Here is this week’s television episode of the program, which was first broadcast on Free Speech TV on Monday, October 26 2026. Richard Wolff and I discussed the ongoing uprisings in France and their place in a new wave of global resistance, and Judith Ehrlich discussed her new film on Daniel Ellsberg’s work as a nuclear war planner and then to prevent nuclear war.
A lightly-edited transcript of the program is below.
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Many thanks—RJE
Transcript for October 26, 2026 broadcast
Richard Eskow: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another edition of The Zero Hour. I’m your host, Richard RJ Eskow. We’re covering two exceptionally important topics tonight. In the first conversation, I’ll be talking with Professor Richard Wolff about the protests and uprisings that began in France, have now spread through Europe, and are adding to or complementing the protests already underway in Albania and India, among other places.
That’s a prerecorded interview, so if the situation on the ground has changed a little, we won’t have addressed that. But I think the basic outline of the story will be the same, and the principles certainly are. Then we’ll be talking with filmmaker Judith Ehrlich about her extremely important new film on Daniel Ellsberg, his work as a doomsday planner, and his crusade to avoid nuclear holocaust.
So please stick around. I think it’s an important episode tonight, and we’ll be right back.
And we are back on The Zero Hour. I, as always, am your host, Richard RJ Eskow, and I always welcome my conversations with my good friend and ally Richard Wolff. Professor Wolff is an economic historian as well as an economist, and he’s the founder of Democracy at Work, an excellent organization you should check out.
I love his perspective on things. It so often clarifies my own thinking. So without further ado, Richard Wolff, welcome back to the program.
Richard Wolff: Thank you very much, Richard. Glad to be here.
Richard Eskow: In our last conversation, two weeks ago, we talked about the protests in France, which of course continue as we speak. As of a couple of days ago, we now see this headline on PBS.org: “From France to Albania, how social unrest is fueling protests across Europe.”
Their subhead: “Rising fuel costs, discontent with the state of schools, declining public services, and a housing crisis have created stormy weather for an autumn of protests in Europe.” They mention France, Italy, Albania, Spain, and Portugal. We could add the ongoing protests in India, which we’ve spoken about before, and the Cockroach Janata Party, which means Cockroach People’s Party, a satirical name. It seems to me there are some common factors in all of this, one of which is that students are often in the lead.
Another is that these protests aren’t limited to a single issue, as earlier demonstrations here and elsewhere might have been. They seem to be unified by broader economic injustices, which in France, for example, are bringing the unions in and bringing other people in.
There are tent cities in Spain, and I believe Portugal, protesting housing prices. The Cockroach Janata Party has also gained a lot of widespread support. So it seems to me this is a sign of something deeper and broader. That’s not to say student concerns are trivial. They’re profoundly important. But in many of these countries, students seem to have touched a nerve for their societies as a whole.
Does that sound right to you?
Richard Wolff: Absolutely. I’m going to quote RJ Eskow right back to RJ Eskow. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s very nice to wake up in the morning with the aroma of rebellion in the air. That’s how I feel, as though I’m waking up from a sleep. And here’s why. Let me add the following to the list you gave.
Last Saturday, a Saturday in the middle of October, 500,000 people went into the center of Madrid, the capital of Spain, to demand radical change in the housing situation. The rents are too high. The cost of housing is impossible. The commitments and promises conventional politicians made to deal with the situation have come to nothing.
So what we’re seeing is a movement across Europe saying that the so-called social contract has been broken. That’s how it’s often described in Europe, and it roughly means this: it’s okay for the government to help out big business, and it’s okay for the government to bail out big business when it collapses, but the deal is that you’ve got to give the mass of people, who after all pay the mass of taxes, some kind of roughly equivalent services.
Okay? That contract has been broken across Europe. I’d love to talk about the historical reasons for that. But Europe has never recovered from the end of World War II, from those two world wars fought mostly in Europe, on European soil, by European countries, in which three centuries of capitalism and colonialism exploded in the worst carnage the human race has ever visited upon itself. And by the way, those wars cost all of those countries their colonies.
That’s what made them rich. That’s what they built the global economy to get: the 90% of people living outside Europe, North America, and Japan providing incredible wealth to Europe, North America, and Japan. That’s over. Over the last 75 years, the Global South has let the world know that it is done with that arrangement.
There has to be a redistribution of everything in the world economy, because the Europeans, the Americans, and the Japanese built one for themselves and not for the mass of people. And that’s done. Europe has never recovered. For a while it tried to be the junior partner of the United States. Mr. Trump advised them that’s over.
Then they tried to recoup by moving eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aha, they could move eastward. They promised they wouldn’t, and they immediately did.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: And they took Eastern Europe back for themselves: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria. And Russia, threatened by all of this, drew a line in Ukraine, and the rest is what we’re living through now. So the Russians were the other ones who said to the Europeans, “No, no, no. You are not going to recoup your empire at our expense.”
And Mr. Trump has told them, “We’re not your allies anymore, Jack. You’re on your own.” The Europeans are desperate. And the people who built their political careers on being the junior partner of the United States, by which I mean Macron in France, Merz in Germany, Burnham in England, and all the rest of them, are now sinking.
The political center is gone. In France, it’s obvious. The right wing in France is sitting down with Mr. Macron to discuss saving him. That means a government of the right in France, with a party full of Nazis. That’s true in Germany, and it’s true in France. These are Nazis. You have to be scraping way down deep in the barrel to have that as part of your political coalition.
And they’ve been that way for decades. But that’s where the center is now, dealing with the right, because the alternative is the left, as it is everywhere in Europe. Americans don’t know this, because the media here operate as if there’s only a center and a right in European politics. When I explain the power of the left to them, they don’t understand it.
But I want to stress that the movement of the young people, the movement of those who feel the social contract has been violated, includes those 500,000 in Madrid. And their protest is against a socialist government. The government of Spain at this point is run by the Socialist Party. Again, Americans aren’t familiar with this, but it shows that the mass of people are as upset with the parties they feel close to as they are with the political center they’re kicking out of office now.
They’re serving notice that if all they get is a right-wing or left-wing repeat of what they’ve already seen, those protests will resume on a dime. One last point. There are five union confederations in France. Where we have one, the AFL-CIO, they have five, and they often disagree with one another on important issues.
All five of them, unified, simultaneously expressed their deep appreciation for the students and for the independence of their movement, and then announced that they support the students. Part of that support is a request that the students support them in return. And they announced that all of France will shut down on November 5th in a general strike.
Uh-oh. We’re now seeing a worker-student alliance forming immediately, right in the face of what Mr. Macron is doing. And what is he doing? Is he taking a new stand, or coming up with a plan for the schools? I want to remind everyone that this all began with teachers striking. Mr. Macron has done exactly nothing.
What he has done is as despicable as anything. He has unleashed the police, and now the army too. Repression is his number one response. The only other thing he’s done is get his cabinet to keep suggesting that immigrants are the problem. He took a page from Mr. Trump: scapegoat the immigrants. Why?
Well, immigrants are a sizable part of the population in France. They live overwhelmingly in ghettos.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: They get the worst jobs, the lowest pay, and the most abuse from the police. This is a tried-and-true tactic, just like here. And in case you were wondering, yes, Mr. Trump has weighed in. He doesn’t like Macron, but he said, “Good for you. Repression is what you should do.”
Wow. Wow.
Richard Eskow: And, you know—
Richard Wolff: By the way, that was so bad for Mr. Macron that he had to denounce it. He described Trump’s statement of support, along with those of several other European leaders, with an adjective that’s the same word in French as in English: stupid. That’s how bad it was for him, because the French people understood that he’s in the same place as Trump.
Richard Eskow: I’m sorry, go ahead. I didn’t realize you had another thought.
Richard Wolff: One last thought.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: He calls Trump stupid, but the one who’s stupid is him. Repression is a stupid response. What do you think it says? Whether or not it works to slow down the protests, it makes this government the enemy of all the students. Who’s supporting Mr. Macron? Older people. Who’s supporting the protests? Younger people.
Richard Eskow: Including working-age people and working people, which is a tough coalition to go up against.
Richard Wolff: That’s right. It’s been the dream of leftists, a worker-student alliance that really is one. And you’ve got it now, and you’ve got it from the very first step.
