Globalization from Celebration to Condemnation
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Democracy at Work
4.8 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff provides an analysis of "globalization" as a fancy slogan to hide a profit-driven, profit-boosting period (1970-2015) that saw US capitalists move factories abroad. It destroyed so many well-paid factory jobs (especially of white, male Christians) that it produced massive suffering among the affected communities. As their rage built and both Republican and Democratic politicians turned a blind eye to their suffering, right-wing politicians saw an opportunity. Find a candidate really different from the old Republican and Democratic establishments - a Trump - and have him express the rage, anger, and bitterness of those who had lost the American Dream. Trump blamed globalization, foreigners in general, immigrants in particular, liberals, and Democrats: all lumped into "globalists," a term that changed from celebration to total evil. Conveniently for the leaders of major US corporations - the people who had actually made the decisions to move production abroad and profited from that escaped from Trump's blame. Now he promises to lead them to more profits by switching back to economic nationalism. But like globalization, it will prove profitable for the same corporations now as it did before. America First will hide the suffering it imposes every bit as much as globalization did. Capitalism is the problem.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic |
| 0:26.5 | dimensions of our lives and those of our children. |
| 0:30.2 | I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. |
| 0:33.7 | Before jumping into today's program, I wanted to remind you that a useful companion to this program every week is the book we put out called Understanding Capitalism. |
| 0:47.5 | It really takes you through the kinds of issues we raise here in the program, but into much greater depth and exploring |
| 0:56.5 | how these are features of a system that's important to understand as a system. |
| 1:04.0 | So if that's something that might interest you, getting more into it, getting a richer |
| 1:09.0 | experience from this, well then I advise go to our |
| 1:13.2 | website where you can find out all about understanding capitalism. My second and |
| 1:21.4 | final announcement has to do with a problem we're having that we want to share |
| 1:26.7 | with you because you've been very kind to help us. |
| 1:30.6 | There's a proliferation of fake IDs on YouTube. What I mean is videos that purport to be me but are not |
| 1:41.2 | me, saying things and having me argue things that I've never argued and do not |
| 1:47.7 | believe. But the likeness of me is remarkable. I guess modern AI enables that sort of thing |
| 1:55.3 | and other mechanisms as well. You have been reporting those to us. We in turn work with Google to get them taken down. |
| 2:05.6 | But all of that takes time and effort. Please continue to send us these sorts of things. |
| 2:12.6 | We're trying to speed up the removal process. |
| 2:17.5 | You can always, however, be sure if you go to four places, the Democracy at Work.info |
| 2:25.1 | website, my personal website, r.d.wulf.com with two F's, the Democracy at Work YouTube channel, and the Democracy at Work social media outlets. |
| 2:41.5 | By subscribing to them, you can make sure that the videos you encounter and that we in fact |
| 2:48.4 | produce in an ongoing way are genuine and not fakes. |
| 2:54.6 | Today's program is going to be devoted to a concept that has been very important, globally |
... |
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