Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Welcome to it could Happen Here, a podcast about things
falling apart this week featuring an entire three sentences about
putting it back together again. I am your host, Bio Wong,
and today we are gathered here to talk about tariffs.
Oh boy, it has been a massive two weeks of
(00:29):
tariff news, the most important aspect of which has been
finally getting a resolution to what was going on with
the Liberation Day turf tariffs that Trump tried to impose
at the beginning of his time in office. On July
thirty first, we finally actually found out what those tarrists
are going to look like, and what those troists are
going to look like is prisciannen Effectively, what happened is
(00:55):
that roughly, if the US runs a trade deficit with you,
you get a fifteen percent tariff, and you get a
ten percent tariff if we run a trade surplus with you.
Now there's a bunch of other individual rates. We'll get
to some of them in a second, but it's worth
emphasizing that this doesn't make any sense. So okay, before
(01:19):
we get into the structural effects of this, I want
to sort of look at what the nominal stated justification
for imposing these tariffs are and how they're at odds
with each other. And this is the point where we're
turn to later. Part of the justification for the tariffs
is that, okay, they're trying to use tariffts to replace
the income tax. That's nonsense, it's gibberish. You literally cannot
(01:42):
raise enough money through tariffs to replace the income tax.
But okay, that's the thing that they want to do.
The other nominal justification, and this is what's being used
in negotiations and is the thing that is causing individual
tariff rates to randomly sort of be jacked up, is
that Trump is pissed off that the US runs trade
(02:03):
deficits with countries. And again, like this is basically nonsense.
The US pays for things in its own currency. We
don't actually need other places currency. It doesn't matter if
we run trade deficits. I really hate that Rand Paul
is right when he said I run a trade deficit
with my grocery store. But like, that's how the American
Empire is supposed to work. These people do not care
(02:25):
that this is how the American Empire is supposed to work.
They have been handed the most sophisticated imperial machinery that
has ever existed in the entirety of human history. And
they see numbers on a chart which says we pay
them more money than we're getting and they're pissed about it.
But again, okay, if that's the state of justification, right,
then why are you imposing a terra fund countries? We
(02:46):
have a trade serplus two that doesn't make any sense,
and the difference between them is only five percent, So
what are we doing here? It's nonsense, like our trade
policy is being run by people who don't understand how
any of this works and are operating off of, you know,
effectively just pure anger and rage. So I'm going to
talk about a few of the really really high rates.
(03:10):
We're not going to focus on much on the thirty
percent South Africa, for example, but oh boy, so Syria
is at forty one percent, which is absolutely fucking hideous.
Syria is a country that I don't know anyone who
listens to this show is aware of the extent to
which Syria has been devastated by the civil war, and
this is an incredible blow to their economy. Laus and
(03:35):
Me and mar are also being terriffed at forty percent,
and we promised in the executive disorder to explain how
Trump recognizing the junta. So Joe Biden had refused to
recognize me and Mar's like military coup government. As long
time listeners of this show are aware, there is a
military coup in in memr There is a large gale
(03:56):
revolutionary process attempting to overthrow this government. My co host
James Stout and Robert Evans have done a lot of
very good reporting on this that you can go find.
You should find it. It's some of the best journalism
that I've ever encountered. But the US's official position has
been that we don't recognize the coup government because it is,
and this is true, a coup government. But Trump just
(04:19):
sent the junta a letter of it says you're tariff
to forty percent. And the thing about this is the
Junta was like, oh shit, hell yeah, Like that means
you recognize us, right, because you're sending us official fucking
notices of shit. So you're recognizing US as the legitimate
government of mean Mar. And so the Juta is like
thrilled by this. There's some evidence of like the US
lifting sanctions on them after. It's kind of messy, but yeah, great,
(04:42):
somehow in the attempts to sort of just like squeeze
every last drop out of all of these countries, we
have recognized an incredibly brutal military dictatorship. Hate that back
to the more direct tariff stuff. The tariffs on Laos
is also going to be devastating for Laosian economy, which
is a lot of the economies in Southeast Asia are
(05:05):
pretty heavily export driven, and it's one of the places
where a lot of textiles manufacturing takes place. After the
sort of increase in labor prices and increase in resistance
from the labor movement in China kind of pushed all
of that capital down the make Cong River delta. This
is going to absolutely fucking suck for everyone in Laos.
