power and wealth wins.”
— Richard Eskow

“There oughtn’t to be people that are that rich. It produces weird behavior, behavior that shouldn’t be possible.”
— Richard Wolff

“This story to me is a powerful example of how interpersonal relationships and the personal sphere reflects the political and economic sphere and vice versa, and how each shapes and interacts with the other.”
— Richard Eskow

“These are not people who’ve been able to have an adequate sexual connection to an adult … a partner to share the complexities of life.”
— Richard Wolff

Transcript (lightly edited):

Richard Eskow: Joining me once again is my good friend Professor Richard Wolff, whose insights on topics timely and timeless I always look forward to hearing and discussing with him. We’re going to talk about a timely and perhaps timeless topic right now. But first of all, Richard Wolff, welcome back to the program.

Richard Wolff: Thank you very much, R.J. I’m very pleased, as always, to be doing this with you.

Richard Eskow: Likewise. And of course, the story I was alluding to is the release of more Jeffrey Epstein documents and the ever-widening gyre of people—men, pretty much all, virtually all—getting drawn into his orbit and getting their reputations tarred along with him. A surprising collection of men, sometimes.

I know you and I talked about the Epstein files a couple of months ago, but there seems to be a shift in public consciousness, even more so than last time. It’s like watching a pointillist painting come together. More dots get filled in, the shape of what you’re looking at, the details of what you’re looking at become clearer. And it seems to me that what we’re looking at is something both very characteristic of our time—you could call it the zeitgeist—and also very characteristic of our economy and of our human relationships on any number of scales.

But I’m not really being very specific with that description. What are your thoughts?

Richard Wolff: Well, I start by being horrified. I suspected this, and there’s a bit of naiveté on my part as well. I’ve been a critic of capitalism all my life. I am horrified every day living in New York City, as I do, by the gap between rich and poor, which is screaming at me literally every time I leave my home.

In my home it’s not there because in a way I’ve excluded it from the interior of my house. But I go out and, whether it’s a beggar, whether it’s a poor person talking to themselves walking down the street, whether it’s the way I watch police dealing with others, it’s an endless display, if you’re open to it, of the inequalities of our system.

I talk to other people. In the apartment complex where I live, everybody’s afraid to go out at night. The fear is largely irrational in the sense that there’s not that much happening at night that you have to be afraid of. But on the other hand, it’s also rational because it isn’t crazy to think it might happen, because it happens often enough.

For me, what I’m watching is that rich people who have so much money can actually slither out of accountability for things they do that are immoral, illegal, unethical, outrageous—really beyond words. There’s something in the system that not only gives them the means, but breathes in them the appetite that somehow goes with the means.

There’s some sort of process here, and I’m thinking particularly of the advertising industry. The job of the advertising industry is to get you to spend money on whatever the client of the advertiser is paying the advertiser to advertise. The point is to get you to open your wallet and spend money on the car, on the drink, on the clothing item, whatever it is.

It begins to create, particularly in people who have a lot of money and can therefore indulge what the advertiser is doing—most of us can’t do much of that because we’re limited by the funds that we have. But now imagine the world of advertising imploding on a person like Jeffrey Epstein with hundreds of millions of dollars.

So there is no limit. Well, if there is no limit, then those things that might limit you become almost challenges. It becomes a kind of contest. And the one who goes the furthest—Jeffrey Epstein—goes beyond buying sex to literally buying an entire island where, away from any political authority other than himself, he can indulge.

He can find someone who goes and lures teenage girls to come to this island. It’s so ugly, you don’t really know where to start with the horror of it. And yet it seems rooted in the particular system that we have. There oughtn’t to be people that are that rich. It produces weird behavior, behavior that shouldn’t be possible.

One last point. I’m going to link it to something that isn’t about Jeffrey Epstein for a moment and isn’t about an island and isn’t about rape and all the rest. I read this morning about the firing of one third or one half of the reporting staff of the Washington Post. Jeffrey Bezos is in a bizarre position.

He’s in the same position toward journalism that Jeffrey Epstein was toward sexuality. What is Mr. Bezos doing? For reasons of his own, he’s in a position to buy one of the most important media institutions in the country. Right off the bat, there’s something wrong here. It’s at least as horrible as buying someone else’s sexual services—we make that an illegal act.

