April 28, 2025 • 41 mins
Mia and Gare discuss the history of the modern economy and how the terf tariffs are going to destroy the system we live under and make our lives worse.
Sources:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/trans-pacific-blank-sailings-soar-as-ocean-shipments-plunge
https://gcaptain.com/massive-surge-in-transpacific-blank-sailings-amid-u-s-china-trade-tensions/
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/air-cargo-faces-22b-revenue-hit-when-china-tariff-exemption-ends
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Calzon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to it. Could that be here?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
A podcast where the the the ancient leftist adage there
was power logistics has finally been realized by one Donald Trump.
I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Gear.
How are you doing, Gear?
Speaker 4 (00:18):
Just another great day in America.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
It's great, it's great. There were arresting judges. It's it's
a good time. It's great.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Something that Mia has probably called for before, but under
different circumstances.
Speaker 5 (00:30):
Hey, look, have I ever publicly called for the arrest
of the judge.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm not sure I have.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Maybe probably not, because like arresting power itself is a
little bit problem hashtag problematic.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Yeah, I mean this is this is this is this is.
Speaker 5 (00:43):
A carcial solution to this. This is Garrison, Like we
kind of for using carcialism to solve the problems of
the cucural system. Sure, speaking of carcural systems, there is
the economy that we're all living under, which is also
quite literally a cucural system, because so much of it
is based on prisident and slave labor of various kinds
across the world. Now, I have good news and I
(01:04):
have bad news about this.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I don't remember what the good news was.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So we're only getting the bad news, which is that
well the good news and the bad news is that
this the system that we all.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Grew up on.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
That the economic system that has, you know, supported us
our entire lives or not supported us for our entire lives.
The thing, you know, the system that encompasses everything we
have ever known, is fucking dead.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It is dead as shit.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
The economic system that existed literally at the end of
last year does not exist anymore. It is it right
now in the process of dying, and the thing that
is emerging has not emerged yet, which means we get
to go to the Gramsey quote where he says, this
is the time of monsters.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
The Chinese century. My favorite see whatever Gramski, how do
we say this guy's name Gramski, Gramm gram Sheet see
you fucked up too? Yeah, my favorite gram Sheet quote?
Or entering the Chinese Century?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Look I okay, So, like here's the thing.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
I I, on a fundamental level think that GRAMPSI is
like the harbinger of the entire retreat of the twentieth
century left. So I hate him and therefar if you
say his name properly. Also, we're going to get into
a little bit about white. The Chinese century is going
to also be a complete shitcho for them too, But
you know.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
The Canadian century, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Finally, the Yugoslavian century.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
With God Emperor Mark Carney in charge, he will usher
in a new era of Canadian progress and global supremacy.
As climate change worsens, the Canadian economy will suck up
all of the independency and resources from the US in
the late twentieth century. And finally we will have a
Tim Hortons in every country in the planet.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I'm so excited for us to finally get our first
war between two countries with Tim Hortons in it.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
That will be exciting.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
So here is a story that we have told on
the show many many, many, many many many times, and
it is the story of the structure of the modern
world economy. The birth of the liberalism, the ascendancy of
free trade, the decline of the US as the world's
grand manufacturing power, the collapse of the clower of the
global working class, and the generalized ascension of capitalism, and
(03:21):
this specific force of capitalism as the structuring force of
the world system. It is a story of how structural
forces and contingent choices, technological changes in class weres, domestic
politics and grand international maneuvers, and international relations built a
political and economic structure that ruled the world for half
a century of American hegemony. And we are going to
tell a very very abbreviated version of that story for
(03:43):
one final time because that world.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
The world, say final, because you'll probably do this again
in two years. But okay, the.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
World that we were all born into, that world is
fucking dead and Donald Trump has killed it.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
This is how it died. Garrison. Yes, in the beginning,
there was war.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Sure, in the ashes of a continents read by the
flames of fascism, two army's stood triumphant over a new world.
One of them, unfortunately, was the United States. The second one, unfortunately,
was the USSR. Now it's also worth mentioning that very briefly,
both the French and the British assumed they would also
be like superpowers and no jokes, washed failed failed powers,
(04:33):
zero out of ten absolute dipshits destroyed.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Now, oddly enough, Japan walked away with more power than
either of those countries. Yes, yeah, a little bit, a
little bit odd considering the conditions that led to this happening.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Well, you know, I mean, but the actual shift here though,
and this is and this is you know, this actually
is a lot of what this episode is about is
that the thing that World War One or World War
two did was was more I would also do this,
but was fundamentally break the power of the old world empires. Right,
because the world had been ruled for several hundred years
(05:08):
by various combinations of the French, the British, and the Germans.
And you know this is some extent like Spain, but
Spain was sort of gone, right, But like those old
World empires had been what had structured everything in the world,
and at the end of World War Two that suddenly
wasn't the case anymore. And the product of this was
that if if you look at the places in the
world that had the largest remaining industrial reserves, right, you know,
(05:31):
I mean, there was obviously some industrial production in Latin America,
particularly Argentina. There was some like Chinese manufacturing belts that
were run by Japan in China that weren't destroyed. And
then there was the entire manufacturing power of the United States.
And this meant that alone among countries, right, the US
was in the most dominant position, like one of the
(05:54):
most positions of great power has ever been and even
though there technically was a second great power, right, they
had an unbelievable percentage of the world's total manufacturing power,
We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total gold reserves.
We had I mean, I guess, like the second largest
army in the world. But you know, like we were
significant the more technologically advanced than the USSR. And this
(06:15):
had a bunch of extremely weird consequences because there was
really no way for the amount of like concentrated industrial
power the US had to go but down because we
controlled so much of the world's wealth and so much
of the world's manufacturing capacity that the only thing that
could ever possibly happen was that the rest of the
(06:35):
world would catch up. And this was a thing that
was actually necessary. And this is something that was that
was spurred on by the American industrial class, right, because
they suddenly had all of these like jeep factories you're
trying to make cars out of, and they needed people
to buy the cars. And the only way to do
that was to rebuild Europe and to rebuild Japan in
order to sort of rebuild these places as markets and
so for like a very brief time. And this is
(06:56):
the sort of like golden age that all of these
Trump people know these like weird dipshits like harkened back to.
Was this like part time of like unmatched American power,
but also it was it was a time in the
world economy where you could have multiple powers industrializing at
the same time without it being zero s and that
just was not going to last because at a certain point,
(07:20):
and this is accelerated by things we've talked about in
other episodes, like this attempt by a bunch of what
we're called the Non Aligned Movement or sort of the
G seventy seven, you know, also like the Third World Movement,
a bunch of these countries that were non alliance, like Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan,
which you can immediately tell how this alliance is going
to shit because these two countries are allied, are like
(07:40):
in the same alliance, right, like you know, this is
the Chiito's Yugoslavia is in this with like Saudi Arabia,
these countries sort of like economic strategy was to create
something that actually is in a lot of ways kind
of like what Trump is trying to do, which is
like using their control of resources, although again the resource
of the US has now is like money basically took
(08:01):
all of the fucking world's resources, right, but using that
to develop your own local industrial basis so you can
have your own local manufacturing economy. And this is something
that like a lot of countries pursued this, like Venezuela
pursues this, like Bolivia pursues it is. This is something
that like everyone like kind of across the political spectrum
is trying to do in like the sitties and seventies
(08:21):
and through the eighties. But the thing is it's destroyed
by the second thing that's sort of a model for
what these people are trying to do, which is what
Reagan was able to do to the American economy in
the sort of nineteen eighties. And what Reagan is able
to do is Reagan actually does something that sounds really
bizarre now, but he was actually successfully able to temporarily
(08:43):
for about maybe like six years, six or seven years,
was able to actually like dramatically ramp up American like
like industrial production and like was able to do the
whole sort of like we're bringing the jobs back to
the US. But the thing is, the way he did
this was not the way the Trump administration is doing it.
Speaker 5 (09:02):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
What he did was, on the one hand, he blew
a smoking crater in the entire world economy. And that
garrison will sound familiar to you because these people are
trying to.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Blow a hole in the American economy, right, like you
have seen this.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
Yes, I have seen the stonks and the trade and
the shipments, yes I am.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
But but even like like Elon Musk would like deliver
like post about this, right, like very deliberately about how
he wants to destroy the economy so that there could
be like a oh yeah, brief economic hardship and that
a golden age.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Right, necessary hardship will have to endure for a short
period of time to then reach the like utopia which
is surely around the corner.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yeah, And it's interesting because when when when serious people
have to defend this like Fox Okay, I say serious people,
I'm taking this and I'm saying Fox News because like serious.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Look, look here's a serious clouds.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah, I don't have to defend this, right, Like, Okay,
you know we're not dealing with like you know, we're
not dealing with like intellectual titans here. But like when
someone who is mildly more intelligent than Elon Musk has
to defend this, it is Reagan, they point you, because
Reagan and Carter was also had a hand in this.
