It Could Happen Here - Tariffs and the Corruption State

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Mia gives an update on the recent round of tariffs and what they say about the American state under Trump. Sources: https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/01/economy/tariff-more-expensive https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/trump-hikes-india-tariffs-50-percent-buying-russian-oil-rcna223374 https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/us-tariffs-take-effect-08-07-25 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nvidia-amd-chip-sales-china-15-percent-h20-mi308/ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/business/tariffs-switzerland-trump.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/07/trumps-reciprocal-tariffs-come-into-effect-hitting-dozens-of-us-trading-partners.html https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/12/trump-extends-china-tariff-deadline-for-the-second-time-what-does-it-mean https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2025/08/12/trump-2-0-tariff-tracker/ https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/business/trade-exemptions-tariffs-trump https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7jjkvzmkxo https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/us-tariffs-take-effect-08-07-25#cme17o5l400003b6ns7mwdwnv https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/06/tech/apple-investment-us-trump https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/trump-tariffs-latest-round-takes-effect-thursday-august-7-2025-rcna223461 https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/us-tariffs-take-effect-08-07-25 https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-administration-tells-foreign-military-junta-wants-hear-raising-e-rcna221569 https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-iphone-factory-china/ https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/06/tech/apple-investment-us-trump https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/i-wont-humiliate-myself-brazils-president-sees-no-point-tariff-talks-with-trump-2025-08-06/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. When I became a journalist, I was the first Latina in the newsrooms where I worked. I'm Maria Inojosa. I spent my career creating journalism that centers voices who have been historically sidelined. From the most pressing news stories to deep cultural explorations, Latino USA is journalism with heart. Listen to Latino USA, the longest running Latino news and culture show in the United States. Hear it on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on.

Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So, what do we do? We get support. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at Love Your Mind. Today.org. That's love your mind today.org. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health.

Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Jeff Perlman. And I'm Rick Jervis. We're journalists and hosts of the podcast Finding Sexy Sweat. At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat. A couple years ago, we set out to find him.

But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down, and he never woke up. But then I see, my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on particular. their own. Listen to finding sexy sweat on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. CallZone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about things falling apart this week featuring

an entire three sentences about putting it back together again. I am your host, Bia Wong, and today we are gathered here to talk. about tariffs. Oh boy. It has been a massive two weeks of tariff news. The most important aspect of which has been finally getting a resolution to what was going on with the Liberation Day turf tariffs that Trump tried to impose

at the beginning of his time in office. On July 31st, we finally actually found out what those tariffs were going to look like and what those tariffs were going to look like is per CNN. Effectively what happened is that roughly if the U.S. runs a trade deficit with you, you get a 15% tariff, and you get a 10% tariff if we run a trade surplus with you. Now, there's a bunch of other individual rates. We'll get to some of them in a second. But it's worth emphasizing that this doesn't make any sense.

So, okay, before we get into the structural effects of this, I want to sort of look at What the nominal stated justification for imposing these tariffs are and how they're at odds with each other? And this is a point where we'll turn to later. Part of the justification for the tariffs is that, okay, they're trying to use tariffs to replace the income tax. That's nonsense. It's gibberish. You literally cannot raise enough money through tariffs to replace the income tax. But, okay, that's the thing that they want to do. The other nominal justification, and this is what's being used in negotiations. and is the thing that is causing individual tariff rates to randomly sort of be jacked up is that

Trump is pissed off that the U.S. runs trade deficits with countries. And again, like, this is basically nonsense. The U.S. pays for things in its own currency. We don't actually need other places currency. It doesn't matter if we run trade deficits. I really hate that Rand Paul is right when he said I run a trade deficit with my grocery store. But, like, that's how the American Empire is supposed to work. These people do not care that this is how the American Empire is supposed to work. They have been handed the most sophisticated imperial machinery that has ever existed in the entirety of human history and they see numbers on a chart which says we pay them more money than we're getting and they're pissed about it. But again, okay, if that's the state of justification,

right, then why are you imposing a tariff on countries we have a trade surplus to? That doesn't make any sense. And the difference between them is only 5%. So, what? What are we doing here? It's nonsense. Like our trade policy is being run by people who don't understand how any of this works and are operating off of, you know, effectively just pure anger and rage. So I'm going to talk about a few of the really, really high rates. We're not going to focus on 30% South Africa, for example, but, oh boy. So Syria is at 41%, which is absolutely fucking hideous. Syria is a country

that, I don't know, anyone who listens to this show is aware of the extent to which Syria has been devastated by the Civil War, and this is an incredible blow to their economy. Laos and Myanmar

are also being tariffed at 40%. And we promised in the executive disorder to explain how Trump recognizing the junta. So Joe Biden

had refused to recognize Myanmar's like military, coup government. As long-time listeners of this show are aware, there is a military coup in Myanmar, there is a large-scale revolutionary process attempting to overthrow this government.