Richard Eskow: Just to be clear about his response, when we talk about repression we mean extreme violence. I’ve talked to people in France who say this is worse than 1968 in terms of police violence. For example, among what we’d call high school students here, one lost an eye, one lost an arm, one lost a hand.
These were extreme levels of violence. They’ve also created these rush courts, special quasi-military courts where people have already been tried, convicted, and punished. So it’s very repressive. And I want to tie this back to something you mentioned, the cozying up of French elites to Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party.
I thought about this after our last conversation, Rick, because you mentioned that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the largest left party in France, France Unbowed, you could call it, was saying, “Oh, maybe we don’t pay the banks back. Maybe we don’t pay the banks their interest.”
Marine Le Pen is not going to say that. So after lumping the left and the right together under the scare word “populist,” I suddenly thought to myself, maybe one group of populists will become more popular with the elites than the other. That was one reaction I had.
Another was this. Immediately we saw hand-wringing in the New York Times and in some of the European papers as well: “This is just going to boost Marine Le Pen, right? This is just going to ensure that the National Rally wins, because the chaos will be blamed on the left.”
Well, first of all, says who? You’re trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy when you say that. Second, of course, older people may think of Nixon and the silent majority and all that from the 1960s. But two pieces get left out of that picture.
One is the utter ineptitude of Macron and the centrists in France and all across Europe, and the centrists here. In terms of my own thought process, I want to point you to a 2018 political science study. I’m blanking on its name, but they used a massive survey that’s conducted in a number of countries and then sifted it for this data.
These were political scientists in Finland, and they concluded that growing numbers of economically marginalized people felt, in their words, “extreme discontent with disliked elites.” And they said these people were intentionally spreading false news stories and irate language, and these are the political scientists’ terms, because they wanted to “unleash chaos,” “to burn down the entire established political order,” and to “disrupt the entire established democratic cosmos and start anew.”
Rather striking words, so they stuck with me. And of course, the centrism represented by, let’s say, Macron, or Andy Burnham in the UK, or Joe Biden in the United States, is the failed political philosophy of those despised elites. I don’t necessarily idealize any US president, but one of JFK’s speechwriters came up with a good line: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Remember that? If you turn all your firepower against the left, as they’ve been doing here and in Europe for at least a decade now, you are in fact empowering the right among people who want anything but the crappy system we have now, a system they understandably feel has marginalized and wronged them.
What are your thoughts on that?
Richard Wolff: I could not agree more, and I think American history illustrates your point. If you want to know what created the opportunity for Mr. Trump, it was the policies of the Republican and Democratic governments that preceded him. They celebrated the departure of our manufacturing as if it had no consequences anybody should worry about.
My profession celebrated neoliberal globalization as, and I’m quoting here, “a win-win for everyone.” Yeah? You know what the losers from that did? They bounced Mr. Bush out of office and brought Mr. Trump in. So yes, exactly that. You have militated against the left over and over again, first because of its link to the Soviet Union, and thereafter because, as Europe, you were drowning for all the reasons we’ve already talked about.
So you turned against Russia because you wanted to recreate an empire for yourself in Eastern Europe. It is a pathetic display. And I want to zero in on Mr. Macron. People don’t know what his last job was before he became prime minister. He was minister of education in a Socialist Party government in France.
His career was as a socialist, and then he jumped ship when he could run against the socialists and become the icon of the center. Well, he jumped onto a ship that hit an iceberg, and now he’s going down with that ship. And I’m going to make a prediction, not that I believe I can actually predict anything. Of course I can’t.
But I think you’re going to see the collapse of Mr. Macron. He’ll cut a deal, because he has no principles and never did, like so many of the elites in France. If you whore yourself out economically to the United States for 75 years, your moral fiber gets worn out. Let me leave it at that.
So these people go with the wind, and the wind is now blowing to the right. They’ll become shills for Marine Le Pen, and we’ll see that happen. But I’ve studied the right wing. They have no solutions to the problems of France. None at all. And they have to serve the business community, because they always have and that’s their financial support.
So they will fail. And then, with Mr. Mélenchon or whoever replaces him, it will be the left’s turn. And I’m noticing that some of the right-wing thinkers in Europe I pay attention to see this too.
Richard Eskow: Really? That’s interesting. Let’s play out another dimension of this, if you don’t mind. Again, I’m going off the quotation you shared last time from Mélenchon, saying maybe we need to renegotiate or reconsider paying back the debt to these banks.
Richard Wolff: Right.
Richard Eskow: Because of course, here in the United States, every mainstream commentator is willing to reconsider paying back the debt the government owes to the Social Security Trust Fund, and therefore to the elderly and disabled in this country.
Nobody would dare suggest the same about the banks. I remember debating a Fox News guy back when George Bush was saying the trust fund bonds were “just IOUs,” and I said, “What about JPMorgan Chase’s Treasury bonds? They’re just IOUs too.” So that’s a red line, in a sense. But I think we have an interesting situation going on.
And maybe we can contribute in our own way to the conversation around it. Western democracy, such as it is today, is largely based on John Locke’s idea of the consent of the governed. It’s written into our founding documents: the just consent of the governed.
Is that the right phrase? “Just consent of the governed”? Yes, I think so. Oh yes: governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In other words, if the people being governed don’t want to be governed that way, it’s unjust. That’s written into the founding of the United States of America.
Now, the combination of economic power, monopoly power, runaway inequality, concentration of wealth, Elon Musk being a theoretical trillionaire, all of this means we are now subject to unjust rule. We are the economically governed, and we have not given our consent to be governed by Wall Street or by financial institutions.
We have not given our consent to be governed by the IMF or by any other multilateral organization of that kind. We have not. And yet we’re always hearing about how the bond market is going to react to this and how Wall Street is going to react to that. You’ve made a theme of bringing democratic principles into the workplace.
Well, I’d argue there’s a macro equivalent of that too: who the hell put Jamie Dimon in charge of anything? Who put Scott Bessent in charge of anything? Our political process is totally bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires. We’ve seen that now. People are doing great things to try to wrest power back.
But until we confront that directly and say, “You’re not the boss of us, Bank of America, Brian Moynihan, whomever,” nothing will change. And of course, if you bring that up, people get terrified and say it will cause an utter collapse of the US economy. Well, we’ll see about that. But shouldn’t we at least be talking about it?
Richard Wolff: It’s unbelievable. I’ve been trying to get this across in my teaching and writing all my life. Here’s the practical way it’s coming. You’re going to have masses of people, and you already have them here in this country. Affordability, we’re told, is a big issue. Okay. That can be reframed as: the government could do the following list of wonderful things if it didn’t pay back its debt to the richest people in the country.
You could say the debt is canceled if your net worth is over X. Okay? I could give you a thousand ways to rearrange this. This obeisance, this unspoken notion that you can’t touch certain things because it won’t work and it’ll all fall apart, is the protective coating of the status quo.
It is never true. Karl Marx was enthralled by the Paris Commune, the takeover of the city of Paris in 1871 that lasted a few months, when the working class rose up, took power, and threw out the old establishment. One of the institutions they didn’t touch was the bank. Marx wrote The Civil War in France, one of his most famous pamphlets, as his assessment after the Commune’s defeat.
What happened? What did we do right? What did we do wrong? That’s what a good organizer does after every defeat.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: And after every victory. What happened here? What do we learn? One of his comments was that the bank isn’t a neutral agency. The bank isn’t some deus ex machina you have to bow down to. It’s a human institution like everything else, and it has to be interrogated, confronted, and reorganized, because if you don’t, it will pull you back into the way things were before.
And that’s exactly what you just said. It’s just the historical equivalent. We are rediscovering, as is the whole country, that there was a guy named Karl Marx who figured a good number of things out, and that we would do better to build on them, criticism included, than to pretend he isn’t there.
Most of the education I had pretended he wasn’t there.
Richard Eskow: Right. For reasons I can’t go into, I was going through my old books, and of all things, I found that my father gave me The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner, a book about economics, for my 16th birthday. It had a chapter on Marx. Heilbroner was almost the only well-known economist of that era who acknowledged that there was this other guy in there among the others.
But I think people get it if you ask them, “What’s money?” Money is a way to allocate resources, and it can be used in different ways, et cetera, et cetera. But ask “What’s finance?” and you’ve lost everybody. And the reason you’ve lost everybody is that while money, particularly coins, has at least some traceable relationship to physical objects, finance is truly just conceptual, unless I’m missing something.
