It Could Happen Here - The Old Economy Is Dead

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Mia and Gare discuss the history of the modern economy and how the terf tariffs are going to destroy the system we live under and make our lives worse. Sources: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2222-carbon-democracy?srsltid=AfmBOop1btGiR59VH99WTMZMzuAgua2p9xgWyT8zbZzAhET-DEwjImqw https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/china-raises-tariffs-on-us-goods-to-125-in-retaliation https://spectrumlocalnews.com/us/national/business/2025/04/11/tariffs-shipping-china-port-of-la-declines https://www.freightwaves.com/news/trans-pacific-blank-sailings-soar-as-ocean-shipments-plunge https://gcaptain.com/massive-surge-in-transpacific-blank-sailings-amid-u-s-china-trade-tensions/ https://www.freightwaves.com/news/air-cargo-faces-22b-revenue-hit-when-china-tariff-exemption-ends https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/modifying-reciprocal-tariff-rates-to-reflect-trading-partner-retaliation-and-alignment/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's nostalgia overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddy Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast Dos Amigos. Wilmer's friend and former That 70s Show castmate Topher Grace stops by the Speakeasy for a two-part interview to discuss his career and reminisce about old times. We were still in that place of like what will this experience become and you go you're having the best time but it was like such a perfect golden time. Listen to Dos Amigos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and my latest interview is with Michelle

Obama. To whom much is given much is expected. The guilt comes from am I doing enough? Me, Michelle Obama, to say that to a therapist. So let's unpack that. Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, Federation? It's Freddie Prinze Jr. and Wrestling with Freddie is back. And we're going all in on WrestleMania 41. From the unpredictable to jaw-dropping finishes, this year's Mania might have just changed everything. By the way, almost all the matches that we saw looked like real fights. I thought, like, they were like, yo, we're going hard today, tomorrow we're gonna hurt, but we're going hard today.

Because it was like beast mode times 10 out there. Listen to this episode of Wrestling with Freddie on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it.

Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Callzone Media or wherever you get your podcasts. CAUZO MEDIA Welcome to IKATAP, a podcast where the ancient leftist adage there is power in logistics has finally been realized by one Donald Trump. I am your host Mia Wong, and with me is Gare. How are you doing Gare?

Just another great day in America. It's great, it's great. They're arresting judges. It's a good time. It's great. Something that Mia has probably called for before, but under different circumstances. Hey, look, have I ever publicly called for the arrest of a judge? I'm not sure I have. Maybe probably not, because like arresting power itself is a little bit problem... hashtag problematic. Yeah, I mean this is a carceral solution to this, to this garrison, like we cannot be using carceralism

to solve the problems of the carceral system. Sure. Speaking of carceral systems, there is the economy that we're all living under, which is also quite literally a carceral system because so much of it is based on prison and slave labor and various crimes across the world. Now I have good news and I have bad news about this. I don't remember what the good news was. So we're only getting the bad news, which is that well the good news and the bad news is that this

the system that we all grew up on that the economic system that has you know, supported us our entire lives or not supported us for our entire lives. The thing you know, the system that encompasses everything we have ever known is fucking dead. It is dead as shit. The economic system that existed literally at the end of last year does not exist anymore. It is right now in the process of dying. And the thing that is emerging has not emerged yet, which means we get to go to the Gromsey quote where he says, this is the time of monsters. The Chinese century, my favorite Gromsey. Gromsey, whatever.

Gromsey? How do we say this guy's name? Gromsey? Gromsey. Gromsey. Gromsey. See, you fucked up too. Yeah.

My favorite Gromsey quote, we're entering the Chinese century. Look, I, okay, so like here's the thing. I on a fundamental level think that Gromsey is like the harbinger of the entire retreat of the 20th century left. So I hate him and therefore I refuse to say his name properly. Also, we're going to get into a little bit about why the Chinese century is going to also be a complete shit show for them too, but you know. The Canadian century. I don't know. Finally, the Yugoslavian century. Oh, no. Finally, the Yugoslavian century. With God Emperor Mark Carney in charge, he will usher in a new era of Canadian progress and global supremacy. As climate change worsens, the Canadian economy will suck up all of

the dependency and resources from the US in the late 20th century. And finally, we will have a Tim Hortons in every country in the planet. I'm so excited for us to finally get our first war between two countries with Tim Hortons in it. That will be exciting. So there is a story that we have told on the show many, many, many, many, many, many times. And it is the story of the structure of the modern world economy, the birth of neoliberalism,

the ascendancy of free trade, the decline of the US as the world's great manufacturing power, the collapse of the power of the global working class, and the generalized ascension of capitalism and this specific form of capitalism as the structuring force of the world system It is a story of how structural forces and contingent choices technological changes in class wars domestic politics and grand international maneuvers and international relations built a political and economic structure that ruled the world for half a century of American hegemony and We are going to tell a very very abbreviated version of that story for one final time because that world well don't say final because you'll

