Speaker 1: Calzon Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome Tock It Happen. Hear a podcast about things falling
Speaker 2: apart and them continuing to fall apart. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Mia Wong with me as James Stout.
Speaker 3: Hi. Miya glad to hear about whatever's going to shit today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so before we start talking about imperialism, we're starting
Speaker 2: everything episode with this until you people stop, until you
Speaker 2: stop doing this. It is the year two thousand and
Speaker 2: twenty five. We are a quarter of a century into
Speaker 2: this millennia and people are still getting kettled by cops
Speaker 2: on bridges. They did this occupy in twenty eleven. They
Speaker 2: did it in twenty eighteen during the Occupy Ice protest.
Speaker 2: The people did it in twenty twenty. People did it
Speaker 2: last year during the Dream of the Power sign and
Speaker 2: Cambus people are doing it again this year. Simply do
Speaker 2: not lead a march onto a bridge, yep or a
Speaker 2: tunnel to dai reasons. We would also include a tunnel. Yes,
Speaker 2: don't do the tunnel either.
Speaker 3: Yeah. If there's no side exits, just don't.
Speaker 2: Yes, here's the thing. You walk onto a bridge, all
Speaker 2: the cops have to do is take both exits and
Speaker 2: everyone on the bridge gets arrested. You can simply not
Speaker 2: do this. If you must do it, you need to
Speaker 2: like make one thousand percent sure you can hold both
Speaker 2: sides of the bridge. Yeah, both of them. You need
Speaker 2: to hold both of them. Yeah, and almost certainly you can't.
Speaker 2: So only you, only you, dear listener, can prevent four
Speaker 2: thousand more people from getting kettled on locking bridges. And
Speaker 2: I'm going to keep starting episodes packing well, get it,
Speaker 2: don't get kettled up bridges until this stop. All right,
Speaker 2: this is this is this has been me as public
Speaker 2: service announcement of a bridge kettling. Let's get into the
Speaker 2: nature of imperialism and why Trump's is different. So we've
Speaker 2: been covering a lot of Trump's sort of I don't know,
Speaker 2: the trade wars, his call for the US to seize
Speaker 2: the Gouzel Strip, a whole bunch of stories about the
Speaker 2: way that Trump is using the power of the American
Speaker 2: state to do imperialism. And I think it's worth actually
Speaker 2: taking a second to unpack this because things are probably
Speaker 2: going to get worse. There is a non zero chance
Speaker 2: that we effectively start a war with Mexico in the
Speaker 2: next like few months.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's great, it's spanging, everything's going as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But I want to start with talking about the
Speaker 2: way that Trump has been using tariffs as as a
Speaker 2: sort of political weapon and not as an economic tool,
Speaker 2: but varies very specifically as a political weapon, and how
Speaker 2: this differs from the previous economic regime because I think
Speaker 2: there's been a lot of you know, as the terriffs,
Speaker 2: the threat of the tariffs go up, in the markets
Speaker 2: sort of tank in fear of them. There's been a
Speaker 2: lot of sort of defense of like free trade in
Speaker 2: ways where I don't think people actually understand what's happening.
Speaker 2: And to understand how what Trump is doing is different
Speaker 2: from the stuff that's come before, we need to actually
Speaker 2: understand what trade is. Now, when an economist talks about trade,
Speaker 2: they go, oh, yeah, obviously trade is when two countries
Speaker 2: exchange a thing, right, yep. But that's not actually what
Speaker 2: most of the stuff on earth that is labeled as
Speaker 2: global trade, that's not what it is, right, look at
Speaker 2: like US Mexico trade. We're gonna go a bit more
Speaker 2: too detail about what that stuff is, but do you
Speaker 2: know what most not most, but do you know what
Speaker 2: a huge portion of US Mexico trade is? It is
Speaker 2: the same company, the same company moving an auto part
Speaker 2: from one side of the border to the other, back.
Speaker 3: And forth across the body. Yeah. I was gonna say, yes,
Speaker 3: back and forth.
Speaker 2: Right, So it's a lot of different people being paid
Speaker 2: different wages can make the same thing. Yeah, or if
Speaker 2: someone paid lower wages can make it, and yeah, someone
Speaker 2: paid more con Q see it and then they can send.
Speaker 3: It back yep. Yeah, very very common.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And this is actually a real substantive problem with
Speaker 2: the way that I think everyone thinks about trade because
Speaker 2: what is happening here and this is an argument that
Speaker 2: the anti globalization movement used to make. You know, David
Speaker 2: Graeber like makes this argument a lot, and they're right,
Speaker 2: which is that most things that we think of as
Speaker 2: quote unquote global trade are just a single corporation moving
Speaker 2: a resource around the world.