Buying sexual services, that’s prostitution. That’s against the law. Mr. Bezos doesn’t have to worry about that. That law has been fixed. He can buy the Washington Post, he can fire one third of the staff. And the goal supposedly is to make the newspaper more efficient. The man has just spent publicly—he didn’t deny it—$55 million to promote the movie Melania, which everyone who’s not paid has said is a large waste of time.

But whatever you think, he had $55 million to promote that movie rather than to maintain the integrity of the Washington Post. And at a time when the events in Minneapolis screamingly say we need more independent journalism looking over the shoulder of the government than we have ever needed it, we’re going to cut staff.

How is it possible that there is a man like Bezos who’s in a position to do all of this horrific damage? Well, it’s the same to me. It’s Epstein ruining the lives of all these young people, corrupting the legal system so that he could slither out of it. Mr. Acosta, who was the first Secretary of Labor under the first presidency of Mr. Trump, we find out was the local legal authority who looked the other way so that Epstein could get out of being properly dealt with for what he was caught and convicted of doing.

It is a testimony, if you needed it, that allowing inequality like this becomes an invitation, a goad if you like, to these wealthy people to literally push the boundaries like an out-of-control child who has to test how far can I go in throwing food before mommy and daddy tell me, you’re not going to get your dinner if you keep throwing the food this way.

Nobody’s there to do that for these gentlemen. And so they have sex slavery on a hidden island for decades before anybody does anything about it.

Richard Eskow: That’s a very interesting take. Thank you for that, Richard Wolff. And it’s interesting to me because I think in terms of the chain of effect, the causal relationships, I look at it a little differently, and I think the two views are complementary. But to me, one of the things this illustrates starkly—because many other things illustrate it as well—is that the system we have now, the capitalist, so-called competitive, really anti-competitive as soon as people can arrange that system, it self-selects. Sociologists say self-selecting groups. It self-selects for psychopathy, for psychopaths.

It’s as if we created a system of economic governance and political governance where you don’t take a test like the Mandarin system in Imperial China. You don’t advance through elections or whatever. The most sociopathically obsessive competitor and accumulator of personal power and wealth, whatever the cost, wins. And when they win, they get to be Jeff Bezos, they get to be Bill Gates, they get to be all these other people who are implicated in it. They get to be Jeffrey Epstein.

And they do horrible things. You’ve been defending a system—not you, Rick, but society has been defending a system—that encourages that. Back in the 1980s, I’ve mentioned this before, the director Oliver Stone, when he made the character of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, saying “greed is good,” portrayed him as a villain.

Stone was amazed that people treated him—young Wall Street guys treated Gordon Gekko as their hero. He said, “It’s like he’s the devil. I mean, what?” But of course. But that’s what you’ve been celebrating. That’s what you’ve been encouraging. And then you’re right. There are studies about this too, that people as they move up a certain income ladder and live a more insulated life—not everyone, I mean, there are exceptions—but their empathy may wane, to say the least.

But we have a system—and the other thing that strikes me in my view of the Epstein horrible saga that we’re seeing now—is it almost feels to me like a hologram with these different dimensions and layers. When you move around it, you see different things. Because you see the really billionaire people like Bill Gates, who’s now implicated. I can’t say it’s proven, but the suggestion in the emails is that he had sex with Russian women, got a disease. Jeffrey Epstein claimed that, anyway. His ex-wife now was very upset about his association with Epstein. We hear that she’s not denying those stories.

So you have those guys, and they are guys, of course, which is a big part of this story. Then you have the Epsteins who are the sort of grand viziers to these people, right? Where Epstein made hundreds—if not billions, but hundreds of millions—by managing their money and making connections for them.

He’s almost a combination of—the sociologist Stanley Milgram talked about connectors, right? People who just put people together. Epstein seems to have been partly that and partially, I think in Yiddish the word was Handelman, a middleman who worked things out for you. You needed to get a private plane to the Caribbean? Yeah, Jeffrey will get you one. This kind of grand vizier slash concierge to the real billionaires, but rich as hell compared to the rest of us.

And then you have the mere multimillionaires like Deepak Chopra, the self-help alternative spirituality guru and physician, whose most memorable quote, perhaps, from this latest tranche of emails was—I believe I’ve got this correctly—he wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, “God is a construct, period. Pretty girls are real and obvious.” It seems obvious anyway that he was joking, quote unquote. But he was also toadying, obsequious to the point of repulsive.