(05:27):
And you know, this is something I want to keep
emphasizing over and over again that these turf teriffs, people
they hurt the most are workers in places like Laos,
in places like Syria, right, who are going to just
be absolutely fucking devastated by it. Now, let's also talk Switzerland,
which was the other country that had a terriff at
(05:47):
like forty percent This one is genuinely really funny, which
is that it seems to largely be driven by Trump
being pissed off of the trade deficit, which is like
compared to like the scale of the US economy, that
deficit is like zero dollars. But the funniest part of
this is that the trade deficit is largely driven by
gold imports. Now, this is extremely funny because if you
(06:08):
know anything about the American Right, you know that a
lot of the ways that they did their funding, especially
when they were sort of building their operations, a huge
source of their funding is getting their followers to buy gold.
This was the original Alex Jones grift right. I think
he still does it a little bit now. Before he
sort of pivoted into supplements, he would partner with like
gold salesmen and like silvia salesman. This and this has
(06:29):
always been a huge source of these people's money. Now
there's there's been a little bit of decrease in the
prominence of gold as a thing. There's a very good
Folding Ideas video about this incredibly bizarre Indrius Elba Weird
gold promotion documentary which talks about the ways in which
gold has been sort of threatened by bitcoin, and well
(06:52):
mostly bitcoin, but it's like cryptocurrency in general is like
the scam you're trying to sell all of these sort
of weird prepper and like hard lia line quote unquote
sound money libertariany types. But it is very funny that
this is in effect a self reinforcing cycle, because the
thing about the price of gold is that it is
largely determined by how fuck the rest of the economy is.
(07:13):
The old people who are trying to sell gold are
trying to sell you on the fact that the economy
is about to fucking explode. But this is a cyclical effect,
right where these terff rates go up and the economy explodes,
and so people buy more gold from Switzerland, at which
point are trade balanced with Switzerland gets worse. It works,
it worse, so and any other like Swiss watches or
another sort of major source of export currency so off,
(07:34):
which are again all worn by all these fucking maga
grifters with their like fucking ten thousand dollars watches or whatever.
So that one's just funny. Trump has also announced and
this has not gone into effect yet, who fucking knows
when if it goes into effect, But I think it's
worth talking about, which is that Trump has been talking
about putting a one hundred percent tariff on semiconductors unless
(07:59):
you invest in the US. So Apple sort of in
response to this, pledged one hundred million dollars in investment
in the US to build chips. And I think it's
also worth looking at the ideological underpinnings of this, because
a huge part of this thing is something that you've
been seeing increasingly on the right, is this dream of
making domestic iPhones. And if you look at the people
(08:21):
in the tech sector, right, the sort of tech billionaires
who run all this stuff, they're openly fantasizing about like, oh,
these like soft weak liberals are going to be forced
to like work in the factories and put iPhones together
or whatever. And it's worth emphasizing that this is just
not possible, right, And this is true of a significant
number of the things that they want these tariffs to do.
(08:42):
They're just not possible results of the policy levers they're pulling.
A couple of months ago, I described a sort of
similar policy thing to this as like they're they are
attempting to scream at the moon in order to control
the tides and it's like it doesn't work, it's not
the right lever. It literally can't do what you think
it's going to you. And it's worth going into why,
which is that we can't make iPhones here because we
(09:05):
don't have the migrant labor force to do it. And
a lot of you may be thinking, oh, well, the
US has a lot of migrant workers. No, you don't
understand China, which is where most of these things are built.
Even with the terriffs, like a lot of you know,
there were some downcycling of plants, that stuff has mostly
been upcycled. Again, China has three hundred million migrant workers.
(09:26):
That is almost the entire population of the United States. Right,
we are talking about individual plants with two hundred thousand workers.