But Reagan does this thing called the Folker shock, right,
like working working hand in hand with.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Paul Volker's the head of the Federal.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Reserve, which notably, Trump just spent a bunch of time
threatening to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and
then had to back off on that because all of
the markets were like, this is our fucking rubicon, Like
we don't.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Give a fuck about any of the other thing. Well,
I we kind of give a fuck up the other
things he'd be doing.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
But like, if you fire the head of the Federal Reserve,
like we're going ape shit. But like, you know, the
Fed and Reagan work together in order to do this thing,
which is the jack interest rates to just like unhinged levels,
causing everyone else's debt in the world to become like
unbelievably unsustainable to repay this like annihilates boast of the
(10:46):
world's economies. This also creates like a double dip recession,
where the US has like almost twenty percent unemployment.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
But he's able to.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Write this out specifically because like, this thing actually benefits
a bunch of sections of the American capitalis class. Like
if you are someone who holds debt, right, this is
fucking great for you. And this is something very different
from what's happening right now because nobody is winning the
trade war, Like everyone is just having the very worst
time I've ever had.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
It does seem like a globe of losers.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, But the thing that Reagan does that actually allowed
him to temporarily restore the profitability of a lot of
American manufacturing. And there is still a lot of American manufacturing.
We'll get to that in a bit. But the thing
he was able to do was the thing that Garrison
I was threatening at the beginning of the show.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
By the time I am done doing this, pot like
maybe not this podcast block. By the time I.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Finish doing it, could happen here when I like die
on the battlefield in fifteen years, everyone will be able
to fucking explain the Plaza Chords and the reverse Plaza
Chords because they're they're the central thing that got us
to this alt of this fucking place, which is that
Ronald Reagan goes to Japan and goes to like West Germany,
and the subtext of what he's saying is like you
(11:59):
are a Maria military protectorates and because you are American
build or Japan by the way, it's like the great
industrial power of the nineteen eighties right and through the nineties,
Like they are like the defining like they are the
thing that everyone thinks about China today. Like if you
want to find every argument people make about China from
the entire political spectrum, like all the way from like
people in the one hands going like this is they're
(12:20):
going to destroy American hegemony to people on the other
hand being like this is what socialism is, you can
find all of those same arguments people made about Japan
in like the eighties. But you know, what Reagan forces
these countries to do is to increase the value of
their currency relative to the dollar. Right, so the dollar
is suddenly worthless, and because the dollar is like worthless
relative to other international currencies, it makes US manufacturer more competitive.
(12:41):
And this like temporarily restores American techleological production, but then
they have to reverse them because that nukes the entire
Japanese economy, and the Japanese economy becomes an entire thing
of real estate speculation, which you know, I guess, I
know you may be too young to remember what happened
the last time that we base the entire.
Speaker 6 (12:57):
Economy of ailsa speculation.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
But that's not true.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
I say, you're like a few days older than me.
Come on, that's unbelievably not sure.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
I am over half a decade older than you. Is
that real?
Speaker 5 (13:10):
No?
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Yeah, real, Yeah, we'll talk about this afterwards. I don't
I don't think that's true. Let me pull up my
mea Wong docs file to check once, all.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Right, while Garrison checks to be a Wong Docks file.
The economy that is built up from all of us, though, right,
is an economy based on a few different things. One,
it's based on an entire network of global supply chains
with you know, like very very minimal tariff barriers between them.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
Right.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
It is based on the sort of doctrine of free trade,
which is, you know, not really free, but obviously like
the ways that these were written structurally benefited the US, right,
where like the US is allowed to do all of
this shit for like its corn production that nowhere the
country is allowed to do. Like all of the market
tampering that all these people scream about is just what
the U S does with corn. But you know, the
(13:58):
entire canoxysm was based on being able to cheaply produce
different components of goods in different countries, assemble them, and
then move them across the world cheaply in order to
sort of avoid the localized power of workers movements. It
is based on the US running a series of bubble economies,
so the tech bubble, the housing bubbles, heata, et cetera.
And it is based on the US dollar and the
(14:20):
bond as like the fundamental aspects of the like as
the world reserve currency, the.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Fundamental thing that drives the system.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
And when we come back, we will talk about this
literally all exploding and what it's going to do for
all of.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
You, which is not good.
Speaker 6 (14:37):
Yay, okay, we are back now.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
One of the things that have in a lot of
ways locked the system in place was that because of
the that these manufacturing like networks are set up right,
because they're all so interlinked, because they're all dependent on
like exploiting differences between production capacity and like labor costs
(15:12):
in different countries. They are all so interconnected that if
you try to pull one thread out of it and
do a major change to the system, the entire thing
is at risk immediately. And this meant that there has
always been an enormous structural incentive to keep things the
way they were, even if everyone can also already like
realize that they're kind of fucked up. And this stays
(15:33):
all the way back to like things that most people
largely have forgotten about. But like Obama, for example, ran
on renegotiating NAFTA, and he never like intended to do that,
but like even if he had the moment he got
into power, you know, like Trump renegotiates NAFTA too, right,
but he renegotiates NAFTA and it's just like the same
trade deal.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Because for a long.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Time, right, if if you were going to run the
capitalist economy in a functional way, the only thing you
could possibly do was run it the way he had
already been set up, because there were so many structural
factors about how this is no production works, that this
is only that this is the only way you could
run it and still like have the economy not explode.
But now we have finally produced a group of men
so stupid that they are unconstrained by the structural limits
(16:14):
of the economy. And this is where we get into
the ground of turf terracemberon right now, and we get
into something that is very important to understand about this,
which is that this shit is not about economics, right
in the sense that you or I were understand them.
This is none of this stuff is about like we
(16:34):
want the economy to grow. It's this is not something
that like really any of the major sectors of capital
want because it is just nucing this whole thing. And
this is why you've seen a split between even Elon
Musk has like openly criticized the trade policy, even if
he's been sort of hedging it. What we've been seeing
(16:54):
is this widening rift. And we talked about this in
the last Executive Disorder, where like different factions of the
Trump administration we're literally trying to like isolate Trump from
like Navarro, who's the guy who wants to do all
of the all of the tariff bullshit they've been you know,
like literally try to get them alone in a room
so that they can they can implement their trade policy.
But the actual underlying urge here is completely ideological, right
(17:19):
it is. It is this idea that like if you
run a trade deficit with a country, or if you're
if you are buying things from a country, they are
ripping you off and you always need to be selling
more things than you're buying, which is just like so
okay on one level, like this is just so fucking
nonsense that like attempting to explain why his bullshit is
kind of pointless, But we're gonna do it anyways, because
(17:42):
someone fucking has to somewhere, And this actually does also
reveal something about the way that money has always worked
under these systems. Okay, So before we get to like
what this is going to do to the entire world economy,
we need to talk about garrison. Do you know what
balance of payments is?
Speaker 4 (17:58):
That sounds like something and to ask my accountant about.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Yeah, so this is a technically an accounting thing, right,
but the balance of payments of a country it is
like a leisure thing, right, But it's the measure of
like their accounts, right, in terms of all of the
money coming out of the country and all of the
money coming into the country.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
That's you know, that's like trade balance stuff.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Right, and the balance of payments is actually very important
for a lot of countries because specifically most countries in
the world need to buy things in a currency they
can't print. This has always been the structural limit of
things like modern monetary theory, which talks about how like
your country's ability to like have things isn't constrained by
(18:39):
just like the pure money supply of your country as
long as you're buying things in your own currency, right, Like,
the purpose of money is the thing that move assets around.
But inflation isn't a product. I mean, like, yeah, okay,
if you just like hammer the fucking printer button, right, Like, yeah,
you can cause hyper inflation, but substantively because money is
something that is a production of the government, because it
is literally government debt.
Speaker 6 (19:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
It's not a commodity in the conventional sense.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Where you have to like figure out how much of
that there is and there's like a limited supply of it,
and you have to like manage limited supply and make
sure the economy doesn't explode. You can just use the
money that you have, and you can use debt like
deficit spending effectively to continue to circulate goods around.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
The economy.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
The problem is if you have to buy something that
is not in your currency, that's where you need trade
because you need to find a way so you know,
I'm gonna taken example that we're gonna come back you later,
which is Bolivia.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Right. If you are.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Bolivia, you need to get American dollars. You can buy
like gas, right, so people can like fucking fuel their cars.
And the problem is you can only buy oil in
American dollars, so you have to find something to export
to a place where you can get American dollars for it.
And in this sense, balance of payments actually matters enormously, right,
And balance of payments is also just like a function
(19:52):
of all of your trade deficits and all of your
trade surpluses sort of combined.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
But think about the US, this is a notable thing.
Everyone uses the dollar to buy shit. There's like nothing
that you.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Can't buy with the dollar.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
So for the United States, none of this shit matters
at all, none of the mottle flame of stuff.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
It is completely.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Irrelevant, like literally, completely totally and utterly irrelevant. Right now,
if you are like Bolivia and you run out of dollars,
then what you have as a spirally economic crisis where
like peoples looking suddenly can't buy food because no one
can buy oil, so no one can move things around,
So like the entire equality literal collapses. This is a
very very very common mode of economic collapse. But you know,
(20:32):
none of the things that the right is talking about,
like in terms of like, oh you have like the
United States has like a trade deficit with China's like yeah, great,
that means that we're buying.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Things from them.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Like the one good Rand Paul quote ever was like, yes,
I have a trade deficit with my grocery store, like
and that's fine.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
Mia goes full Rand Paul on the podcast today.