Speaker 3: So that they can produce something, yeah, and explore labor
Speaker 3: at thes some impossible exploitation rate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know. And this means that using nation states
Speaker 2: as a way to understand trade is an absolutely terrible
Speaker 2: way to think about the global economy. Right there, there
Speaker 2: are some things we're thinking about specifically nation state trade,
Speaker 2: like trade is important because you know, even even the
Speaker 2: same corporation moving goods around. Right, that does contribute to
Speaker 2: how much foreign currency a country right, right, And so okay,
Speaker 2: there's things like balance of payments where if you run
Speaker 2: out of it, if you're a country and you run
Speaker 2: out of American dollars, suddenly you can't employ like fuel
Speaker 2: anymore in your country, like explodes, And that's a very
Speaker 2: common way that like this happens in Sri Lanka, for example,
Speaker 2: pretty recently. This is a way for your economy to
Speaker 2: blow up. But that's kind of an edge case in
Speaker 2: terms of how global trade actually operates. But the problem
Speaker 2: is that it is to the advantage of the ruling
Speaker 2: class for you and everyone else to think about trade
Speaker 2: as something that's like a war between you and the
Speaker 2: country next to you, instead of a corporation. Like fucking
Speaker 2: over everyone involved in the this entire thing. Now, there's
Speaker 2: a pretty interesting book that I read recently called Border
Speaker 2: Economies Cities, Bridging the US Mexico Divide by James Gerber
Speaker 2: Gerber Nix Gerber, Okay, And one of the things he
Speaker 2: points out is that the two largest trade relations between
Speaker 2: any country, any two countries on Earth are the US
Speaker 2: in Mexico and the US in Canada, and those are
Speaker 2: the countries with the highest tariffs that Trumple's attempting to apply. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's worth actually understanding what this does by looking
Speaker 2: at what actually is traded between, for example, the US
Speaker 2: and Mexico. And the place I want to start is
Speaker 2: that one of the largest kinds of goods that is
Speaker 2: moved from from Mexico to the US is computer equipment.
Speaker 2: And nobody fucking talks about this ever, No one, like
Speaker 2: zero fucking people talk about this. I am convinced this
Speaker 2: is because of racism. But Mexico is a huge sort
Speaker 2: of like assembly place for a whole bunch of things
Speaker 2: like monitor screens, like computer equipment in general, and a
Speaker 2: lot of that stuff comes into the US. And there's
Speaker 2: also you know, the thing, the thing that we started
Speaker 2: this episode on, that's I think the thing I guess
Speaker 2: talked about the most now is transportation equipment, right, And
Speaker 2: this is a combination of consumer vehicles and also like
Speaker 2: heavy duty cargo trucks, yeah, which are unbelievably important for
Speaker 2: the maintenance of the American economy, right of the entire
Speaker 2: global economies. Like having these trucks is is if sort
Speaker 2: of vital infrastructure thing for the United States. You can
Speaker 2: move stuff around. A lot of that comest in Mexico.
Speaker 2: And then also like a lot of it is like
Speaker 2: whole cars that are like like finished assembly like in Mexico,
Speaker 2: and they get shipped across the border, and there's a
Speaker 2: lot of things there. And these are also like all
Speaker 2: the same international car companies that work in the US.
Speaker 2: So it's like Toyotas like Honda, Yeah, I mean these
Speaker 2: are your American trucks often, right or like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: four does this too, Yeah, what's GM now Stalares.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like Chevy GM like these as well as
Speaker 3: like Toyota. Toyota I think has a big planet. I
Speaker 3: forget exactly where, but along the border is somewhere cool correctly, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is extremely common.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And what this is right, like this is multinational
Speaker 2: capitalist companies who are moving their products across the border.
Speaker 2: And this gets counted as Mexico doing trade.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: One of the things in one of the questions in
Speaker 2: this book is about why Mexico's economy never had the
Speaker 2: kind of economic bump that China did from the amount
Speaker 2: of industrial production. If you look at like the East
Speaker 2: Asian tigers, right. And I think part of that is
Speaker 2: actually something that is not mentioned in the book, which
Speaker 2: is if if you look at the East Asian economies
Speaker 2: that develop their economies that you're talking like Sey, your
Speaker 2: South Korea's, et cetera schedule like a lot of those countries,
Speaker 2: like Japan, there was a lot of US military investment
Speaker 2: there in a way that's just not true of Mexico.
