NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, January 22, 2026, and our dear friends, Richard Wolf and Michael Hudson, are here with us. Welcome back, Richard and Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be back.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Let me start, Michael, with you. And you know that we were talking about these sorts of geopolitical issues all along, but here at Davos, and when you look at Davos and the World Economic Forum, is Davos turning from an economic forum into the launch pad for a new global power order? And who actually voted for that? And when Donald Trump is talking about peace, it seems to me that he’s really talking about, he’s not talking about ending wars. He’s talking about reorganizing the world into rival military blocs. What’s your understanding of that, Michael?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, his idea of making peace is to wage war against all the enemies. And when you beat them, there’s peace because the war is over and they’re defeated. And the reason all of this is relevant at Davos is it’s all ultimately about economics. I mean, that’s what’s triggered the whole war. If the American strategy as a whole is to take over the world economy, to keep the dollar in the center, to create this new rules-based order, then you can’t be more economic than that.
And the question is, what’s Europe going to do about it? China has reacted in a way. Russia, we’re waiting for it to happen. Iran is waiting for it to happen. And you’ve had two recent guests on [your show] that have been just wonderfully explaining what the key relevance of Greenland is for all of this. You’ve had John Helmer and you’ve had my friend Craig Roberts saying it’s not really about rare earth elements or minerals at all, because these minerals are under a kilometer of ice and glaciers, and you’re not going to get to them for quite a while. It’s about military and it’s about control of the sea.
And it’s not only about getting control of Greenland as the 51st state, but as the named U.S. Ambassador to Iceland has pointed out, it’s to make Iceland the 52nd state. There’s no point in taking Greenland over militarily unless you control Iceland also, because then you have a kind of seaborne Maginot Line. You’ve got everything from Canada to Greenland to Iceland to Norway, all in a line, and that blocks access from the North Atlantic into the Arctic Sea. And of course, that’s the whole idea of the Arctic Sea melting and letting there to be transport so that Europe doesn’t have to go around either South Africa or the bottom of Patagonia in South America. It can just go very simply to the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Arctic. That’s what Trump wants to block, just as he’s wanted to block China’s investment in the port on the Panama Canal. He wants to control the law of the sea.
Well, the problem is that this is against all international law of freedom of the seas. That’s the basis of international law, and it’s written into the United Nations Charter. So what Trump has tried to do, in addition to talking about Greenland, is this board of peace that you’ve been mentioning. And you’re right, the board of peace is, we will declare war on everyone who does not agree [to] peace on the American terms of the new Cold War order. And Mark Carney had given a good speech yesterday saying, you know, this whole idea of the rules-based order is all a fiction. And they’re trying to play with our minds. They’re trying to make us think of the order as really being something that serves uniquely the United States without really coming to terms with the fact that this reverses all of the body of international law, not only that was included in the United Nations Charter in 1945, but goes all the way back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, national sovereignty.
So you can look at Trump’s speech and those of Bessent and the other people who were there saying we really want to nullify all reference to national sovereignty. Well, the question is, what’s Europe going to do about it? What has complicated things is that Trump didn’t merely want something that NATO wants and that Denmark wants, which is to militarize Greenland, which is to fight Russia. Denmark is just as anti-Russian as Germany and Britain.
Trump wants to actually own Greenland so that he can say he’s expanded the United States for the greatest extent since James Polk in 1844 when he grabbed much of Mexico with Manifest Destiny. And America’s manifest destiny was extended all the way to Asia already in the Spanish-American War when it said, well, we need the Philippines as part of America’s destiny to control the seas. We need Hawaii to control the Pacific.