Speaker 5 (20:54):
Yeah I know.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
But the thing is, the thing is it is very
very funny that Rand Paul is now complaining about this.
It's like, well, yeah, I don't know if all of
you motherfuckers hadn't spent all this time like fucking polling
around with like Alex Jones and the Klan, like we
probably wouldn't be here right now.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
The zero faults definitely, like the Tea Party does have
a sizeable chunk of the blame here.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, Like like that's the thing, like this this is
your all of your fucking fault. Lock them up quick,
zero tot of ten zero a ten, Get him out,
Get him out, Get them out.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Now.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Do you know what else we need to get out?
Gett a stock. Oh it's these fucks and services.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
Yeah, get them out of stock.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Get them out of stock while you still can.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Well, we still have an economy.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
We are back now again.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
As I was saying, like this attempt to make the
American economy function in a way that it has trade
surpluses with every other country. And also, and this is
also important, these people don't think that like services are
real and a lot of what the US exports as services.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
But because they're all these really weird like me.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Because they're all fascists, right, they all have this all
of this weird ideological shit about masculinity and about the
favoring of the concrete over the abstract, because the concrete
is like masculated. It is like it is the nation,
right like this like steel workers and people who fucking
hammer coal out like this. This is what masculinity is.
This is what nationalism is. This is what men are
(22:21):
supposed to do.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Yeah, you have the materialists on the evil side, and
you have the post materialists on Well no.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Okay, So so this is a long time ago.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
I did a bunch of episodes called The Class and
the Culture War, and one of the points that I
make in that episode is that one of the arguments
that the Canadian Jewish Marxist historian Moish Pistone makes about
what the Holocaust was was this attempt to pit the
concrete part of capital against the abstract part of capital. Right,
(22:52):
where the concrete part of capital is like the nation
and the worker and the factory and like the boss, right,
and all of these like conk things were pitted against
the like the quote unquote abstract part of capital, which
is to say, like quote unquote like Jewish financiers and
all of the sort of like weird collection of like
modifiers that gets associated with like you know, the rootless
(23:14):
positive politanism, like the globalism, like all of this shit, right,
And what the Nazis did was embody all of that
stuff into just the figure of the Jewish person and
his arguments. And this is arguing about like sort of
structural anti semitism, and what the Holocaust was was that
the like that was what the Nazi revolution was. That's
what the liquidation of like and this is how episode describes,
(23:36):
like liquidation of Jesus is what this is what the holocaust,
This is what the genocide was. Was their attempt to
destroy the like abstract part of part of this thing
by pitting it against the concrete part of this thing.
And this is what these fucking people are also are
also doing in their own way, right.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
Like yeah, they're just doing it with like the price
of eggs or like the availability of housing.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Right, and you know, and it's also renting. Like these
people are like unhe and gentti Semitic, right because this
is all part of the same ideology. They just sort
of like they're doing the shit in different ways and
they haven't like yeah, I don't know, like if these
people are in power for like a decade, we might
just get this right where they're literally doing the Holocaust again,
but like we're not at that point yet, but we're
at the point is where like this this kind of
(24:16):
like under like this kind of fascist understanding of the
nation and masculinity and like the concrete versus the abstract,
and like these figures can be like embodied in anti thinking.
This is also what like what the like this is
what the administration is doing with immigrants, right, is like
passing them in that role of like the abstract like
the foreigner, the yeah, the national, the like the anti
the anti national.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
Those things are are what is causing our economic problems,
our housing problems. And then you have other instances like
with like Mexico and Canada where they tie in the
trade war with this like ventanyl thing being like you know,
like immigrants are bringing fentanyl over the border and we're
using tariffs as a negotiating tactic to stop ventanyls like
they're they're bringing in even more like aspects regarding like
(24:58):
immigration and tying it directly to like our trade wars
with these with these you know, massive massive countries, some
of our most important trading partners.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah, and this is causing an interesting split because Trump's
like political coalition, right, has a bunch of kind of
different kinds of fascists in a lot of ways. We're
like Trump and Navarro and like, I mean, Trump is
instinctually pro tariff and like he can be talked out
of it because again this guy's brain, like we saw
(25:30):
this last administration, like the last person in the room
with him can convince them but basically anything. But you know,
those people are structurally committed to like this specific version
of masculinity. And there's a lot of portions of the
right that are and that are committed to like this
trade policy is like the America first American nationalist thing.
But like someone like Elon Musk isn't that committed to this,
And like even a lot of the people who are
(25:52):
like the inner circle sort of like Jarvin, like tech
fascist right are like okay, but hold on, like we
make all of our shit in China, so like you know,
and this is why like Elon is coming against the
terrorists because like, yeah, they're gonna fuck him, like because
he has to import stuff and export stuff from China
because that's where a bunch of his production facilities are, right,
and you know, and if once you get out of
(26:12):
the circle of of like that kind of like tech
fascist right, and and the tech people are the people
who are the most closely aligned with this administration, right,
like an internships are like all the sexus of the capital.
Tech is the most closely aligned one. But you know,
you can get out into like places like fucking Walgreens
and Walmart, right, and these are also like like the
Waltons as a family are like traditional backers of the
(26:32):
right for ages and ages and ages right, there've been
backers of far right causes. They also don't want this
because also their entire supply chains work through fucking China
and work through moving a bunch of like commodities around,
and the further route you go when you when you
start getting into like actual finance capital. These people are
fucking terrified because they're looking at this and like, holy shit,
we're about to lose all over goddamn money. And the
consequence to face is that all of this stuff is
(26:55):
shaping out in a sort of political battle in the
administration over who can get Trump in the room last
to try to figure out how how the economy is
going to work. But the problem is, and I have
been vindicated in this, in the very brief amount of
time between when the episode of Friday came out and
when we're recording this, there are no negotiations with China. Like,
(27:16):
they haven't started. There's no process for starting them.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
Trump does keep lying about starting negotiations, and yeah, he's
just lying about this, right, Chinese government says, no, we
have not started negotiations.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
It's like, no, there's no negotiations.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Yeah, and there and and again, like the structurally there
can't be negotiations because there's no actual way for the
US to like not have a trade deficit with China,
Like there's no way you can do that. And that's
the thing that will satisfy these people. So all of
this means that the economy is fucking dead, right. This
is the sort of like free trade economy we've all
grown up in that functions off of like you know,
(27:50):
like fucking drop shipping and all this cheap production of a
bunch of other countries and you know, like assemblies of
a bunch of different like goods in different places, and
the US is like the economic center of world is
just fucking gone.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Now.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
One of the reasons I started writing this episode in
the first place is that I have read so much
fucking analyzes of these goddamn turf tariffs, and do you
know how many of them, for a single fucking second,
considered what this was going to be like for anyone
who doesn't live in the United States. What the fuck
(28:25):
is wrong with people? Why does nobody fucking care about
a single goddamn person who.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Lives beside the United States.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
I have read so many fucking analyzes of this fucking shit.
I have read these things from I have read these
things from the business papers. I have read these things
from fascists. I have read these things from the center left.
I have read these things from leftists. Do you know
how many of these things have said anything about actual
fucking people who do not live.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
In the goddamn United States. Fucking none of them.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Every once in a while you'll get like, this will
be bad for the economy of China, and this is
this is a catastrophe because the people who are going
to be most affected by this when when the fucking
turf terrifts some liberation they come back into effect over
the summer are the working classes Sri Lanka.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
This is going to be.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
The fucking apocalypse for a bunch of people who have
been going through hell for years and years and years
and years. It's going to be places like fucking Bolivia,
who which is already facing a dollar crisis and is
struggling to import fuel.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
It is going to be places like Bangladesh.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
It is going to be places like Vietnam, which is,
you know, structurally in a better position than a lot
of the rest of these countries, but like fucking won't
be in a structurally better like balance for a structurally better
position when it has like ninety percent goddamn tariffs on it.
