It Could Happen Here - Trade Wars? Mia Snores: The Rogue Agenda 47 Episode

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Mia discusses Trump's Agenda 47 trade policy, why it probably won't happen, and how anti-free trade organizing built the modern left and right alike.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that much to the chagrin of my upstairs neighbors is being recorded at almost 3 in the morning. of my upstairs neighbors is being recorded at almost three in the morning.

It's being recorded at three in the morning instead of at a normal time because a bunch of protests broke out across college campuses against the genocide in Palestine. We will cover that at some point very soon. However, comma, there is this episode to be done. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and this episode is something a little different. So there's an element of Trump's Agenda 47 that we didn't really talk about in our episodes. That's actually a pretty significant amount of the material, and that's Trump's trade policy. And this is sort of surprisingly a very large part of his pitch.

The sort of gist of it is that Trump's appeal to like the white working class TM is, okay, we're going to do a bunch of protectionist terrorists. This is going to bring jobs back to the US by imposing costs on manufacturing in other countries, etc, etc. This will bring jobs back to America and it will make America greater some shit. Now, the centerpiece of this is what's called the Reciprocal Tariff Bill. And it's not that complicated. Basically, what it says is if a country imposes a tariff on an American good, the U.S. imposes an identical tariff on that tariff. It's designed to basically automatically start trade wars.

Now, the reason we didn't cover this in the original Agenda 47 slate of episodes is that even in the worst-case scenario where Trump takes power in a coup, and the sort of power of anyone to oppose him is significantly curtailed i don't think he can get this one passed and the reason i don't think he can get this one passed is because you know as as it turns out this package and what we're going to sort of explore this a little bit uh actually seriously messing with

tariffs is something that is really really going to piss off a lot of corporations that actually matter. Now, okay, so like we could have, I could have just done the episode anyways, led with that and just given a sort of, you know, just given the disclaimer that like it's probably not going to happen but i think there's a more interesting story here that hasn't really been talked about about the origin of basically the framework of modern american politics both on the right and on the left because they both emerge i think from a series of arguments about trade that has been i kind broadly forgotten. I think that's to our detriment. And the product of this is that there's been a sort of raft of arguments, and I've seen this as much from the left as from the right, that Trump's support for tariffs and particularly the sort of trade spat he got in with China from 2018 to 2019 marks the end of the sort of like neoliberal free trade regime and the emergence of like new nationalist protections against free trade it's like the new economic system that's replaced neoliberalism

and i am very skeptical of this and the reason why i'm very skeptical of this is because i like when when i was coming up as a leftist i spent a bunch of time seriously became involved in like irl left organizing around 2017. I'd done some stuff in like 2013 before then. But that meant that, you know, a lot of the stuff I was reading was accounts of what was called the global justice movement, which was or alter globalization, anti globalization, there's like it has it has a million names. But it was it was a series of mass protest movements against the sort of raft of free trade agreements coming out of the 90s. So. And you get a very, very different picture of the history of free trade that is sort of broader and more expansive in the history of the resistance to it than you get if you just sort of like, you know, assume neoliberalism has been the same always,

and Trump is the sort of aberration to it. Now, Trump's status as an aberration is something that I question. I mean, you know, the trade war that he got into is something, you know, it is different, but I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of sort of hype around Trump's like opposition to free trade. Like one of the big things, you know, that Trump ran on was pulling out of NAFTA. And he did, he did pull out of NAFTA.

However, comma, he then set up a new trade NAFTA, by the way, it's a North American free trade agreement. It's really shit. We're going to talk a bit more about what exactly it did later, but it, you know, later, but it's broadly

seen, I think rightly, as something that smashed both huge portions of what was left of the American manufacturing economy and the parts of the economy that had been rebuilt in the 80s, and also just absolutely annihilating the Mexican agricultural industry. For reasons that we will explain in a bit. It's now becoming extremely deeply unpopular because unbelievable numbers of workers lost their jobs and the jobs that they

got afterwards had shittier wages. Entire communities are ravaged, etc, etc, etc. So Trump famously campaigns on pulling out of this deal, but he replaces it with something called USMCA. Now, here's the thing about this deal. This is basically just NAFTA with slightly stronger carve outs for the auto industry about like what percentage of the parts of vehicles have to be produced in the US and some like slightly stronger labor like protections, which is like fine, but it's basically the same deal. labor like protections which is like fine but it's it's basically the same deal right so you know you you have to take this whole sort of like ah trump is like the anti-free trade thing with a

grain of salt and look at again this deal that he negotiated which is just nafta it is literally after all of the hype of him pulling out of naFTA, he did NAFTA again. Now, this is something very interesting that I don't think people remember. Obama also opposed NAFTA, and they came into office, and then nothing ever fucking happened to NAFTA. So, you know, the rumors of NAFTA's demise have been greatly exaggerated. But, comma, the story of the building of opposition to NAFTA is very, very interesting. So something I don't think most people understand is that the modern American left is descended from the Zapatistas, very specifically. We're going to one day cover the Zapatista uprising in some detail. But the sort of cliff-nosed version is that on January 1st, 1994, the Zapatistas, who are named after the great Mexican revolutionary hero,