So all of this control of the sea is an attempt to complement the American war against China’s Belt and Road Initiative, trying to integrate Eurasia with each other and with China. It’s all about geoeconomics and geopolitics is geoeconomics here. So the fight over Greenland is sort of one step to taking over Iceland and Trump’s major backers, the Silicon Valley people, look at Iceland not only militarily, but as a vast support of energy through its volcanic, it’s hot water. It’s volcanic. Iceland, I think a decade ago, leased its volcanic power in the north to aluminum companies to do aluminum refining, since aluminum is made out of electricity. And it didn’t get anything at all in exchange for this. The aluminum company said we’re going to employ a few Icelanders there. I think seven or eight Icelanders were employed. And I spoke to three prime ministers of Iceland about this, and they all said, Well, there’s nothing we can do. The big families in Iceland are all very pro-American.
And so this is really what’s complicating everything. What will Iceland [do]? If Europe gives up about Greenland, it’s going to give up about Iceland. It’s going to essentially say, we’re going to block Russia’s access to the sea, not only access to the Arctic, but its trade with Cuba and Venezuela and the Atlantic, its access to the Baltic Sea, which is already they’re seizing tankers. The seizure of tankers is technically an act of war. If a private company seizes a tanker, that’s piracy. If a government seizes a tanker, that’s an act of war.
I don’t see Europe responding in any way trying to stop this by, for instance, going to the International Criminal Court and accusing Trump of being a war criminal. The Financial Times, of all people and papers, has been emphasizing again and again: here are all the things that Europe can do to block the United States. And one of the wildcards here is that those agreements that von der Leyen made, the surrender to Trump over the U.S. tariffs that were imposed on Europe in exchange for its givebacks of total subordination, have not been approved by the national parliaments yet. And you can be sure that all of this European response in national parliaments is blocking them, I think, from surrendering to Trump’s tariff and giveback demands.
So you’re just seeing the rise-up of European realization [that] maybe we should begin to do what we’d threatened to do … as a response to Trump. Maybe we should begin taxing … America’s internet companies [like] Google and Facebook in the same way that we tax other companies. Maybe we should not give special exemptions to the United States. There are all sorts of things that Europe can do. But to start things off, before all of this, you had the head of NATO, Rutte, write an amazing memo sucking up to Trump saying, you know, I’m with you. … What you’re doing in Greenland is wonderful. We’ve got to talk as soon as you get to Davos. I’m with you. You know, we’ll block the fact that European politicians may not want that.
And most of the European politicians are really quite silent. And the newspapers, Financial Times, and others say, well, maybe they’re talking among themselves as to what to do, but this is really the showdown. And as you just pointed out, Trump’s Board of Peace is basically it. He wants it to replace the Gang of Seven to replace really the United Nations. He’s saying the United Nations is the old body of international law. The Board of Peace will have the rules-based order, and that will be a new form of international law where the rest of the world are satellites. The United States, Russia, and China are really the three powers. And the national security strategy said, well, we have to recognize India and, of course, Japan.
Well, Japan is just a satellite of the United States. And what’s happening is something very much like how the Catholic Church took over Europe in the 11th century when they had all sorts of warlords. They wanted to subdue Germany. They wanted to conquer the Eastern Christianity out of Constantinople, but they didn’t have an army. So they made deals, first with Robert Guiscard in Sicily, in southern Italy, and then William the Conqueror.
And they actually drew up contracts with each of these leaders saying, we will make you the king of Sicily, the king of England, and we’ll recognize you with the church. We’ll legitimize your rule, but you have to sign a contract. And you have to give us control of all of the finances of your church lands there. The church was the largest landowner and the largest economic center as well as a social center of Europe. And you have to, the money that you collect in Peter’s Pence, the contributions to support the poor, instead of supporting the poor in your social spending, you have to send it all to Rome.
And William the Conqueror signed, and Robert Guisgaard signed, and that basically became a format that turned other countries into satellites first of Rome, but then after the Crusades fell, Rome lost the power, and all this control over governments passed into the international banking class. And it was the bankers that sort of said, Well, now we’re telling governments, you know … you have to give priority to paying all of the war debts that you’ve taken on to us to put foreign creditors first and to put our power first. And that’s what led them to back the Protestant parliamentary countries that were willing to tax the entire population to pay their debts.