And of course the victims in all this, these women who were treated like things, like objects, because these men knew they could do it. And that is part of the same—I’m going to call it psychopathy—that leads people to cheat and lie and go behind people’s backs and break deals and do whatever they have to do to get ahead. But I could tell you stories from my own career, not from myself, but from people I worked with or for and observed, about that and the rush they get off of that.

Well, you can get that too off of breaking the spirit of a young girl for your own sexual satisfaction. It’s just so loathsome, so disgusting. But to me it’s all of a piece, and it’s this sort of capitalist, ultra-hyper-capitalist monkey house where the big apes are being served by the medium-sized apes and the little ones and then down to the frail ones that they just beat and batter and then throw away.

To me, it represents the lowest of human existence. My only prayer for this, if I may use that theological word, is that people come to understand that this is what our system does. This is what it is. This is the real thing, right? You’re getting to see the beating heart of it now. If you don’t like it and you’re sick—if you hate it, if you don’t like it—you might want to change the whole system rather than put these people in charge of everything.

Richard Wolff: I agree, I agree. I also think there’s something here that we have to face, and it’s sexism. These are men. The vast majority of the people being caught up here are men. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t bring adult women. He brought men and he brought children. And he put those two things together: the children and the adult men.

The adult men whose sexuality has to at the very least be deeply questioned. These are not people who’ve been able to have an adequate sexual connection to an adult female or male, for that matter, who could be a partner and could satisfy the complexities that life is about. No, these are people who live in another world.

It’s the world of pornography, of watching somebody else’s sexual activity. Only it’s one better than that. It’s one you can control. It’s one that, because you’re an adult surrounded by male adults on an island that the young girls cannot escape—they got there by an airplane, et cetera, et cetera.

This is a fantasy life of people who have the money to do such a thing, but who also have a twisted sexual repression. I understand our culture is sick about sex, right? My parents were Europeans, and Lord knows Europeans have a lot of problems. But when my mother was a teenager in Germany, she was sent at age 13 or 14 to the beach in the summer with other young teenagers.

And these were nude beaches. And it was explained to them, “Look, so you know what this is all about. So you’re not intimidated, you’re not frightened. No one’s going to tell you lies. Get your fill of what you need to see.” And the implication was you make some experiments. You do what young people do one way or another anyway.

But no one is pretending that it isn’t there, that it isn’t normal. We don’t do that in our culture. We have no way of doing that. So we have men who don’t have any idea of what a decent sexuality is. It’s all hidden, it’s furtive, it is guilt-ridden.

So if they then become very rich, they can buy their way out of their incapacity and have an indulgent moment with some child that another person has procured, which they can put out of their mind as soon as they’re done. I mean, it’s so perverse that you have to realize it is a mixture of things that are really wrong in this culture.

I like very much the way you use the word pathology here. You’re right. It is a social pathology that is expressed here. My daughter said to me the other day, “Young women are expected to manage their sexuality carefully and cautiously, whereas the boys are given weird other messages.” You know, “you sow your wild oats.” It’s kind of exciting for boys. The girls—don’t ever do anything like that.

It’s so different that when they then get a lot of money, the women don’t do this. We don’t have a female Jeffrey Epstein, and if we get one, it’ll be really rare, but we got Jeffrey Epsteins in every generation, one way or the other.

Pasolini in Italy made a film 20 years ago or more called 120 Days of Sodom, and it was a study of the Fascist elite in Italy. And large parts of it are Epstein’s Island. It wasn’t done on an island there. It was done in secret buildings. But you see, again, coming to the peak of this twisted society, people working off their pathologies in these awfully destructive ways.

Richard Eskow: I just want to add a couple things to that. One is that when we reach a certain level of maturity early in life, much earlier than these men we’re talking about, intimacy is supposed to come into play, right? And I’m not just talking about—although primarily I’m talking about intimacy in terms of male-female, or male-male, female-female, whatever sexual relationships, intimate relationships, love relationships, whatever you want to call them—which include love, right?

And love and intimacy seem to be alien in this equation here. And the very opposite of intimacy would be someone where the power imbalance is so stark—a child, right? A virtual child. So that’s a piece of it.

And I also wanted to tell you a story, if you don’t mind. It’ll seem irrelevant, but I think you’ll get the connection after a while.