Tell me if I’m missing something, but to me—
Richard Wolff: Oh, no, no, no.
Richard Eskow: Okay. Futures, pork belly futures: “We think they’re going to do that.” But that’s just like me saying to you, “I think people are going to stop buying those pork bellies.” It has no more weight than that. Yet we give that entire universe, which last time I looked accounted for more than 50% of corporate profits in this country, maybe less now, the power to become a source of vast wealth.
Vast power, vast misallocation of resources. And yet we treat it as if no other ideas had ever existed, as if this were as fundamental as E=mc². It’s just the way the universe is built.
Richard Wolff: Yeah. Look, it’s amazing to me. The way I do it is the same as the way you just did it. I say, Elon Musk is a trillionaire or close to it. That means he has control over a trillion dollars. What is he going to do with it? Is he going to use SpaceX to go exploring the heavens?
Is he going to make an electric car we can all have, one that flies as well as drives on the road? He is making a decision equivalent to what the government does with a trillion dollars. And a trillion dollars is a big chunk of what we have.
Richard Eskow: Yeah, right.
Richard Wolff: So we’re saying this one man has the same role in shaping the economic future of our society, the one in which I will make a living and my children will make a living, as the government, which represents 330 million people.
There’s no way to square that with democracy. It’s a standing refutation of the whole notion of calling the United States a democratic society. It’s just done. And anybody who doesn’t get that seems to me to be unconnected to the reality we live in, so busy providing an excuse or a rationale that looking at the actual situation is impossible.
Richard Eskow: Yeah. People talk about the expenditures for Social Security. Well, Elon Musk could basically pay for Social Security for a year. He could certainly fund the war in Ukraine and three others indefinitely. It’s absolutely insane. And of course, as you know, studies have shown that people in this country are incapable of fully grasping how much money these people have and how distorted it is compared to the rest of us.
And if they can’t grasp it, they certainly can’t take the next step, and I don’t blame them. It’s astronomical. If they can’t grasp it, they can’t understand what it means in terms of concrete power. So maybe we’re defining the theme of our next conversation: how does this message get communicated so that people understand, “Hey, you don’t live in a democracy”?
Elon Musk can put a quarter of a billion dollars into an election without batting an eye. It’s not a democracy when you have Elon Musk and 10 other billionaires in there, when you have 40 people who have more than three-quarters of us and five people who have more than half of us.
This is not a democracy. Yes, you can do a few things. You can allocate the little budget they allow you to have in certain ways. You’re kind of like the king’s local viceroy for a village, but you don’t have the power to decide your own democratic future.
This is not just power derived from the consent of the governed. Isn’t it our mission to get that across?
Richard Wolff: Yes, with the following caveat.
Richard Eskow: Okay.
Richard Wolff: It seems that the experience of this crazy wealth produces, in those who have it, a blindness and a hostility toward the mass of people that combines into what appears to the rest of us to be endless greed. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk is deep in thought these days about whether to merge Tesla and SpaceX.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: In other words, to make himself even richer. He’s spending his time and energy the way capitalism as a system does. As I say every chance I get, the achievement of capitalism in America over the last few years has been to make the already richest man in the world, Elon Musk, much richer, on a planet with starvation in large parts of it, with inadequate housing, inadequate healthcare, and inadequate education.
That’s so crazy that I think it allows us to point out that these people are caught up in their own little craziness and don’t understand their limits. So let me close with a line from Clint Eastwood, the actor. In one of his movies, he looks at a crooked police official who has just killed himself and muses, “Some people don’t know their own limits.”
Richard Eskow: Well, I hope that’s true. Let me quote another Clint Eastwood line, one that my late brother wrote, because he was a screenwriter: “My position on gun control is that if there’s a gun in the room, I want to control it.”
The gun in this room is $1 trillion.
Richard Wolff: Right.
Richard Eskow: And it’s being used to decimate our future through data center pollution and to live out an absurd SpaceX fantasy. I’ve read that plan cover to cover. You could find a more realistic business plan in a 1957 copy of Amazing Stories about the bride-women of Mars or whatever.
So, this lunatic... You said being so wealthy makes them this way. I agree, but I also think they self-select and become wealthy because of a certain inherent sociopathy. So we also have a system that selects our economic rulers based on maladaptation to human society.
Okay, I guess we’ll have to leave it there, but there’s a lot to talk about, and it’s certainly fun doing it with you. We need all the fun we can get these days. Richard Wolff, economist and host of Economic Update on Free Speech TV, as always, thanks for coming on the program and thanks for your insights.
Richard Wolff: Thank you, Richard, for making the program possible. You initiated this, and it’s been a wonderful experience. I look forward to the next one as well.
Richard Eskow: As do I. And we’ll be right back after this. I’m Richard RJ Eskow, and this is The Zero Hour.
And we are back on The Zero Hour. I’m your host, Richard RJ Eskow. When future historians write the story of our time, provided there are future historians around to write it, I think one of the figures who will loom largest in importance to the future of humanity is the late Daniel Ellsberg.
Daniel Ellsberg, of course, first became famous for revealing the Pentagon Papers. He followed that with at least 50 years of committed activism and action in a number of areas. He was on this program a couple of times before his death in, I believe, 2023. And my next guest has now produced and directed two films about Daniel Ellsberg, the latest of which was just recently released.
The filmmaker Judith Ehrlich co-produced and co-directed The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which was nominated for an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy in 2009. Her other films include The Boys Who Said No, about the draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War. She also co-produced and directed The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, the story of the men who refused, for the cause of pacifism, to take part in World War II.
She has twice won the top U.S. awards for history film: the John E. O’Connor Film Award from the American Historical Association and the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians. Her new film is An Ordinary Insanity: Daniel Ellsberg on the Nuclear Threat, and she joins us now.
So first of all, Judith Ehrlich, welcome to the program.
Judith Ehrlich: Thank you, Richard.
Richard Eskow: Did I get anything wrong in my introduction?
Judith Ehrlich: No, that was perfect.
Richard Eskow: Okay, except that I stumbled a little bit, but I’m a perfectionist. What can I say? An Ordinary Insanity is extremely gripping. I’ve watched it a couple of times now. But first, tell us a little about the film and how it came to be.
Judith Ehrlich: Well, it had been in the back of my mind for a while. I made The Most Dangerous Man, which is really a biography of Daniel Ellsberg and his work as both a whistleblower and a troublemaker. But this film covers something we didn’t get into in that one: his work as a nuclear war planner, and how he rebelled against who he had been.
He spent many decades, at least the last five decades of his life, fighting nuclear war, and he was arrested more than 80 times protesting it. He protested other things as well, but nuclear war was the focus of what he was really opposed to, and he felt an obligation to do something about it since he had been a war planner.
This film is half an hour long. It was made with Norman Solomon and RootsAction, and with our very generous executive producer as well. It’s really meant to be an advocacy piece, and it is. But what has really surprised me is that it’s doing well on the film festival circuit. I just sort of randomly thought, “Oh, I’ll slip it into a couple of film festivals.”
Everyone had been telling me it’s impossible, the competition is ridiculous. And it’s gotten into about 70% of the festivals I’ve applied to, which was a real surprise. My first thought was, who’s going to want to watch this at a film festival? But it turns out people do want to watch it.
I think we had taken this off the table. Climate change was the big threat, and now AI is the big threat, and who has time for three big threats all at once? So, could we just forget about nuclear war for a little while? We had that one for a long time.
“Please don’t pull that out of the closet.” Well, I have to apologize for pulling it out. But it just seemed so important to who Dan was. At the time, Norman and I were both interested in talking to Dan about this issue. You know Dan. There’s never a short interview with Dan.
This turned into a four-hour interview.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Judith Ehrlich: I think we asked one question, and four hours later we were wrapping. And for those four hours, your tongue is hanging out most of the time in amazement and fear. He went into the whole story of how he became a nuclear war planner.
There’s a really interesting story at the beginning, I think, about the loss of the papers. He had two sets of papers in his safe.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Judith Ehrlich: One was the Pentagon Papers. The other was the secrets of nuclear war planning. He had a whole debate about it with Randy Kehler, one of the prominent war resisters and a big influence on Dan.
They talked it over and decided he should release the Pentagon Papers. There was a chance he would have released the nuclear papers instead, but since the war was going on, he decided the Pentagon Papers were more important at that moment. So he released them. And he hid the nuclear war secrets and gave them to his brother for safekeeping.
