This is the Tom Harbin Program.

Welcome back Tom Harbin here with you.

Professor Richard Wolff is on the line with us, the economist, co-founder of democracywork.info.

The author of numerous books is latest, the sickness is the system when capitalism fails

to save us from pandemics or itself now available also as an e-book.

And already Wolff with 2Fs.com, his Twitter handle, Prof Wolff, as in Professor Wolff

with 2Fs.

And Dr. Wolff, the sanctions on Cuba are back in the news.

President Obama had removed some of those sanctions, Donald Trump put them back on.

Now there's a lot of pressure on Joe Biden to remove them and hopefully he will do so

I think it's just good policy.

In the larger frame, in the grand scheme of things, the economic sanctions ever worked

as a foreign policy tool and for that matter do they even make sense if not for foreign

policy purposes, economic sense?

Well, the short answer to your question is they don't work and they don't make any sense.

That is, they don't make any sense as policy or as economic objectives of any kind.

They do make sense in the pandering to particular groups of voters.

And I think that's mostly what these things are about.

And let me explain.

The sanctions against Cuba, which are a good example, but we could use those in place

against Venezuela or those in place against Russia and all the others.

They tend to, unless they're very unusual, they tend to harm large groups of people in

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