And yes, the US is going to be real fucking bad, right,
Everything is going to cost a lot more money. All
of us are going to have a lotless jobs, The
people who are in jobs are going to make a
(29:48):
lot less money. There is going to be a lot
of people fucking homeless. There is going to be a
lot of people who can't get fucking food. It is
going to be a catastrophe. And also at the same time,
the US is going to look like fucking fully automated,
luxury gase based commonism compared to fucking Shri Lanka. This
kind of sort of wrote American nationalism that has consumed
(30:08):
the brains of basically this entire goddamn country on a
level so deep Americans don't even fucking think about it,
like is the reason why we fucking have all of
this bullshit in the first place. And this is why,
like in like four fucking months, literally no one in
the entire country social security actually going to show up
because nineteen year ol grow up doesn't understand sequel because
(30:28):
nobody in this fucking country gives a single shit about
anyone who lives outside of the country enough to try
to do a single goddamn word of analysis about how
this is going.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
To affect everyone.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Because the death of the global economy will be felt here,
it is going to be felt so much fucking worse
everywhere else on goddamn Earth. And I am like, I
am losing my fucking mind at the extent to which
everyone is just fucking refusing to engage with this complete.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
This is gonna be.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Being unbelievably fucking angry because, like I don't know, a
bunch of my family doesn't live in this country, which
means I have to deal with the fact that, like
everyone else who lives in another country, is a human
being who's exactly the same as fucking we are, and
this is the thing that nobody else appears to want
to fuck deal with. I am losing my shit. Please
God stop talking about the tariffs as if they only
(31:17):
affect the United States and aren't mostly going to be
born by everyone else. I didn't write a transition for this,
but you know I will transition out of this by
again going back to the fact that all of the
reason this is going to be so bad is that
the global economy is based on, you know, a combination
(31:39):
of resource extraction and a combination of logistical supply lines
that all rely on there not being one hundred percent
tariffs on goods and importers to the US. And when
this shit goes through and when the rest of the
tariffs go through and make it you know, the thing
that's happening right now as an attempt to avoid this
stuff is everyone you know, and this is something like
Nintendo has been talking about right with a like, Okay,
(32:00):
our plan to avoid the tariffs on China is to
move a bunch of our production into Vietnam. And that
was happening anyways before the tariffs because of sort of
rising labor costs in China, and you know, a whole
bunch of sort of factors like that. But none of
that shit, none of that stuff that's like to sort
of like keep the current global economy on a lifeline,
(32:21):
is going is going to be able to function once
the tariffs on basically every country on Earth go into effect.
And there's a second problem here, which is that, Okay,
so what is the new economy going to look like
these people like that are the people running like the administration, right,
like people like Navarro and people like Trump, and a
lot of the sort of like right, who is driving
(32:41):
the policy thing here? Think that this that the production
that's happening everywhere else in the world will just be
replaced by the US. And there was a trap that
people fall into with Chinese economics. And I do this
too sometimes because it's you know, it's a fast and
easy way to think about the Chinese economy, and.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's not accurates.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
It's not like, isn't capital the whole picture of what's
going on? But the way that people think about the
Chinese economy tends to be that the reason that things
are made in China is because labor is cheap there
because either a culmination of exploitation and poverty. And that's
true to an extent, right, But the actual sort of
genius from capitalist perpective of capitalis returns to China was that,
(33:23):
you know, from a capitalist perspective, the Chinese workforce, and
this continues to be true thirty or forty years into
the transition, is highly educated and highly skilled, and the
education was paid for not by capitalism, right, it was
paid for by the sort of socialist system. Like this,
This combination of things of a highly educated and an
increasingly highly skilled as they've been, you know, working these jobs,
(33:44):
means that there is an extremely high skilled migrant labor
population that knows how to do a bunch of shit
like circuit board assembly and like stuff with like chip assembly, right,
that is vital to making electronics. And the US does
not have a couple of one hundred thousand micro workers
that you can just have and like exploit and not
(34:06):
pay healthcare costs to to know how all of the
chip manufacturing shit works. Right, There are people in the
US who know how to do some of these kinds
of things. But we're talking, you know, even even though
the US does have a manufacturing economy and it is
very high tech, it is not on the scale of
these things.
Speaker 5 (34:25):
Right.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
And the second, the second big reason why things are
producing in China, and this is this is the reason
why production didn't just shift all shift out of China
after twenty eleven when there were huge protests there and
huge riots there over sort of labor conditions, is that
there is an unbelievable amount of like capital outlet, like
this physical factory infrastructure that is in China that you
can't easily just move out to another country.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
And this is this is the basic things.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Like the power grid functions right, and you can't really
easily replicate that, and you can't just have this thing
that they're all people want to do. We're like the
US will just suddenly, you know, have all of these factories,
right and suddenly like all these things will just like
come back and miraculously like there will be all of
these jobs because like who the fuck is going like,
(35:12):
we don't we literally we don't have.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
The technology for this. We'll not technlogy.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
It was like, who is going to build all of
the factories, right, Like the factories don't exist here, the
like the interlague technical systems for them don't exist here.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
You don't want to switch to costing fifty thousand dollars
available in ten years pre order now, Sorry, no available
in twenty years. I forgot about the environmental impact surveys.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah iPhone, iPhone twenty years.
Speaker 6 (35:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
But like you know, and like and like a lot
of this is because I like, you know, you're hearing
a lot of reports now if like small business owners
we're talking about, like, yeah, it's so much easier to
work with Chinese manufacturers, is like im possible to work
with American manufacturers, And part of that is just exploitation, right, Like, yeah,
there's a lot of things that like there there were
like labor conditions that are very common in China that
do happen in the US but are much easier to
(35:57):
do there. But also like I don't know, like China
it has like an entire network of like the ability
to basically do this sort of like pop up light
and media manufacturing that can like retool itself really quickly,
and the US doesn't fucking have that, right, Like we
do have a bunch of manufacturing in the US, right,
Like that is the thing that we have, but it
was largely pushed into like the suburbs to get rid
(36:19):
of sort of like the masses of workers that a
rose in cities like Detroit, to like atomize them, right,
And this is actually like also happening in China right now, weirdly,
Like China has been pivoting to a service economy for
a long time, but think this thing is those service economies.
A lot of that shit is like also like drop
shipping production. Right, but like you know, there's no actual
way for you know becaure like capital at like costs
(36:40):
and things like that. There's no actual way to replicate
the conditions in China that make it like an effective
like source of global production in the US or even
in like a country like India, Like there's just not
the infrastructure there to do it, and there's not the
sort of like migrot labor population. It's not the sort
of things that you need. And what this means right now,
right is that like there is not a future lined
(37:02):
up to replace the one that we're in right now.
We literally don't know what this is going to do
because no one has ever bothered planning this shit out,
because this is just like taking a sledgehammer to fucking everything.
Like they are trying to extract the copper wires from
the house, and in order to do this, they like
you know aid because they think they think that's how
the economy works, is they attract the copper wires and
b their planned to extract the copper wires is to
(37:23):
blow the house.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Up with dynamite.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
And now no one's ever done in environmental impact statements
on what if you blow the house up with dynamite,
because why the fuck would you do that?
Speaker 4 (37:33):
Right, Sometimes the police do that.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
It's true, it's true, but I guess, I guess the
US is the world's police force. But you go, you know,
like no one has planned for this. But the second
thing is there isn't another model of capital waiting in
the wings in the way that there was when when
the sort of Reaganites did this the economy, because the
Reaganites had an entire ideological apprightus.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
They had they had.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
A like a functional way for the economy to work
and be worse and be more exploitive. But there's there's
nothing behind this, right, There's just a vision that literally
cannot work. And so the place that I want to
end as as we head into the end of the economy,
and as you know, I like I've been trying to
grapple with what is it going to look like after this,
(38:16):
is that we just don't know. Things in the supply
chain are going to break that we have never thought
about before, Like medical systems are going to start breaking down, right,
The supply chains for like like really really basic goods
that we don't even think about the production process of
is going to start breaking down because it relies on
being able to cheaply import one very very specific kind
(38:39):
of like I don't know, like ball bearing that's made
in one factory and suddenly cost like four hundred times
as much as it did before, And we don't know
what that's going to do. And this is on the
one hand, absolutely horrifying, right, like, this is going to
mean an unbelievable amount of suffering for people across the world.
(39:04):
But on the other hand, there is no plan, right,
They don't have a fucking strategy, and that means that
the future of the global economy is up in the air,
and it's up to us to make it a fucking
better one. Right, It's we either drive these people from
power and we and we destroy the basis of their
power on such a fundamental level they can never return
to power, right, Like, we just we just fucking ncap them.
(39:27):
We physically seize all of the fucking assets and all
of the things, of the productive capacity that they have
that has been allowing you to do this. We make
sure they can never get it again, and we make
sure that we fucking control it. And we either do
that or we all get crushed for a generation and
we enter a period of just unmitigated global suffering, the
(39:47):
likes of which only a few people in the most
hideously wartone parts of the world have experienced today.
Speaker 4 (39:55):
Yeah, I for one am very excited to see the
anarchist liberal reglobalization Alliance finally fighting in the streets of
Seattle to regain globalization full circle.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
You know, I will point out the reason they all
called it alter globalization and not anti globalization was that,
like one of the one of the original.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
Lines them did say anti globalization, they did, right, but.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
Like a like a like a lot of their argument was.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
Like the West Coast team, certainly this is true.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
But like like it's also it's also true that like
like like one of the arguments they were making was that,
like neoliberal globalization meant that people couldn't move to places,
but capital could. And the thing that they want was
a world where people can move between things and like,
fuck capital, what the fuck like eat shit? Right, And
that's a world that we can build, right, we can
build a world where fucking nobody gets arrested by the
(40:49):
immigration Gestapo, where like there isn't a fucking line on
the ground that dictates whether people can disappear you to
a concentration.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Camp, and that is also globalization.