Well, his brother buried them in a dump in upstate New York, where he lived, and put a stove over the spot. Then there was a hurricane. The hurricane picked up the stove and threw it down the mountainside, and Dan’s brother and his wife spent something like a year searching. They rented a backhoe and dug up the whole dump, and they never found the papers.
They found lots of other things, but not the papers. Anyway, Dan was really brilliant and an amazing researcher. He didn’t have the documents anymore, but he could recreate many of them from memory. He was also able to find them in archives and bring things up to date.
So he then wrote The Doomsday Machine, a book about his experience as a nuclear war planner and the threat of nuclear war. It’s a very sobering book and really well written. And I just want to plug this book, because I don’t think it’s gotten as much attention as it should. Wait, I got stuck in here.
It’s called... can you see that?
Richard Eskow: Yes, I can. Some people will be listening on the radio, though.
Judith Ehrlich: Oh, sorry.
Richard Eskow: Yes, it’s Truth and Consequence. If you hold it up again, I’ll read it for our audience. Truth and Consequence. It looks like a compendium of Dan’s work.
Judith Ehrlich: It has a subtitle, Richard: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope. It was compiled by his son Michael and his longtime assistant, Jan Thomas. It’s a really compelling read, and it’s his unpublished work, his notes. Dan always had a little notebook with him. When he wasn’t talking, he was writing.
Something would always grab him. I’ve never been in a conversation with Dan where he didn’t write down some notes. So he had copious notes, both handwritten and digital, and they put the book together from those notes.
Richard Eskow: And a prodigious memory. He discussed The Doomsday Machine on this program. It astonishes me that it wasn’t more of a conversation changer than it became, although it certainly had a strong influence. And that brings me to a point about the creation of this movie, An Ordinary Insanity, Judith, that I think is really important.
There was an old political science truism in the ’70s or ’80s. Political science was my minor; it was your major. I can’t remember who said it, but it was something to the effect of: the media can’t tell us what to think, but it can tell us what to think about. I’d argue that maybe it does both nowadays. But in terms of what to think about, I think you hit the nail right on the head earlier when you said everybody was talking about climate change.
Now they’re talking about AI. I have a computer background too, and I don’t think AI is an existential threat. I think it could cause harm. But isn’t it interesting that despite some of the terrifying brinkmanship of, for example, the first couple of years of the Ukraine war, we’re not talking about that? There’s a book out now about crossing what Joe Biden called his red lines, about risking nuclear conflict with Russia.
Instead we’re talking about AI and its hypothetical threat, as opposed to this extremely concrete one. So, A, I wonder whether that was part of the thinking in creating this film. And B, I have to say I’m not surprised it’s done well at film festivals, because we, the collective we, the zeitgeist, may not think that much about nuclear war on a day-to-day basis.
But within the first minute or two of your film, there’s a mushroom cloud. And once we see that mushroom cloud, I’d say for most of us, our attention kicks in fast and we’re reminded: oh yeah, this is what we’re talking about. I wonder if that was part of the thought process behind this film.
Judith Ehrlich: Definitely. There’s some very powerful imagery when you talk about nuclear war. It’s hard to avoid. And the reason I love seeing it from Dan’s perspective is that he always went to the moral question. It wasn’t just, can we do this? Can we get away with it?
What are the repercussions? It was always, why are we doing it? Why did we do it? Why do we spend this humongous, I don’t even know the word for how big it is, amount of money we’re now putting into modernizing these weapons, which we should be dumping? He really had a clear moral compass about why we do this.
Why, as a world of people... and more countries are jumping on the bandwagon because of the disruption of the Trump administration. The French are thinking about upgrading. The Germans want to get in.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Judith Ehrlich: All these countries that haven’t had nuclear weapons are now hoping to get them.
So it’s gotten even worse. And China has become a real player in this, although unlike us and the Russians, it doesn’t have a first-strike policy. It’s something that seems to have no justification for existing at all. And I’ve been really lucky: my two impact producers on this film were both leaders of the California freeze movement, the nuclear freeze, in the ’80s.
It’s amazing to me how committed the people in this movement are. There are so many organizations still around, still doing great work. We’re trying to embed this film in the organizations that exist, because so many people are still involved with this issue. I was sort of shocked to realize that it hasn’t died for many people.
Claire, one of my impact producers, went to the UN, and she knew everybody at these meetings of the NGOs involved in disarmament. It was like, how can they still be there? This is 40 years later, is it? I’m not so good with numbers, but it’s a long time. And many of the surviving members are still very actively fighting for disarmament.
It isn’t over. It isn’t a done deal. Somehow it’s just been taken off the table. I think the Cold War ended, and we all felt, “We don’t have to worry about that anymore. Let’s worry about all the other things we’re doing wrong.” But I think it’s time to put it back on the agenda.
And I’m getting the feeling that a lot of people agree with us that it’s a good time to bring it back. And Dan’s the right messenger, although he’s no longer with us. He is with us in spirit.
Richard Eskow: Well, and he experienced it. The title, An Ordinary Insanity, comes from his comment very early in the film that this insanity of nuclear war planning, of planning to annihilate most of humanity, is ordinary. He says it’s insane but common. And one of the powerful testimonies he can offer is that he was part of that cult.
He talks about it not just from the facts-and-figures point of view, but in terms of how it felt, as a young man, to be let in on these psychotic planning processes at the RAND Corporation or wherever he might have been. First in the military, I guess, and then with RAND.
That’s very striking to me. And you mentioned that we’re not talking about it much anymore. I should probably publish this, but I spent a lot of time going through John F. Kennedy’s 1960 platform (I don’t idealize any politician) and Joe Biden’s 2024 platform from before he stepped down, which became Kamala’s by default because she didn’t update it.
Kennedy talked about disarmament, I think, a dozen times. He talked about a world free of nuclear war. That was the liberal, or Democratic, position.
Judith Ehrlich: Yeah.
Richard Eskow: You said you didn’t know how much money it was. I believe Joe Biden’s 2024 platform boasted that, if reelected, he planned to spend $1.5 to $2 trillion upgrading our nuclear arsenal.
Judith Ehrlich: Yeah.
Richard Eskow: So there’s been nobody in the mainstream political world talking about disarmament. And yet the hair-trigger realities Dan described still exist, don’t they? We know that if not for a Soviet officer in 1983 or so, there might have been a war. That kind of thing could still happen, couldn’t it?
Judith Ehrlich: And it’s happened many times. There have been many false alarms, and it’s shocking. Honestly, I can’t even look at that information. It scares me. How close have we come, and how many times, to blowing up the world? It’s hard for me to understand why people are willing to live with that, and to invest so much money that could be used productively. Well, who knows how it would be used under this administration. Probably on more gilded buildings.
But anyway, it’s there. It’s trillions of dollars that could feed the world, and we’re spending it to kill everyone on the planet, and the planet itself. I was just reading a great piece Jerry Brown wrote in the New York Review of Books this month, a review of the book Truth and Consequence.
There are a couple of things in it from Dan that I’d love to quote. He said, “Any nuclear plan is a plan for madness. I am living in a society that is preparing a catastrophe. I taste ashes in the wind.” That really grabbed me as something poetic and absolutely true.
The other one that really grabbed me was when Dan talked about the Titanic to Jerry Brown, the former governor of California.
Richard Eskow: Sure.
Judith Ehrlich: The Titanic was speeding through the dark despite numerous ice warnings. His message was clear: “We are not merely drifting towards Armageddon, we’re racing there.” It feels like we just don’t look at the consequences of our behavior, or at how much this is costing us, morally and economically. If this is where we put our money, it says a lot about what we value.
And if what we value is mass murder, that doesn’t seem like a good thing to me. I think it reflects badly on our society and on all the other nuclear perpetrators. But it isn’t as if no one’s talking about this. There’s the... oh, what’s it called?
I should know this. There are something like 96 countries that have signed a ban on nuclear weapons, but of course none of them have the bomb.
Richard Eskow: Right, right.
Judith Ehrlich: So it’s easy enough to say “no more nuclear war” when you’re not one of the perpetrators. We’ve got to get the countries that have the bombs to start pledging to reduce them.
Richard Eskow: And that’s it for this week’s program. To hear the rest of my conversation with Judith Ehrlich, please go to www.zerohourreport.com, where you can also support our work, which we urgently need you to do. I know everybody says that, but if you think there’s value in this, please help us out. Either way, we’ll certainly plan on seeing you same time, same place next week.