Speaker 2: Like Mexico is not like a place where you offshore
Speaker 2: you're supplying your supplies to because you need to move
Speaker 2: stuff to you know, fight the war in Vietnam. But
Speaker 2: you know one of the other reasons is that, Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 2: so like where is all the profit from the international
Speaker 2: trade going. It's like, well, it's going to a bunch
Speaker 2: of American and Japanese car companies. Yeah, because it's it's
Speaker 2: those those multinationals are the people who actually reap all
Speaker 2: of the benefits.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to a degree, like post NAFTA, right, post ninety four.
Speaker 3: It has created a class of people in Mexico who
Speaker 3: have benefited from it, but it has it has not
Speaker 3: lifted up like like the average income. Right, It's created
Speaker 3: a greater disparity of income than at any point. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: previous to that, and you'll hear people. So I was
Speaker 3: talking to friend about this yesterday in Tijuana, like, how
Speaker 3: like what NAFTA did, Like if you look at nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety four, I think it's a really good example of
Speaker 3: what you're talking about of Like, yeah, we opened up
Speaker 3: that border to international companies to do taraff free back
Speaker 3: and forth, right, but we didn't open it up to people. Yeah.
Speaker 3: At the same time, we had Operation Gatekeeper, right like
Speaker 3: enforced much harsher border enforcement. And the two things in
Speaker 3: parallel really kind of indicate what the free trade is
Speaker 3: going for.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And you know, and this is another old
Speaker 2: anti globalization thing, like we were talking about. This is
Speaker 2: like yeah, free like free trade is about the free
Speaker 2: movement of capital and unfree movement of people, right yeap,
Speaker 2: is that it's about locking people down in place so
Speaker 2: you can like you can you can dictate wages to
Speaker 2: them and then moving capital around the world to avoid
Speaker 2: them exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And we're gonna get into this more in a second,
Speaker 2: but I want to talk about some you know, some
Speaker 2: of the other things that are that are exported from
Speaker 2: Mexico fruits, vegetables, alcohol, or like huge exports.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then also, and this is something that I don't
Speaker 2: think is people don't understand what's happening very well. Is
Speaker 2: there's a lot of oil from Mexico that's shipped to
Speaker 2: the US. But the thing that's happening there, and this
Speaker 2: is the thing that's very good about the oil industry,
Speaker 2: is that the refinery facilities are not in the same
Speaker 2: country as the extraction facilities a lot of the time,
Speaker 2: So this oil is getting shipped around because they don't
Speaker 2: have the refinery facilities to like refine the specific kind
Speaker 2: of like crude oil or whatever that they're extracting. So like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's again one of these situations where it's not
Speaker 2: really like Mexico is sending its oil to the US.
Speaker 2: It's like, I mean kind of right, that's like one
Speaker 2: of the more direct ish ones. But largely what's happening
Speaker 2: is that like again like it's an oil company moving
Speaker 2: stuff to you know, moving stuff around to do refinement
Speaker 2: of it so they.
Speaker 3: Can sell it.
Speaker 2: Now, there's there's been some other stuff happening with Mexico
Speaker 2: that's a kind of reaction to Trump's previous thing. And
Speaker 2: I think the extent of this has been overblown to
Speaker 2: some extent, but a lot of very low end manufacturing
Speaker 2: stuff has been leaving China for a long time. This
Speaker 2: is one of my media things on the show is
Speaker 2: that this has been happening for a while because labor
Speaker 2: price has been rising in China and one of the
Speaker 2: places that these things went to is Mexico. So there's
Speaker 2: been a lot of like direct investment from trying to
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera, and all of these things. You know,
Speaker 2: like these these kind of movements, I'm talking about them
Speaker 2: because these kind of like seismic global economic shifts, right
Speaker 2: of the kind that we're going to be see are
Speaker 2: driven by a lot of things, you know, I mean
Speaker 2: stuff like currency evaluations, like local tax laws, like state
Speaker 2: corporate planning policies, like demands or just blah blah blah
Speaker 2: blah blah. But one of the single most important things
Speaker 2: is the state of class struggle in a country and
Speaker 2: what effect that has on wages or like you know,
Speaker 2: like straight up uprisings. Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The geographer David Harvey, he gets credit for popularizing the
Speaker 2: term the spatial fix, though other people were already using it,
Speaker 2: and I don't like his work much, but he did.
Speaker 2: He is the guy who gets credited with this. He describes,
Speaker 2: you know, the sort of free trade regime that that
Speaker 2: persisted roughly through like now. I mean it was it
Speaker 2: was taking shape in sort of the eighties, like the
Speaker 2: eighties through like roughly now, as the spatial fix for
Speaker 2: declining profitability. Right, you know what else has declining profitability?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know. The worst things get the more
Speaker 3: people listen to our podcast, and you can say that
Speaker 3: we are back.