That is the low end estimate. By the way of
those numbers, we don't actually have very good numbers on
how big some of these fox Con facilities are. The
low end estimate is two hundred thousand. Right, and again
(09:47):
this is just in time production. So okay, what does
that actually mean? Right? This means that the production cycles
work a lot of For example, the way that ups works. Right,
We're like, you have a bunch of people who are
effectively seasonal or part time workers who only come in
when demand increases, so for ups, right, and it's actually
a relatively similar schedule to the way it works in China.
(10:08):
But it's like there's these massive surges around the holidays
with apples. It's more like September November roughly. But it's
in order to like massively be able to ramp up
production in time for you know, the sort of like
massive holiday increase of orders. Right. But in order to
do this, you need to have a production apparatus where
(10:28):
you have two hundred thousand workers there, but you can
also get rid of most of them and they can
support themselves doing other stuff for the rest of the year,
and then you have to be able to bring them
back in during peak season. We just do not have
the populations to replicate this, right, even if you're trying
to replace it with prison labor. The thing about the
American prison system is that it's decentralized, right. This is
(10:50):
actually a key element of how the US economy is structured.
Prisons are one of the sort of three major sources
of jobs in rural areas. The other two are like
va March style service jobs, which replaced anything else that
was in the economy and the military basis, which is
part of why you know, like like this is part
of why rural politics of console reactionary because like, okay,
so if your options in the economy are soldier, prison guard, service, labor,
(11:16):
you're gonna generate a bunch of unhinged reactionary bullshit. But again,
even even though the American prison system has a really
high population, these people are really spread out, and iPhone
production requires sort of like mass centralization, right, that's the
only way to get these things to work. Plus, the
(11:36):
workers that you're bringing in have to be skilled enough
to be able to do this shit. And this is
a capacity that's built up in China over the course
of like of like decades, right, And we don't really
have this now that people have tried moving this production
into other places like Vietnam, for example, the teriff rates
there are also making this extremely difficult. But it's been
really really hard to replace. And the other issue, and
(12:00):
this is a technological issue, not just a sort of
issue of the systemic elements of the population of China.
The infrastructure to build microchips in the US doesn't exist,
and it's not just that the infrastructure to build the
chips doesn't exist. It's actually way worse than that, and
this is why all of the attempts, and the Biden
administration has put an enormous amount of money into this.
(12:21):
The Chinese government also has put an enormous amount of
money spifically into the microchip angle, and none of them
may have been able to do it. And part of
it's technological problem, but part of it is that the
machines that you need to make the chips don't exist, right,
But the machines you need to make the machines that
make the chips also don't exist. And the machines you
need to make the machines that make the machines that
(12:42):
make the chips also don't exist. We are so far
up the supply chain, right, and this is one of
the you know, one of the things, the thing that
they're trying to do through sort of like pure politics,
right through like just like the pure exertion of state power,
is to reshape the fundamental structural way that the supply
chain work, and the way the supply chain is worked
is by intense specialization in very very very small areas. Right,
(13:06):
So Taiwan for example, becomes the only place basically that
can manufacture these chips. And that intense specification means that
like the machines that make the machines that they that
are used to build this thing are only made by
like one company in social land, and like machines to
make those machines like who the fuck knows where they're built.
And this is a thing where the technology involves become
so complicated and the laborers become so specialized that you're
(13:26):
dealing with machines that like just straight up not many
people in the world know how to use, and not
on people in the world know how to create, and
so we're so far up the supply chain, right, And
this is also if you want to look at like
what the impact of these terrists are going to be, right,
because your supply chains are so specialized. You know, you
can think of these supply chains as like incredibly complicated machines, right,
(13:49):
and any sort of like little rock that you throw
into the machine, or do you know, you throw sand
into the machine and suddenly the ball bearing doesn't work
at quite the right efficiency, and so things just start
breaking down across the entire supply chain, and they think
that they can just replicate all of this with just
like pure tariffs and like throwing money at it, and no,
you can't. These are these are actual structural things of
(14:11):
how the economy works. Now, do you know what else
is a structural element of how the economy works? Idiot?
Is these products and services and the fact that they
fund this podcast. Woo, we are so back now. One
(14:35):
of the other kind of terriffs I think I've been
calling I guess like defiance tariffs. One of the things
that Shop administration has been doing is threatening to impose
a fifty percent teriff on anyone who buys oil from Russia.