probably do this again in two years but okay the world that we were all born into that world is fucking dead and Donald Trump has killed it this is how it died Garrison yes in the beginning There was war Sure in the ashes of a continent ripped by the flames of fascism two armies stood triumphant over a new world One of them unfortunately was the United States and the second one unfortunately was the USSR Now it's also worth mentioning that very briefly both the French and the second one unfortunately was the USSR. Now it's also worth mentioning that very briefly both the French and the British assumed they would also be like superpowers and no jokes washed failed failed powers zero

out of ten absolute dipshits destroyed. Now oddly enough Japan walked away with more power than either of those countries. Yeah. Yeah. A little bit odd considering the conditions that led to this happening. Well, you know, I mean, but the actual shift here, though, and this is, you know, like this actually is a lot of what this episode is about, is that the thing that World War I or World War II did was, and World War I also did this, but was fundamentally break the power of the Old World Empires, right? Because the world had been ruled for

several hundred years by various combinations of the French, the British, and the Germans, and you know, to some extent like Spain, but Spain was sort of gone, right? But like those Old World Empires had been what had structured everything in the world. And at the end of World War II, that suddenly wasn't the case anymore. And the product of this was that if you look at the places in the world that had the largest remaining industrial reserves, right? You know, I mean, there was obviously some industrial production in Latin America, particularly Argentina.

There was some Chinese manufacturing belts that were run by Japan in China that weren't destroyed. And then there was the entire manufacturing power of the United States. And this meant that alone among countries, right, the US was in the most dominant position, like one of the most dominant positions of great power has ever been in, even though there technically was a second great power, right? They had an unbelievable percentage of the world's total manufacturing power. We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total manufacturing power. We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total gold reserves. We had, I guess, like the second largest army in the world.

But, you know, we were significantly more technologically advanced than the USSR. And this had a bunch of extremely weird consequences because there was really no way for the amount of concentrated industrial power the US had to go but down. Because we controlled so much of the world's wealth and so much of the world's manufacturing capacity that the only thing that could ever possibly happen was that the rest of the world would catch up. And this was a thing that was actually necessary. And this is something that was spurred on by the American industrial class, right? Because they suddenly had all of these like Jeep factories you're trying to make cars out of and they needed people to buy the cars. And the only way to do that was to rebuild Europe and to rebuild Japan in order to sort of rebuild these places

as markets. And so for like a very brief time, and this is the sort of like golden age that all of these Trump people and all of these like weird dipshits like Harken back to was this like hard time of like unmatched American power But also it was it was a time in the world economy where you could have multiple powers industrializing at the same time without it being zero sum and that Just was not going to last Because at a certain point and this is accelerated by things we've talked about in other episodes like this attempt by a bunch of what were called the non-aligned movement or sort of the G77, you know, also like the third world movement, a bunch of these countries that were non-aligned, like Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan, which you can immediately tell how this alliance is going to shit because these two countries are like in the same alliance, right? Like, you know, this is the Tito's Yugoslavia is in this with like Saudi Arabia. These countries sort of like economic strategy was to create something that actually is in

a lot of ways kind of like what Trump is trying to do, which is like using their control of resources. Although again, the resource the US has now is like money, because we took all of the fucking world's resources, right? And but using that to develop your own local industrial basis, so you can you can have your own local manufacturing economy. And this is something that like a lot of countries pursued this, like Venezuela pursues this, like Bolivia pursues this. This is something that like everyone, like kind of across the political spectrum is trying to do in like the 60s and 70s and through the 80s. spectrum is trying to do in like the 60s and 70s and through the 80s.

But the thing is, it's destroyed by the second thing that's sort of a model for what these people are trying to do, which is what Reagan was able to do to the American economy in the sort of 1980s. And what Reagan is able to do is Reagan actually does something that sounds really bizarre now, but he was actually successfully able to temporarily for about maybe like six years, six or seven years, was able to actually like dramatically ramp up American like, like industrial production. And like was able to do the whole sort of like we're bringing the jobs back to the US. But the thing is, the way he did this was not the way the Trump administration is

is doing it, right? What he did was, on the one hand, he blew a smoking crater in the entire world economy. And that, Garrison, will sound familiar to you because these people are trying to blow a hole in the American economy, right? Like, you have seen this. Yes, I have seen the stonks in the trade and the shipments. Yes, I am. Yeah, but even like Elon Musk would like to like post about this, right? Like very deliberately about how he wants to destroy the economy so that there could be like a brief economic hardship and that a golden age. Right.

Necessary hardship will have to endure for a short period of time to then reach the like utopia, which is surely around the corner. Yeah. And it's interesting because when serious people have to defend this, like Fox, okay, I say serious people, I'm saying necessarily, and I'm saying Fox News, because like, look, look, look, here's like- Serious clowns have to defend this.