Speaker 2: Okay, So let's talk about this, the sort of declining
Speaker 2: profitability and the fix that capitalism sort of finds fit this, right.
Speaker 2: You know, through the seventies there's this sort of spiraling
Speaker 2: unemployment and inflation and the economy is sort of going
Speaker 2: to shit and it's happening everywhere because they're sort of
Speaker 2: like structural overcapacity and manufacturing. And the solution to this
Speaker 2: is a spatial fix, right, which is destroying some manufacturing
Speaker 2: capacity and just moving it to other places. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: you know, and this is this is sort of what
Speaker 2: James was talking about earlier.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The goal is to sort of weaken the power of
Speaker 2: the working class by locking people down into their countries
Speaker 2: and then moving capital to poorer countries, the weaker labor protections,
Speaker 2: and also a weaker level of sort of like workers organization, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then it leaves like the previously well organized workers,
Speaker 3: Like if you look at the industries and the places
Speaker 3: where my grandparents come from, the dog workers and minors, right,
Speaker 3: those are not really jobs that are employing large numbers
Speaker 3: of people in the UK anymore. And like as a result,
Speaker 3: those working class towns are just destituting, you know that
Speaker 3: previously thriving a well organized working class. So we had
Speaker 3: Northern England, it's have to kind of like it has
Speaker 3: to relocate or reorganize, right, and it destroys those like
Speaker 3: nexuses of working class power that existed in Britain up
Speaker 3: until the eighties with a minus strike, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this was this was done deliberately, yeah, right,
Speaker 2: I mean there's there's always a debate in the literature
Speaker 2: about to what extent, like neoliberalism was like planned, or
Speaker 2: to what extent it was you know, a sort of
Speaker 2: reaction to a bunch of crises. But specifically this kind
Speaker 2: of like offshoring and they get the container ship is
Speaker 2: a big part of this, but like this specific kind
Speaker 2: of thing and even the transition called oil was like
Speaker 2: was a very deliberate thing done by like done done
Speaker 2: by sort of American and British politicians in order to
Speaker 2: sort of break the power like minors unions. And you know,
Speaker 2: one of the major places that this went obviously like
Speaker 2: a lot of these things go to Mexico. The sort
Speaker 2: of first round of these go to like the original
Speaker 2: like Asian tiger economies that I was talking about, I
Speaker 2: mean places like it like Indonesia to with a lot
Speaker 2: of those comomies sort of like Thaighland, those coconomies kind
Speaker 2: of blew up in the nineties. Yeah, but you know,
Speaker 2: one of the largest, most important ones was China. And
Speaker 2: you know, it's important to sort of remember I've talked
Speaker 2: about this on the show before. A lot of this
Speaker 2: is also the product of Tianman Square. Because the thing
Speaker 2: that's important to remember about Tianneman is that contra both
Speaker 2: sort of liberal histories of Tannemen and also the sort
Speaker 2: of CCP line. Most of the people who died at
Speaker 2: Tannama were workers, right, Most people who were executed after words,
Speaker 2: were workers. They were like students died, but it was
Speaker 2: mostly workers who were killed. And a lot of what
Speaker 2: happened there was that, you know, Tianneman was like the
Speaker 2: last time that China's like trade union federation, which is
Speaker 2: like now such a joke that it's like it's genuinely
Speaker 2: a subject of academic debate and discussion as to whether
Speaker 2: you can even literally consider it a trade union. Like
Speaker 2: that's it, that's how fuck it is. And the last
Speaker 2: time that Chinese trade unions took a political stand was
Speaker 2: in favor of the Tianaman protests. And then the army
Speaker 2: shows up and just like like slaughters their base.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And what this does is it makes the old Chinese
Speaker 2: working class, right, it breaks the alliance with the students
Speaker 2: that they'd had that was you know, and that was
Speaker 2: a durable political force dating back to like the nineteen twenties, right,
Speaker 2: And it breaks this extremely militant, well organized Chinese urban
Speaker 2: working class, replaces them with a more exploitable and less
Speaker 2: organized like migrant working class. And that is the class
Speaker 2: that like to this day right now is like the
Speaker 2: engine of global capital or like those like three hundred
Speaker 2: million migrant workers yea.
Speaker 3: And they can be in different parts of the world,
Speaker 3: right like, well, the.