India has been threatened with this. India's current terrif rate
is twenty five percent. They're right now threatening with another
twenty five percent against in the fifty percent. It's sort
of unclear exactly who's going to back down here. More interestingly,
(14:58):
and we've talked a little bit about this, Brazil. There
was a fifty percent turf of tariff on Brazil again
for refusing to release Bolsonaro, which is very funny because
this has managed to piss off the entire sort of
political sphere in Brazil to the extent that like Bolsonaro,
has had to come out and announce this because Bolsonaro
(15:19):
was getting fucking torn to shreds by the Brazilian right
for being basically a trader sort of lapdog of the US,
as they're sort of, you know, imposing this direct attack
on Brazil through this fifty percent tariff. Right. It's backfire
so spectacularly that like Lula, who was floundering, is now
writing this incredible wave of sort of anti American Brazilian
(15:40):
nationalism from both the left and the right. So Lula,
who is who is again in a pretty strong political
position because of this, has refused that you direct talk
to the US because he was like, absolutely not fuck this.
Here's a quote from Routers. We had already pardoned the
US intervention in the nineteen sixty four coup, said Lula,
who got his political start as a union leader protesting
against the military government that followed a US backed ouster
(16:01):
of a democratically elected presidents. Quote. But this is now
not a small intervention. It's the president of the United
States thinking he can dictate rules for a sovereign country
like Brazil. It's unacceptable. Now. Again, as I said in
the ed, there's a lot of things now that are
worth looking at here. Right, we have, on the one hand,
this direct connection from Lula from you know, the sort
(16:22):
of subtle CIA backing of military coup stuff which happens
under the table to you know this just like the
president of the United States is telling you how to
run your country. And that is a subjective shift, even
if like the CIA overthrowing your government like has more
of a direct political impact on it. Right. The thing
about the thing about the way American power worked was
(16:43):
that it was mostly supposed to be under the table,
and it's not now. It's just it's just out there
in the open. Right. The premise that the US governments,
like the president of the United States, should just be
able to tell another country what to do is the
fucking premise of American imperialism. And now they're just saying
it out loud and noting that it's not like Lula
is some kind of like anti American radical, right, Like
(17:04):
Lula worked really well in his first term in office,
which was w Bush, but again because of the way
that the political winds have shifted here, right to the
extent that like Bolsonaro has had to condemn an attempt
to get him released from prison, which is so funny
because he's doing this. He is, he is, he is
pushing very hard. Now there hasn't really been a response
(17:27):
yet for Lula's call for organized terror resistance from China
and India and bricks. I don't know if there's going
to be. It's worth talking a little bit about what
bricks actually is here. So bricks stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China,
South Africa. It was originally like an asset class designed
by some guys at Goldman Sachs who were, you know,
(17:49):
trying to like classify the assets of this kind of
like developing economy thing. It was like, you know, you
can buy bonds and these things and maybe you can
you can classify their asset rates together and has kind
of become a political alliance. But you know, there's a
lot of people who will attempt to sell you on
bricks being this sort of like leftist anti imperial alliance,
you know, and as a sort of socialist thing. And
(18:10):
like I will simply ask, right, who is doing the
socialism here? Right? Is it a butcher of Gujarat? Is
it she quote? We must oppose Welfarerism jimping. Is it, Vladimir,
we will show Ukraine true decommunization Putin? Is it the
African National Congress of selling your country to Bank of America?
(18:30):
Is it the butcher of Haiti?
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Like?
Speaker 2 (18:32):
What are we doing here?
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Right? Like?
Speaker 2 (18:34):
This is not actually a substantively anti American political alliance.
India is a close American ally, South Africa is a
close American ally. None of this really makes any sense.
It's not a substantive political alliance. Really, people periodically make
noise about it trying to be a substantive political alliance.
But like I mean, like India and China are periodically
(18:55):
like at war or like almost at war with each
other over the border. It's right, these are a bunch
of countries that absolutely fucking hate each other. It's never
been a coherent political project. Lula is trying to turn
it into one, but like, I fucking I don't think
that's gonna work. So, you know, that's sort of what's
been going on on the front to sort of national resistance.