Long time ago, I was talking to a guy, long dead now, who had been a senior CIA official during the Kennedy era. One of the top five or six guys, probably. And he told me that Jack Kennedy would make a point of having sex with everybody around him. And the women would say, “It lasts 20 minutes, was frustrating, whatever, but he’s the president.”

And there’s a reason why I say that too. Including the wives of these guys. And I said, “Boy, what most people would probably say is I’d be pissed. I’d be upset.” He said, “No, no. It was—we’d all be sitting around having a drink by the pool and they’d say, ‘So-and-so, where’s your wife?’ ‘Oh, she’s with Jack.’” It was a status thing.

And my point about it, both in terms of Jack Kennedy being Mr. Hit-It-and-Quit-It, as they say, and about the way these men—who remember were also manipulators by profession, master manipulators—was that women, the commodification of women. They’re just like you get a pretty one because she has—conventionally pretty—she has value. And then you trade her for favors. Now the President owes you a favor, whatever it is.

That’s life to them. It’s not a new thing with Epstein. I mean, the perversity of Epstein may have happened dozens of times before in our history. We just didn’t hear about it. But this is the world we’re living in.

What are your thoughts about what I just said?

Richard Wolff: I agree. What it made me think of—I haven’t done a thorough study, but I’ve been reading and looking at the coverage of these new documents that were just released a couple days ago—and here’s what struck me, along your lines. In a number of the communications between Epstein and, say, Prince Andrew in England or even Noam Chomsky or Woody Allen or any of them, there’s a certain boyish asking for favors: “How am I going to get girls?” Remember Larry Summers? Unspeakable.

What teenage boys might say to one another, or comforting each other. They dealt with the other men, Jeffrey Epstein particularly, as quasi-intimate friends. Meanwhile, they’re engaged in treating these girls in an unspeakable, insensitive way. Wow. This is like the worst example of bifurcating your life so that some people are genuine human beings and other people are not.

And there’s a word for that, and that’s called racism. It’s not a matter of skin color, never was. It’s a matter of othering. This is a collection of immature men who are othering women. If they’re adult women, it’s your story of the Kennedys. And if they’re children, it’s Epstein.

It is a screaming testimony to the messed-up sex and intimate lives of our people on the one hand, and the inequality which allows these bad examples to do unspeakable damage on the other hand. Just like there shouldn’t be a Jeffrey Bezos able to hamstring a major newspaper at a time when we need more journalism than we have ever had before.

It’s so dysfunctional that it’s hard for me not to get excited about what it is telling us about a society in a pretty advanced state of disintegration.

Richard Eskow: Well, no question about it in my mind. And to me—Bezos, I want to say, and I want to be careful because I don’t want to stigmatize based on appearance and everything—but Bezos is an extreme example of what we’ve seen among a number of these guys, including Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, of taking steroids apparently, and doing other things to try to bulk themselves up.

Guys who would have been normally thought of as nerds, and there’s a lot of plastic surgery in their proximity and that kind of thing. And I’ve always thought, for eugenicists, Elon Musk seems very dissatisfied with his own DNA because he has hair plugs and all that. Do what you want with your appearance.

I’m not judging that, except to say that there is also this sort of lack of a core self. And as within, as without, as they say. Human nature is mysterious and ineffable on one level. It can’t be controlled. You shouldn’t try to control it. You should experience it, you should flow with it.

But these guys want total control. And when I say as within, as without, what I mean is—and your comments helped crystallize this for me—this story to me is a great example of how interpersonal relationships and the personal in general, the personal sphere, reflects the political and economic sphere and vice versa, and how each shapes and interacts with the other.

If you are not cooperative in your family, in your neighborhood, in your relationship with your primary partner, with your children, you’re not going to integrate and reinforce a cooperative society. If you are—and conversely, if you have a society that’s built on cooperative principles, you will be more comfortable doing these things.

And to me, when I think about the kind of strains of thought that you and I derive from, or are thinking from anyway, I think for me anyway, that’s a big part of it—that integration of the self, the immediate circle, and the society as a whole. Does that make sense to you?

Richard Wolff: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Richard Eskow: So any final thoughts on this before we call it a day?

Richard Wolff: Well, if I understand correctly, there are millions more documents. The Trump administration is trying desperately not to release them. It lost that battle initially. Then it released them too late, but not all of them. Then it lost that battle. Now it’s released a few more. It claims that’s all there is.