And all of this has happened before. And each time, the European governments have surrendered. And this time they’re not surrendering to an abstract international financial group. What is different is that the United States wants to control the international financial system itself, the international trade system, international investment, and the law of the seas. You have a huge power grab that Trump is trying to do. And the question is: I other countries do not fight back, they’re going to end up essentially in a unipolar society where they are diverting their social spending to military spending to try to break up Russia and China until they too can be drawn into this U.S.-centered system. That’s the U.S. national security strategy that was just published a month ago. And that really is what’s at stake in Davos right now.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, jump in.
RICHARD WOLFF: Nima, let me try to, as often happens, complement in a way what Michael has just said with a bit of a different interpretation. First, I too was struck by Rutte’s statement because it exemplified to me that in every European capital, the leaders, and I, by the way, mean every European capital, the leaders are trying to figure out which way the wind is now really kind of blowing, whether it’s safe to break away from the United States or it isn’t. Can you imagine a unified Europe taking a different position? Or will that simply be the occasion for the French to betray the Germans and the Italians, both of them, and the Scandinavians still again?
They haven’t been able to overcome the results of the Treaty of Westphalia. You know, nationalism was the midwife of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, which is why capitalism has remained so committed to the national mentality and the national framework for understanding long after it didn’t make much sense anymore because of the economic development. And I think you’re seeing that right now, number one.
Number two, my understanding of the grabbing of Greenland is that it’s all about the struggle with Europe. The United States is taking an immense gamble. It is gambling that it can subordinate its allies and turn them into slaves. Transform Europe from the ally you needed to come to terms with, because it’s the front line against the Soviet Union, into Europe that will do for you what Central American countries have been doing for you for a long time.
I also think it’s delusional. The statement on the 4th of December that we have talked about, that national security, that’s a delusional argument. That’s a well-written version of Mr. Trump’s incoherent press conferences. It also confuses Greenland and Iceland because they are indistinguishably a problem. And what is the problem? Europe. The United States wants to take Greenland because it’s a way of subordinating Europe. The fear in New York is not that Russia or China take Greenland. There isn’t the slightest shred of evidence that they need it or want it or covet it or plan on it. Not one word in 20 years.
What is the problem? The problem is, and I sure hope my friends in Europe are listening, the problem for the United States is that Europe would finally do something about Greenland. That Europe would say, we’re going to get the energy that’s available there, and we’re going to get the rare earths or whatever it is that we can find under the ice as it melts. They don’t want that to be some other country.
And they had nothing to lose because the more menace the United States undertakes, the more billions it spends to threaten Greenland, the better the deal that will be cut by the Kobald company, a company you ought to look into that already has invested for years in Greenland, and some of whose major shareholders are Silicon Valley companies, Amazon, Apple, Peter Thiel, all of it. This is an old issue. They don’t want to have to give Greenland huge amounts of money.
They want the government of the United States to use taxpayer money to go in there and make enough noise to compel a better deal. More bases for the American military, more investment, cheaper fees to pay, fewer Greenlanders to hire. This is a very old game of using public money to subsidize privately profitable enterprise, and in this case, with the added goal of not getting the Europeans involved, because that’ll just make it all more expensive. And they’ve had to give up already on one of these. Mr. Trump said he won’t use military force.
Well, that’s a problem. He hadn’t said that before. He didn’t want to have to say that. That was forced out of him by what? By the risk that if he didn’t do that, the Europeans might actually figure out what was being done to them and put up the resistance that could make a difference, which they still can do, but they would have to find the unity, which they do not have, and they would have to find the courage, which they do not have, to do this thing. They can still do it. It’s in their hands. Mr. Trump is very upset that it isn’t in his hands.
Now, a word on that. It is possible to play big power politics when the world is what it was in the 15th, 18th, and 20th centuries. You cannot do that now. We don’t live in the colonial age. We live in the anti-colonial age. The vast majority of the people of the world are committed to an anti-colonial way of thinking. Oh, yes, there are exceptions, and there are people who use that language for their own benefit, of course, always.