Yeah, I know, have to defend this, right? Like, okay, you know, we're not dealing with like, you know, we're not dealing with like intellectual titans here, but like when someone who is mildly more intelligent than Elon Musk has to defend this, it is Reagan they point you because Reagan and Carter was also ahead of hand in this but Reagan does this thing called the Volcker shock right like working working hand-in-hand with Paul Volcker is the head of the Federal Reserve

Which notably Trump just spent a bunch of time threatening to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and they had to back off on that because all of the markets were like this is Our fucking Rubicon like we don't give a fuck about any of the other thing Well, I mean we kind of give fuck about the other things you'd be doing but like if you fire the head of the Federal Reserve Like we're going ape shit But like you know the Fed and and Reagan work together in order to do this thing Which is the jack interest rates to just like unhinged levels causing everyone else's debt in the world to become like unbelievably unsustainable to repay.

This like annihilates most of the world's economies. This also creates like a double dip recession where the US has like almost 20% unemployment. But he's able to write this out specifically because like this thing actually benefits a bunch of sections of the American capitalist class. Like if you are someone who holds debt, right? This is fucking great for you. And this is something very different from what's happening right now because nobody is winning the trade war. Like everyone is just having the very worst time they've ever had.

It does seem like a globe of losers. Yeah. But the thing that Reagan does that actually allowed him to temporarily restore the profitability of a lot of American manufacturing and there is still a lot of American manufacturing, we'll get to that in a bit. But the thing he was able to do was the thing that Garrison, I was threatening at the beginning of the show, by the time I am done doing this podcast, maybe not this podcast, but by the time I finish doing it, it could happen here, when I like die on the battlefield in 15 years everyone will be able to fucking explain the Plaza Accords and the reverse Plaza Accords

because they are they are the central thing that got us to this all to this fucking place which that Ronald Reagan goes to Japan and goes to like West Germany and the subtext of what he's saying is like you are American military protectorates and because you are American build a Japan by the way is like the great industrial power of the 1980s right into the 90s like they are like the defining like they are the thing that everyone thinks about China today like if you want to find every argument people make about China from the entire political spectrum like all the way from like people on the one hand going like this is they're going to destroy American hegemony to people on the other hand being

like this is what socialism is You can find all of those same arguments people made about Japan in like the 80s But you know what Reagan forces these countries to do is to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar Right so the dollar is suddenly worth less and because the dollar is like worth less relative to other international currencies It makes us manufacturing more competitive and this like temporarily Restores American technological production but then they have to reverse them because that nukes the entire Japanese economy and the Japanese economy becomes an entire thing of real estate speculation which you know I guess I know you may be too young to remember what happened the last time

that we based the entire economy on real estate speculation but it didn't go great. That's not true. You're like a few days older than me. Come on. That's unbelievably not true. I am over half a decade older than you. Is that real? No, that can't be real. Yeah.

We'll talk about this afterwards. I don't think that's true. Let me pull up my Mia Wong docs file to check once a... All right. While Garrison checks the Mia Wong docs file, the economy that is built up from all of this, though, right, is an economy based on a few different things. One, it's based on an entire network of global supply chains with, you know, like very, very minimal tariff barriers between them, right?

It is based on the sort of doctrine of free trade, which is, you know, not really free, but obviously like the ways that these were written structurally benefited the US, right? Like the US is allowed to do all of this shit for like its corn production that no other country is allowed to do, like all the market tampering that all these people scream about is just what the US does with corn. But you know, the entire economic system was based on being able to cheaply produce different components of goods in different countries, assemble them and then move them across the

world cheaply in order to sort of avoid the localized power of workers movements. It is based on the US running a series of bubble economies, so the tech bubble, the housing bubble, et cetera, et cetera. And it is based on the US dollar and the bond as like the fundamental aspects of like as the World Reserve currency. The fundamental thing that drives the system. And when we come back, we will talk about this literally all exploding and what it's going to do for all of you, which is not good. Yay. It's nostalgia overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddie Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast Dos Amigos.

Wilmer's friend and former That 70s Show castmate Topher Grace stops by the Speakeasy for a two-part interview to discuss his career and reminisce about old times. We were still in that place of like, what will this experience become? And you go, you're having the best time. But it was like such a perfect golden time listen to dose amigos on the I heart radio at Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Wrestling fans all over the globe, it's Freddie Prince

junior and on wrestling with Freddie we're breaking down every damn moment from WrestleMania 41 2 nights nonstop chaos legend surprises, surprises, emotions, and some of the best wrestling we've seen coming from WWE. We've got takes, we've got questions, and we have a whole lot of love for what these men and women pulled off at Mania. Tiffany Stratton, she earned her stripes at WrestleMania. And I don't mean because she won, she bled for her art.

And it always felt like to me after the Attitude Era once a wrestler gets cut and you see real blood coming out of their mouth or real blood coming out of their head the crowd kind of goes hey respect and they kind of give you that nod right? You go wow every one of these guys is bleeding for the road. Bro, that's literally like blood, sweat, and tears. It's all they got is blood. We're talking Cody, we're talking Rhea, Roman, Seth, Tiffany.