Speaker 2: Other way, the three hundred million number, that's just the
Speaker 2: microantworkers in China Jesus. To be clear, there are a
Speaker 2: lot more internationally. Yeah, but yeah, China's market working population
Speaker 2: is like almost the size of the US. It's like
Speaker 2: the fourth largest country in the world just by like itself.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, that's mad. I was just thinking of today,
Speaker 3: like the scam compounds which exists on the border between
Speaker 3: me and mahar and Thailand. Like they actually Thailand just
Speaker 3: cut power off to them today. I mean, I can
Speaker 3: see that the strategy there, but it's just going to
Speaker 3: end up hurting people whore in those compounds more, of
Speaker 3: course it is. Yeah, of course those people who are
Speaker 3: in those compounds used to be able to escape and
Speaker 3: go to places where they could like get back to
Speaker 3: their lives, right like like be re taken care of,
Speaker 3: And of course that's were funded by USA. So they
Speaker 3: don't exist as of this week, which is pretty brutal,
Speaker 3: but like, yeah, these people, right, these these migrant workers
Speaker 3: who come from all over the world hoping for a
Speaker 3: chance that the things that capitalism have promised them are
Speaker 3: the people who have to be exploited so that people
Speaker 3: in wealthy countries can have their treats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and those workers are the basis of mono global capitalism, right,
Speaker 2: Like you know, like those Chinese workers for example, like
Speaker 2: it is it is illegal for them to form an
Speaker 2: independent union. If you try to form an independent union,
Speaker 2: you will go to prison so fast that like those
Speaker 2: dust clouds like.
Speaker 3: Hey, like Wiley Charyot will take you to prison.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, even trying to get your union to like
Speaker 2: do something like trying to have your own independent people
Speaker 2: elected to you to that union like canon will get
Speaker 2: you arrested and like and even like Chinese lbor repression
Speaker 2: like is pretty intense. But it's like you know that
Speaker 2: we're also talking about countries like Columbia. It's like, well, yeah, o,
Speaker 2: because what happens to union organizers in Colombia's like they
Speaker 2: get being shopped by paramilitaries with machine guns, right, And
Speaker 2: that's that's that's what the sort of spatial fix was, right,
Speaker 2: was moving jobs to places where the ruling classes sort
Speaker 2: of control was more firm and their ability to use
Speaker 2: violence was higher. Yeah, And so this is what the
Speaker 2: American imperial system sort of had been, right. It's based
Speaker 2: on American capital flowing around the world. And this is
Speaker 2: also like international capital too, right, Like we've literally been
Speaker 2: talking about like Japanese corporations right doing like the same shit, right,
Speaker 2: But you know, it's like international capital flowing around the world,
Speaker 2: extracting resources and labor from other countries and accumulating it
Speaker 2: in American corporations like that. That's what free trade is.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's also you know, secondarily, right, it is a
Speaker 2: debt system. It's based on forcing countries to like pay
Speaker 2: back loans that were taken out by dictators Gogury de
Speaker 2: Draber's debt least five thousand years. It's very good. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's based on like turning entire countries into
Speaker 2: just debt servicing engines or like all of the wealth
Speaker 2: that is produced by the entire nation is just going
Speaker 2: to like pay debts to Bank of America. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: you know the thing about this is that this is
Speaker 2: actually a very very efficient model of empire. It's one
Speaker 2: of the most sophisticated imperial systems that the world has
Speaker 2: ever seen.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It workstremely well. It makes the US an unbelievable amount
Speaker 2: of money, It protects global capitalism, and the people currently
Speaker 2: running it don't want it to work like that. Now,
Speaker 2: do you know who else, it doesn't want the current
Speaker 2: system to work like it does because they can make
Speaker 2: more money. I can guess it's the products and services
Speaker 2: for this point, excited to hit which one we get?
Speaker 3: You know, it can be it could be anything. I
Speaker 3: really at this point, who knows?
Speaker 2: We are back? So we've entered I guess what you
Speaker 2: could call the phase of mask off imperialism US imperialism
Speaker 2: usually at least sort of like war human face. And
Speaker 2: and it did it for good reason, right you know,
Speaker 2: Ronald Reagan did not give a single shit about democracy
Speaker 2: and human rights, right like, like you know, and this
Speaker 2: is this has been true of the US for like
Speaker 2: ages and ages and ages, right you know that like
Speaker 2: they prop up right wing military dictatorships constantly. But the
Speaker 2: thing is democracy and human rights are things that like
Speaker 2: people like, and so you know, it was it's it's
Speaker 2: a weapon that he and and his sort of brand
Speaker 2: of conservatives, like anti communist conservatives like, wielded it against communism.