It’s crystal clear that there’s more. I would like us to keep an open mind about revisiting this if, as I suspect, we’re getting closer and closer to the people they did not want to see publicly identified here. And as a number of the women who were victimized have now made clear, they were revealed in what was released.

Richard Eskow: Right.

Richard Wolff: Men who patronized them have still been protected, which is again, the teenage, underdeveloped, perverse male protecting themselves at the expense of the people they already victimized. I mean, it gets—I want to be able to come back and talk about it some more if the material warrants it, which I’m virtually certain it will.

Richard Eskow: Good. Let’s plan on that. And let’s also say we’ll focus on the perpetrators as perpetrators of many things, of which these obscenities are one, and respect the victims as victims who as individuals are far more important to me and worthy of care and respect than their predators. So with that, Richard Wolff, it’s always—well, I would say a great pleasure talking with you, but it’s not a pleasurable topic.

Very insightful as always, speaking with you. And as always, thanks for coming on the program.

Richard Wolff: My pleasure, Richard. I look forward to our next one.

Richard Eskow: As do I.

It’s trivial, really—but it feels so creepy.

A couple of writers I know commented that they found their own names in the latest release of the Epstein files. Killing time while on hold—and expecting nothing—I typed in my last name and hit “return.” What came up was an email newsletter Epstein received in 2013 by someone named Greg Brown, who is listed as an investment counselor with a group called GlobalCast (one of several with similar names).

I was writing in The Huffington Post those days in my role as a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, where my primary beat was Wall Street and financial corruption. (My colleague in that effort was Zach Carter, who later achieved considerable success with his biography of John Maynard Keynes entitled The Price of Peace.)

Brown—about whom there is remarkably little online—writes as follows:

“Last week I read an article in The Huffington Post by Richard Eskow - The Hearing: Reality, Delusion, and the Federal Reserve - which centered around Janet Yellen appearance (sic) before the Senate banking committee on November 14, 2013 for a hearing on her confirmation as the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank.”

He goes on to cut and paste liberally (and often carelessly) from my column, e.g.:

“Yellen, a mainstream economist, isn’t likely to transform it into the central bank our nation needs. That may take a political mandate—one we’re not likely to see soon in our corporate-dominated political process. The real reason for this is that the Fed has become far too deeply embedded with the banking industry. This can be seen in its board structure, as well as in its policies.”

Pretty populist for the Epstein crowd, although I doubt the man actually read it. Brown’s newsletter (this one, anyway) ran to 45 pages, after all. It seemed like output from one of those mailing lists we all find ourselves on and never get around to unsubscribing from.

Still—and perhaps childishly—I feel unclean just being in those files. I know it’s irrational, but my level of loathing for Epstein and his crowd knows no bounds. That is not irrational. I’m sickened by the image of powerful people cavorting in the hot tub where so many young hearts were scarred and broken.

We live in an empire of psychopaths. From the above video commentary (lightly edited):

“(The behavior of Epstein and his crowd) is part of the same—I’m going to call it psychopathy—that leads people to cheat and lie, go behind people’s backs, break deals, and do whatever they have to do to get ahead.

I could tell you stories from my own career—not about myself, but about people I worked with or for and observed. The rush they get off of (lying and cheating)—well, you can get that same rush off of breaking the spirit of a young girl for your own sexual satisfaction.

It’s so loathsome, so disgusting. But to me it’s all of a piece. It’s this sort of capitalist, ultra-hyper-capitalist monkey house where the big apes are served by the medium ones, the medium ones by the little ones, and then down to the frail ones that they just beat and batter and throw away.

And to me it represents the lowest of human existence. My only prayer for this, if I may use that theological word, is that people come to understand that this is what our system does. This is what it is. This is the real thing, right? You’re getting to see the beating heart of it now.

If you don’t like it—and you’re sick if you don’t hate it—you might want to change the whole system that put these people in charge of ... everything.”

I realized in retrospect that my reference to the “monkey house” was unfair to nonhuman primates. It’s true that they have often engaged in this kind of aggression in zoos, but that’s the fault of the humans who trapped them in inhumane conditions.

It was also unfair because the behavior of these captives is worsened by a scarcity of space and resources. The human animals in the Epstein crowd have more wealth and comfort than anyone could ever need. And yet, they descended again and again to the lowest rungs of moral and corporeal depravity.

Look at them. Don’t turn away. Look, and remember: These are the people who run everything.

If that’s not a good reason to start a revolution, by God, I don’t know what is.