The future of the business is bright. And if you watched Mania and you're still buzzing, or if you missed it and want to know what went down, we got you. Listen to this episode of Wrestling with Freddie on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid.

Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, let's me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcast. The Marvin, I'm La Agatha, the culture's favorite reggaeton historian, musicologist, public scholar, and recording artist. Yes, that means I've done the work.

On my show, The Reggaeton con La Gata Podcast, I'm not only talking to Flor Menor, who has the number one reggaeton track in the world right now, I'm also going to be on Perreo to speak with music innovators like Rainel, who is known for her media roquera tracks and collaborating with artists like Bad Bonnie. You're also giving me the culture breakdown straight from the source. Listen to Reggaeton con La Gata on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back. Now, one of the things that have, in a lot of ways, locked the system in place was that because of the way that these manufacturing networks are set up, right, because they're all so interlinked, because they're all dependent on like exploiting differences between production capacity and like labor costs in different countries.

They are also interconnected that if you try to pull one thread out of it and do a major change to the system, the entire thing is at risk immediately. And this meant that there has always been an enormous structural incentive to keep things the way they were, even if everyone can also already like realize that they're kind of fucked up. And this dates all the way back to like things that most people largely have forgotten about. But like Obama, for example, ran on renegotiating NAFTA and he never like intended to do that. But like even if he had, the moment he got into power, you know, like Trump renegotiates NAFTA too, right? But he renegotiates NAFTA and it's just like the same trade deal. Because for a long time, right, if you were going

to run the capitalist economy in a functional way, the only thing you could possibly do was run it the way it had already been set up because there were so many structural factorsors about how the system of production works that this is the only that this is the only way you could run it and Still like have the economy not explode but now we have finally produced a group of men so stupid that they are unconstrained by the structural limits of the economy and this is where we get into the the brown of turf terrorism wrong right now and We get into something that is very important to understand about this, which is that this shit is not about economics, right? It in a sense that you or I were understand that this is none of this stuff

is about like, we want the economy to grow. It's this is not something that like really any of the major sectors of capital want, because it is just nuking this whole thing. And this is why you've seen a split between even Elon Musk has openly criticized the trade policy, even if he's been sort of hedging it. What we've been seeing is this widening rift, and we talked about this in the last executive disorder, where different factions of the Trump administration were literally literally trying to like isolate Trump from like Navarro

Who's the guy who wants to do all of the all of the tariff bullshit? They've been you know, literally try to get them alone in a room so that they can they can implement their trade policy But the actual underlying urge here is completely ideological, right? it is it is this idea that like if you run a trade deficit with a country or if you're if you are buying things from a country they are ripping you off and you always need to be selling more things than you're buying which is just like yeah so okay on one level like this is just so fucking nonsense that like attempting to explain why is bullshit is

kind of pointless but we're gonna it anyways, because someone fucking has to somewhere. And this actually does also reveal something about the way that money has always worked under these systems. OK, so before we get to like what this is going to do to the entire world economy, we need to talk about. There's you know, a balance of payments is that sounds like something I would ask my accountant about. Yeah, so this is a technically an accounting thing, right? But the balance of payments of a country, it is like a leisure thing, right?

But it's the measure of like their accounts, right? In terms of all of the money coming out of the country and all of the money coming into the country. That's, you know, that's like that's like trade balance stuff, right? And the balance of payments is actually very important for a lot of countries because specifically most countries in the world need to buy things in a currency they can't print. And this has always been the structural limit of things like modern monetary theory, which talks about how like your your country's ability to like

have things isn't constrained by just like the pure money supply of your country as long as you're buying things in your own currency, right? Like the purpose of money is the thing to move assets around. But inflation isn't a product. I mean, like, yeah, okay, if you just like hammer the fucking printer button, right? Like, yeah, you can cause hyperinflation, but substantively because because money is something that is a production of the government because it is literally government debt, right? It's not a commodity in a conventional sense where you have to like figure out how much of it there is and there's like a limited Supply of it and you have to like manage limited supply to make sure the economy doesn't explode

You can just use the money that you have and you can use debt like deficit spending effectively To continue to circulate goods around the economy The problem is if you have to buy something that is not in your currency, that's where you need trade, because you need to find a way, so, you know, I'm going to take an example that we're going to come back to later, which is Bolivia, right? If you are Bolivia, you need to get American dollars so you can buy like gas, right? So people can like fucking fuel their cars. And the problem is, you can only buy oil in American dollars, so you have to find something to export to a place where you can get American dollars for it.

