the final stages of capitalism Karl Marx wrote will be marked by developments that are intimately familiar unable to expand and generate profits at past levels the capitalist system will begin to consume the structures that sustain it it will prey upon in the name of austerity and government efficiency the working class and the poor driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens it will as it has increasingly relocate jobs including both manufacturing and professional positions to countries with cheap pools of labor industries will mechanize their workplaces this will trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class the bull work of a capitalist system that will at first be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes decline or remain stagnant politics in the late stages of capitalism will become subordinate to economics leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and objectly objectly subservient to the dictates of corporations and oligarchs but as Markx warned there is a limit to an economy built on the scaffolding of debt expansion there comes a moment Markx warned when there will be no new markets available and no new pools of people who can take on more debt capitalism will then turn on the so-called free market itself along with the values and traditions it claims to defend it will in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that make capital is impossible it will resort as it causes widespread suffering to harsher forms of oppression it will attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions contradicting its stated nature the final stages of capitalism as Markx grasped is not capitalism at all corporations gobble down government expenditures in essence taxpayer money like pigs at a troth then the system crashes joining me to discuss our latestage capitalism and what it means for us in the global economy is Professor Richard Wolf professor Wolf is a professor ameritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the new school he has also taught economics at Yale University City University of New York University of Utah and the University of Paris so let's talk about latestage capitalism uh the hollowing out of state institutions Doge uh and and what the capitalists in the short term of course are going to make lots of money uh but what it's going to do to the rest of us well I think your uh your opening Chris as often your openings are is wonderfully comprehensive it it leaves me kind of amazed at how much more I can provide in the way of specifics and and concreteness uh I won't be departing i think you've captured it really very very well uh but let me let me drive some of the points home uh part of what you're watching with the Trump administration can be and in my judgment ought to be understood as a war on the working class at home but also abroad uh what is being done let me start at the at the opposite end what is being done in Europe is is remarkable a deal that came out of World War II in which the United States would defeat the new enemy the Soviet Union barely uh a few months after being the great ally it became overnight the great enemy showing a kind of flexibility which is at once astonishing but also impressive in terms of meeting your own needs and rearranging uh the pieces on the board that you're playing with the deal that was made was the following we the United States we have two big worries right now number one the New Deal an awful lot of money was taxed or borrowed from rich corporations and the wealthy people to provide a remarkable array of mass services unemployment insurance a minimum wage uh the social security system uh government employment this had to be rolled back and as you know very well that our last 50 years are the story of the roll back of that new deal but it also required smashing the socialist and communists who had created that new deal uh with their alliance for a while with the Democratic party all of that had to be undone and was undone the second great anxiety at the end of the war was that we would fall back into a depression let's remember it was only the war that finally got us out of the horrible collapse of capitalism the worst in its history from 1929 to 194041 and only by taking the remaining many many millions of people putting I'm going to be simple now putting half of them in uniform and the other half making the uniforms we were able and then the great worry and it was very serious at the end of the war 45 what would now happen we would demobilize all these people out of the military out of producing for the military what would prevent us from slipping back and you can see the government did extraordinary things the GI bill to take all those soldiers and instead of having them go into the unemployment stick them in the university where the government would pay for it the housing program the highway program all of them but what people don't recognize was that there was another part of this and that was the international part with Europe the problem was Europe had the same dem depression history as this country did and during that time as in the United States socialist and communist parties became much stronger than they had ever been in Europe so at the end of the war you had the worry about slipping back but you had an even bigger one that you had very strong socialist and communist parties who had led the movement of the 1930s to get social services which were much more generous in Europe than they were in this country plus the socialists and communists provided the militants who were the anti-fascist resistance so they were popular they were strong de Gaulle's first government after 45 had to have Communist Party people in the cabinet for Italy the second biggest party in the 20 years after the war was the Italian Communist Party and I could go on and they all had the Soviet Union literally a few hours by train from them so they were their capitalist classes were even more freaked out about what was going on and then the alliance with the Soviet Union it was all too much so what the United States did is cut a deal we will solve our economic problem by