Speaker 2: And it was a very very powerful ideological weapon because
Speaker 2: if if if your choice ceases to be between like
Speaker 2: communism and capitalism, and your choice is now between like
Speaker 2: do you want to live in a dictatorship? But do
Speaker 2: you want to live in a democracy? Like that's a
Speaker 2: very different question, and it's it's a very very important
Speaker 2: question for sort of how how the Cold War was
Speaker 2: won and how international power is wielded, right, because there's
Speaker 2: there's always been an illusion that there's an international community
Speaker 2: in that countries are like working together and this is
Speaker 2: this is a very very powerful ideological thing, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, and this is something like you live through this,
Speaker 2: God probably listen to you didn't leave to this now,
Speaker 2: dear God. But like like the Iraq War, right, the
Speaker 2: US didn't unilaterally invade Rock now. Now. It was called
Speaker 2: the quote unquote Coalition of the Wilding and included like
Speaker 2: like they dragged Australia in the war by threatening to
Speaker 2: like destroy their like milk shipping contracts with the Iraqi government.
Speaker 3: Like so you know, yeah, you had all kinds of
Speaker 3: people running around in the Rock for a while there,
Speaker 3: I guess. Yeah, obviously the United Kingdom played a big
Speaker 3: role in it, like an outside troll, given being a
Speaker 3: relatively small country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, and this this, this is the
Speaker 2: way that you do you know, even just overtly straight
Speaker 2: up imperialis stuff like it like invading a rock right
Speaker 2: was still done under the auspices of like multinational like coalitions.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: And the thing about different about Trump is Trump doesn't
Speaker 2: give a fuck about any of that, right, absolutely not.
Speaker 2: He has turned on Rob Ford, a man who is
Speaker 2: like who boldly answers the question what if Trump smoke
Speaker 2: crack like that is Rob Ford. Like he's he's turning
Speaker 2: on his allies, like like right wingers who should be
Speaker 2: his allies in Canada, right, who are exactly the kind
Speaker 2: of people who you would expect to do sort of
Speaker 2: like right wing multilateral interventions in countries, right. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: you know he is caused with his like threat to
Speaker 2: put terifs on, like he's caused these people to become
Speaker 2: anti American. And this is the same thing with Mexico. Right,
Speaker 2: Even the sort of like the nominally center left governments
Speaker 2: in Mexico like have cooperated with American impulism. But Trump
Speaker 2: doesn't want to fucking do that anymore. He wants to
Speaker 2: run everything just very purely and very openly as as
Speaker 2: an American empire.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like America's always bullied Mexican. Right, when we talk
Speaker 3: about the deployment of troops to the border Biden absolutely
Speaker 3: bullied Amlo into into bringing those troops to the border
Speaker 3: because they came before Donald Trump even came into office.
Speaker 3: But now Donald Trump's just doing it on true social Yeah,
Speaker 3: like it's it's it's different or Panama fuck. Like, you know,
Speaker 3: I was in Panama September of twenty four and I
Speaker 3: went to the Canal Museum, and Panama like is very
Speaker 3: proud of its history of independence. Right it's relatively short, yeah,
Speaker 3: and hardened and paid for in blood. But like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I traveled. I'm a US city Cinea traveling. You know,
Speaker 3: one gave me any shit. It was fine. Everyone's very
Speaker 3: nice to me. Now the burning American flags in Panama City,
Speaker 3: like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Because CRUP is trying to take the Panama Canal back.
Speaker 2: And before we get into like you know, I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess we can get into. Hear some of the
Speaker 2: stuff that he's doing. Right, He's pulled out of the
Speaker 2: International Criminal Court and it's putting sanctions on it. He
Speaker 2: has been trying to use the sanctions that he's been
Speaker 2: threatening to apply to Canada to get Canada to join
Speaker 2: the US, Like he is trying to conquer Canada, right,
Speaker 2: fucking silly, Yeah, he's he's been trying to he's been
Speaker 2: trying to force the government of Denmark to buy Greenland,
Speaker 2: sell Greenland, right, like he wants to purchase Greenland from them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he wants to buy Greenland. Yeah, there was. There was
Speaker 2: the whole sort of showdown with Colombia over Columbia's like
Speaker 2: being pissed off about the treatment of deportees to Columbia
Speaker 2: and he used sanctions. There there is again him saying
Speaker 2: the US is going to take over Gaza and this
Speaker 2: is a very very substantively different thing than the than
Speaker 2: the kind of American empire that we've had before. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the last time the US tried to take Canada was
Speaker 2: eighteen twelve. Right, it's been like two hot years. This
Speaker 2: is how Britain returns to the world stage, right, And
Speaker 2: the thing is last time, the last time in the US
Speaker 2: try to take Canada, they burned the capitol down, so
Speaker 2: like you know, but like like this is something that
Speaker 2: even even under like like people like Bush, right, who
Speaker 2: is like a Bush is like a very very vert
Speaker 2: American imperialist. Right, Yeah, Bush would never try to invade
Speaker 2: Canada like that. Yeah, that's that's completely unhinged, right, and
Speaker 2: this is this, This is just a very very different
Speaker 2: kind of imperialism than than what existed before. And I
Speaker 2: wanted to go into I think why this is the case? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I think the reason why this is the case. Okay,
Speaker 2: So the reason that there's been such a defensive free
Speaker 2: trade is like people being like, oh my god, he
Speaker 2: puts tariff in place, it'll raise prices, and like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's true, right, we'll crash the global economy. The global
Speaker 2: economy has been turned into a very very efficient engine
Speaker 2: of extracting profit from countries and putting them in the
Speaker 2: hands of corporations. Right, it's working exactly how Trump wants
Speaker 2: to work.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: If the US wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that
Speaker 2: is technically possible. Right, Reagan was able to do this.