But Lula does have you know, a kind of very
(19:18):
very large and powerful political force behind him domestically to
resist this. We'll see what happens going forward. It's also
worth noting that China has been negotiating with the US
and their tariff increases, which are supposed to go into effect,
have been delayed for another ninety days. So we're stuck
in this holding pattern again. But let's talk about what
this means for the economy, right, And I think the
(19:41):
very short term answer is that I don't think anyone
really knows, right, Like, the actual macro effects of this
are things that we've only just started to see. No
one's ever really tried to model this out because there's
no reason why it whatever happened, you know, And you're
starting to see things behind the scenes, like medical supplies
(20:04):
being incredibly difficult to require. You're starting to see a
bunch of very very weird items and supply chains become
increasingly difficult to find. But again, the supply chains are
going to break down in ways that we just don't
really understand. What is going to happen, And what has
started to happen is inflation is increasing. I want to
sort of again review our kind of inflation theory, right,
(20:26):
which is largely derived from our friends as strange matter,
sort of supply chain theory of inflation. Their usis of
inflation is that, like, it's not set by just supply
and demand. It's set by cost plus markup. Because you know,
price is not set by like an autonomous thing called
the market. Price is set by like a guy with
(20:48):
like a price gun. Right, It's directly set by people.
And the way that those people set the price is
you know, the cost of acquiring the item, plus and
markup for their profit. Now out, One of the sort
of fundamental like insights here is that price is sort
of sticky until it isn't, right, which is that like, okay,
So the actual thing that controls price is sort of
(21:10):
like how pissed off consumers get at price increases, but
also comma that is also very very much tied to brand, right,
And if you raise your prices and consumers get pissed,
you even if you drop them again, that doesn't necessarily
mean those people will come back, right, So you know
a lot of times when they when they when there's
price increases, companies try to eat it. And that's and
(21:32):
that's been what's happening with a lot of these things,
right where at each point in the supply chain, people
are you know, people are having to sort of pay
for the tariff parts, right, and and when someone has
to pay for the tariff, they increase their prices that
they sell it to the next person in the supply chain.
The next person's supply chin increases their prices right now.
So the way that these terraffs play out, right, is
that each person in the supply chain is doing costless
(21:53):
mark up, but their costs are going up. So your
options are either you sell it at the same price
and you reduce the amount of markup you're getting, which
is reducing the raw profit you're taking in, or you
raise your prices. And these things are trying to not
raise their prices, and part of this is from direct
political pressure, right like Trump has been threatening companies to
not raise their prices from the tariffs. But prices are
(22:18):
starting to increase. And as this goes on, and as
more and more teriffs come into effect, that this becomes
more and more difficult to evade the tariffs. The prices
are going to keep increasing because they're driven by these
supply chain price increases. So you know cost is going
to go up. It is going to have absolutely devastating
impacts on workers across the world, primarily not in the US.
(22:41):
But the workers who are in these export oriented economies
are going to have to deal with just the absolute
horror of large scale economic collapse. You know what, who
else hopefully doesn't have to deal with the absolute horror
of larger scale economic collapse. It is the products and
services to support this podcast. We are back now. The
(23:08):
thing I want to close this episode on is not
actually a look at the economy, because I think, you know,
we kind of don't know exactly what's going to happen
with the economy other than bad. But there is something
that I think we can look at that's been broadly
ignored or miscovered, which is what these tariffs say about
the nature of the state. And I think what's happening
(23:31):
is that we're seeing a fundamental change in the way
that the state functions from the previous sort of neoliberal
regime to this like just really openly fascist one. And
I think the most clear example of this isn't necessarily
the terroriffs, so they are a pretty clear example. It's
this extremely weird like extortion agreement reached between Trump, AMD
(23:57):
and Nvidia. And to read this from CBS quote, US
chip makers in Nvidia and AMD will pay the US
government fifteen percent of revenue generated by sales of their
AI chips in China. A White House official confirmed to
CPS News this is just a shakedown, right. You know,
this is part of a negotiating process by which originally
(24:20):
AMD and and Video are going to be banned for
selling the AI chips to China. And in order to
be allowed to sell these ships to China, Trump was like, okay,
if you want to do that, give us like thirty
percent of your revenue, when they were like, okay, what
if we did fifteen percent? Right, this is just a shakedown.