putting Keynesianism on steroids the government is going to come in and do what save us from the Soviet menace build up the military industrial and say to the Europeans "We'll take care of it we'll provide you with the defense umbrella will divide you with all the support and all you have to do is make sure you crush the socialists and communists at home and you are a good bull work against the Soviet Union and to that end here's what we're going to do you won't have to cover defense we're taking care of that with our domestic Keynesian military Keynesianism and you're going to take the money you would have had to spend to provide the social services that will allow you to compete with what the Russians are offering their people and had been already for quite a while at that time so you're going to compete with them and then we're going to take our National Endowment for Democracy our CIA and all the rest and make sure the right politicians willing to commit to this deal sit at the top of the government in France in Germany in Britain and we all know the story of all the money and the sloshing that was done that was it that was the way we were going to destroy the socialist and communist inside and weaken or destroy if we could the one outside and all of it justifying the massive government spending but the problem is all of that was paid for to touch on your point by debt the United States does not like to fight wars with taxes it likes to fight wars with money borrowed because if you tax the people the opposition to the war would be much bigger and much arise much sooner so you you can't do that you borrow the money here's the irony the Europeans were major lenders for a while to the United States to fund the Keynesianism that protected them from having to use their money for their own defense the ironies of how this all fit together are a charming story that's never quite been put down on paper what we have now is the collapse of that deal it it's very important historically and I know you do the history too Chris something we have in common which I think is part of whatever effect we have the story it fits together our situation coming out of World War II and working out this way for another lease on life with lots of domestic government spending but the problem is so much of it was done on debt and so of it so much of it was done without understanding of the special moment the United States had no competitor coming out of World War II britain France Germany Italy Japan they Russia they were all destroyed we came out king of the hill our economy was in better shape coming out of the war than it was going in and no one else could say that and the result was a very bizarre unique special moment that could not possibly last i think historians will look back be rather impressed it lasted as long as it did but in any case it is now over you can't do it the United States lost the war in Vietnam it lost it in Iraq it's losing it in Ukraine i mean look at it and these are among the poorest countries on earth to which the US is losing and the Europeans are left in a way one almost has to sympathize they're irrelevant they've become not the the literal opposite of what they were three or four centuries ago the center of the universe the apogee of culture the colonial master all of that it's all gone europe is is a footnote living in a world of fantasy where being unable to stop the Russians with the United States they actually think that they're going to do it without the United States i these are levels of of of craziness that are part of the decline I suspect of all empires when they consume themselves last point I am particularly struck with this crazy business of attacking federal employees in the name of efficiency that is so laughable that one has to kind of take a deep breath because it's sort of overwhelming what you get here two and a half million civilian employees of the federal government versus 5 million working for state government and 15 million working for the local government if you cared a damn about efficiency or whatever that exactly means your obvious targets would be local and state but they can't get at those so they go after the federal that's not a decision of efficiency that's a decision of where can we make a public performance and they're making a public performance it ruins the lives of those people it destroys whatever function these agencies often had it drives people entering the labor force which is a larger number than those leaving the federal they're all going to go into the private sector where they're going to bid down wages at the same time that they can't control the inflation you're ripping up your working class more and more and more as if there were no end to this process these are the desperate behaviors of a dying empire there's really no other framework that I can think of that makes sense of this well aren't they trying to essentially destroy uh government agencies like the postal service for instance education because they privatize it they they make money off it they live in a world look I'm part of I've been a professor of economics all my life i I grew up in that framework i I had to learn all of that i had to teach it often they live in a framework governed by the theory of economics their theory which says that and I mean this as blunt and as religious sounding in the negative sense of the term as I can make it they live in a world in which whatever the private sector does is efficient more so than any other way of getting the job done and anything that you can do to reduce the economic footprint of the government thereby shifting the work over to the private sector will be an increase in efficiency from which all of us will benefit they actually believe it's like listening to a plantation owner in Louisiana in in in 1832 explaining how and why master and slave is the best possible arrangement for the human race uh to accomplish what it needs to produce it's just it's so obvious it's just beyond needing to be explained yeah you have these people it's a small business mentality i can do it i'm doing it real well if only the government rules and