And in this sense, balance payments actually matters enormously, right. And balance payments is also just like a function of all of your trade deficits and all of your trade surpluses sort of combined, right. But think about the US. This is a notable thing. Everyone uses the dollar to buy shit. There's like nothing that you can't buy with the dollar So for the United States none of this shit matters at all None of the balance name and stuff it is completely irrelevant like literally completely totally and utterly irrelevant

Right now if you are like Bolivia and you run out of dollars Then you have a spiraling economic crisis where like people fucking suddenly can't buy food because no one can buy oil So no one can move things around so like the entire economy literally collapses This is a very very very common mode of economic collapse but You know none of that none of the things that the right is talking about like in terms of like oh you have like the United States has like a trade deficit with China's like yeah great that means that we're buying things from them Like the United States has like a trade deficit with China. It's like yeah great. That means that we're buying things from them

Like the one good Rand Paul quote ever was like yes. I have a trade deficit with my grocery store And that's fine Mia goes full Rand Paul on the podcast today Yeah, I know what but thing is but thing is it is very very funny that Rand Paul is now complaining about this because it's Like well Yeah I don't know. If all of you motherfuckers hadn't spent all this time, like, fucking palling around with like Alex Jones and the Klan, like we probably wouldn't be here right now.

So this is your fault. This is definitely... Like the tea party does have a sizable chunk of the blame here. Yeah, like that's the thing, like this is all of your fucking fault. Lock him up quick! Zero to ten, zero to ten, get them out, get them out, get them out. Now do you know what else we need to get out? Get out of stock!

Oh. It's the products and services! Yeah. Get them out of stock, get them out of stock, while you still can. Well, we still have an economy. It's Nostalgia Overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddy Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast, Dos Amigos. Wilmer's friend and former That 70s Show castmate Topher Grace stops by the Speakeasy for a

two-part interview to discuss his career and reminisce about old times. We were still in that place of like, what will this experience become? And you go, you're having the best time. But it was like such a perfect golden time. Listen to dos amigos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Wrestling fans all over the globe. It's Freddie Prince Jr.

And on wrestling with Freddie, we're breaking down every damn moment from WrestleMania 41. Two nights, nonstop chaos, legends, surprises, emotions and some of the best wrestling we've seen coming from WWE. We've got takes, we've got questions, and we have a whole lot of love for what these men and women pulled off at Mania. Tiffany Stratton, she earned her stripes at WrestleMania. And I don't mean because she won, she bled for her art.

And it always felt like to me after the attitude era, once a wrestler gets cut and you see real blood coming out of their mouth or real blood coming out of their head, the crowd kind of goes, hey, respect. And they kind of give you that nod, right? You go, wow, every one of these guys is bleeding for the road. Bro, that's literally like blood, sweat and tears. It's all they got is blood. We're talking Cody, we're talking Rhea, Roman, Seth, Tiffany.

The future of the business is bright. And if you watched Mania and you're still buzzing, or if you missed it and want to know what went down, we got you. Listen to this episode of Wrestling with Freddie on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, ****less me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. Here's the deal. We got to set ourselves up. See, retirement is the long game. We got to make moves and make them early. Set up goals. Don't worry about a setback. Just save up and stack up to reach them. Let's put ourselves in the right position. Pre-game to greater things.

Start building your retirement plan at thisispretirement.org, brought to you by AARP and the Ad Council. We are back. Now, again, as I was saying, like this attempt to make the American economy function in a way that it has trade surpluses with every other country and also, and this is also important, these people don't think that like services are real and a lot of what the US exports is services, but because they're all these really weird, like, because they're all fascists, right? They all have this, all of this weird ideological shit

about masculinity and about the favoring of the concrete over the abstract, because the concrete is like, masculine, it is like, it is the nation, right? Like this, like, steel workers and people who fucking hammer coal out, like this is, this is what masculinity is, this is what it is the nation right like this like steel workers and people who fucking hammer coal out Like this is this is what masculinity is this is what nationalism is. This is what men are supposed to do Yeah, you you have the materialists on the evil side and you have the post materialists. Well, you know, okay, so this is I a long time ago, I did a bunch of episodes called class in the culture war and I did a bunch of episodes called Class and the Culture War. And one of the points that I make of that episode is that one of the arguments that the Canadian Jewish Marxist historian Moish Pastone makes about what the Holocaust was,

was this attempt to pit the concrete part of capital against the abstract part of capital, right? Where the concrete part of capital is like the nation and the worker and the factory and like the boss, right? And all these like concrete things were pitted against the like the quote-unquote abstract part of capital which is to say like quote-unquote like Jewish financiers and all of this sort of like weird collection of like modifiers that gets associated with like, you know, the rootless positivism, like the globalism, like all of this shit, right? And what the Nazis did was embody all of that stuff into just the figure of the Jewish person. And his argument, and this is arguing about like sort of structural anti-Semitism and what the Holocaust was, was that like that was what the Nazi Revolution was.

