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