Speaker 4 (40:59):
Right, we just have to fucking do it and our
co clintonism. One day we can look at a beautiful world.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Look, if Bill Crystal can admit the radicals were right,
all of these other motherfuckers could come around. We've been
writ all, but we've been right the whole fucking time.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Fuck you assholes.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
This all of you broke this world and it is
now our job to put it back together. And you
fuckers are going to back us or we are all
going to be killed by fascism.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
And those are the terms. Deal with it.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
It's a strange world we live in. Boom.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
You can now find sources for it Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Calzon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to it. Could that be here?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
A podcast where the the the ancient leftist adage there
was power logistics has finally been realized by one Donald Trump.
I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Gear.
How are you doing, Gear?
Speaker 4 (00:18):
Just another great day in America.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
It's great, it's great. There were arresting judges. It's it's
a good time. It's great.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Something that Mia has probably called for before, but under
different circumstances.
Speaker 5 (00:30):
Hey, look, have I ever publicly called for the arrest
of the judge.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm not sure I have.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Maybe probably not, because like arresting power itself is a
little bit problem hashtag problematic.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Yeah, I mean this is this is this is this is.
Speaker 5 (00:43):
A carcial solution to this. This is Garrison, Like we
kind of for using carcialism to solve the problems of
the cucural system. Sure, speaking of carcural systems, there is
the economy that we're all living under, which is also
quite literally a cucural system, because so much of it
is based on prisident and slave labor of various kinds
across the world. Now, I have good news and I
(01:04):
have bad news about this.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I don't remember what the good news was.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So we're only getting the bad news, which is that
well the good news and the bad news is that
this the system that we all.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Grew up on.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
That the economic system that has, you know, supported us
our entire lives or not supported us for our entire lives.
The thing, you know, the system that encompasses everything we
have ever known, is fucking dead.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It is dead as shit.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
The economic system that existed literally at the end of
last year does not exist anymore. It is it right
now in the process of dying, and the thing that
is emerging has not emerged yet, which means we get
to go to the Gramsey quote where he says, this
is the time of monsters.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
The Chinese century. My favorite see whatever Gramski, how do
we say this guy's name Gramski, Gramm gram Sheet see
you fucked up too? Yeah, my favorite gram Sheet quote?
Or entering the Chinese Century?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Look I okay, So, like here's the thing.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
I I, on a fundamental level think that GRAMPSI is
like the harbinger of the entire retreat of the twentieth
century left. So I hate him and therefar if you
say his name properly. Also, we're going to get into
a little bit about white. The Chinese century is going
to also be a complete shitcho for them too, But
you know.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
The Canadian century, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Finally, the Yugoslavian century.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
With God Emperor Mark Carney in charge, he will usher
in a new era of Canadian progress and global supremacy.
As climate change worsens, the Canadian economy will suck up
all of the independency and resources from the US in
the late twentieth century. And finally we will have a
Tim Hortons in every country in the planet.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I'm so excited for us to finally get our first
war between two countries with Tim Hortons in it.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
That will be exciting.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
So here is a story that we have told on
the show many many, many, many many many times, and
it is the story of the structure of the modern
world economy. The birth of the liberalism, the ascendancy of
free trade, the decline of the US as the world's
grand manufacturing power, the collapse of the clower of the
global working class, and the generalized ascension of capitalism, and
(03:21):
this specific force of capitalism as the structuring force of
the world system. It is a story of how structural
forces and contingent choices, technological changes in class weres, domestic
politics and grand international maneuvers, and international relations built a
political and economic structure that ruled the world for half
a century of American hegemony. And we are going to
tell a very very abbreviated version of that story for
(03:43):
one final time because that world.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
The world, say final, because you'll probably do this again
in two years. But okay, the.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
World that we were all born into, that world is
fucking dead and Donald Trump has killed it.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
This is how it died. Garrison. Yes, in the beginning,
there was war.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Sure, in the ashes of a continents read by the
flames of fascism, two army's stood triumphant over a new world.
One of them, unfortunately, was the United States. The second one, unfortunately,
was the USSR. Now it's also worth mentioning that very briefly,
both the French and the British assumed they would also
be like superpowers and no jokes, washed failed failed powers,
(04:33):
zero out of ten absolute dipshits destroyed.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Now, oddly enough, Japan walked away with more power than
either of those countries. Yes, yeah, a little bit, a
little bit odd considering the conditions that led to this happening.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Well, you know, I mean, but the actual shift here though,
and this is and this is you know, this actually
is a lot of what this episode is about is
that the thing that World War One or World War
two did was was more I would also do this,
but was fundamentally break the power of the old world empires. Right,
because the world had been ruled for several hundred years
(05:08):
by various combinations of the French, the British, and the Germans.
And you know this is some extent like Spain, but
Spain was sort of gone, right, But like those old
World empires had been what had structured everything in the world,
and at the end of World War Two that suddenly
wasn't the case anymore. And the product of this was
that if if you look at the places in the
world that had the largest remaining industrial reserves, right, you know,
(05:31):
I mean, there was obviously some industrial production in Latin America,
particularly Argentina. There was some like Chinese manufacturing belts that
were run by Japan in China that weren't destroyed. And
then there was the entire manufacturing power of the United States.
And this meant that alone among countries, right, the US
was in the most dominant position, like one of the
(05:54):
most positions of great power has ever been and even
though there technically was a second great power, right, they
had an unbelievable percentage of the world's total manufacturing power,
We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total gold reserves.
We had I mean, I guess, like the second largest
army in the world. But you know, like we were
significant the more technologically advanced than the USSR. And this
(06:15):
had a bunch of extremely weird consequences because there was
really no way for the amount of like concentrated industrial
power the US had to go but down because we
controlled so much of the world's wealth and so much
of the world's manufacturing capacity that the only thing that
could ever possibly happen was that the rest of the
(06:35):
world would catch up. And this was a thing that
was actually necessary. And this is something that was that
was spurred on by the American industrial class, right, because
they suddenly had all of these like jeep factories you're
trying to make cars out of, and they needed people
to buy the cars. And the only way to do
that was to rebuild Europe and to rebuild Japan in
order to sort of rebuild these places as markets and
so for like a very brief time. And this is
(06:56):
the sort of like golden age that all of these
Trump people know these like weird dipshits like harkened back to.
Was this like part time of like unmatched American power,
but also it was it was a time in the
world economy where you could have multiple powers industrializing at
the same time without it being zero s and that
just was not going to last because at a certain point,
(07:20):
and this is accelerated by things we've talked about in
other episodes, like this attempt by a bunch of what
we're called the Non Aligned Movement or sort of the
G seventy seven, you know, also like the Third World Movement,
a bunch of these countries that were non alliance, like Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan,
which you can immediately tell how this alliance is going
to shit because these two countries are allied, are like
(07:40):
in the same alliance, right, like you know, this is
the Chiito's Yugoslavia is in this with like Saudi Arabia,
these countries sort of like economic strategy was to create
something that actually is in a lot of ways kind
of like what Trump is trying to do, which is
like using their control of resources, although again the resource
of the US has now is like money basically took
(08:01):
all of the fucking world's resources, right, but using that
to develop your own local industrial basis so you can
have your own local manufacturing economy. And this is something
that like a lot of countries pursued this, like Venezuela
pursues this, like Bolivia pursues it is. This is something
that like everyone like kind of across the political spectrum
is trying to do in like the sitties and seventies
(08:21):
and through the eighties. But the thing is it's destroyed
by the second thing that's sort of a model for
what these people are trying to do, which is what
Reagan was able to do to the American economy in
the sort of nineteen eighties. And what Reagan is able
to do is Reagan actually does something that sounds really
bizarre now, but he was actually successfully able to temporarily
(08:43):
for about maybe like six years, six or seven years,
was able to actually like dramatically ramp up American like
like industrial production and like was able to do the
whole sort of like we're bringing the jobs back to
the US. But the thing is, the way he did
this was not the way the Trump administration is doing it.
Speaker 5 (09:02):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
What he did was, on the one hand, he blew
a smoking crater in the entire world economy. And that
garrison will sound familiar to you because these people are
trying to.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Blow a hole in the American economy, right, like you
have seen this.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
Yes, I have seen the stonks and the trade and
the shipments, yes I am.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
But but even like like Elon Musk would like deliver
like post about this, right, like very deliberately about how
he wants to destroy the economy so that there could
be like a oh yeah, brief economic hardship and that
a golden age.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Right, necessary hardship will have to endure for a short
period of time to then reach the like utopia which
is surely around the corner.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yeah, And it's interesting because when when when serious people
have to defend this like Fox Okay, I say serious people,
I'm taking this and I'm saying Fox News because like serious.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Look, look here's a serious clouds.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah, I don't have to defend this, right, Like, Okay,
you know we're not dealing with like you know, we're
not dealing with like intellectual titans here. But like when
someone who is mildly more intelligent than Elon Musk has
to defend this, it is Reagan, they point you, because
Reagan and Carter was also had a hand in this.