Emilio Zapata, staged an uprising in Mexico. They seized a bunch of cities very quickly. They were sort of driven out of those cities, but eventually they took control of a decent part of the territory of the Mexican state of Chiapas. The Zapatistas staged this uprising for a number of reasons. The most famous of them is that January 1st, 1994 is the year that NAFTA took effect. One of the things about this free trade agreement is that in order to ratify it,

the Mexican government changed the constitution, and the part of the constitution they eliminated was the part that had secured collective ownership of a bunch of land for indigenous people. And this would allow corporations to seize and control the indigenous lands, exploit it for resources, kick the people off of it, and kill them. Now, this obviously was unacceptable to the Zapatistas. They go into revolt. What I think people don't realize is what the Zapatistas did next, which is holding a series of these things called encuentros, like encounters. Sorry, my Spanish is not as good as it once was, and it was never great. But, you know, in which they invited, you know, sort of leftist activists from all over the world to get together. And this is the thing that rebuilt the left after the absolute catastrophe of the death of the old left around the collapse of the Soviet Union, which sort of annihilated, like, the sort of old left, like communist political parties and, you know, ushered in like the pure error of the left like communist political parties and you know ushered in like the pure error of the march on neoliberalism and the activists that came out of these encounters

go back to you know go back to their respective countries and they start and you know they're they're organizing against these against you know these series of free trade deals. And they start doing what's become known as summit hopping. I think the most famous of these in America is what's become known as the Battle of Seattle, the 1999 giant protest against the World Trade Organization summit. And this starts from about 1999 to 9-11. There's a huge wave of these. Well, I mean, it goes 1999 to 9-11. There's a huge wave of these.

Well, I mean, it goes on after 9-11, but 9-11 really damages it. But there's this massive, it's like really the first sort of real, like, mass mobilizations and social movements, like, in the U.S. Since, like, there's a stuff in the anti-nuclear room in the 80s, but this is the first really big sort of like resurrection of the left and i think importantly for us like the people who people who found occupy like david david graber for example is someone who starts doing politics like during this period during during alter globalization during these sort of protests and those people those are the people who build occupy and you know occupy for whatever whatever else you can say about it occupy is the single event that brought that like drag the american left kicking and screaming out of irrelevance and all of that shit everything

you know every like all of the sort of organizational tenants of occupy all of its sort of ideology that stuff is all stuff from multi-globalization, right? the way that the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, you know, use sort of economic restructuring deals to devastate economies and like turn entire nations into sort of debt peons. This is all ultra-globalization stuff. And this movement is very, very powerful and very successful. Even the sort of arch, like, you know, by the time you hit 2016, right, this has reshaped politics in the U.S. to the extent that, like, arch neoliberal Hillary Clinton says she's openly in favor of renegotiating NAFTA and opposes her own Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is the last of the sort of giant free trade deals that would eventually, like, die and go up in smoke with trump right i'm gonna read a passage from david graver's piece the shock of victory about what actually happened uh during this

movement this is you know section about free trade agreements all the ambitious free trade treaties planned since 1998 have failed the maa was routed the FTAA, the focus of the actions in Quebec and Miami, stopped dead in its tracks. Most of us remember the 2003 FTAA summit mainly for introducing the quote-unquote Miami model of extreme police repression against even obviously non-violent civil resistance. It was that. But we forget that this was more than anything the enraged flailings of a pack of extremely sore losers. Miami was the meeting where the FTAA was definitively killed. Now, no one is even talking about broad ambitious treaties on that scale. The US is reduced to pushing for minor country-to-country trade pacts with traditional allies like South Korea and Peru, or at best deals like CAFTA uniting its remaining

client states in Central America, and it's not even clear it will manage to pull that off. And this is what we've seen from, you know, sort of projecting forward from the future from the 2000s when this is written. Free trade was not killed by Trump or Xi Jinping. These free trade agreements, if anyone, was killed by the Zapatistas and the global justice and the global justice movement that the Zapatistas, you know, the sort of like Encontros and the Zapatistas built. and the global justice movement that the Zapatistas built.

Now, one thing the Zapatistas did not build is the products and services that support this podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how TexElite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

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Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back from products and services. Products and servicing? That is slightly ominous. Now, the modern left isn't the only thing that sort of descended from the backlash to free trade, right? We've gone over the extent to which the left is built off of this stuff. But much of the modern right is descended from the sort of Ross Perot, like, right-wing nationalist backlash to the same stuff.