I’m Richard RJ Eskow, and this is The Zero Hour.Transcript for October 26, 2026 broadcast
Richard Eskow: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another edition of The Zero Hour. I’m your host, Richard RJ Eskow. We’re covering two exceptionally important topics tonight. In the first conversation, I’ll be talking with Professor Richard Wolff about the protests and uprisings that began in France, have now spread through Europe, and are adding to or complementing the protests already underway in Albania and India, among other places.
That’s a prerecorded interview, so if the situation on the ground has changed a little, we won’t have addressed that. But I think the basic outline of the story will be the same, and the principles certainly are. Then we’ll be talking with filmmaker Judith Ehrlich about her extremely important new film on Daniel Ellsberg, his work as a doomsday planner, and his crusade to avoid nuclear holocaust.
So please stick around. I think it’s an important episode tonight, and we’ll be right back.
And we are back on The Zero Hour. I, as always, am your host, Richard RJ Eskow, and I always welcome my conversations with my good friend and ally Richard Wolff. Professor Wolff is an economic historian as well as an economist, and he’s the founder of Democracy at Work, an excellent organization you should check out.
I love his perspective on things. It so often clarifies my own thinking. So without further ado, Richard Wolff, welcome back to the program.
Richard Wolff: Thank you very much, Richard. Glad to be here.
Richard Eskow: In our last conversation, two weeks ago, we talked about the protests in France, which of course continue as we speak. As of a couple of days ago, we now see this headline on PBS.org: “From France to Albania, how social unrest is fueling protests across Europe.”
Their subhead: “Rising fuel costs, discontent with the state of schools, declining public services, and a housing crisis have created stormy weather for an autumn of protests in Europe.” They mention France, Italy, Albania, Spain, and Portugal. We could add the ongoing protests in India, which we’ve spoken about before, and the Cockroach Janata Party, which means Cockroach People’s Party, a satirical name. It seems to me there are some common factors in all of this, one of which is that students are often in the lead.
Another is that these protests aren’t limited to a single issue, as earlier demonstrations here and elsewhere might have been. They seem to be unified by broader economic injustices, which in France, for example, are bringing the unions in and bringing other people in.
There are tent cities in Spain, and I believe Portugal, protesting housing prices. The Cockroach Janata Party has also gained a lot of widespread support. So it seems to me this is a sign of something deeper and broader. That’s not to say student concerns are trivial. They’re profoundly important. But in many of these countries, students seem to have touched a nerve for their societies as a whole.
Does that sound right to you?
Richard Wolff: Absolutely. I’m going to quote RJ Eskow right back to RJ Eskow. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s very nice to wake up in the morning with the aroma of rebellion in the air. That’s how I feel, as though I’m waking up from a sleep. And here’s why. Let me add the following to the list you gave.
Last Saturday, a Saturday in the middle of October, 500,000 people went into the center of Madrid, the capital of Spain, to demand radical change in the housing situation. The rents are too high. The cost of housing is impossible. The commitments and promises conventional politicians made to deal with the situation have come to nothing.
So what we’re seeing is a movement across Europe saying that the so-called social contract has been broken. That’s how it’s often described in Europe, and it roughly means this: it’s okay for the government to help out big business, and it’s okay for the government to bail out big business when it collapses, but the deal is that you’ve got to give the mass of people, who after all pay the mass of taxes, some kind of roughly equivalent services.
Okay? That contract has been broken across Europe. I’d love to talk about the historical reasons for that. But Europe has never recovered from the end of World War II, from those two world wars fought mostly in Europe, on European soil, by European countries, in which three centuries of capitalism and colonialism exploded in the worst carnage the human race has ever visited upon itself. And by the way, those wars cost all of those countries their colonies.
That’s what made them rich. That’s what they built the global economy to get: the 90% of people living outside Europe, North America, and Japan providing incredible wealth to Europe, North America, and Japan. That’s over. Over the last 75 years, the Global South has let the world know that it is done with that arrangement.
There has to be a redistribution of everything in the world economy, because the Europeans, the Americans, and the Japanese built one for themselves and not for the mass of people. And that’s done. Europe has never recovered. For a while it tried to be the junior partner of the United States. Mr. Trump advised them that’s over.
Then they tried to recoup by moving eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aha, they could move eastward. They promised they wouldn’t, and they immediately did.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: And they took Eastern Europe back for themselves: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria. And Russia, threatened by all of this, drew a line in Ukraine, and the rest is what we’re living through now. So the Russians were the other ones who said to the Europeans, “No, no, no. You are not going to recoup your empire at our expense.”
And Mr. Trump has told them, “We’re not your allies anymore, Jack. You’re on your own.” The Europeans are desperate. And the people who built their political careers on being the junior partner of the United States, by which I mean Macron in France, Merz in Germany, Burnham in England, and all the rest of them, are now sinking.
The political center is gone. In France, it’s obvious. The right wing in France is sitting down with Mr. Macron to discuss saving him. That means a government of the right in France, with a party full of Nazis. That’s true in Germany, and it’s true in France. These are Nazis. You have to be scraping way down deep in the barrel to have that as part of your political coalition.
And they’ve been that way for decades. But that’s where the center is now, dealing with the right, because the alternative is the left, as it is everywhere in Europe. Americans don’t know this, because the media here operate as if there’s only a center and a right in European politics. When I explain the power of the left to them, they don’t understand it.
But I want to stress that the movement of the young people, the movement of those who feel the social contract has been violated, includes those 500,000 in Madrid. And their protest is against a socialist government. The government of Spain at this point is run by the Socialist Party. Again, Americans aren’t familiar with this, but it shows that the mass of people are as upset with the parties they feel close to as they are with the political center they’re kicking out of office now.
They’re serving notice that if all they get is a right-wing or left-wing repeat of what they’ve already seen, those protests will resume on a dime. One last point. There are five union confederations in France. Where we have one, the AFL-CIO, they have five, and they often disagree with one another on important issues.
All five of them, unified, simultaneously expressed their deep appreciation for the students and for the independence of their movement, and then announced that they support the students. Part of that support is a request that the students support them in return. And they announced that all of France will shut down on November 5th in a general strike.
Uh-oh. We’re now seeing a worker-student alliance forming immediately, right in the face of what Mr. Macron is doing. And what is he doing? Is he taking a new stand, or coming up with a plan for the schools? I want to remind everyone that this all began with teachers striking. Mr. Macron has done exactly nothing.
What he has done is as despicable as anything. He has unleashed the police, and now the army too. Repression is his number one response. The only other thing he’s done is get his cabinet to keep suggesting that immigrants are the problem. He took a page from Mr. Trump: scapegoat the immigrants. Why?
Well, immigrants are a sizable part of the population in France. They live overwhelmingly in ghettos.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: They get the worst jobs, the lowest pay, and the most abuse from the police. This is a tried-and-true tactic, just like here. And in case you were wondering, yes, Mr. Trump has weighed in. He doesn’t like Macron, but he said, “Good for you. Repression is what you should do.”
Wow. Wow.
Richard Eskow: And, you know—
Richard Wolff: By the way, that was so bad for Mr. Macron that he had to denounce it. He described Trump’s statement of support, along with those of several other European leaders, with an adjective that’s the same word in French as in English: stupid. That’s how bad it was for him, because the French people understood that he’s in the same place as Trump.
Richard Eskow: I’m sorry, go ahead. I didn’t realize you had another thought.
Richard Wolff: One last thought.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: He calls Trump stupid, but the one who’s stupid is him. Repression is a stupid response. What do you think it says? Whether or not it works to slow down the protests, it makes this government the enemy of all the students. Who’s supporting Mr. Macron? Older people. Who’s supporting the protests? Younger people.
Richard Eskow: Including working-age people and working people, which is a tough coalition to go up against.
Richard Wolff: That’s right. It’s been the dream of leftists, a worker-student alliance that really is one. And you’ve got it now, and you’ve got it from the very first step.
Richard Eskow: Just to be clear about his response, when we talk about repression we mean extreme violence. I’ve talked to people in France who say this is worse than 1968 in terms of police violence. For example, among what we’d call high school students here, one lost an eye, one lost an arm, one lost a hand.