But Reagan does this thing called the Folker shock, right,
like working working hand in hand with.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Paul Volker's the head of the Federal.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Reserve, which notably, Trump just spent a bunch of time
threatening to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and
then had to back off on that because all of
the markets were like, this is our fucking rubicon, Like
we don't.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Give a fuck about any of the other thing. Well,
I we kind of give a fuck up the other
things he'd be doing.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
But like, if you fire the head of the Federal Reserve,
like we're going ape shit. But like, you know, the
Fed and Reagan work together in order to do this thing,
which is the jack interest rates to just like unhinged levels,
causing everyone else's debt in the world to become like
unbelievably unsustainable to repay this like annihilates boast of the
(10:46):
world's economies. This also creates like a double dip recession,
where the US has like almost twenty percent unemployment.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
But he's able to.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Write this out specifically because like, this thing actually benefits
a bunch of sections of the American capitalis class. Like
if you are someone who holds debt, right, this is
fucking great for you. And this is something very different
from what's happening right now because nobody is winning the
trade war, Like everyone is just having the very worst
time I've ever had.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
It does seem like a globe of losers.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, But the thing that Reagan does that actually allowed
him to temporarily restore the profitability of a lot of
American manufacturing. And there is still a lot of American manufacturing.
We'll get to that in a bit. But the thing
he was able to do was the thing that Garrison
I was threatening at the beginning of the show.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
By the time I am done doing this, pot like
maybe not this podcast block. By the time I.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Finish doing it, could happen here when I like die
on the battlefield in fifteen years, everyone will be able
to fucking explain the Plaza Chords and the reverse Plaza
Chords because they're they're the central thing that got us
to this alt of this fucking place, which is that
Ronald Reagan goes to Japan and goes to like West Germany,
and the subtext of what he's saying is like you
(11:59):
are a Maria military protectorates and because you are American
build or Japan by the way, it's like the great
industrial power of the nineteen eighties right and through the nineties,
Like they are like the defining like they are the
thing that everyone thinks about China today. Like if you
want to find every argument people make about China from
the entire political spectrum, like all the way from like
people in the one hands going like this is they're
(12:20):
going to destroy American hegemony to people on the other
hand being like this is what socialism is, you can
find all of those same arguments people made about Japan
in like the eighties. But you know, what Reagan forces
these countries to do is to increase the value of
their currency relative to the dollar. Right, so the dollar
is suddenly worthless, and because the dollar is like worthless
relative to other international currencies, it makes US manufacturer more competitive.
(12:41):
And this like temporarily restores American techleological production, but then
they have to reverse them because that nukes the entire
Japanese economy, and the Japanese economy becomes an entire thing
of real estate speculation, which you know, I guess, I
know you may be too young to remember what happened
the last time that we base the entire.
Speaker 6 (12:57):
Economy of ailsa speculation.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
But that's not true.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
I say, you're like a few days older than me.
Come on, that's unbelievably not sure.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
I am over half a decade older than you. Is
that real?
Speaker 5 (13:10):
No?
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Yeah, real, Yeah, we'll talk about this afterwards. I don't
I don't think that's true. Let me pull up my
mea Wong docs file to check once, all.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Right, while Garrison checks to be a Wong Docks file.
The economy that is built up from all of us, though, right,
is an economy based on a few different things. One,
it's based on an entire network of global supply chains
with you know, like very very minimal tariff barriers between them.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
Right.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
It is based on the sort of doctrine of free trade,
which is, you know, not really free, but obviously like
the ways that these were written structurally benefited the US, right,
where like the US is allowed to do all of
this shit for like its corn production that nowhere the
country is allowed to do. Like all of the market
tampering that all these people scream about is just what
the U S does with corn. But you know, the
(13:58):
entire canoxysm was based on being able to cheaply produce
different components of goods in different countries, assemble them, and
then move them across the world cheaply in order to
sort of avoid the localized power of workers movements. It
is based on the US running a series of bubble economies,
so the tech bubble, the housing bubbles, heata, et cetera.
And it is based on the US dollar and the
(14:20):
bond as like the fundamental aspects of the like as
the world reserve currency, the.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Fundamental thing that drives the system.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
And when we come back, we will talk about this
literally all exploding and what it's going to do for
all of.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
You, which is not good.
Speaker 6 (14:37):
Yay, okay, we are back now.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
One of the things that have in a lot of
ways locked the system in place was that because of
the that these manufacturing like networks are set up right,
because they're all so interlinked, because they're all dependent on
like exploiting differences between production capacity and like labor costs
(15:12):
in different countries. They are all so interconnected that if
you try to pull one thread out of it and
do a major change to the system, the entire thing
is at risk immediately. And this meant that there has
always been an enormous structural incentive to keep things the
way they were, even if everyone can also already like
realize that they're kind of fucked up. And this stays
(15:33):
all the way back to like things that most people
largely have forgotten about. But like Obama, for example, ran
on renegotiating NAFTA, and he never like intended to do that,
but like even if he had the moment he got
into power, you know, like Trump renegotiates NAFTA too, right,
but he renegotiates NAFTA and it's just like the same
trade deal.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Because for a long.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Time, right, if if you were going to run the
capitalist economy in a functional way, the only thing you
could possibly do was run it the way he had
already been set up, because there were so many structural
factors about how this is no production works, that this
is only that this is the only way you could
run it and still like have the economy not explode.
But now we have finally produced a group of men
so stupid that they are unconstrained by the structural limits
(16:14):
of the economy. And this is where we get into
the ground of turf terracemberon right now, and we get
into something that is very important to understand about this,
which is that this shit is not about economics, right
in the sense that you or I were understand them.
This is none of this stuff is about like we
(16:34):
want the economy to grow. It's this is not something
that like really any of the major sectors of capital
want because it is just nucing this whole thing. And
this is why you've seen a split between even Elon
Musk has like openly criticized the trade policy, even if
he's been sort of hedging it. What we've been seeing
(16:54):
is this widening rift. And we talked about this in
the last Executive Disorder, where like different factions of the
Trump administration we're literally trying to like isolate Trump from
like Navarro, who's the guy who wants to do all
of the all of the tariff bullshit they've been you know,
like literally try to get them alone in a room
so that they can they can implement their trade policy.
But the actual underlying urge here is completely ideological, right
(17:19):
it is. It is this idea that like if you
run a trade deficit with a country, or if you're
if you are buying things from a country, they are
ripping you off and you always need to be selling
more things than you're buying, which is just like so
okay on one level, like this is just so fucking
nonsense that like attempting to explain why his bullshit is
kind of pointless, But we're gonna do it anyways, because
(17:42):
someone fucking has to somewhere, And this actually does also
reveal something about the way that money has always worked
under these systems. Okay, So before we get to like
what this is going to do to the entire world economy,
we need to talk about garrison. Do you know what
balance of payments is?
Speaker 4 (17:58):
That sounds like something and to ask my accountant about.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Yeah, so this is a technically an accounting thing, right,
but the balance of payments of a country it is
like a leisure thing, right, But it's the measure of
like their accounts, right, in terms of all of the
money coming out of the country and all of the
money coming into the country.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
That's you know, that's like trade balance stuff.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Right, and the balance of payments is actually very important
for a lot of countries because specifically most countries in
the world need to buy things in a currency they
can't print. This has always been the structural limit of
things like modern monetary theory, which talks about how like
your country's ability to like have things isn't constrained by
(18:39):
just like the pure money supply of your country as
long as you're buying things in your own currency, right, Like,
the purpose of money is the thing that move assets around.
But inflation isn't a product. I mean, like, yeah, okay,
if you just like hammer the fucking printer button, right, Like, yeah,
you can cause hyper inflation, but substantively because money is
something that is a production of the government, because it
is literally government debt.
Speaker 6 (19:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
It's not a commodity in the conventional sense.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Where you have to like figure out how much of
that there is and there's like a limited supply of it,
and you have to like manage limited supply and make
sure the economy doesn't explode. You can just use the
money that you have, and you can use debt like
deficit spending effectively to continue to circulate goods around.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
The economy.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
The problem is if you have to buy something that
is not in your currency, that's where you need trade
because you need to find a way so you know,
I'm gonna taken example that we're gonna come back you later,
which is Bolivia.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Right. If you are.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Bolivia, you need to get American dollars. You can buy
like gas, right, so people can like fucking fuel their cars.
And the problem is you can only buy oil in
American dollars, so you have to find something to export
to a place where you can get American dollars for it.
And in this sense, balance of payments actually matters enormously, right,
And balance of payments is also just like a function
(19:52):
of all of your trade deficits and all of your
trade surpluses sort of combined.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
But think about the US, this is a notable thing.
Everyone uses the dollar to buy shit. There's like nothing
that you.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Can't buy with the dollar.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
So for the United States, none of this shit matters
at all, none of the mottle flame of stuff.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
It is completely.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Irrelevant, like literally, completely totally and utterly irrelevant. Right now,
if you are like Bolivia and you run out of dollars,
then what you have as a spirally economic crisis where
like peoples looking suddenly can't buy food because no one
can buy oil, so no one can move things around,
So like the entire equality literal collapses. This is a
very very very common mode of economic collapse. But you know,
(20:32):
none of the things that the right is talking about,
like in terms of like, oh you have like the
United States has like a trade deficit with China's like yeah, great,
that means that we're buying.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Things from them.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Like the one good Rand Paul quote ever was like, yes,
I have a trade deficit with my grocery store, like
and that's fine.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
Mia goes full Rand Paul on the podcast today.
Speaker 5 (20:54):
Yeah I know.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
But the thing is, the thing is it is very
very funny that Rand Paul is now complaining about this.
It's like, well, yeah, I don't know if all of
you motherfuckers hadn't spent all this time like fucking polling
around with like Alex Jones and the Klan, like we
probably wouldn't be here right now.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
The zero faults definitely, like the Tea Party does have
a sizeable chunk of the blame here.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, Like like that's the thing, like this this is
your all of your fucking fault. Lock them up quick,
zero tot of ten zero a ten, Get him out,
Get him out, Get them out.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Now.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Do you know what else we need to get out?
Gett a stock. Oh it's these fucks and services.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
Yeah, get them out of stock.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Get them out of stock while you still can.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Well, we still have an economy.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
We are back now again.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
As I was saying, like this attempt to make the
American economy function in a way that it has trade
surpluses with every other country. And also, and this is
also important, these people don't think that like services are
real and a lot of what the US exports as services.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
But because they're all these really weird like me.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Because they're all fascists, right, they all have this all
of this weird ideological shit about masculinity and about the
favoring of the concrete over the abstract, because the concrete
is like masculated. It is like it is the nation,
right like this like steel workers and people who fucking
hammer coal out like this. This is what masculinity is.
This is what nationalism is. This is what men are
(22:21):
supposed to do.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Yeah, you have the materialists on the evil side, and
you have the post materialists on Well no.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Okay, So so this is a long time ago.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
I did a bunch of episodes called The Class and
the Culture War, and one of the points that I
make in that episode is that one of the arguments
that the Canadian Jewish Marxist historian Moish Pistone makes about
what the Holocaust was was this attempt to pit the
concrete part of capital against the abstract part of capital. Right,
(22:52):
where the concrete part of capital is like the nation
and the worker and the factory and like the boss, right,
and all of these like conk things were pitted against
the like the quote unquote abstract part of capital, which
is to say, like quote unquote like Jewish financiers and
all of the sort of like weird collection of like
modifiers that gets associated with like you know, the rootless
(23:14):
positive politanism, like the globalism, like all of this shit, right,
And what the Nazis did was embody all of that
stuff into just the figure of the Jewish person and
his arguments. And this is arguing about like sort of
structural anti semitism, and what the Holocaust was was that
the like that was what the Nazi revolution was. That's
what the liquidation of like and this is how episode describes,
(23:36):
like liquidation of Jesus is what this is what the holocaust,
This is what the genocide was. Was their attempt to
destroy the like abstract part of part of this thing
by pitting it against the concrete part of this thing.
And this is what these fucking people are also are
also doing in their own way, right.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
Like yeah, they're just doing it with like the price
of eggs or like the availability of housing.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Right, and you know, and it's also renting. Like these
people are like unhe and gentti Semitic, right because this
is all part of the same ideology. They just sort
of like they're doing the shit in different ways and
they haven't like yeah, I don't know, like if these
people are in power for like a decade, we might
just get this right where they're literally doing the Holocaust again,
but like we're not at that point yet, but we're
at the point is where like this this kind of
(24:16):
like under like this kind of fascist understanding of the
nation and masculinity and like the concrete versus the abstract,
and like these figures can be like embodied in anti thinking.
This is also what like what the like this is
what the administration is doing with immigrants, right, is like
passing them in that role of like the abstract like
the foreigner, the yeah, the national, the like the anti
the anti national.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
Those things are are what is causing our economic problems,
our housing problems. And then you have other instances like
with like Mexico and Canada where they tie in the
trade war with this like ventanyl thing being like you know,
like immigrants are bringing fentanyl over the border and we're
using tariffs as a negotiating tactic to stop ventanyls like
they're they're bringing in even more like aspects regarding like
(24:58):
immigration and tying it directly to like our trade wars
with these with these you know, massive massive countries, some
of our most important trading partners.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah, and this is causing an interesting split because Trump's
like political coalition, right, has a bunch of kind of
different kinds of fascists in a lot of ways. We're
like Trump and Navarro and like, I mean, Trump is
instinctually pro tariff and like he can be talked out
of it because again this guy's brain, like we saw
(25:30):
this last administration, like the last person in the room
with him can convince them but basically anything. But you know,
those people are structurally committed to like this specific version
of masculinity. And there's a lot of portions of the
right that are and that are committed to like this
trade policy is like the America first American nationalist thing.
But like someone like Elon Musk isn't that committed to this,
And like even a lot of the people who are
(25:52):
like the inner circle sort of like Jarvin, like tech
fascist right are like okay, but hold on, like we
make all of our shit in China, so like you know,
and this is why like Elon is coming against the
terrorists because like, yeah, they're gonna fuck him, like because
he has to import stuff and export stuff from China
because that's where a bunch of his production facilities are, right,
and you know, and if once you get out of
(26:12):
the circle of of like that kind of like tech
fascist right, and and the tech people are the people
who are the most closely aligned with this administration, right,
like an internships are like all the sexus of the capital.
Tech is the most closely aligned one. But you know,
you can get out into like places like fucking Walgreens
and Walmart, right, and these are also like like the
Waltons as a family are like traditional backers of the
(26:32):
right for ages and ages and ages right, there've been
backers of far right causes. They also don't want this
because also their entire supply chains work through fucking China
and work through moving a bunch of like commodities around,
and the further route you go when you when you
start getting into like actual finance capital. These people are
fucking terrified because they're looking at this and like, holy shit,
we're about to lose all over goddamn money. And the
consequence to face is that all of this stuff is
(26:55):
shaping out in a sort of political battle in the
administration over who can get Trump in the room last
to try to figure out how how the economy is
going to work. But the problem is, and I have
been vindicated in this, in the very brief amount of
time between when the episode of Friday came out and
when we're recording this, there are no negotiations with China. Like,
(27:16):
they haven't started. There's no process for starting them.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
Trump does keep lying about starting negotiations, and yeah, he's
just lying about this, right, Chinese government says, no, we
have not started negotiations.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
It's like, no, there's no negotiations.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Yeah, and there and and again, like the structurally there
can't be negotiations because there's no actual way for the
US to like not have a trade deficit with China,
Like there's no way you can do that. And that's
the thing that will satisfy these people. So all of
this means that the economy is fucking dead, right. This
is the sort of like free trade economy we've all
grown up in that functions off of like you know,
(27:50):
like fucking drop shipping and all this cheap production of a
bunch of other countries and you know, like assemblies of
a bunch of different like goods in different places, and
the US is like the economic center of world is
just fucking gone.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Now.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
One of the reasons I started writing this episode in
the first place is that I have read so much
fucking analyzes of these goddamn turf tariffs, and do you
know how many of them, for a single fucking second,
considered what this was going to be like for anyone
who doesn't live in the United States. What the fuck
(28:25):
is wrong with people? Why does nobody fucking care about
a single goddamn person who.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Lives beside the United States.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
I have read so many fucking analyzes of this fucking shit.
I have read these things from I have read these
things from the business papers. I have read these things
from fascists. I have read these things from the center left.
I have read these things from leftists. Do you know
how many of these things have said anything about actual
fucking people who do not live.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
In the goddamn United States. Fucking none of them.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Every once in a while you'll get like, this will
be bad for the economy of China, and this is
this is a catastrophe because the people who are going
to be most affected by this when when the fucking
turf terrifts some liberation they come back into effect over
the summer are the working classes Sri Lanka.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
This is going to be.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
The fucking apocalypse for a bunch of people who have
been going through hell for years and years and years
and years. It's going to be places like fucking Bolivia,
who which is already facing a dollar crisis and is
struggling to import fuel.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
It is going to be places like Bangladesh.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
It is going to be places like Vietnam, which is,
you know, structurally in a better position than a lot
of the rest of these countries, but like fucking won't
be in a structurally better like balance for a structurally better
position when it has like ninety percent goddamn tariffs on it.
And yes, the US is going to be real fucking bad, right,
Everything is going to cost a lot more money. All
of us are going to have a lotless jobs, The
people who are in jobs are going to make a
(29:48):
lot less money. There is going to be a lot
of people fucking homeless. There is going to be a
lot of people who can't get fucking food. It is
going to be a catastrophe. And also at the same time,
the US is going to look like fucking fully automated,
luxury gase based commonism compared to fucking Shri Lanka. This
kind of sort of wrote American nationalism that has consumed
(30:08):
the brains of basically this entire goddamn country on a
level so deep Americans don't even fucking think about it,
like is the reason why we fucking have all of
this bullshit in the first place. And this is why,
like in like four fucking months, literally no one in
the entire country social security actually going to show up
because nineteen year ol grow up doesn't understand sequel because
(30:28):
nobody in this fucking country gives a single shit about
anyone who lives outside of the country enough to try
to do a single goddamn word of analysis about how
this is going.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
To affect everyone.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Because the death of the global economy will be felt here,
it is going to be felt so much fucking worse
everywhere else on goddamn Earth. And I am like, I
am losing my fucking mind at the extent to which
everyone is just fucking refusing to engage with this complete.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
This is gonna be.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Being unbelievably fucking angry because, like I don't know, a
bunch of my family doesn't live in this country, which
means I have to deal with the fact that, like
everyone else who lives in another country, is a human
being who's exactly the same as fucking we are, and
this is the thing that nobody else appears to want
to fuck deal with. I am losing my shit. Please
God stop talking about the tariffs as if they only
(31:17):
affect the United States and aren't mostly going to be
born by everyone else. I didn't write a transition for this,
but you know I will transition out of this by
again going back to the fact that all of the
reason this is going to be so bad is that
the global economy is based on, you know, a combination
(31:39):
of resource extraction and a combination of logistical supply lines
that all rely on there not being one hundred percent
tariffs on goods and importers to the US. And when
this shit goes through and when the rest of the
tariffs go through and make it you know, the thing
that's happening right now as an attempt to avoid this
stuff is everyone you know, and this is something like
Nintendo has been talking about right with a like, Okay,
(32:00):
our plan to avoid the tariffs on China is to
move a bunch of our production into Vietnam. And that
was happening anyways before the tariffs because of sort of
rising labor costs in China, and you know, a whole
bunch of sort of factors like that. But none of
that shit, none of that stuff that's like to sort
of like keep the current global economy on a lifeline,
(32:21):
is going is going to be able to function once
the tariffs on basically every country on Earth go into effect.