My co-host, James Stout, Robert Evans, have done a lot of very good reporting on this, that you can go find, you should find it is some of the best journalism that I've ever encountered. But the U.S.'s official position has been that we don't recognize the coup government because it is, and this is true,

a coup government. But Trump just sent the junta a letter that says you're tariffed at 40%. And the thing about this is the junta was like, oh shit, hell yeah. Like, that means you recognize us, right? Because you're sending us official fucking notices of shit. So you're recognizing us as a legitimate government of Myanmar. And so the junta is like thrilled by this.

There's some evidence of like the U.S. lifting sanctions on them after. It's kind of messy. But yeah, great. Somehow in the attempts to sort of just like squeeze every last drop Out of all of these countries, we have recognized an incredibly brutal military dictatorship. Hate that, hate that. Back to the more direct tariff stuff, the tariffs on Laos is also going to be devastating for Laosian economy, which is a lot of the economies in Southeast Asia are pretty heavily export-driven,

and it's one of the places where a lot of textiles manufacturing takes place after the sort of increase in labor prices and increase in resistance from the labor movement in China kind of pushed all of that capital down the Mekong River Delta. This is going to absolutely fucking suck for everyone in Laos.

And, you know, this is something I want to keep emphasizing over and over again that these turf tariffs, the people, they hurt the most, are workers in places like Laos in places like Syria, right? Who are going to just be absolutely fucking devastated by it.

Now, let's also talk Switzerland, which was the other country that had a tariff at like 40%. This one is genuinely really funny, which is that it seems to largely be driven by Trump being pissed off of the trade deficit, which is like, compared to like the scale of the U.S. economy, the trade deficit is like $0, but the funniest part of this is that the trade deficit is largely driven by gold imports. Now, this is extremely funny, because if you know anything about the American right, you know, that a lot of the ways that they did their funding, especially when they were sort of building their operations, a huge source of their funding is getting their followers to buy gold. This was the original Alex Jones grift, right? I think he still does it a little bit now.

Before he sort of pivoted in supplements, he would partner with like gold salesmen and like silver salesmen. And this has always been a huge source of these people's money. Now, there's been a little bit of decrease in the prominence of gold as a thing. there's a very good folding ideas video about this incredibly bizarre Idris Elba weird gold promotion documentary which talks about the ways in which gold

has been sort of threatened by Bitcoin and, well, mostly Bitcoin, but it's like cryptocurrency in general as like the scam you're trying to sell all of these sort of weird prepper and like a hardline, quote-unquote, sound money libertariany types. But it is very funny that this is in effect

a self-reinforcing cycle because the thing about the price of gold is that it is largely determined by how fuck the rest of the economy is gold. Gold people who are trying to sell gold are trying to sell you on the fact that the economy is about to fucking explode. But this is a cyclical effect, right?

Where these tariff rates go up and the economy explodes and so people buy more gold from Switzerland, at which point our trade balance from Switzerland gets worse and worse and worse. So like Swiss watches or another sort of major source of export currency stuff, which are again all worn by all these fucking

Maga grifters with their like fucking $10,000 watches or whatever. So that one is just funny. Trump has also announced, and this has not gone into effect yet, who fucking knows when if it goes into effect, but I think it's worth talking about, which is that Trump has been talking about putting a 100% tariff on semiconductors unless you invest in the U.S. So Apple, sort of in response to this, pledged $100 million in investment in the U.S. build chips. And I think it's also worth looking at the ideological underpinnings of this because a huge part of this thing is something that you've been seeing increasingly on the right

is this dream of making domestic iPhones. And if you look at the people in the tech sector, right, the sort of tech billionaires, you run all the stuff, they're openly fantasizing about, like, oh, these like soft weak liberals are going to be forced to like work in the factories and put iPhones together or whatever. And it's worth emphasizing that this is just, not possible, right? And this is true of a significant number of the things that they want these tariffs to do. They're just not possible results of the policy levers they're pulling. A couple of months ago, I described a sort of similar policy thing to this as like they're attempting to scream at the moon in order to control the tides. And it's like, it doesn't work. It's not

the right lever. It literally can't do what you think it's going to do. And it's worth going into why, which is that we can't make iPhones here because we don't have the migrant labor forced to do it. And a lot of you may be thinking, oh, well, the U.S. has a lot of migrant workers. No, you don't understand. China, which is where most of these things are built, even with the tariffs, like a lot of, you know, there were some downcycling of plants. That stuff has mostly been upcycled again. China has 300 million migrant workers. That is almost the entire population of the United States, right? We are talking about individual plants with 200,000 workers. That is the low-end estimate, by the way, of those numbers.