regulations weren't there and if all the bad people that intervene in the free market which is our modern religious icon well then yeah they actually to the degree that they are governed by any theoretical awareness at all it is a simple-minded version of that simplistic mantra which you know you you and I know I went to the fanciest schools this country has and that's what they taught us but it's dynamiting the very foundations that makes a capitalist system work uh the I mean the infrastructures collapsing you don't educate your population we s see what a privatized social service uh postal service has done in England it's a it's a mess it doesn't work uh I mean I from that introduction aren't they perhaps unwittingly aren't they actually destroying the the very structures that makes the accumulation of wealth in the long term possible here's the way I understand it they they had that ideology the private sector is the efficient all they've been believing that for 200 years if not longer you know it has many names liberalism neo neoliberalism uh less afair lots of language for the same basic idea but they were always and this is the way I understand it they were always counteracted to some extent by sort of practical men and women who said to them wait a minute yeah yet maybe but if we don't solve this problem real quick and the only agency that's going to do that is the government we are going to be in deep trouble right you know we turn to the government to run the military when we're attacked because the private isn't quite and they you and then they will make a break they will do what Roosevelt ended up doing in the 1930s you know they'll intervene in the labor market there's a minimum wage we don't care what market forces are you don't go below that and I want to remind people even the conservatives had those when the inflation was unmanageable in 1971 nixon goes on the uh radio and television 15th of August 1971 and says "I am freezing all wages and prices in the United States as of tomorrow morning if you raise your price Mr businessman we're going to come we're going to arrest you and you're going to jail." Whoa okay here this is a kind of recognition if you have the space what we have now is a population increasingly persuaded right up to the top that there is no space you can't afford the apparent solution of the government you've got to you've got to do something and the only thing they can think of given the narrowness of our education is that fantasy they're going to save America by going backwards what what in the world is that go back to what whatever it is that got you here i mean it's nuts and what they're doing is they're living out the fantasy i would guess in other empires as they declined they began to appeal to their gods to their fetishes to their fantasies because they had nothing practically workable left we are borrowed up to here with our $ 35 trillion of national debt it's way above our national GDP which is not supposed to be that used to be considered a no line our European allies don't do it as badly as we do it although they are about to look at the Germans there's a losing of your mind mr mertz became the new uh about to become chancellor there he ran a campaign on preserving the German commitment to no government borrowing within days of the election he completely reverses himself and now champions the biggest debt expansion in German history to build a military who's he going to fight the Russians that's a joke the Chinese that's a bigger joke the United States perhaps the biggest joke of all what the only people he could use that for are the other Europeans and I I think somewhere we've seen that picture before this these are behaviors that people like you and me and and and others in the media are going to have a harder and harder time nailing down because they are the desperate acts of a declining empire that doesn't know where to turn let's talk about the tariffs uh the tax cut they've proposed more tax cuts right well how is that all going to play out economically you know are they really can can they leave the military industrial complex alone because they're not there's a bill in Congress pushed by the Republicans to increase military spending by hundred billion dollars over the next decade so if they're not going to touch the military which consumes half of all discretionary spending I don't see how they're going to save that much money first of all and second of all uh with these uh economic policies that are that cater to the oligarchic class what what are going to be the ramifications of that economically well I think what you're seeing in part let's start with the tariffs there's something that's important about the tariffs that doesn't get the attention it ought to if I read American politics correctly then for at least the last hundred years the Republican party's major mantra has been either we're going to cut your taxes or we're not going to raise your taxes we are the anti-ax party and they go to every part of the population they can to sell that story a tariff is a tax that's all it is it's attacks on imported objects that are produced elsewhere and sold here in the early days of American history these were called import duties because that's what they are calling them a tariff didn't we start a revolution over that yes among other things right that's right because we weren't allowed to put them on us yeah yeah yeah king George III made that decision that's right so here we have an anti-ax party whose major economic weapon as of Mr trump is a tariff it's kind of a rem there's more evidence that something is really breaking down because they have to become advocates of the very thing they claimed in principle they were against very bizarre kind and the same people out of whose mouth on the 4th of July comes anti-ax BS are now telling you about what a wonderful weapon the tariff is the reason Mr trump uses it by the way is that Congress gave the president a lot of leeway about doing that and so he can do it and so he can play the role Mr trump likes to play uh you know the angry god with his weapons and he couldn't do that with many other weapons because they have to go through the congress or through various procedures uh other than him just spouting off on truth social how he's going to do this or that do it today cancel it tomorrow all all this bizarre theatric he's doing it because he can do it with that there is no principle behind behind it number one number two you cannot know and there's by the way tariffs are very old there's nothing new countries have been throwing tariffs against each other for centuries why do I tell you this because there's an immense literature i've had to teach courses in international economics that's where that literature is the students spend you know three weeks going through articles and books etc etc all right so we here's what we know we know that a tariff cannot you cannot tell people what a tariff will do the reason is a tariff sets off a whole series of reactions you can't know them in advance in other words everyone affected by a tariff has to make a choice about how they're going to respond they will all respond but how they do it is it's like knowing in advance the chess move you have some probabilities maybe but you never know and the genius is the one who adjusts so when Mr trump tells you the tariffs will do X this is snake oil this is nonsense he doesn't know what that's going to do he didn't even in his first statements about the tariff he thought he kept saying it the Chinese will pay the tariff he had to have his advisers some of whom I know had to explain to him and he couldn't get it no the tariff is paid by Americans to the American government the Chinese don't pay any of it you can imagine a reaction in China that might Yes you can but there's no reason to assume it for example one response to a tariff is a retaliatory tariff okay you can't know in advance whether they will do that and you can't know in advance what products of yours they will impose a tariff again they don't have to do it across everything europe is busy taxing bourbon whiskey and so are the Chinese for obvious political reasons because it impacts Mr trump's uh economic bay but we don't know if ch if Canada cannot sell its electricity into the United States well then they're going to sell it to China is that really an advantage the answer is no is that a possibility yes in other words the minute you you understand what's going on all you have for Mr trump and his associates is blather what looks good on the evening news we're going to do this and it's going to have that result that's exactly what he can't do nobody can do that and even a passing awareness if you're not a paid hustster is you would say well this is this is going to hurt the relationship it's going to lead to a lot of rethinking and choices among optional yeah and how they all add up and impact on us i mean the only honest answer is I don't know i don't but isn't ostensibly the tariff aren't tariffs being imposed on the Canadians and others uh one to kickstart American manufacturing and two fill the gap of the tax cuts is that the ostensible reason for the tariffs that that's the kind of thing you say but that implies the pretense that you know that the the line of causation will go from your tariff to that decision for example an automaker removing or relocating the assembly plant from Mexico into Texas or something like that yeah but here's the problem it is very expensive to move production facilities they take years to establish and they take almost as much time to relocate and it is very expensive no one no businessman or woman I have ever talked to about this would ever make a decision because country A imposes a tariff even more so if that country were to behave in such a way as to say the tariff is temporary the tariff is why because who in the you that'd be crazy spend billions move your Ford plant from Wajaka to to Cincinnati and then at the end of three years discover that the rationale is gone because this crazy president has decided to go bother somebody else with a tariff you're then out a fortune of money and then you really lose because if you come to the United States which he always neglects to tell you you have to pay a lot more money in wages on top of the cost of the move the the the intrinsic cost that accountant in a in a multinational corporation will sit down and tell their CEO this is what this is going to cost you and that's one of the reasons the CEOs are very unhappy uh I monitor a a CEO program at Yale the way Yale panders to CEOs it brings them there puts them in a lovely old colonial building winds and dines them and sends them off on their way and lo and behold contributions come to Yale a few months later but in any case it's a nice sounding board i like to pay attention they are all afraid of saying anything publicly because Mr trump is punitive but with the protection of anonymity whoop what they are willing to say to their friends and and cohorts at Yale about they are very they don't want any of this they don't want the uncertainty above all else they can't make decisions and so by the way that's one of the reasons we see works worries now about recession that's not about anything other than there's such a massive re reization in the corporate sector that we have no idea what this clown is going to do next we can't make a decision we can't decide to build a factory let alone to move one because we can't figure out where that ought to be and making a mistake in this environment is deadly by the way that introduces another dimension that we haven't spoken about but which at some point and maybe on a different occasion the United States is different now Chris from what it has been for a century because we really have an economic competitor we never had that as per your own remark at the beginning the Soviet Union may have been a military problem but it was never an economic problem it was much too small much too backward much too weak and that's through all the way uh till it collapsed in 1989 it just wasn't china is it already is and not to speak of the population not to speak of the bricks alliance it has erected i mean everything is now qualified by the fact that we ha we the US have something we