But that is the case. And if you try to do a colonial activity during a period of anti-colonial sentiment, you are going to fail. Not only are you going to fail, you’re going to end up having to do things that will contribute to your failure. Israel is trying to establish a colonial settler regime in Palestine. You could do that all in the past. That’s how Palestine was created in the past. You can’t do that now. And if you try, you end up in things like genocide and an isolation in the world that Israel will never overcome.
And the United States is playing big power politics. It’s too late, Jack. It’s too expensive. It’s too late. You’re not strong enough to do it anymore. What is changing the world? I mean, I’m overstating it, but I want to make the point. What is happening in the world is not a rupture created by Mr. Trump. All due respect, and I don’t have much for Mr. Carney. You know, for him to say that he now, now figured out that the last 50 years have been a hustle on the world means that he has finally figured out what 50 years of Marxist analysis of neoliberalism was able to produce far better than anything he’s ever said or written.
So he’s another one: real late, Jack, for you to understand. But what’s disrupting the world isn’t Mr. Trump. What’s disrupting the world is the evolution of capitalism from the private type that we have in the West to the hybrid private plus state version in China. Socialism, if you like, the Chinese have every right to that term, just like everybody else does. China is the problem. China’s proof that it can grow faster than everybody else and then harvest all of the political, ideological…
My God, that’s the issue. Let’s not be fooled by thinking that Mr. Trump, that clown, is trying to cope, which he can’t do, with the challenge of China, which he can’t do, dancing around the edges. Yes, he grabs tankers. Michael is absolutely right. He’s trying to figure out how far can he go? They learned in Ukraine, not very far. Okay, now they’re going to try something else.
Even the interest in the ocean is because what they were able to do on the land, the United States, here’s what they were able to do. They lost the war in Vietnam. They lost the war in Iraq. They lost the war in Ukraine. You know what? That’s a lot of loss. Hundreds of thousands of American troops didn’t solve the problem. It’s not boots on the ground, Jack, it’s China and everything that that represents. The core economic growth has moved from the West to the East. That’s the problem. And until you come up with a plan to deal with that, and the United States hasn’t begun to do that, you are, if you pardon me, playing around on the edges. Could you provoke a world war? Of course. Does it have to be taken seriously? Yes, and we try to do that on this program.
But let’s not be taken in by what they find to be moving theatrics. They were all excited. They stood up and gave Mark Carney a standing ovation because he was the only one who said a little something that sounded like courage. Wow. Wow. Mr. Carney had the courage to say that he now wants us to know what, again, 50 years of Marxism—and even others beyond the Marxists— were able to teach us about neoliberal globalization, which has been critiqued from the beginning. It’s just that bankers like Mr. Carney don’t read the relevant literature. They think they’re above it. So they can figure it out 50 years later.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, what you’ve said is what we’ve been talking about between us for the last, I guess, over a year now. And it’s exploded in Davos in a way that if we would have tried to forecast it, people would have said we’re just vastly exaggerating. But this is where the trends are leading. And in an economy that is polarizing, the tendency is naturally to go to extremes. And all we have to do is [say that] if there is an imbalance in the economy, an imbalance that is aimed at concentrating all the wealth of the world in the United States and not leaving anything for other countries, and especially not for countries strong like Russia and China, then all of this is the natural playing out of it all.
And what’s so ironic in this, and this came out so clearly in Davos, the Cold War against Russia and China is the enabling fiction for the U.S. claim that the world needs to support the United States economy to protect it against Russia and China. Trump needs to grab Greenland to protect it against the imminent Chinese and Russian invasion.
Well, the Greenlanders have said, well, they export a lot of shrimp to China. They haven’t seen any Chinese shrimping boats. China and Russia have no need for Greenland. They need to go through it, alongside of it, in order to get to the Arctic, but they don’t need Greenland itself. They have enough. The United States has this enabling fiction that is trying to shape the narrative.