We don't actually have very good numbers on how big some of these Foxcon facilities are. The low-end estimate is 200,000, right? And again, this is just-in-time production. So, okay, what does it actually mean, right? This means that the production cycles work a lot of, for example, the way that UPS works, right? We're like, you have a bunch of people

who are effectively seasonal or part-time workers who only come in when demand increases. So for UPS, right, and it's actually a relatively similar schedule to the way it works in China but it's like there's these massive surges around the holidays. With Apple, it's more like September, November roughly, but it's in order to

massively be able to ramp up production in time for, you know, the sort of like massive holiday increase of orders, right? But in order to do this, you need to have a production apparatus where you have 200,000 workers there, but you can also get rid

of most of them, and they can support themselves doing other stuff for the rest of, of the year, and then you have to be able to bring them back in during peak season? We just do not have the populations to replicate this, right? Even if you're trying to replace it with prison labor, the thing about the American prison system is that it's decentralized, right? This is actually a key element of how the U.S. economy is structured. Prisons are one of the sort of three major sources of jobs in rural areas.

The other two are like Walmart-style service jobs, which replaced anything else that was in the economy and then military bases, which is part of why, you know, like, the This is part of why rural politics have gone so reactionary because, like, okay, so if your, if your options in the economy are soldier prison guard service labor, you're going to generate a bunch of unhinged reactionary bullshit. But again, even though the American prison system has a really high population, these people are really spread out. And iPhone production requires sort of like mass centralization, right? That's the only way to get these things to work. Plus, the workers that you're bringing in have to be skilled enough to be able to do this shit.

And this is a capacity that's built up in China over the course of like decades, right? And we don't really have this. Now, people have tried moving this production to other places like Vietnam. For example, the tariff rates there are also making this extremely difficult. But it's been really, really hard to replace.

And the other issue, and this is a technological issue, not just a sort of issue of the systemic elements of the population of China, the infrastructure to build microchips in the U.S. doesn't exist. And it's not just that the infrastructure to build the chips doesn't exist. It's actually way worse than that. And this is why all of the attempts in the Biden administration has put an enormous amount of money into this.

The Chinese government also has put an enormous amount of money specifically into the microchip angle, and none of them have been able to do it. And part of it's a technological problem. But part of it is that the machines that you need to make the chips, don't exist, right? But the machines you need to make the machines that make the chips also don't exist. And the machines you need to make

the machines that make the chips also don't exist. We are so far up the supply chain, right? And this is one of the, you know, one of the thing that they're trying to do through sort of like pure politics, right? Through like, just like the pure exertion of state power is to reshape the fundamental structural way that the supply chain has worked. And the way the supply chain has worked is by

intense specialization in very, very, very small areas, right? So Taiwan, for example, becomes the only place basically that can manufacture these chips. And that intense specification means that, like, the machines that make the machines that are used to build this thing are only made by, like, one company in Switzerland. And, like, machines that make those machines, like, who the fuck knows where they're built? And this is the thing where the technology involved has become so complicated, and the laborers become so specialized that you're dealing with machines that, like, just straight up, not many people in the world know how to use.

and not many people in the world know how to create. And so we're so far up the supply chain, right? And this is also, if you want to look at what the impact of these tariffs are going to be, right? Because your supply chains are so specialized, you know, you can think of these supply chains as like incredibly complicated machines, right? And any sort of like little rock that you throw into the machine, or, you know, you throw sand into the machine and suddenly the ball bearing doesn't work at quite the right efficiency. And so, and things just start breaking down across the entire supply chain. And they think that they can just replicate all of this with just, like, pure tariffs and, like, throwing money at it. And no, you can't. These are actual structural things of how the economy works.

Now, do you know what else is a structural element of how the economy works? It is these products and services and the fact that they fund this podcast. Woo! What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a moment? maximum security prison, or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional

programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything.

Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville Tennessean, but the most unforgettable part are roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakland, sports editor, and aspiring rapper. And his stage name, sexy sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 9-1-1. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died.

I'm like thanking you, but then I see, my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to finding sexy sweat on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA, using new scientific tools.

they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Noah. I'm 13, and as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast, and I explain those fake headlines like your uncle would, like your cousin would if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah de Barroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. And I'm watching everything. Sheesh. The majority of the youth, 18 through 24, say they trust Republicans more than Democrats

differ on the economy. You kidding me. Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here to pay it, but I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us. Bring your brain. Listen to Now You Know with Noah de Barossa on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get. You are so back. Now, one of the other kind of tariffs, the thing I've been calling, I guess, like defiance

tariffs, one of the things that Trump administration has been doing is threatening to impose a 50% tariff on anyone who buys oil from Russia. India has been threatened with this. India's current tariff rate is 25%. They're right now threatening with another 25% to get into the 50%. it's sort of unclear exactly who's going to back down here more interestingly, and we've talked a little bit about this, Brazil. There is a 50% turf tariff on Brazil, again, for refusing to release Bolsonaro, which is very funny because this has managed to piss off the entire sort of political sphere in Brazil to the extent that like Bolsonaro has had to come out and denounce this because Bolsonaro was getting fucking torn to shreds by the Brazilian right. for being basically a traitor, sort of lapdog of the U.S. as they're sort of, you know, imposing this direct attack on Brazil

through this 50% tariff, right? It's backfired so spectacularly that, like, Lula, who was floundering, is now riding this incredible wave of sort of anti-American Brazilian nationalism from both the left and the right. So Lula, who is, who is, again, in a pretty strong political position because of this, has refused to do direct talk to the U.S. because he was like, absolutely not. Fuck this.

Here's a quote from Reuters. we had already pardoned the U.S. intervention in the 1964 coup, said Lula, who got his political start as a union leader protesting against the military government that followed a U.S.-backed ouster of a democratically elected president. Quote, but this is now not a small intervention. It's the president of the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a sovereign country like Brazil. It's unacceptable. Now, again, as I said in the E.D., there's a lot of things that are worth looking at here, right?

we have, on the one hand, this direct connection from Lula from, you know, the sort of subtle CIA backing of military coup stuff, which happens under the table, to, you know, this just like the president of the United States is telling you how to run your country. And that is a substantive shift. Even if, like, the CIA overthrowing your government, like, has more of a direct political impact on it, right? The thing about the thing about the way American power worked was that it was mostly supposed to be under the table. And it's not now. It is just, it's just, it's just, it's just, It's just out there in the open, right? The premise that the U.S. governments, like the president of the United States should just be able to tell another country what to do is the fucking premise of American imperialism, and now they're just saying it out loud. And it's also worth noting that it's not like Lula is some kind of like anti-American radical, right? Like, Lula worked really well during his first term in office, which was W. Bush. But again, because of the way that the political winds have shifted here, right, to the extent that like, Bolsonaro has had to condemn an attempt to get him. released from prison, which is so funny, because he's doing this, he is, he is pushing very hard. Now, there hasn't really been a response yet for Lula's like call for organized terror

resistance from China and India and Bricks. I don't know if there's going to be, it's worth talking a little bit about what Bricks actually is here. So Bricks stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It was originally like an asset class designed by some guys at Goldman Sachs, who were, you know, trying to, like, classify the assets of this kind of, like, developing economy thing. It was like, you know, you can buy bonds in these things and maybe you can classify their asset rates together. And it has kind of become a political alliance, but, you know, there's a lot of people who will attempt to sell you on bricks being the sort of, like, leftist anti-imperial alliance, you know, and as a sort of socialist thing. And, like,

I will simply ask, right, who is doing the socialism here, right? Is it a sort of socialist here, right? Is it a butcher of Gujarat? Is it she, quote, we must oppose welfareism, Jim Ping? Is it Vladimir, we will show Ukraine, true decommunization, Putin? Is it the African National Congress of selling your country to a bank

of America? Is it the butcher of Haiti? Like, what are we doing here? Right? Like, this is not actually a substantively anti-American political alliance. India is a close American ally. South Africa is a close American ally. None of this really makes any sense. It's not a substantive

political alliance really people periodically make noise about it trying to be a substantive political alliance but like India and China are periodically like at war or like almost at war with each other over the border right these are a bunch of countries

that absolutely fucking hate each other it's never been a coherent political project Lula is trying to turn it into one but like I fucking I don't think that's going to work so you know that's sort of what's been going on on the front of sort of national resistance

but Lula does have, you know, a kind of very, very large and powerful political force behind him domestically to resist this. We'll see what happens going forward. It's also worth noting that China has been negotiating with the U.S. and their tariff increases which are supposed to go into effect have been delayed for another 90 days. So we're stuck in this holding pattern again. But let's talk about what this means for the economy, right? And I think the very short-term answer is that I don't think anyone really knows. Right? Like, the actual macro effects of this are things that we've only just started to see.