did not have before which is an entire competitive totality um China and the bricks are over if you add them up are over 50% of the world's population the United States is 4 and a.5% you got to keep this somewhere in your head what we are talking about here if you add up the GDP of the G7 the US Canada Japan Britain France Italy and Germany it's about 27 28% of the world's output if you add up China and the bricks it's 35% it's already a bigger economic unit than we are every country in Asia Africa Latin America thinking about building a railroad or borrowing money or expanding its medical care they used to go to New York or Washington or London and and get the help they they still go and they still propose but as soon as that's done they send the same team to Beijing or New Delhi or Sao Paulo and they and they're they're bargaining who's going to give me the better deal and they're in a better position than we are to do that which is why the railroads of Africa are being built by the Chinese and the ports in Latin America and so on it's relentless the decline of this empire and the rise i don't know if it's going to be a Chinese empire i don't know if maybe their commitment to multinateralism or nationalism is genuine or not how can I know but the decline of this one unmistakable unless you need to deny it which you and I know is the air we breathe in this country i want to talk about the swift the world's reserve currency the dollar alfred McCoy argues that's the final end point of the American empire if that happens that the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency the empire is impossible to sustain because the Chinese and others won't buy our debt which is what treasury bonds are do you agree and do you see that coming i do not agree um and I don't mean to be disrespectful let me explain the history of capitalism has always produced people who fetishize one or another aspect it is a system and it depend it's as important in the reproduction of that system that the production of goods and services happens in certain ways that the exchange in markets happen and that money as the as the kind of lubricant if you like plays the appropriate role all of those things are necessary money the US dollar very important but the system like all systems has within it the capacity to adjust if one or not of the ele you know it's a little bit like doctors explain if you lose your left arm it turns out your right arm can do all kind of things and it will your body will kind of adjust yes you will always know you don't have a left arm but you will be amazed at what your right arm can do or your left eye or your right eye or or different parts of you it it's that way so it used to be thought that the great evil of capitalism was the banker or the the people with the money well they are important but they are not the beginning and the end anymore than anybody else no other part is it's a system so here's the way I understand it part of the decline of the empire is a dimminion in all of the signs of empire you know the sign of the British Empire was that the pound sterling was the global currency we now know that the British Empire is a vague fading memory because nobody cares about the British pound sterling you know just the British barely do and nobody else but Rick when they dropped the pound sterling in the 50s right as the world's reserve currency Britain Great Britain did go into a recession a a pretty deep recession economically it was suffered but Britain's decline is a century old britain's decline starts in the 19th century you know and then is wiped out in World War I and again in World War II and it's you know it it's giving away bits and pieces of its empire as it goes you know at the end of World War II you know it's very famous at Breton Woods when when all the victory countries got together up there in the woods of New Hampshire uh to decide on the monetary system the British led by canes you know at that point the greatest economist in the world uh they thought they could reconstruct the pound sterling universe and and Harry Dexter White the American equivalent said to them looked at them and laughed he said "You know that's over for you the dollar is going to end and and and everybody nodded because they all kind of understood without much argument that that they were part of that process i think the US dollar is shrinking there's easy ways to show it you know if you look um 40 years ago then central banks around the world kept dollars and gold as their basic two reserves to back up their own currencies and the dollar was often 70 75 80 even up above that percent of those reserves little bit of gold lots of dollars good as gold today that number it's variously estimated no one knows exactly for sure but it's in the 40 to 50% rate so that that's a very dramatic drop it's telling you that for the rest of the world something very big has changed from what it was in 1945 to now i mean it's so big and it's so everywhere and and you can see what they're replacing it with at first it was the euros then it was the euros and the yen now it's the euros the yen and the yuan from China i mean it it's like a subtext you know translating what we're talking about as a decline so I see it more as a steady erosion one of the major projects of the brick nations which you can see when you study their reports when they meet is to replace the dollar there's no question that they're interested in doing that they are already doing it you know the the decision of Saudi Arabia doesn't get all that much attention here but they are now willing to sell their oil for a whole variety of currencies before they insisted on the dollar all of the each of these decisions by itself is limited but when you add them up yes then it's then it's bye-bye the dollar but we are still a very rich country we are still a very important part I I don't want overstated i'm saying it's dying i'm not saying it's dead we are not Britain we are doing what Britain did we are following a lot more than people willing to admit but we are still several decades before what they have gone through and let's talk let's talk about the ramifications of what's happening now uh the stripping down of the bureaucratic state uh uh the destruction of social programs uh which is going to further emiserate the poor head start and stuff like that what do you see coming what and the kind of chaos I mean you tariffs one day then the next day we don't have tariffs i mean you can't figure out where this guy's going so what what do you see you know the the f where are we headed economically politically of course we're becoming fascists but economically Yes um well in economics that's also underway if fascism by fascism you mean and you know it's a very contentious term and people define it differently and all that but if by classical fascism you mean a kind of merging of the corporate leadership and the governmental apparatus into a situation where the government is the um military enforcement of the rules of capitalism well I look at it at Pana you know that you first you get a mafia economy and then you get a mafia state yes okay uh yeah I think all of that is very much underway i think the symbolism I mean I should qualify i My mother was born in Berlin my parents are Europeans and my parents became refugees from fascism in Europe and that's how I got born in Ohio you know that so I'm a product of what I'm about to talk about so it's close it's close to me uh the symbolism of Mr trump having behind him a row of billionaire oligarchs you know Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musk and all my first reaction Chris this is so stupid why do I think that because it is the fascist story laid out in a symbolism you couldn't possibly miss if you know anything about that history not not the Supreme Court not big politicians not Nobel Prize winners or whatever he might have assembled behind him he chose the you know the biggest richest corporate oligarchs he could find and dress them up and put them there each with their appropriate partner it staggering i mean just just staggering now economics he it everything I see is an act of desperation it has nothing to do with any coherent plan that means I want to be careful i'm a mathematician that'd be This is the equivalent i won't use a math metaphor i'll use a football metaphor mr trump is heaving the so-called Hail Mary pass down the field right for everybody who who might not know it's when you're so desperate you're about to lose the game you tell all your players to run down the field maybe towards the left or the right then you heave the ball over there and you hope that as it bounces around the different hands reaching up to get it it will actually come down by accident in one of your team members rather than the other one and you miraculous could Mr trump's assemblage of nonsense get you an outcome he would be happy with yes it has exactly the same chance as the Hail Mary pass because everything he's doing is chaotic if you rem you know it it's so difficult to talk about this with sensibly given the unsenselessness most of the regulations we have in the federal government come as a result of years of struggle by impacted people who could not rely on the private sector demanded action which could only be done by the government so you know after Upton Sinclair teaches us about you know the meat business and we and and people die left and right from food poisoning from the meat we have a Food and Drug Administration because of course we have to make sure that the profit motive which has nice outcomes sometimes has awful outcomes just as often and if we don't police that we're going to get the awful right alongside the good and that and that's unbearable right so every one of these things has that history behind it more or less the business community blocks it delays it postpones it and then having lost that battle takes credit for it when it's done it's like my friend Deedra McCloski an economist you probably know right she loves to go around and say "Isn't capitalism wonderful because we have a higher standard of living now than people did 200 years ago." And and I I love this every one of the things she points at was opposed delayed blocked by the capitalists they fought it tooth and nail and then they have the clever PR once they've been defeated and we have it to take credit for it and now the final indignity having taken credit for it for 20 years they're going to smash it in the name of efficiency the irony here you have to you really you have to take a breath th this is what you get in the last in the last gasps of an economy you get crazy stuff so now we're going to deregulate we will have one scandal after look look at the scandal today's paper was full of people being deported from the United States who have no reason to be deported and the government has to say well that was a glitch or this was a mistake or that one attended a funeral of a leader oh come on that's not what this is about is it really that's what you're doing you're so out and so people will now have a story to tell how incompetent how inappropriate how dangerous these deregula so my guess we're going to we're creating we're creating the opportunity for someone on the left side using the word left very broadly to come in hopefully not a demagogue to ride across all of the messups that are coming down the pike and put the finger on Mr trump and MAGA and push them back into the margins from whence they came look Mr trump rode the dissatisfaction of a declining empire a population that could not face that its empire was over and so were willing to blame Biden for God's sake what a joke right but he was able to ride that and the people who come after him they will ride the same process and blame him with the same minimum justification he's not the author of this he is riding as he himself said to be right his opening remark "I could go I remember from years ago I could go out on Fifth Avenue," he said and shoot someone and nothing would happen to me because somehow right now what comes out of my mouth isn't the nonsense it always would thought to be it is incredible wisdom great thanks Rick i want to thank uh Sophia Diego Thomas and Max who produce the show you can find me at chris edges.substac.com