And you know it's been described as such all over
the press, but they're missing something fundamental here, which is
(24:43):
that the state fundamentally is just a shakedown.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
The analysis of Trump isn't from the sort of critical
press has been to view it as corruption. And it
is absolutely corrupt, right, Like, no question about this. It
is unbelievably corrupt. Like we have people just giving the
president blocks of fucking gold with an eye I phone
embedded into them. Right, it's it's hideous, open corruption. But
analysis that looks at the Trumpe administration as corruption of
(25:09):
an ideal type, right, that looks at it as the
transformation of the state into something that it fundamentally isn't
That kind of analysis is just wrong. The state has
always and has always only been the localized monopoly on
the legitimate use of force. Right, That's all it is.
That's all it's ever been. Everything we know about the
(25:31):
state today, right from the legal system to education, to roads,
to environmental regulation to the welfare state, are all just
functions that were tacked onto the core monopoly on violence,
either as part of a carrot and stick gambit to
maintain control of population or simply as a concession to
popular force. You can just have a state that is
(25:53):
a bunch of guys with guns who rule purely by
fiat and have control over an area. That is a state.
Everything else that we think of as being part of
a state is tacked on, and trump Ism as a
political force has simply reverted the state back to a
pure mode of extraction. Right, the state is men with
guns who take shit from you to pay for those guns.
(26:13):
And it becomes breathtakingly clear that this is, you know,
how the state is functioning. Try and Trump administration, because
the Trump administration has been slashing benefits while handing tax
breaks and giant government contracts worth billions of dollars to
the tech elite, and they've been spending tens of billions
of dollars, you know, to hand to the men's with
guns and to recruit new men with guns for the
(26:33):
mass deportation regime. Right, this is just a pure version
of the state as an extraction regime, as a regime
that fucking takes money for you a gunpoint to buy
more men with guns so it can take more money
from you. Trump Ism imagines that you can collect this
money to pay for the apparatus of violence and terror
from just pure extortion of foreigners in the working class,
(26:54):
you know. And we talked about this a bit at
the beginning, right, this is part of why they want
to do tariffs, as they think can replace the income tax.
You know. The income tax is just like absolutely despised
by the extra state elements of the ruling class because
rich people hate paying taxes. But there just isn't enough
capital to run a state like that with unemploying some
(27:15):
kind of like mmts money printing, which is alienated a
huge part of from Sosterity coalition because his quote unquote
deficit reduction stuff hasn't actually reduced the deficit. So the
people who like really really care about that shit ideologically
are pissed. But also on a fundamental level, this is
already how most city governments operate, right. They are enormous
police budgets extracted at gunpoint, either from the city council
(27:38):
directly or directly from the working class, from fees and
fines and tickets, like just leveled at working class people directly.
And this is something that is a little different from
how previous regimes of neoliberalism has functions, because those previous
regimes of neoliberalism did a lot of these same things,
but they were run through regimes of debt extraction, right.
(28:00):
It was you know, it was the imf right coming
into your country and being like, okay, if you want
to pay back these loans that this dictator took out, right,
you're going to have to like sell your entire fucking
working class into pe andage so that your entire economy
is going to be reoriented towards paying this debt back.
But again, that was debt extraction, base and finance based.
(28:21):
Trumpism wants to take out the middleman and just straight
up set give me all your money if you want
to live. But this is not a particularly smart strategy.
There's a reason that the state takes on other guises
than just a man with a gun asking for your wallet.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
A more literal regime, a more direct regime, a regime
where the violence is just out in the open, invites
more literal resistance than a sort of symbolic regime, or
a regime that operates through more principles. All regimes of accumulation,
of dispossession of resources, taking by violence to produce more
violence come to an end, brick by brick and stone
(28:58):
by stone. Trumpism too will be torn to the ground
by the hands of the people who had thought it
could exploit forever this husband It could happen Here.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
You can now find sources for it could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.