Speaker 2: But what Reagan did instead of doing tariffs is that well,
Speaker 2: I mean kind of you. But like the main thing
Speaker 2: that he did was this thing called the Plaza Accords.
Speaker 2: And the Plaza Accords was this this thing in the
Speaker 2: eighties where he forced Japan. Japan was the important one,
Speaker 2: but like Japan, West Germany, I think there are a
Speaker 2: couple other countries like he forced them to increase the
Speaker 2: value of their currency relative to the dollar, because like
Speaker 2: you know, so if if you have a currency and
Speaker 2: it's worth a bunch of like another person's currency, so
Speaker 2: like you know, you have like the dollar and it's
Speaker 2: worth like a million, like yen or whatever the fuck, right,
Speaker 2: the currency that's worthless has a more competitive manufacturing economy.
Speaker 2: And Reagan was able to like restart the American like
Speaker 2: manufacturing economy for a while by doing this. But the
Speaker 2: problem is that it blew up the entire world economy.
Speaker 2: And so to save the world economy, Clinton rolled back
Speaker 2: the accords and it, you know, and that was the
Speaker 2: thing that actually finally sort of like a viscerated American
Speaker 2: manufacturing and the exchange here was you know, and all
Speaker 2: the stuff that I've been I've been talking about for
Speaker 2: the last like a few minutes. So there's a very
Speaker 2: very good essay written right after two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: called What's good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America
Speaker 2: by the economist Robbert Brenner. And what the strategy became,
Speaker 2: and this is a strategy that was originally pioneered by
Speaker 2: Japan that we took was instead of having like a
Speaker 2: manufacturing economy like actually a production based economy. You have
Speaker 2: an economy based on the value of assets, right. So
Speaker 2: assets are things that you own, right, It's the stocks, bonds,
Speaker 2: like real estate, which is important for our purposes, and
Speaker 2: the goal is to make the value of those things
Speaker 2: go up. Right. And so what you do is you
Speaker 2: speculate on you take out loans, You speculate on the
Speaker 2: prices of stocks going up, the prices of houses going
Speaker 2: up right, and you know, you make it very easy
Speaker 2: to borrow money. Now, obviously this produced a series of
Speaker 2: like staggering economic collapses, including like the dot com collapse
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight with you know remember that one.
Speaker 2: But the thing is, in the wake of the financial collapse,
Speaker 2: the US mostly figured out how to sort of stabilize
Speaker 2: the system. But the thing is, you know, they were
Speaker 2: sort of able to stabilize the system economically, right, what
Speaker 2: they couldn't stabilize was the political sector. Where if you
Speaker 2: look at the two people who are currently running the
Speaker 2: United States, it is Elon Musk, who is the human
Speaker 2: personification of the stock price goes up bubble economy, right,
Speaker 2: and the other one is Donald Trump, who is the
Speaker 2: human manifestation of the real estate class. Right, whose wealth
Speaker 2: like believe enormously and the thing is right, But because
Speaker 2: Elon Musk is like a tech bubble, go up guy, right,
Speaker 2: those people don't think like the people who built like
Speaker 2: American financial capitalists, right, like the people who designed the tratism.
Speaker 2: They don't think the same way Trump does. Trump is
Speaker 2: a fucking real estate guy, right, And this is how
Speaker 2: he sees the world.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: He thinks in terms of land and borders and territorial control.
Speaker 2: And he thinks in terms of like what physical thing
Speaker 2: can I steal from someone in order to make money? Right,
Speaker 2: and that you know, this is why he's trying to
Speaker 2: steal the Panama Canal and and he thinks this way
Speaker 2: instead of like things that are more abstract like debt
Speaker 2: servicing and like you know, the sort of lines of
Speaker 2: power in the coalition building.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: He looks at a map of Greenland and goes, this
Speaker 2: looks really big. I want it and so and now
Speaker 2: he's going to try to use the American empire to
Speaker 2: just seize this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he sees things in terms of like raw power.