These were extreme levels of violence. They’ve also created these rush courts, special quasi-military courts where people have already been tried, convicted, and punished. So it’s very repressive. And I want to tie this back to something you mentioned, the cozying up of French elites to Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party.
I thought about this after our last conversation, Rick, because you mentioned that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the largest left party in France, France Unbowed, you could call it, was saying, “Oh, maybe we don’t pay the banks back. Maybe we don’t pay the banks their interest.”
Marine Le Pen is not going to say that. So after lumping the left and the right together under the scare word “populist,” I suddenly thought to myself, maybe one group of populists will become more popular with the elites than the other. That was one reaction I had.
Another was this. Immediately we saw hand-wringing in the New York Times and in some of the European papers as well: “This is just going to boost Marine Le Pen, right? This is just going to ensure that the National Rally wins, because the chaos will be blamed on the left.”
Well, first of all, says who? You’re trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy when you say that. Second, of course, older people may think of Nixon and the silent majority and all that from the 1960s. But two pieces get left out of that picture.
One is the utter ineptitude of Macron and the centrists in France and all across Europe, and the centrists here. In terms of my own thought process, I want to point you to a 2018 political science study. I’m blanking on its name, but they used a massive survey that’s conducted in a number of countries and then sifted it for this data.
These were political scientists in Finland, and they concluded that growing numbers of economically marginalized people felt, in their words, “extreme discontent with disliked elites.” And they said these people were intentionally spreading false news stories and irate language, and these are the political scientists’ terms, because they wanted to “unleash chaos,” “to burn down the entire established political order,” and to “disrupt the entire established democratic cosmos and start anew.”
Rather striking words, so they stuck with me. And of course, the centrism represented by, let’s say, Macron, or Andy Burnham in the UK, or Joe Biden in the United States, is the failed political philosophy of those despised elites. I don’t necessarily idealize any US president, but one of JFK’s speechwriters came up with a good line: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Remember that? If you turn all your firepower against the left, as they’ve been doing here and in Europe for at least a decade now, you are in fact empowering the right among people who want anything but the crappy system we have now, a system they understandably feel has marginalized and wronged them.
What are your thoughts on that?
Richard Wolff: I could not agree more, and I think American history illustrates your point. If you want to know what created the opportunity for Mr. Trump, it was the policies of the Republican and Democratic governments that preceded him. They celebrated the departure of our manufacturing as if it had no consequences anybody should worry about.
My profession celebrated neoliberal globalization as, and I’m quoting here, “a win-win for everyone.” Yeah? You know what the losers from that did? They bounced Mr. Bush out of office and brought Mr. Trump in. So yes, exactly that. You have militated against the left over and over again, first because of its link to the Soviet Union, and thereafter because, as Europe, you were drowning for all the reasons we’ve already talked about.
So you turned against Russia because you wanted to recreate an empire for yourself in Eastern Europe. It is a pathetic display. And I want to zero in on Mr. Macron. People don’t know what his last job was before he became prime minister. He was minister of education in a Socialist Party government in France.
His career was as a socialist, and then he jumped ship when he could run against the socialists and become the icon of the center. Well, he jumped onto a ship that hit an iceberg, and now he’s going down with that ship. And I’m going to make a prediction, not that I believe I can actually predict anything. Of course I can’t.
But I think you’re going to see the collapse of Mr. Macron. He’ll cut a deal, because he has no principles and never did, like so many of the elites in France. If you whore yourself out economically to the United States for 75 years, your moral fiber gets worn out. Let me leave it at that.
So these people go with the wind, and the wind is now blowing to the right. They’ll become shills for Marine Le Pen, and we’ll see that happen. But I’ve studied the right wing. They have no solutions to the problems of France. None at all. And they have to serve the business community, because they always have and that’s their financial support.
So they will fail. And then, with Mr. Mélenchon or whoever replaces him, it will be the left’s turn. And I’m noticing that some of the right-wing thinkers in Europe I pay attention to see this too.
Richard Eskow: Really? That’s interesting. Let’s play out another dimension of this, if you don’t mind. Again, I’m going off the quotation you shared last time from Mélenchon, saying maybe we need to renegotiate or reconsider paying back the debt to these banks.
Richard Wolff: Right.
Richard Eskow: Because of course, here in the United States, every mainstream commentator is willing to reconsider paying back the debt the government owes to the Social Security Trust Fund, and therefore to the elderly and disabled in this country.
Nobody would dare suggest the same about the banks. I remember debating a Fox News guy back when George Bush was saying the trust fund bonds were “just IOUs,” and I said, “What about JPMorgan Chase’s Treasury bonds? They’re just IOUs too.” So that’s a red line, in a sense. But I think we have an interesting situation going on.
And maybe we can contribute in our own way to the conversation around it. Western democracy, such as it is today, is largely based on John Locke’s idea of the consent of the governed. It’s written into our founding documents: the just consent of the governed.
Is that the right phrase? “Just consent of the governed”? Yes, I think so. Oh yes: governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In other words, if the people being governed don’t want to be governed that way, it’s unjust. That’s written into the founding of the United States of America.
Now, the combination of economic power, monopoly power, runaway inequality, concentration of wealth, Elon Musk being a theoretical trillionaire, all of this means we are now subject to unjust rule. We are the economically governed, and we have not given our consent to be governed by Wall Street or by financial institutions.
We have not given our consent to be governed by the IMF or by any other multilateral organization of that kind. We have not. And yet we’re always hearing about how the bond market is going to react to this and how Wall Street is going to react to that. You’ve made a theme of bringing democratic principles into the workplace.
Well, I’d argue there’s a macro equivalent of that too: who the hell put Jamie Dimon in charge of anything? Who put Scott Bessent in charge of anything? Our political process is totally bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires. We’ve seen that now. People are doing great things to try to wrest power back.
But until we confront that directly and say, “You’re not the boss of us, Bank of America, Brian Moynihan, whomever,” nothing will change. And of course, if you bring that up, people get terrified and say it will cause an utter collapse of the US economy. Well, we’ll see about that. But shouldn’t we at least be talking about it?
Richard Wolff: It’s unbelievable. I’ve been trying to get this across in my teaching and writing all my life. Here’s the practical way it’s coming. You’re going to have masses of people, and you already have them here in this country. Affordability, we’re told, is a big issue. Okay. That can be reframed as: the government could do the following list of wonderful things if it didn’t pay back its debt to the richest people in the country.
You could say the debt is canceled if your net worth is over X. Okay? I could give you a thousand ways to rearrange this. This obeisance, this unspoken notion that you can’t touch certain things because it won’t work and it’ll all fall apart, is the protective coating of the status quo.
It is never true. Karl Marx was enthralled by the Paris Commune, the takeover of the city of Paris in 1871 that lasted a few months, when the working class rose up, took power, and threw out the old establishment. One of the institutions they didn’t touch was the bank. Marx wrote The Civil War in France, one of his most famous pamphlets, as his assessment after the Commune’s defeat.
What happened? What did we do right? What did we do wrong? That’s what a good organizer does after every defeat.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: And after every victory. What happened here? What do we learn? One of his comments was that the bank isn’t a neutral agency. The bank isn’t some deus ex machina you have to bow down to. It’s a human institution like everything else, and it has to be interrogated, confronted, and reorganized, because if you don’t, it will pull you back into the way things were before.
And that’s exactly what you just said. It’s just the historical equivalent. We are rediscovering, as is the whole country, that there was a guy named Karl Marx who figured a good number of things out, and that we would do better to build on them, criticism included, than to pretend he isn’t there.
Most of the education I had pretended he wasn’t there.
Richard Eskow: Right. For reasons I can’t go into, I was going through my old books, and of all things, I found that my father gave me The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner, a book about economics, for my 16th birthday. It had a chapter on Marx. Heilbroner was almost the only well-known economist of that era who acknowledged that there was this other guy in there among the others.
But I think people get it if you ask them, “What’s money?” Money is a way to allocate resources, and it can be used in different ways, et cetera, et cetera. But ask “What’s finance?” and you’ve lost everybody. And the reason you’ve lost everybody is that while money, particularly coins, has at least some traceable relationship to physical objects, finance is truly just conceptual, unless I’m missing something.
Tell me if I’m missing something, but to me—
Richard Wolff: Oh, no, no, no.
Richard Eskow: Okay. Futures, pork belly futures: “We think they’re going to do that.” But that’s just like me saying to you, “I think people are going to stop buying those pork bellies.” It has no more weight than that. Yet we give that entire universe, which last time I looked accounted for more than 50% of corporate profits in this country, maybe less now, the power to become a source of vast wealth.