I think probably the most famous link between that era and this era is Alex Jones. This is the reason that, like, Alex Jones and people like him scream constantly about globalists, right? Because, you know, the global justice movement has two kind of wings. There's, or, you know, it was called anti-globalization uh it has two wings one wing is a sort is a leftist wing which is like okay we actually support like the you know we support the global like movement of ideas and people but we but you know what what globalization and free trade actually means is locking people down in their countries with militarized borders while capital moves freely between them and we think that's fucking bad there was also another you know there was

also the right-wing reaction which is this incredibly right nationalist reaction which is that like ah like these these like rootless cosmopolitan globalists are uh are like like you know taking all of our jobs and moving them to like mexico and you know they've like sold they're like sold out the american people and you know like obviously the stuff is just it starts anti it starts like as anti-semitic dog whistles and just gets you know i mean like like okay these are like the loudest dog whistles of all time right but you know they get increasingly anti-semitic. And this is the kind of stuff that Alex Jones is doing. And this is the

kind of sort of right-wing politics that wins out over sort of like neoconservatism's more like sort of hoorah, free trade, we're going to use the might of the American empire to spread sort of like this very specific model of capitalism to other countries

and you get this sort of Trump style, like, fuck every other country, we're going to do tariffs and stuff. Now, what I think is very interesting, so what Trump eventually winds up producing as a discourse, I guess you could say, is this image of, okay, so like the thing that's holding back the American worker is China, because all of our jobs are being sent to China. And so if we just put more tariffs on China, and we defeat China geopolitically, everything will sort of like, be great in the American nation, like you, the white worker, are going to have jobs again, like everything's going to go back to the way they were. And what's fascinating about this is that, you know, as the trade war is intensifying in the mid-late 2010s, in China, there is a parallel discourse, which is almost identical,

where Chinese nationalists will do this thing where they talk about, like, breaking through the Great Ming as a solution to involution. they talk about like breaking through the Great Ming as a solution to involution. We talked about involution on the show before is this concept that's very popular in China right now where it's becoming increasingly clear that like working hard is not going to actually get you any more money than you're getting now.

Like you're not going to get ahead in life. You're just sort of stuck. And so you're stuck in this condition of putting more and more effort into nothing and the chinese nationalist argument is that if you can if you can geopolitically defeat the u.s china will sort of like break out of its wage stagnation and economic stagnation and so you know what what you have is this very very dangerous collision of these two sort of like right-wing nationalisms that are like offering these really sort of categorically false assertions that if you if you just follow their sort of nationalist geopolitical

agenda then all of the sort of class issues that everyone's dealing with will suddenly magically work themselves out now contra this and contra i, the argument that even that sort of just, you know, the argument that I was talking about before that, like, Trump and this sort of nationalist, like, economic policy discourse in China, like, represents something, you know, seismic, like a seismic change in, like, trade policy that signals the end of neoliberalism. I want to come back to the point of will Trump actually be able to implement any of this stuff, even if he had sort of near dictatorial power? And I think the answer to that is no. And the reason I think the answer to that is no is that, you know, one of the old observations about quote unquote free trade from the global justice movement is that, okay, if you look at what quote unquote trade is, right, international trade trade huge amount of it is literally the same company moving its own resources from one place to another now the problem is the more expensive

it is for corporation to do this the more pissed off they get right and this means that this kind of like tariff war bullshit and this happened through the trump administration that pissed off a lot of people and if if you know and and trump is you know his intention is to start an even larger and more powerful series of trade wars this is going to piss off a lot of people who actually matter in the sort of in the american political system which is to say a lot of shareholders and a lot of ceos and you know and so i think the fairly obvious conclusion is that what actually happens here is you get exactly the same kind of shit that happened with trump's like quote-unquote pullout of nafta where he makes like one or two symbolic gestures and then everything continues as normal

and he declares victory now the second problem i have with people looking at this as a sort of new regime is the way that they're thinking about this sort of like tariff and subsidy regime as something that's that's not a part of neoliberalism right like the the sort of theoretical ideal of neoliberalism is countries aren't supposed to do tariffs countries aren't supposed to be able to do like quote-unquote protectionism so we're not supposed to give subsidies to manufacturers and everyone's supposed to like compete on a free and equal playing field. This has never been true. And in fact, what free trade has meant in practice,

and this has been true since the founding of the World Trade Organization, what it means is that Western countries get to impose tariffs and manufacturing subsidies, and non-Western countries don't. Even in the WTOto there's a bunch of random carve-outs for like fucking like random workers in germany and stuff this is also a part of like literally a part of what started the zapatista uprising i mean we talked about you know the primary cause like the elimination of collective ownership from mexican constitution but another huge problem is what nafta whatFTA was going to do is force a bunch

of Mexican corn farmers to compete with American corn farmers. Now, okay, if it was literally just corn farmers from these two countries competing like Mexican corn farmers probably eventually could out-compete American corn farmers because Americans are fucking dog shit at farming. But under the terms of nafta and this is again the thing that's been true of free trade this whole time they have to compete with subsidized american corn this is impossible mexican farmers got fucking annihilated all of their land was seized by corporations and you know it has brought sort of devastation and ruin to the mexican economy ever since this has been absolutely great for the ruling class because all of these farmers who suddenly like you know can't afford to keep their

farms anymore were forced into sort of like labor and a bunch of shitty sweatshops that were set up from nafta so this worked great from the perspective of american capital but again if you look at what actually happened here right all of the sort of like rhetoric of free trade, you know, like sort of like fades into mist in face of the reality of one of the great industrial policy programs in the history of world economies, which is the American subsidization of its own fucking agriculture. industrial policy or like industrial like government planning or whatever like largely because people have this weird bias when they talk about government planning that it only is supposed to apply to like oh government planning means when someone like plans steel output or some shit but like no like the actual large-scale economic plan that goes on the u.s is the unfathomable billions of billions of billions of billions of dollars will be poured into the agricultural industry every year so you know if if you look at the stuff that everyone's claiming are these sort of new innovations that are like the end of neoliberalism right it's like

oh my god other countries are are putting up like protectionist subsidy things like they're having their you know people are like trying to make microchips and they're having like state sponsored programs to do microchips. It's like, well, they're just doing with microchips what the US has been doing with cord this entire time, right? that Western countries get to impose tariffs and have manufacturing subsidies and non-Western countries don't. And I think part of what's wearing people out is that China has actually been kind of attempting to break the West's monopoly on being able to do industrial policy.

And this has caused a bunch of people to really severely overestimate the extent to which this is an actual break from previous regimes of trade and capital now another point that i want to make that i i've talked about this before on the show but i want to kind of briefly touch on it again because i think it's really important and it's really badly understood is that for all of the sort of discourse about how like ah china's like entering into economic competition with the west and and it's increasingly using the party to pursue nationalist aims instead of following the market.

If you look at what's actually going on in China, despite all the hype about China and the US are decoupling their economies, or China is trying to make its own domestic silicon industry, the actual tendency in Chinese economic policy is towards further integration and increasing foreign ownership. China has a lot of provisions about foreign companies needing to be in partnership with Chinese companies in order to operate in China. There's always been massive restrictions on how much stock a foreign company can own in Chinese companies. And these restrictions in sector after sector after sector after sector

are being lifted and so you have to sort of look at this you know the sort of like surface level nationalist narratives about like ah we're entering an era of like warring like like warring mutually exclusive economic trading spheres with the reality of China being like, no, please foreign capital. Like you can operate here without us. It's going to be great just to keep, keep,

keep pumping more capital. And if we, if we all, if we all work together, all of the sort of bushels, he will keep making money together. And I think all of this leads to something. The last thing I want to touch on,

which is what's actually happening here. And the thing that's actually happening here. And the the thing that's actually causing all of these sort of like all like the the sort of focus on trade itself and the sort of trumpian nationalists we can solve all your problems by trade competition. What's happening is that after about the 1960s, because of sort of structural manufacturing over capacity and under consumption, production, you know, industrial production is zero sum, right? You can't increase production rates in a country without that, you know, without that production coming at the cost of another country and this is this is because and wow stop me if you've heard this one before this is because of fucking capitalism and what trump is trying to do and what you know to a lesser extent sort of xi jinping and what to you know this these sort of chinese nationalists are trying to do is turn

you know they're trying to stand on a beach and order the tide to recede in order to stop the coming class war. They are trying to say, no, we can go back to the era where production wasn't zero-sum, we can do this with sort of tariffs, we can go back to the golden age of both corporations

and unions making more, corporations and workers making money together, and this sort of national collaborationist project. and they're doing this in large part because they are watching the same thing that you and i are watching the same thing that's the reason this episode is being recorded at fucking three in the morning instead of a normal time which is that all across the u.s and you know increasingly all across the, you can fucking see the working class starting to organize again. You can see it starting to wake up.

You can see it starting to mobilize. And this whole fucking thing, all of Trump, this entire sort of racist, xenophobic nationalist project is just utter dread that Ferguson andon and the black revolution put into the fucking hearts of these people and if we fight hard enough we fight smart enough and we fight organized enough inshallah we will see the fucking day when these people's nightmare comes true and we never have to hear another word from these fuckers again says bin 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead,

now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.

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