That's what the liquidation of, like, and this is how Basso describes it, like liquidation of the Jews, this is what the Holocaust, this is what the genocideation of like in this is how it describes like liquidation Jesus What this is what the Holocaust is what the genocide was was their attempt to destroy? The like abstract part of part of this thing by pitting it against a concrete part of this thing And this is what these fucking people are also are also doing in their own way, right? Like yeah, they're just doing it with like the price of eggs or like the availability of how is that right? And you know, it's also with like, these people are like unhinged anti-Semitic, right? Because this is all part of the same ideology. They just sort of like, they're doing the shit in different ways and they haven't, like, I don't know, like, if

these people are in power for like a decade, we might just get this, right? Where they're literally doing the Holocaust again. But like, we're not at that point yet. What we're at the point is where, like, this kind of, like, the point is where this kind of fascist understanding of the nation and masculinity and the concrete versus the abstract and these figures can be embodied in these things. This is also what the administration is doing with immigrants, right? It's like passing them in that role of the abstract, the foreigner, the national, the anti-national. Matthew 5.00 Those things are what is causing our economic problems, our housing problems.

And then you have other instances, like with like Mexico and Canada, where they tie in the trade war with this like fentanyl thing, being like, you know, like immigrants are bringing fentanyl over the border and we're using tariffs as a negotiating tactic to stop fentanyl. So like they're bringing in even more like aspects regarding like immigration and tying it directly to like our trade wars with these massive, massive countries,

some of our most important trading partners. Yeah, and this is causing an interesting split because Trump's like political coalition, right, has a bunch of kind of different kinds of fascists in a lot of ways. We're like Trump and Navarro and like, I mean, Trump is instinctually pro-tariff and like he can be talked out of it because again, this guy's brain, like we saw this thing in the last administration, like the last person in the room with him can convince him of basically anything.

But you know, those people are structurally committed to, like, this specific version of masculinity. And there's a lot of portions of the right that are and that are committed to like this trade policy is like the America first American nationalist thing. But like someone like Elon Musk isn't that committed to this. And like even a lot of the people who are like the inner circle, sort of like Yarvin, like tech fascist, right, are like, are like okay, but hold on like we make all of our shit in China so like you know this is why like Elon is coming against a terrorist because like

Yeah They're gonna fuck him like because he has to import stuff and export stuff from China because that's where a bunch of his production facilities are right and you know and if once you get out of the circle of of like that kind of like tech fascist right and and the tech people are The people who are the most closely aligned with this administration right like an insurance there's like all the sectors of capital tech is the most closely aligned one but you know you can get out into like there's like fucking Walgreens and Walmart right and these are also like like the Waltons as a

family are like traditional backers of the right for ages and ages and ages right they've been backers of far-right causes they also don't want this because also their entire supply chains work through fucking China and work through moving a bunch of like commodities around. And the further out you go, when you start getting into like actual finance capital, these people are fucking terrified because they're looking at this and like, holy shit, we're about to lose all of our goddamn money. And the consequence of this is that all of this stuff is shaping out in a sort

of political battle in the Administration over who can get Trump in the room last to try to figure out how how the economy is going to work but The problem is and I I have been vindicated in this in the very brief amount of time between When the episode on Friday came out and we're recording this There are no negotiations with China. Like they haven't started. There's no process for starting them. Trump does keep lying about starting negotiations.

Yeah, he's just lying about this. The Chinese government says, no, we have not started negotiations. It's like, no, there's no negotiations. Yeah. And again, like structurally, there can't be negotiations because there's no actual way for the US to like not have a trade deficit with China. Like there's no way you can do that. And that's the thing that will satisfy these people. So all of this means that the economy is fucking dead, right?

This is the sort of like free trade economy we've all grown up in that functions off of like you know like fucking drop shipping and all this cheap production to a bunch of other countries and you know like assemblies of a bunch of different like goods in different places and the US is like the economic center of the world is just fucking gone. Now one of the reasons I started writing this episode in the first place is that I have read so much fucking analyses of these goddamn turf tariffs and do you know how many of them for a single fucking second considered what this was going to be like for anyone who doesn't live in the

United States? What the fuck is wrong with people? Why does nobody fucking care about a single goddamn person who lives outside the United States? I have read so many fucking analyses of this fucking shit. I have read these things from I have read these things from the business papers. I have read these things from fascists. I have read these things from the center left. I have read these things from leftists. Do you know how many of these things have said anything about actual fucking people who do not live in the goddamn United States? Fucking none of them. Every once in a while you'll get like, this will be bad for the economy of China.

And this is a catastrophe because the people who aren't going to be most affected by this, when the fucking turf terrorists from liberation day come back into effect over the summer, are the working class of Sri Lanka. This is going to be the fucking apocalypse for a bunch of people who have been going through hell for years and years and years and years

It's going to be places like fucking Bolivia who is already facing a dollar crisis and struggling to import fuel It is going to be places like Bangladesh. It is going to be places like Vietnam Which is you know structurally in a better position than a lot of the rest of these countries But like fucking won't be in a structurally better like balance or structurally better position when it has like 90% goddamn tariffs on it. And yes, the US is going to be real fucking bad, right? Everything is going to cost a lot more money. All of us are going to have a lot less jobs.