No one's ever really tried to model this out because there's no reason why it would ever happen. You know, and you're starting to see things behind the scenes, like medical supplies being incredibly difficult to acquire. You're starting to see a bunch of very, very weird items and supply chains become increasingly difficult to find. But again, the supply chains are going to break. down in ways that we just don't really understand. What is going to happen, and what has started to happen is inflation is increasing. I want to sort of, again, review our kind of inflation theory, right, which is largely derived from our friends as Strange Matter, sort of supply chain theory of inflation.

Their thesis of inflation is that, like, it's not set by just supply and demand, it's set by cost plus markup, because, you know, price is not set by, like, an autonomous thing called the market price is set by like a guy with like a price gun right it's it's directly set by people and the way that those people set the price is you know the cost of acquiring the item plus and bark up for their profit now one of the sort of fundamental like insights here is that price is sort of sticky until it isn't right which is that like okay so the actual thing that controls price is sort of like how pissed off consumers get at price increase but also, comma, that is also very, very much tied to brand, right?

And if you raise your prices and consumers get piss at you, even if you drop them again, that doesn't necessarily mean those people will come back, right? So, you know, a lot of times when there's price increases, companies try to eat it. And that's been what's happening with a lot of these things, right? Where at each point in the supply chain, people are, you know, people are having to sort of pay for the tariff parts, right? And when someone has to pay for the tariff, they increase their prices, that they sell it to the next person in the supply chain.

The next person in the supply chain increases their prices, right? Now, so the way that these tariffs play out, right, is that each person in the supply chain is doing cost plus markoff, but their costs are going up. So your options are either, you sell it at the same price

and you reduce the amount of markup you're getting, which is reducing the raw profit you're taking in, or you raise your prices. And these things are trying to not raise their prices, and part of this is from direct political pressure, right? Like Trump has been threatening companies to not raise their prices from the tariffs, but,

comma, prices are starting to increase. And as this goes on, and as more and more tariffs come into effect, and it becomes more and more difficult to evade the tariffs, the prices are going to keep increasing because they're driven by the supply chain price increases.

So, you know, cost is going to go up. It is going to have absolutely devastating impacts on workers across the world, primarily not in the U.S., but the workers who are in these expert oriented economies are going to have to deal with just the absolute horror of large-scale economic collapse. You know what?

Who else? Hopefully doesn't have to deal with the absolute horror of larger-scale economic collapse. It is the products and services to support this podcast. The summer of 1993 was one of the best of my life. I'm journalist Jeff Perlman, and this is Rick Jervis. We were interns at the Nashville, Tennessee. But the most unforgettable part? Our roommate, Reggie Payne, from Oakland, sports editor and aspiring rapper.

And his stage name, sexy sweat. In 2020, I had a simple idea. Let's find Reggie. We searched everywhere, but Reggie was gone. In February 2020, Reggie was having a diabetic episode. His mom called 911. Police cuffed him face down. He slipped into a coma and died.

I'm like thanking you. But then I see, my son's not moving. No headlines, no outrage, just silence. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own. Listen to finding sexy sweat on the I-heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately from Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming

and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire.

that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it.

He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. And I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all.

Season 2 of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people. and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino.

Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to the locker room every morning, just to shit talk.

We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candice Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. We are back. Now, the thing I want to close this episode on is not actually a look at the economy because I think, you know, we kind of don't know exactly what's going to happen

with the economy other than bad. But there is something that I think we can look at that's been broadly ignored or miscovered, which is what these tariffs say about the nature of the state. And I think what's happening is that we're seeing a fundamental change in the way that the state functions from the previous sort of neoliberal regime

to this like just really openly fascist one and I think the most clear example of this isn't necessarily the tariffs as they are a pretty clear example it's this extremely weird extortion agreement reached between Trump, AMD and NVIDIA I'm going to read this from CBS quote US chipmakers Nvidia and AMD will pay the