And the narrative is what was called “Uncle Sucker” in the 1960s. Europe is exploiting us. Look at all the money we’ve paid to the military-industrial complex to support it. Europe has to pay us back and support our military industrial complex. And in fact, as you know, Trump has just increased military spending in the US budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion this year. He said, this shows how much we’re being exploited by Europe and all the rest of the world, because that’s our cost of protecting them against Chinese and Russia military conquest.
Well, what it’s really doing is… this is the cost of trying to block Europe and the Western countries from turning towards the most rapidly growing economies in the world, Eurasia, or the Asian continent, Russia and China. How do we block them? We have to block them militarily. What do we call it? Peace. Trump’s gang of peace that he’s created. So the aggressor in all this, in this narrative, is not Russia or China. They simply want their own sovereignty. They want to be independent of the United States’ ability to weaponize trade, to weaponize the dollar, to weaponize international finance, to weaponize a SWIFT email bank system and all of this.
And I think some Europeans are beginning to say, well, maybe we’ve picked the wrong side. Maybe we should not have bankrupted German and other European heavy industry by rejecting trade with Russia for its oil and gas and becoming dependent on the U.S. Maybe instead of dependency, we could have had a mutual gain relationship instead of what Trump said, that American first means there’s a winner and loser in every transaction. Under Trump, he said America will always be the winner. That means its counterparties will always be the losers. All Europe has to do is read his speeches, and that’s it.
And yet they’ve all been bought out. And it’s interesting that the guests you’ve had on this program that are most explicit have all worked for the U.S. government before. And in working with the government, they all have been shocked by what they found. Paul Craig Roberts, when he worked for the Treasury, discovered, you know, how, as he’s told me again and again, the U.S. was simply buying foreign politicians with little white envelopes of money. Or instead of directly, they would create non-governmental organizations such as the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantic Council that would back their careers and promote them until you have Tony Blairs and Macrons in power all over Europe knowing which side their bread is buttered on for all of this. And that’s what the U.S. has created.
And where are the European politicians that are opposing this? Well, they’re the nationalist parties, but they’re right-wing parties that basically agree with this whole financial plan that Richard has quite correctly said … is really the American plan of exploitation at all. It’s a financial plan. It’s [a] finance capitalist plan. They’re just saying, we want our cut. We’re in agreement with you, Trump. We’re anti-labor. We want to keep down… we want all the economic surplus in the economy to go to ourselves, not to our own internal economy, not for social spending, but for ourselves to make wealth financially, not industrially. They’re all in favor of that. They just want their piece of the pie.
And America doesn’t, and Trump, doesn’t want to give them anything at all. It’s “grabitization.” It’s like what the U.S. neoliberals did in Russia in the 1990s. And that’s, of course, what was so shocking, what John Helmer did such a good job of explaining back in the 1990s when I first met him in Moscow. It’s people who’ve actually been on the inside that are most shocked with what is happening. And they’re the guests on your show. And the people who did not agree, did not express shock but accepted it all, they’re the people who remain in the CIA, in the State Department, and in all this network of non-government organizations to craft a kind of international intellectual war.
And that’s what the Russians have been calling it. [The] intellectual war is to shape how the rest of the world thinks about what is happening. What are the causal factors? What’s the context for all of this? And if you think the context is America’s defending democracy against autocracy, [no, it’s actually] autocracy … not keeping public utilities in the public domain to provide their services at a subsidized rate, but privatizing them for profit.
Well, it turns out that the real autocracy is [laughs] in the American democracy, and the government[s] that [are] actually representing the interests of uplifting the population as a whole, its living standards, its productivity, its industrial growth, are Russia and China. So there are two models. The question is: how do you use an Orwellian rhetoric and an Orwellian logic … to make people not understand this model by playing with their minds? It’s all for the control of the minds and how people imagine what’s happening. And that’s what European politics has turned into and American politics and along the lines that Richard has just said. We’ve been talking about what’s happening for years, but that’s why we’re on your show, not as part of the policymakers.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me interject also, though, a note of… trying to think of the best word. Well, I won’t do it. Let me explain what I’m saying. This project that we’ve been talking about, and that Michael eloquently reminds us of again this time, as he has in the past, and I agree with it. That’s why we have the relationship that we do. I don’t think it’s succeeding. I think it’s failing. And I want to make that clear, lest people hear us saying, you know, it’s over, we’ve lost. That’s not my position. I don’t think it’s Michael’s, but I want to make clear it’s not mine either.
For example, if this were going well, you would not have, and I want to make this clear, you would not have the city of Minneapolis having decided, and I’ve read the press release of the AFL-CIO Central Labor Council of Minneapolis… [they] released a statement on the 16th of January calling for a general strike in the city of Minneapolis, which is scheduled for tomorrow, the 23rd of January, to protest the use of America’s new special army, ICE, against the city as a whole. And they’re doing this in clear cooperation with the mayor and the governor of this state and this city.
Minneapolis is a major urban area of the Midwest of the United States [proposing] a general strike. We haven’t had a serious call for a general strike in many, many decades in this country. And if you want to know, did we ever do it? Yes. Those are the heroic, radical moments of American history. And here we are at another one. That’s not a sign of strength. That’s a sign of very scary social division. Civil war is spoken of in this country.
The largest bloc in the French General Assembly, as I keep reminding people, is led by Jean-Luc Melenchon. He’s a communist. That’s the biggest block. I mean, he’s not now a member of the Communist Party. If I understand correctly, he was. He’s now the head of La France Insoumise, which is the leading element of a coalition of all the left parties.
And that’s an important fact, that the left parties who were at each other’s throats for decades in France, as they typically have been in much of Europe and beyond that, they were able to get to, they recognize a new and different stage. And yes, there are the right-wing parties that are coming up and pushing a little bit against some of this material from a different place and with different goals.
But history is always messy like that. And the fact is, [Trump] couldn’t just take Greenland. And more and more people understand in Latin America as they process the abduction of Maduro. They know what Michael referred to before. That was not a great feat of American military capability. That was a great feat of bribing enough people in the governing circles of that country to enable them to walk in and do such a thing. It’s extraordinary that we don’t think that this is going to have an effect. You cannot do in Latin America what you did before. A few gunboats won’t do the trick.
They won’t even stop selling oil to China from Venezuela. Why? Because they can’t. Let me end with another little symptom. Americans are not able, in general, to buy electric vehicles from China. Those famous BYD trucks and cars that I have spoken about and others have. BYD, having won the competition to produce the best, cheapest electric vehicles, they won. Not Tesla, not GM, not Fiat, them. And boy, that alone tells you a good deal about where capitalism is or isn’t in the great competition. And what did the United States do … with its big power? Nothing, because it couldn’t do anything. It lost the competition.
So it protected itself. That’s a loser’s game. It put a hundred percent tariff… By the way, Trump started with 27%. Biden raised it to 100%. And Mr. Trump left it at 100%. And to be a good loyal follower, the Canadians hit China with 100% tariff, too, on the same electric cars and vehicles. Until last week, when Mr. Carney, hat in hand, went to China and said, Oh, please, could you help us get away from our dependence on the United States?
Oh, sure, said Xi Jinping. How about this? We’ll buy your canola oil from Saskatchewan and help your farmers, and you drop the barrier [laughs] to our electric vehicles. Mr. Carney dropped the tariff from 100% to 6.1%. That’s called a reduction. That’s a big one. And so now there will be, they agreed, 49,000 BYD vehicles or electric vehicles from China per year. Initial agreement.
Now, as the press discovered what this means, they ask themselves the question they should have asked before. Why is it that in Texas and Arizona and in New Mexico, you will actually see BYD cars on American highways? Did those people pay 100% tariff? No. They just crossed the border into Mexico and bought the vehicles there. Because Mexico signed a deal with China before Canada did. So now we will have New Yorkers taking a little holiday up to Canada and buying a BYD in Montreal on their way home.
You know what this is? This is the historical process, it’s the tectonic plates that are shifting. Davos is the dancing on top, but it cannot control, it can barely reflect what is happening underneath.
And in the last analysis, my guess is it will be the labor movement that will surprise everyone because what the Chinese and the Russians and all the others are doing are taking enormously important steps to hold on to the core manufacturing capability that we all depend on, and that they are monopolizing. And that is going to threaten the standard of living because the capitalists of the West don’t want to share their piece of that action, of that Asian action, with the mass of their own people.
The mass of their own people are becoming house servants. Where are our jobs? You know where they are? They’re in the fitness centers of the West. They’re in personal… you know, if this were Britain 200 years ago, it would be armies of personal servants, which rich British people used to have. Remember the film you last saw, the British movie, some rich person arriving at the wonderful chateau, and lined up out in front are all the servants ready to greet the new master.
We’re all servants here. It’s organized as separate industries, but we are becoming the service personnel. The core of the economy, it’s gone. And the United States is trying to hold on to what it cannot hold on to, minus what its own capitalists did, which is move the manufacturing out of here.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think Richard had left a gap, a pause in what he was saying, where he’d expected me to jump in about Minneapolis, and I didn’t pick it up, but he and I had talked about this earlier because I was born in Minneapolis. And I think its experience is very relevant for the role… [for] what has happened to the left and to the labor union movement in the United States. And
Minneapolis is the center of what has happened. My father was one of the leaders of the Minneapolis general strikes of 1934, 1935. And it was this general strike that led to basically the creation of the CIO and the truckers. Minneapolis was the only city in the world where joining the Trotskyists, the Socialist Workers’ Party, was a path to career advancement. And almost all of Trotsky’s bodyguards and associates in Mexico came to Minneapolis. My mother and father were working with Trotsky in Mexico. My aunt became a Mexican citizen working there. And the problem was that here you had a left-wing movement developing in Minneapolis that was really supporting labor. You had the large companies, my father thought it was Walgreens, that hired goon squads to come in and try to break up the labor parades and the protests.
But there were huge mass meetings in Minneapolis. I wish I could turn the camera around and I’d show you a painting that my aunt did, Aunt Jerry, who lived there and painted pictures of the general strikes that are, many of them are in the Minneapolis Art Museum. This was the high point of Minneapolis history, but also the Democratic Party’s history, because the Democrats wanted to control the party, the labor movement, on behalf of their two main supporters, the mob, the mafia, because the Democrats were a large in the large cities that were very mob control[led], and the right-wing, the AFL, the right-wing unions.
And so Roosevelt listened to [Daniel J.] Tobin, I think it was James Tobin, who was the head of the labor department, and accused the 17 supporters of the Minneapolis general strike under the Smith Act. The Smith Act said it’s a crime to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. The Trotskyists and the labor unions were protecting Minneapolis from the force and violence by the goons that the anti-labor companies were doing, and the right-wingers and the Democratic Party federal forces [were doing] that [was] just like [is] happening today.
And in 19–, the day before Pearl Harbor, in 1941, my father and the other 16 members of the Trotskyists were all committed under the Smith Act. And the supporters of the Smith Act were not only the right-wing, the Communist Party supported it because the Minneapolis labor unions were keeping the Communist Party out of the labor union movement because it was Stalinist. And that’s one reason why there’s been such a split between the Trotskyists and the Stalinists.
And so essentially they made a deal. I’m told that the reason I was given such a high security clearance as I have is because Roosevelt made a deal with Stalin that he would indeed fight against the labor unions and the labor support in Minneapolis, if the Communist Party promised not to have any strikes during World War II and [during] the military buildup that both Roosevelt and Stalin knew was going to develop. So you had basically the tool… [breaks off] …Richard has pointed out that the mayor of Minneapolis has said a lot of nice things, like Mark Carney has said internationally, but … basically was a right-winger fighting against the socialist candidate for mayor of Minneapolis.
Well, his counterpart in the 1940s was that awful pro-Vietnam, later war hawk, Hubert Horatio Humphrey. And it was Humphrey that did everything he did to ostensibly say he was for the workers, he was for the people, while fighting against all of the activists, all of the reformers, all of the labor leaders. And it was his ability to double-cross the population and depict himself as a friend of labor that enabled Johnson to say, this is the guy we want for vice president, because he did for Johnson in Vietnam what he’d done in Minneapolis. He jumped on the Vietnam War war wagon and said, liberals have to wake up. We have to defend Vietnam and Asia against communism.
Well, all of this fight had occurred so much earlier in Minneapolis, and there was such a… it was largely Scandinavian, Irish, it was a very radical population from the very beginning. Obviously, in the 70 years since World War II, it’s become more middle class and has been able to become what it is today. But that’s where I think Richard was leaving a point where I’d jump in because we spoke about that before the show.
And I didn’t see what that had to do with Davos. But now I do. You have … what happened in Minneapolis … destroy[ed] the radical movement and put in a false radical movement, a false labor movement by the Democratic Party and the Social Democrats [and this] is exactly what’s occurred in Europe, from France to the German Social Democrats on the right wing of the political spectrum, the Russophobes. You’re having all this in Europe, the same kind of … trying to capture the minds and the way that labor thinks about … world dynamics and about how finance capitalism works.
There’s a fight for their mind, and this is a kind of intellectual mental warfare that goes hand in hand with the asymmetrical forms of warfare that we’re finding all over the world right now. This is exactly the problem. How can you have in Europe an understanding of what we’re talking about … when the left wing has been so taken over by the social democratic right-wing parties that it’s only the right-wing parties — the nationalist parties — that are saying, essentially, maybe we should turn toward Russia and China and not abandon … or [rather] not back Ukraine and go to a war that’s using all of our money really to support the U.S.-centered fight for hegemony.
RICHARD WOLFF: You know, the only footnote I could give, and I’m very glad that Michael … I did not know, Michael, even your personal history. Had I known it, I would have pushed you even harder to talk about Minneapolis sooner. Okay, thank you very much for that. But let me just end with a footnote to you. Mr. Macron in France became an important politician in France as a member of the Socialist Party. He was in an earlier government, I believe, the Minister of Education in a socialist government led by the Socialist Party. Whatever socialism means, you see its flowering in the utter emptiness of Mr. Macron, whose polling in his own country rivals that of Mr. Trump’s here.
Another example, Mr. Starmer. You know, the Labour Party once called itself a socialist party in England. He’s the head of the Labour Party. The reason he’s the head of it is he led the destruction of Jeremy Corbyn, who actually is a socialist, and using a trumped-up fakery around anti-Semitism, rather like it’s being used by the Trump government to cover over a completely different agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
It’s extraordinary how much of what is being tried isn’t working. And I think the mass of the working classes in Europe are becoming clearer and clearer that the leaders, especially those with claims to having been leftists or labor leaders or socialists, have betrayed whatever that means.
And so you’re building the base for a radical change, which is what I think you’re going to see in Europe. There’s going to be, and that’s, I think, what Von der Leyen and all the others, that’s what they fear. It’s what Michael said at the beginning. They bet on the wrong horse, and they got a lot of winnings for many years from that bet. So they can’t let go, but it is now going to be their end politically, not the beginning of anything. And that’s, I think, what we were seeing in Davos.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Michael, do you want to add something before wrapping up?
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think we’ve really covered anything else would be details in the big picture.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Exactly. That was fully what we wanted to do today. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael. Great pleasure, as always, having you on.
RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you. Talk to you next week.