Speaker 3: It's a very uh.
Speaker 2: Undeveloped notion of like power, right, Like, yeah, I thinking
Speaker 2: the other day, like whoever is in the same room
Speaker 2: as Joseph Nye must be having a fucking field day
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 3: At the guy who he was. He wrote books about
Speaker 3: soft power, right, the idea of the US power to
Speaker 3: persuade rather than power to kind of whether there rare
Speaker 3: than like hard power, which comes in tanks or tariffs.
Speaker 3: I guess Joseph n is no longer relevant.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, no, we're we're back. We're back in pure
Speaker 2: hard And something I think is renal very alarming that
Speaker 2: I want to close on is the extent to which,
Speaker 2: like the US media is just sort of just once.
Speaker 2: Do you propaganda for it? Yeah, I'm gonna I'm going
Speaker 2: to read a quote from a CNN artic Again, this
Speaker 2: is CNN quote. The subject heading is the US has
Speaker 2: been expanding for its entire history. This is an article, oh,
Speaker 2: the title of which is Trump is Trump wants to
Speaker 2: redraw the map of the Western hemisphere for fan's.
Speaker 3: Sake, like twenty twenty five Monroe doctrine posting on CNN
Speaker 3: literally literally literally, Okay, okay, you are so far ahead
Speaker 3: of this thing, because the next I'm going to read
Speaker 3: the one I was going to read first, uplift civilized
Speaker 3: and christianized. What's next paragraph?
Speaker 2: The next section heading is and I quote what is
Speaker 2: Trump's doctrine? And explains the Monroe doctor.
Speaker 3: For fox sake, this is I cannot explain how like
Speaker 3: I have taught this as a thing in history classes
Speaker 3: for more than a decade from the perspective of like
Speaker 3: that was fucked up and shameful, and even the conservative
Speaker 3: suite to like, yeah, hard agree, look at these racists
Speaker 3: as fuck cartoons about Filipino people. That the way that
Speaker 3: we're using here to justify this, and now we are
Speaker 3: back like it is and like, yeah, CNN is just
Speaker 3: out there like fucking cranking the manufacturing consent.
Speaker 2: That's not even the worst part about it, Like I
Speaker 2: want to read the session. So one of the other
Speaker 2: sections headings is the US has been expanding for its
Speaker 2: entire history sick quote expansion. Expansion is built into the
Speaker 2: American DNA SYS Retired Ambassador Gordon Gray, now a professor
Speaker 2: of practice at George Washington University and former Foreign Service
Speaker 2: career officer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like an angel sweeping across the planes, fucking manifest destinies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's we're you know, and this is this
Speaker 2: is this coming all sort of coming into like the
Speaker 2: way that Trump thinks about which Trump thinks about the US,
Speaker 2: like like an eighteenth century land empire.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yah, yeah, yeh.
Speaker 2: Eighteenth century land empires, you know, got money by conquering
Speaker 2: people and like extracting tribute from them directly. And then
Speaker 2: also you know they were mercancilst empires, right, so they
Speaker 2: they got they got a their money. And this is
Speaker 2: something that Tropic suposedly talks about. It is like he
Speaker 2: wants he thinks he can raise revenue from like terrorists,
Speaker 2: which like, no, he can't, but like what he can
Speaker 2: do is use the threat of tariffs to like force
Speaker 2: countries to do whatever the fuck he wants. And this
Speaker 2: is the kind of imperialism that we're in now. It
Speaker 2: is a definite substanctive break from what we've seen in
Speaker 2: the US for a century, more than a century. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I think I think it's important for people to
Speaker 2: understand exactly how this functions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and yeah, it's sick. We're going into the new
Speaker 3: opium Wars. It's going to be so fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great, Bob, this is this spanikot appen here.
Speaker 2: Do not get kettles on bridges go out into the
Speaker 2: world and make trouble.
Speaker 3: And people want to read more about the early like globalizing,
Speaker 3: the previous year of neoliberal globalization, Like Naomi Klein has
Speaker 3: some good stuff, and I think Joe Stiglitz does as well,
Speaker 3: so we can Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also recommend David Graeber's direct action in ethnography,
Speaker 2: which is him writing about the original like anti like
Speaker 2: ult globalization protests and his like time in them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you know, if you need direct action ideas, they
Speaker 2: did some fun stuff. Yeah, dressing guys up like marshmallows
Speaker 2: and police batons and bounce off the great Yeah, bring
Speaker 2: back clown Block.
Speaker 3: That'll get us through it.
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