People who are in jobs are going to make a lot less money. There is going to be a lot of people fucking homeless. There is going to be a lot of people who can't get fucking food. It is going to be a catastrophe. And also at the same time, the US is going to look like fucking fully automated, luxury gay space communism compared to fucking Sri Lanka. This kind of sort of rote American nationalism that has consumed the brains of basically this entire goddamn country on a level so deep Americans don't even fucking think

about it, like, is the reason why we fucking have all of this bullshit in the first place and This is why like in like four fucking months literally no one in the entire country social security It's actually going to show up because a 19 year old grouper doesn't understand sequel because nobody in this fucking country gives a single Shit about anyone who lives outside of the country enough to try to do a single goddamn word of analysis about how this is going to affect everyone Because the death of the global economy will be felt here It is going to be felt so much fucking worse everywhere else on goddamn earth And I am like I am losing my fucking mind at the extent to which everyone is just fucking refusing to engage with this completely

This is gonna be being unbelievably fucking angry because like I don't know a bunch of my family doesn't live in this country which means I have to deal with the fact that like everyone else who lives in another country is a human being who's exactly the same as fucking we are and this is a thing that nobody else appears to want to fucking deal with I am losing my shit. Please God stop talking about the tariffs as if they only affect the United States and aren't mostly going to be born by everyone else I didn't write a transition for this but you know, I will transition out of this by again Going back to the fact that all of the the reason this is going to be so bad is that the global economy is based on that all of the reason this is going to be so bad is that the global economy is based

on, you know, a combination of resource extraction and a combination of logistical supply lines that all rely on there not being 100% tariffs on goods imported to the US. And when this shit goes through, and when the rest of the tariffs go through and make it, you know, the thing that's happening right now is an attempt to avoid this stuff. And something like Nintendo has been talking about, right? Where they were like, okay, our plan to avoid the tariffs on China is to move a bunch of our production into Vietnam. And that was happening anyways before the tariffs because of sort of rising labor costs in China and a whole bunch of sort of factors like that.

But none of that stuff, to sort of keep the current global economy on a lifeline is Going is going to be able to function once the tariffs on basically every country on earth go into effect and There's a second problem here, which is that? Okay, so what is the new economy going to look like these people like the people running like the administration, right? like Navarro and people like Trump and a lot of the sort of like right who is driving the policy thing here think that this that the production that's happening everywhere else in the world will just be replaced by the US and there was a trap that people fall into with Chinese economics and I do this too sometimes because it's you know it's a

fast and easy way to think about the Chinese economy and it's not accurate. Well, it's not like it doesn't capture the whole picture of what's going on. But the way that people think about the Chinese economy tends to be that the reason that things are made in China is because labor is cheap there because either the culmination of exploitation and poverty. And that's true to an extent, right? But the actual sort of genius from capitalist perspective of capitalist return to China was that, you know, from a capitalist perspective, the Chinese workforce, and this continues to be true 30 or 40 years into the transition, is highly educated and highly skilled. And the education was paid for not by capitalism, right? It was paid for by the sort of socialist system. Like this combination of things of a highly educated and an increasingly highly skilled as they've been, you know, like working these jobs means that there is an extremely high-skill

migrant labor population that knows how to do a bunch of shit like circuit board assembly and like stuff with like chip assembly, right? That is vital to making electronics. And the US does not have a couple of hundred thousand migrant workers that you can just have and like exploit and not pay health care costs to, to know how all of the chip manufacturing shit works, right? There are people in the US who know how to do some of these kinds of things. But we're talking, you know, even, even though the US who know how to do some of these kinds of things. But we're talking, you know, even, even though the US does have a

manufacturing economy and it is very high tech, it is not on the scale of these things. Right. And the second, the second big reason why things are produced in China, and this is, this is the reason why production didn't just shift all shift out of China after 2011, when there were huge protests there and huge riots there over sort of labor conditions is that there was an unbelievable amount of like capital outlet, like this physical factory infrastructure that is in China that you can't easily just move out to another country.

And this is this is the basic things like the power grid functions. Right. And you can't really easily replicate that and you can't just have this thing that there's all these people want to do we're like, the US will just suddenly, you know, have all of these factories, right? And suddenly, like all these things will just like come back and miraculously like, there will be all of these jobs because like, who the fuck is going like we don't we literally we don't have the technology for this one, not so much technology was like, who is going to build all of the factories, right?