And there's a second problem here, which is that, Okay,
so what is the new economy going to look like
these people like that are the people running like the administration, right,
like people like Navarro and people like Trump, and a
lot of the sort of like right, who is driving
(32:41):
the policy thing here? Think that this that the production
that's happening everywhere else in the world will just be
replaced by the US. And there was a trap that
people fall into with Chinese economics. And I do this
too sometimes because it's you know, it's a fast and
easy way to think about the Chinese economy, and.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's not accurates.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
It's not like, isn't capital the whole picture of what's
going on? But the way that people think about the
Chinese economy tends to be that the reason that things
are made in China is because labor is cheap there
because either a culmination of exploitation and poverty. And that's
true to an extent, right, But the actual sort of
genius from capitalist perpective of capitalis returns to China was that,
(33:23):
you know, from a capitalist perspective, the Chinese workforce, and
this continues to be true thirty or forty years into
the transition, is highly educated and highly skilled, and the
education was paid for not by capitalism, right, it was
paid for by the sort of socialist system. Like this,
This combination of things of a highly educated and an
increasingly highly skilled as they've been, you know, working these jobs,
(33:44):
means that there is an extremely high skilled migrant labor
population that knows how to do a bunch of shit
like circuit board assembly and like stuff with like chip assembly, right,
that is vital to making electronics. And the US does
not have a couple of one hundred thousand micro workers
that you can just have and like exploit and not
(34:06):
pay healthcare costs to to know how all of the
chip manufacturing shit works. Right, There are people in the
US who know how to do some of these kinds
of things. But we're talking, you know, even even though
the US does have a manufacturing economy and it is
very high tech, it is not on the scale of
these things.
Speaker 5 (34:25):
Right.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
And the second, the second big reason why things are
producing in China, and this is this is the reason
why production didn't just shift all shift out of China
after twenty eleven when there were huge protests there and
huge riots there over sort of labor conditions, is that
there is an unbelievable amount of like capital outlet, like
this physical factory infrastructure that is in China that you
can't easily just move out to another country.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
And this is this is the basic things.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Like the power grid functions right, and you can't really
easily replicate that, and you can't just have this thing
that they're all people want to do. We're like the
US will just suddenly, you know, have all of these factories,
right and suddenly like all these things will just like
come back and miraculously like there will be all of
these jobs because like who the fuck is going like,
(35:12):
we don't we literally we don't have.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
The technology for this. We'll not technlogy.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
It was like, who is going to build all of
the factories, right, Like the factories don't exist here, the
like the interlague technical systems for them don't exist here.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
You don't want to switch to costing fifty thousand dollars
available in ten years pre order now, Sorry, no available
in twenty years. I forgot about the environmental impact surveys.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah iPhone, iPhone twenty years.
Speaker 6 (35:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
But like you know, and like and like a lot
of this is because I like, you know, you're hearing
a lot of reports now if like small business owners
we're talking about, like, yeah, it's so much easier to
work with Chinese manufacturers, is like im possible to work
with American manufacturers, And part of that is just exploitation, right, Like, yeah,
there's a lot of things that like there there were
like labor conditions that are very common in China that
do happen in the US but are much easier to
(35:57):
do there. But also like I don't know, like China
it has like an entire network of like the ability
to basically do this sort of like pop up light
and media manufacturing that can like retool itself really quickly,
and the US doesn't fucking have that, right, Like we
do have a bunch of manufacturing in the US, right,
Like that is the thing that we have, but it
was largely pushed into like the suburbs to get rid
(36:19):
of sort of like the masses of workers that a
rose in cities like Detroit, to like atomize them, right,
And this is actually like also happening in China right now, weirdly,
Like China has been pivoting to a service economy for
a long time, but think this thing is those service economies.
A lot of that shit is like also like drop
shipping production. Right, but like you know, there's no actual
way for you know becaure like capital at like costs
(36:40):
and things like that. There's no actual way to replicate
the conditions in China that make it like an effective
like source of global production in the US or even
in like a country like India, Like there's just not
the infrastructure there to do it, and there's not the
sort of like migrot labor population. It's not the sort
of things that you need. And what this means right now,
right is that like there is not a future lined
(37:02):
up to replace the one that we're in right now.
We literally don't know what this is going to do
because no one has ever bothered planning this shit out,
because this is just like taking a sledgehammer to fucking everything.
Like they are trying to extract the copper wires from
the house, and in order to do this, they like
you know aid because they think they think that's how
the economy works, is they attract the copper wires and
b their planned to extract the copper wires is to
(37:23):
blow the house.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Up with dynamite.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
And now no one's ever done in environmental impact statements
on what if you blow the house up with dynamite,
because why the fuck would you do that?
Speaker 4 (37:33):
Right, Sometimes the police do that.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
It's true, it's true, but I guess, I guess the
US is the world's police force. But you go, you know,
like no one has planned for this. But the second
thing is there isn't another model of capital waiting in
the wings in the way that there was when when
the sort of Reaganites did this the economy, because the
Reaganites had an entire ideological apprightus.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
They had they had.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
A like a functional way for the economy to work
and be worse and be more exploitive. But there's there's
nothing behind this, right, There's just a vision that literally
cannot work. And so the place that I want to
end as as we head into the end of the economy,
and as you know, I like I've been trying to
grapple with what is it going to look like after this,
(38:16):
is that we just don't know. Things in the supply
chain are going to break that we have never thought
about before, Like medical systems are going to start breaking down, right,
The supply chains for like like really really basic goods
that we don't even think about the production process of
is going to start breaking down because it relies on
being able to cheaply import one very very specific kind
(38:39):
of like I don't know, like ball bearing that's made
in one factory and suddenly cost like four hundred times
as much as it did before, And we don't know
what that's going to do. And this is on the
one hand, absolutely horrifying, right, like, this is going to
mean an unbelievable amount of suffering for people across the world.
(39:04):
But on the other hand, there is no plan, right,
They don't have a fucking strategy, and that means that
the future of the global economy is up in the air,
and it's up to us to make it a fucking
better one. Right, It's we either drive these people from
power and we and we destroy the basis of their
power on such a fundamental level they can never return
to power, right, Like, we just we just fucking ncap them.
(39:27):
We physically seize all of the fucking assets and all
of the things, of the productive capacity that they have
that has been allowing you to do this. We make
sure they can never get it again, and we make
sure that we fucking control it. And we either do
that or we all get crushed for a generation and
we enter a period of just unmitigated global suffering, the
(39:47):
likes of which only a few people in the most
hideously wartone parts of the world have experienced today.
Speaker 4 (39:55):
Yeah, I for one am very excited to see the
anarchist liberal reglobalization Alliance finally fighting in the streets of
Seattle to regain globalization full circle.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
You know, I will point out the reason they all
called it alter globalization and not anti globalization was that,
like one of the one of the original.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
Lines them did say anti globalization, they did, right, but.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
Like a like a like a lot of their argument was.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
Like the West Coast team, certainly this is true.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
But like like it's also it's also true that like
like like one of the arguments they were making was that,
like neoliberal globalization meant that people couldn't move to places,
but capital could. And the thing that they want was
a world where people can move between things and like,
fuck capital, what the fuck like eat shit? Right, And
that's a world that we can build, right, we can
build a world where fucking nobody gets arrested by the
(40:49):
immigration Gestapo, where like there isn't a fucking line on
the ground that dictates whether people can disappear you to
a concentration.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Camp, and that is also globalization.
Speaker 4 (40:59):
Right, we just have to fucking do it and our
co clintonism. One day we can look at a beautiful world.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Look, if Bill Crystal can admit the radicals were right,
all of these other motherfuckers could come around. We've been
writ all, but we've been right the whole fucking time.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Fuck you assholes.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
This all of you broke this world and it is
now our job to put it back together. And you
fuckers are going to back us or we are all
going to be killed by fascism.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
And those are the terms. Deal with it.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
It's a strange world we live in. Boom.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
You can now find sources for it Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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