Vast power, vast misallocation of resources. And yet we treat it as if no other ideas had ever existed, as if this were as fundamental as E=mc². It’s just the way the universe is built.
Richard Wolff: Yeah. Look, it’s amazing to me. The way I do it is the same as the way you just did it. I say, Elon Musk is a trillionaire or close to it. That means he has control over a trillion dollars. What is he going to do with it? Is he going to use SpaceX to go exploring the heavens?
Is he going to make an electric car we can all have, one that flies as well as drives on the road? He is making a decision equivalent to what the government does with a trillion dollars. And a trillion dollars is a big chunk of what we have.
Richard Eskow: Yeah, right.
Richard Wolff: So we’re saying this one man has the same role in shaping the economic future of our society, the one in which I will make a living and my children will make a living, as the government, which represents 330 million people.
There’s no way to square that with democracy. It’s a standing refutation of the whole notion of calling the United States a democratic society. It’s just done. And anybody who doesn’t get that seems to me to be unconnected to the reality we live in, so busy providing an excuse or a rationale that looking at the actual situation is impossible.
Richard Eskow: Yeah. People talk about the expenditures for Social Security. Well, Elon Musk could basically pay for Social Security for a year. He could certainly fund the war in Ukraine and three others indefinitely. It’s absolutely insane. And of course, as you know, studies have shown that people in this country are incapable of fully grasping how much money these people have and how distorted it is compared to the rest of us.
And if they can’t grasp it, they certainly can’t take the next step, and I don’t blame them. It’s astronomical. If they can’t grasp it, they can’t understand what it means in terms of concrete power. So maybe we’re defining the theme of our next conversation: how does this message get communicated so that people understand, “Hey, you don’t live in a democracy”?
Elon Musk can put a quarter of a billion dollars into an election without batting an eye. It’s not a democracy when you have Elon Musk and 10 other billionaires in there, when you have 40 people who have more than three-quarters of us and five people who have more than half of us.
This is not a democracy. Yes, you can do a few things. You can allocate the little budget they allow you to have in certain ways. You’re kind of like the king’s local viceroy for a village, but you don’t have the power to decide your own democratic future.
This is not just power derived from the consent of the governed. Isn’t it our mission to get that across?
Richard Wolff: Yes, with the following caveat.
Richard Eskow: Okay.
Richard Wolff: It seems that the experience of this crazy wealth produces, in those who have it, a blindness and a hostility toward the mass of people that combines into what appears to the rest of us to be endless greed. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk is deep in thought these days about whether to merge Tesla and SpaceX.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Richard Wolff: In other words, to make himself even richer. He’s spending his time and energy the way capitalism as a system does. As I say every chance I get, the achievement of capitalism in America over the last few years has been to make the already richest man in the world, Elon Musk, much richer, on a planet with starvation in large parts of it, with inadequate housing, inadequate healthcare, and inadequate education.
That’s so crazy that I think it allows us to point out that these people are caught up in their own little craziness and don’t understand their limits. So let me close with a line from Clint Eastwood, the actor. In one of his movies, he looks at a crooked police official who has just killed himself and muses, “Some people don’t know their own limits.”
Richard Eskow: Well, I hope that’s true. Let me quote another Clint Eastwood line, one that my late brother wrote, because he was a screenwriter: “My position on gun control is that if there’s a gun in the room, I want to control it.”
The gun in this room is $1 trillion.
Richard Wolff: Right.
Richard Eskow: And it’s being used to decimate our future through data center pollution and to live out an absurd SpaceX fantasy. I’ve read that plan cover to cover. You could find a more realistic business plan in a 1957 copy of Amazing Stories about the bride-women of Mars or whatever.
So, this lunatic... You said being so wealthy makes them this way. I agree, but I also think they self-select and become wealthy because of a certain inherent sociopathy. So we also have a system that selects our economic rulers based on maladaptation to human society.
Okay, I guess we’ll have to leave it there, but there’s a lot to talk about, and it’s certainly fun doing it with you. We need all the fun we can get these days. Richard Wolff, economist and host of Economic Update on Free Speech TV, as always, thanks for coming on the program and thanks for your insights.
Richard Wolff: Thank you, Richard, for making the program possible. You initiated this, and it’s been a wonderful experience. I look forward to the next one as well.
Richard Eskow: As do I. And we’ll be right back after this. I’m Richard RJ Eskow, and this is The Zero Hour.
And we are back on The Zero Hour. I’m your host, Richard RJ Eskow. When future historians write the story of our time, provided there are future historians around to write it, I think one of the figures who will loom largest in importance to the future of humanity is the late Daniel Ellsberg.
Daniel Ellsberg, of course, first became famous for revealing the Pentagon Papers. He followed that with at least 50 years of committed activism and action in a number of areas. He was on this program a couple of times before his death in, I believe, 2023. And my next guest has now produced and directed two films about Daniel Ellsberg, the latest of which was just recently released.
The filmmaker Judith Ehrlich co-produced and co-directed The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which was nominated for an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy in 2009. Her other films include The Boys Who Said No, about the draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War. She also co-produced and directed The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, the story of the men who refused, for the cause of pacifism, to take part in World War II.
She has twice won the top U.S. awards for history film: the John E. O’Connor Film Award from the American Historical Association and the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians. Her new film is An Ordinary Insanity: Daniel Ellsberg on the Nuclear Threat, and she joins us now.
So first of all, Judith Ehrlich, welcome to the program.
Judith Ehrlich: Thank you, Richard.
Richard Eskow: Did I get anything wrong in my introduction?
Judith Ehrlich: No, that was perfect.
Richard Eskow: Okay, except that I stumbled a little bit, but I’m a perfectionist. What can I say? An Ordinary Insanity is extremely gripping. I’ve watched it a couple of times now. But first, tell us a little about the film and how it came to be.
Judith Ehrlich: Well, it had been in the back of my mind for a while. I made The Most Dangerous Man, which is really a biography of Daniel Ellsberg and his work as both a whistleblower and a troublemaker. But this film covers something we didn’t get into in that one: his work as a nuclear war planner, and how he rebelled against who he had been.
He spent many decades, at least the last five decades of his life, fighting nuclear war, and he was arrested more than 80 times protesting it. He protested other things as well, but nuclear war was the focus of what he was really opposed to, and he felt an obligation to do something about it since he had been a war planner.
This film is half an hour long. It was made with Norman Solomon and RootsAction, and with our very generous executive producer as well. It’s really meant to be an advocacy piece, and it is. But what has really surprised me is that it’s doing well on the film festival circuit. I just sort of randomly thought, “Oh, I’ll slip it into a couple of film festivals.”
Everyone had been telling me it’s impossible, the competition is ridiculous. And it’s gotten into about 70% of the festivals I’ve applied to, which was a real surprise. My first thought was, who’s going to want to watch this at a film festival? But it turns out people do want to watch it.
I think we had taken this off the table. Climate change was the big threat, and now AI is the big threat, and who has time for three big threats all at once? So, could we just forget about nuclear war for a little while? We had that one for a long time.
“Please don’t pull that out of the closet.” Well, I have to apologize for pulling it out. But it just seemed so important to who Dan was. At the time, Norman and I were both interested in talking to Dan about this issue. You know Dan. There’s never a short interview with Dan.
This turned into a four-hour interview.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Judith Ehrlich: I think we asked one question, and four hours later we were wrapping. And for those four hours, your tongue is hanging out most of the time in amazement and fear. He went into the whole story of how he became a nuclear war planner.
There’s a really interesting story at the beginning, I think, about the loss of the papers. He had two sets of papers in his safe.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Judith Ehrlich: One was the Pentagon Papers. The other was the secrets of nuclear war planning. He had a whole debate about it with Randy Kehler, one of the prominent war resisters and a big influence on Dan.
They talked it over and decided he should release the Pentagon Papers. There was a chance he would have released the nuclear papers instead, but since the war was going on, he decided the Pentagon Papers were more important at that moment. So he released them. And he hid the nuclear war secrets and gave them to his brother for safekeeping.
Well, his brother buried them in a dump in upstate New York, where he lived, and put a stove over the spot. Then there was a hurricane. The hurricane picked up the stove and threw it down the mountainside, and Dan’s brother and his wife spent something like a year searching. They rented a backhoe and dug up the whole dump, and they never found the papers.
They found lots of other things, but not the papers. Anyway, Dan was really brilliant and an amazing researcher. He didn’t have the documents anymore, but he could recreate many of them from memory. He was also able to find them in archives and bring things up to date.
So he then wrote The Doomsday Machine, a book about his experience as a nuclear war planner and the threat of nuclear war. It’s a very sobering book and really well written. And I just want to plug this book, because I don’t think it’s gotten as much attention as it should. Wait, I got stuck in here.
It’s called... can you see that?
Richard Eskow: Yes, I can. Some people will be listening on the radio, though.
Judith Ehrlich: Oh, sorry.
Richard Eskow: Yes, it’s Truth and Consequence. If you hold it up again, I’ll read it for our audience. Truth and Consequence. It looks like a compendium of Dan’s work.
Judith Ehrlich: It has a subtitle, Richard: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope. It was compiled by his son Michael and his longtime assistant, Jan Thomas. It’s a really compelling read, and it’s his unpublished work, his notes. Dan always had a little notebook with him. When he wasn’t talking, he was writing.
Something would always grab him. I’ve never been in a conversation with Dan where he didn’t write down some notes. So he had copious notes, both handwritten and digital, and they put the book together from those notes.
Richard Eskow: And a prodigious memory. He discussed The Doomsday Machine on this program. It astonishes me that it wasn’t more of a conversation changer than it became, although it certainly had a strong influence. And that brings me to a point about the creation of this movie, An Ordinary Insanity, Judith, that I think is really important.
There was an old political science truism in the ’70s or ’80s. Political science was my minor; it was your major. I can’t remember who said it, but it was something to the effect of: the media can’t tell us what to think, but it can tell us what to think about. I’d argue that maybe it does both nowadays. But in terms of what to think about, I think you hit the nail right on the head earlier when you said everybody was talking about climate change.
Now they’re talking about AI. I have a computer background too, and I don’t think AI is an existential threat. I think it could cause harm. But isn’t it interesting that despite some of the terrifying brinkmanship of, for example, the first couple of years of the Ukraine war, we’re not talking about that? There’s a book out now about crossing what Joe Biden called his red lines, about risking nuclear conflict with Russia.
Instead we’re talking about AI and its hypothetical threat, as opposed to this extremely concrete one. So, A, I wonder whether that was part of the thinking in creating this film. And B, I have to say I’m not surprised it’s done well at film festivals, because we, the collective we, the zeitgeist, may not think that much about nuclear war on a day-to-day basis.
But within the first minute or two of your film, there’s a mushroom cloud. And once we see that mushroom cloud, I’d say for most of us, our attention kicks in fast and we’re reminded: oh yeah, this is what we’re talking about. I wonder if that was part of the thought process behind this film.
Judith Ehrlich: Definitely. There’s some very powerful imagery when you talk about nuclear war. It’s hard to avoid. And the reason I love seeing it from Dan’s perspective is that he always went to the moral question. It wasn’t just, can we do this? Can we get away with it?
What are the repercussions? It was always, why are we doing it? Why did we do it? Why do we spend this humongous, I don’t even know the word for how big it is, amount of money we’re now putting into modernizing these weapons, which we should be dumping? He really had a clear moral compass about why we do this.
Why, as a world of people... and more countries are jumping on the bandwagon because of the disruption of the Trump administration. The French are thinking about upgrading. The Germans want to get in.
Richard Eskow: Right.
Judith Ehrlich: All these countries that haven’t had nuclear weapons are now hoping to get them.
So it’s gotten even worse. And China has become a real player in this, although unlike us and the Russians, it doesn’t have a first-strike policy. It’s something that seems to have no justification for existing at all. And I’ve been really lucky: my two impact producers on this film were both leaders of the California freeze movement, the nuclear freeze, in the ’80s.
It’s amazing to me how committed the people in this movement are. There are so many organizations still around, still doing great work. We’re trying to embed this film in the organizations that exist, because so many people are still involved with this issue. I was sort of shocked to realize that it hasn’t died for many people.
Claire, one of my impact producers, went to the UN, and she knew everybody at these meetings of the NGOs involved in disarmament. It was like, how can they still be there? This is 40 years later, is it? I’m not so good with numbers, but it’s a long time. And many of the surviving members are still very actively fighting for disarmament.
It isn’t over. It isn’t a done deal. Somehow it’s just been taken off the table. I think the Cold War ended, and we all felt, “We don’t have to worry about that anymore. Let’s worry about all the other things we’re doing wrong.” But I think it’s time to put it back on the agenda.
And I’m getting the feeling that a lot of people agree with us that it’s a good time to bring it back. And Dan’s the right messenger, although he’s no longer with us. He is with us in spirit.
Richard Eskow: Well, and he experienced it. The title, An Ordinary Insanity, comes from his comment very early in the film that this insanity of nuclear war planning, of planning to annihilate most of humanity, is ordinary. He says it’s insane but common. And one of the powerful testimonies he can offer is that he was part of that cult.
He talks about it not just from the facts-and-figures point of view, but in terms of how it felt, as a young man, to be let in on these psychotic planning processes at the RAND Corporation or wherever he might have been. First in the military, I guess, and then with RAND.
That’s very striking to me. And you mentioned that we’re not talking about it much anymore. I should probably publish this, but I spent a lot of time going through John F. Kennedy’s 1960 platform (I don’t idealize any politician) and Joe Biden’s 2024 platform from before he stepped down, which became Kamala’s by default because she didn’t update it.
Kennedy talked about disarmament, I think, a dozen times. He talked about a world free of nuclear war. That was the liberal, or Democratic, position.
Judith Ehrlich: Yeah.
Richard Eskow: You said you didn’t know how much money it was. I believe Joe Biden’s 2024 platform boasted that, if reelected, he planned to spend $1.5 to $2 trillion upgrading our nuclear arsenal.
Judith Ehrlich: Yeah.
Richard Eskow: So there’s been nobody in the mainstream political world talking about disarmament. And yet the hair-trigger realities Dan described still exist, don’t they? We know that if not for a Soviet officer in 1983 or so, there might have been a war. That kind of thing could still happen, couldn’t it?
Judith Ehrlich: And it’s happened many times. There have been many false alarms, and it’s shocking. Honestly, I can’t even look at that information. It scares me. How close have we come, and how many times, to blowing up the world? It’s hard for me to understand why people are willing to live with that, and to invest so much money that could be used productively. Well, who knows how it would be used under this administration. Probably on more gilded buildings.
But anyway, it’s there. It’s trillions of dollars that could feed the world, and we’re spending it to kill everyone on the planet, and the planet itself. I was just reading a great piece Jerry Brown wrote in the New York Review of Books this month, a review of the book Truth and Consequence.
There are a couple of things in it from Dan that I’d love to quote. He said, “Any nuclear plan is a plan for madness. I am living in a society that is preparing a catastrophe. I taste ashes in the wind.” That really grabbed me as something poetic and absolutely true.
The other one that really grabbed me was when Dan talked about the Titanic to Jerry Brown, the former governor of California.
Richard Eskow: Sure.
Judith Ehrlich: The Titanic was speeding through the dark despite numerous ice warnings. His message was clear: “We are not merely drifting towards Armageddon, we’re racing there.” It feels like we just don’t look at the consequences of our behavior, or at how much this is costing us, morally and economically. If this is where we put our money, it says a lot about what we value.
And if what we value is mass murder, that doesn’t seem like a good thing to me. I think it reflects badly on our society and on all the other nuclear perpetrators. But it isn’t as if no one’s talking about this. There’s the... oh, what’s it called?
I should know this. There are something like 96 countries that have signed a ban on nuclear weapons, but of course none of them have the bomb.
Richard Eskow: Right, right.
Judith Ehrlich: So it’s easy enough to say “no more nuclear war” when you’re not one of the perpetrators. We’ve got to get the countries that have the bombs to start pledging to reduce them.
Richard Eskow: And that’s it for this week’s program. To hear the rest of my conversation with Judith Ehrlich, please go to www.zerohourreport.com, where you can also support our work, which we urgently need you to do. I know everybody says that, but if you think there’s value in this, please help us out. Either way, we’ll certainly plan on seeing you same time, same place next week.
I’m Richard RJ Eskow, and this is The Zero Hour.