Like the factories don't exist here. The the like the interlinked technical systems for them just don't exist here. You don't want to switch to costing fifty thousand dollars available in ten years pre-order now. Sorry, no available in 20 years. I forgot about the environmental impact surveys. Yeah, iPhone, iPhone 20 years. Yeah, but like, you know, and like, and like a lot of this is because, and you know, you're hearing a lot of reports now with like small business owners

who are talking about like, yeah, it's so much easier to work with Chinese manufacturers like impossible to work with American manufacturers. And part of that is just exploitation. Right? Like, yeah, there's a lot of things that like there, there were like labor conditions that are very common in China that do happen in the US, but are much easier to do there, but also like, I don are very common in China that do happen in the US but are much easier to do there but also like I don't know like China has like an entire network of like

The ability to basically do this sort of like pop-up light and medium manufacturing that can like retool itself really quickly in the US Doesn't fucking have that right like we do have a bunch of manufacturing in the US right like that is the thing that we have But it was largely pushed into like the suburbs to get rid of sort of like the masses of workers that arose in cities like Detroit to like atomize them right and This is actually like also happening in China right now weirdly like China has been pivoting to a surface economy for a long time But think of this thing is a service economies a lot of that shit is like also like drop shipping production, right? But like, you know There's no actual way for, you know, for like capital outlay costs and things like that. There's no actual way

to replicate the conditions in China that make it like an effective like source of global production in the US, or even in like a country like India, like they're just not the infrastructure there to do it. There's not the sort of like migrant labor population, not the sort of things that you need. And what this means right now, right, is that like, there is not a future lined up to replace the one that we're in right now. We literally don't know what this is going to do because no one has ever bothered planning this shit out

because this is just like taking a sledgehammer to fucking everything. Like they are trying to extract the copper wires from the house and in order to do this, they like, you know, A, because they think they think that's how the economy are trying to extract the copper wires from the house and in order to do this They like you know a because I think they think that's how the economy works is they strike the copper wires and B they're planning to extract the copper wires is to blow the house up with dynamite and No, no one's ever done an environmental impact statements on What if you blow the house up with dynamite because why the fuck would you do that?

Right sometimes the police do that. It's true. It's true. But I guess the US is the world's police force. There you go. No one has planned for this. But the second thing is there isn't another model of capital waiting in the wings in the way that there was when the sort of Reaganites did this economy, because the Reaganites had an entire ideological apparatus. They had a functional way for the economy to work and be worse and be more exploitative. But there's nothing behind this, right? There's just a vision that literally cannot work.

And so the place that I want to end as we head into the end of the economy and as you know, I've been trying to grapple with what is it going to look like after this is that we just don't know things in the supply chain are going to break that we have never thought about before like medical systems are going to start breaking down right the supply chains for like like really really basic goods that we don't even think about the production process of is going to start breaking down because it relies on being able to cheaply import one very, very specific kind of like, I don't know, like ball bearing that's made

in one factory and suddenly cost like 400 times as much as it did before. And we don't know what that's going to do. And this is on the one hand, absolutely horrifying, right? Like, this is going to mean an unbelievable amount of suffering for people across the world. But on the other hand, there is no plan, right? They don't have a fucking strategy. And that means that the future of the global economy is up in the air. And it's up to us to make it a fucking better one, right? We either drive these people from power and we destroy the basis of their power on such a fundamental

level they can never return to power, right? Like we just fucking kneecap them. We physically seize all of the fucking assets and all of the things of the productive capacity that they have that has been allowing them to do this. We make sure they can never get it again. We make sure that we fucking control it. And we either do that, or we all get crushed for a generation and we enter a period of just unmitigated global suffering the likes of which only a few people in the most hideously war torn parts of the world have experienced today. worlds have experienced today. Yay! I for one am very excited to see the the anarchist liberal

re-globalization alliance finally fighting in the streets of Seattle to regain globalization, full circle. You know, I will point out the reason they all called it ultra globalization and not anti globalization Was that like one of the one of the original? I didn't say anti globalization Did right but like like like a lot of their argument was like the West Coast team certainly to this is true but like it's also it's also true that like like what like one of the arguments they were making was that like neoliberal globalization meant that people

Couldn't move to places but capital could and the thing that they want was a world where people can move between things and like, fuck capital, what the fuck, like eat shit, right? And that's a world that we can build, right? We can build a world where fucking nobody gets arrested by the immigration Gestapo, where like there isn't a fucking line on the ground that dictates whether people can disappear into a concentration camp. And that is also globalization! Right?

We just have to fucking do it. Anarcho-Clintonism. One day we can look at a beautiful world. Look, if Bill Kristol can admit the radicals were right, all of these other motherfuckers can come around. We've been right all the- we've been right the whole fucking time. Fuck you assholes! It's a strange- All of you broke this world, and it is now our job to put it back together and you fuckers

are going to back us or we are all going to be killed by fascism. Those are the terms. Deal with it. It's a strange world we live in. 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. It's nostalgia overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddy Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast Dos Amigos. Thanks for listening. and you go, you're having the best time. But it was like such a perfect golden time. Listen to Dose Amigos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and my latest interview is with Michelle Obama. To whom much is given, much is expected. The guilt comes from am I doing enough? Me, Michelle Obama, to say that to a therapist.

So let's unpack that. Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, Federation?

It's Freddie Prinze Jr. and Wrestling with Freddie is back. And we're going all in on WrestleMania 41. get your podcast. today, tomorrow we're going to hurt, but we're going hard today because it was like beast mode times 10 out there. Listen to this episode of Wrestling with Freddie on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts.