WOLFF & HUDSON: Why U.S. Turns Friends Into Economic Hostages?

Article by: Juan Carlos

In a calm voice that cut sharper than any headline, Richard Wolff opened with a diagnosis: the United States is living through a declining capitalist order and a fraying empire, and the political class is masking that failure with scapegoats (1:07). He ticked through the roll call—Mexicans, China, now “the left”—and paired it to a record of broken promises: quick fixes for Ukraine and Gaza that never materialized, fresh confrontations with Iran and talk of Venezuela instead (2:25, 3:00). The pattern is familiar in history, he said: when elites can’t fix the engine, they blame, distract, and militarize.

Wolff’s ledger of obscenities wasn’t abstract. He cited widening inequality and a boardroom culture that rewards its own with numbers sized to stun—a “trillion-dollar” pay concept for a single tech titan as emblem of a system that makes the richest richer while real society buckles (7:02). At the same time, mid-crisis statistics get “revised” after the fact—leadership at the Bureau of Labor ousted, and a million jobs overcounted—signs, he argued, of an officialdom treating public trust as expendable (26:02).

Michael Hudson took the baton and put names to the machinery. Tariffs and sanctions failed to kneecap Russia and Iran; China is too independent. So the pivot, he argued, is to strip-mine the allies—press Germany, Korea, and Japan to dismantle high-value manufacturing at home and re-site it in the United States, a 21st-century remake of sterling-area colonial finance with the U.S. president directing terms (11:05, 13:39). The butchery comes with fine print: secret deals, coercive “investments,” and profit-splits that leave partner publics holding the risk. And then came the detail that blows the story open. What Hudson describes next—about drones, rules of war, and a boat a thousand miles from U.S. shores—reframes the whole strategy.