U.S. government, 15% of revenue generated by sales of their AI chips in China, a White House official confirmed to CBS News. This is just a shakedown, right? You know, this is part of a negotiating process by which originally AMD and Nvidia were going to be banned from selling their AI chips to China. And in order to be allowed to sell these ships to China, Trump was like, okay, if you want to do that, give us like 30% of your revenue when they were like, okay, what if we did 15%? Right. This is just a shakedown. And, you know, it's been described as such all over the press, but they're missing something fundamental here,

which is that the state, fundamentally, is just a shakedown, right? The analysis of Trumpism from the sort of critical press has been to view it as corruption, and it is absolutely corrupt, right? Like, no question about this. It is unbelievably corrupt. Like, we have people just giving the president blocks of fucking gold with an iPhone embedded into them, right? It's hideous, open corruption.

But analysis that looks at the Trump administration as corruption of an ideal type, right, that looks at it as the transformation of the state into something that it fundamentally isn't, that kind of analysis is just wrong. The state has always, and has always only been, the localized monopoly on the legitimate use of force, right? That's all it is. That's all it's ever been. everything we know about the state

today, right? From the legal system to education to roads, to environmental regulation, to the welfare state are all just functions that were tacked on to the core monopoly on violence, either as part of a carrot and stick gambit to maintain control of population, or simply as a concession

to popular force. You can just have a state that is a bunch of guys with guns who rule purely by Fiat and have control over an area. That is a state. Everything else that we think of has part of a state is tacked on. And Trumpism, as a political force, has simply reverted the state back to a pure mode of extraction, right? The state is men with guns who take shit from you to pay

for those guns. And it becomes breathtakingly clear that this is, you know, how the state is functioning in Trump administration. Because the Trump administration has been slashing benefits while handing tax breaks and giant government contracts worth billions of dollars to the tech elite. And they've been spending tens of billions of dollars, you know, to hand to the men's with guns and to recruit and renew of men with guns for the mass deportation regime, right? This is just a pure version of the state as an extraction regime, as a regime that fucking takes money for you at gunpoint to buy more men with guns so it can take more money from you. Trumpism imagines that you can collect this money to pay for the apparatus of violence and terror from just pure extortion

of foreigners in the working class. You know, and we talked about this a bit at the beginning, right? this is part of why they want to do tariffs is they think you can replace the income tax. You know, the income tax is just like absolutely despised by the extra state elements of the ruling class because rich people hate paying taxes. But there just isn't enough capital to run a state like that

without employing some kind of like MMT-esque money printing which has alienated a huge part of Trump's austerity coalition because his like quote unquote deficit reduction stuff hasn't actually reduced the deficit. So the people who like really, really care about that shit ideologically are pissed, but also on a fundamental level, this is already how most city governments operate, right? They are enormous police budgets extracted at gunpoint, either from the city council directly, or directly from the working class, from fees and fines and tickets, like just

leveled at working class people directly. And this is something that is a little different from how previous regimes of neoliberalism has functions, because those previous regimes of neoliberalism did a lot of these same things, but they were run through regimes of debt extraction, right? It was, you know, it was the IMF, right, coming into your country and being like, okay, if you want to pay back these loans or this dictator took out, right?

You're going to have to, like, sell your entire fucking working class into peonage so that your entire economy is going to be reoriented towards paying this debt back. But again, that was debt extraction base and finance base. Trumpism wants to take out the middleman and just straight up, say, give me all your money if you want to live. But this is not a particularly smart strategy.

There's a reason that the state takes on other guises than just a man with a gun asking for your wallet, right? A more literal regime, a more direct regime, a regime where the violence is out in the open, invites more literal resistance than a sort of symbolic regime or a regime that operates through moral principles. All regimes of accumulation, of dispossession, of resources taken by violence to produce more violence,

come to an end. Brick by brick and stone by stone, Trumpism, too, will be torn to the ground by the hands of the people who had thought it could exploit forever. This has been It Could Happen here. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources. for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Ultra Light, Ultra

Powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel Core Ultra processors, blazing speed, and AI power performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X-1 Carp, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. When I became a journalist, I was the first Latina in the newsrooms where I worked. I'm Maria Inojosa. I spent my career creating journalism that centers voices who have been historically sidelined.

From the most pressing news stories to deep cultural explorations, Latino USA is journalism with heart. Listen to Latino USA, the longest running Latino news and culture show in the United States. Hear it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem,

they just blurt it out and move on. Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So what do we do? We get support. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org. That's loveyourmindtay. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health.

Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perception and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an IHeart podcast.