It Could Happen Here - Why Trump Wants to Conquer Canada

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Mia and James discuss Trump's imperialist drive to take Canada, the Panama Canal, Gaza and Greenland and how it differs from previous versions of free trade American imperialism. Sources: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sg0782h https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-direct-action https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/politics/trump-expansion-ideas-what-matters/index.html https://www.businesstoday.in/world/canada/story/make-them-pay-canada-puts-trumps-first-friend-elon-musks-tesla-in-the-crosshairs-of-tariff-war-463097-2025-02-01 https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.9669319 https://www.economia.gob.mx/datamexico/en/profile/product/motor-cars-and-other-vehicles-principally-designed-cars-for-transport-of-persons?redirect=true https://www.economia.gob.mx/datamexico/en/profile/product/oils-of-petroleum-or-bituminous-minerals?redirect=true https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/mex/partner/usa https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/01/michigan-poised-to-take-a-big-hit-under-trump-tariffs/78099053007/ https://www.ilscompany.com/products-imported-from-mexico/ https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/mexico-automotive-industry https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/31/trumps-25percent-tariffs-this-is-whats-at-stake-for-us-auto-industry.html https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/mexico https://www.businesstoday.in/world/canada/story/make-them-pay-canada-puts-trumps-first-friend-elon-musks-tesla-in-the-crosshairs-of-tariff-war-463097-2025-02-01 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/why-buy-greenland-trump-annex-ronald-lauder-manifest-destiny/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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With me is James Stout. Hi, Mia. Glad to hear about whatever's going to shoot today. Yeah. So before we start talking about imperialism, we're starting every f***ing episode with this until you people stop, until you stop doing this. It is the year 2025. We are a quarter of a century into this millennia. And people are still getting kettled by cops on bridges. They did this in Occupy in 2011.

They did it in 2018 during the Occupy ICE protests. People did it in 2020. People did it last year during the Palestine and Kamath. People are doing it again again this year simply do not lead a march onto a bridge yep or a tunnel for DIY reasons we would also include a tunnel yes don't do the tunnel either yeah if there's no side exits just don't yes here's the thing the moment you walk onto a bridge all the cops have to do is take both exits and everyone on the bridge gets arrested you can simply not do this if you must do it you need to like make 1000% sure you can hold both sides of the bridge gets arrested. You can simply not do this. If you must do it, you need to like make 1000% sure you can hold both sides of the bridge. Yeah.

Both of them. You need to hold both of them. Yeah. And almost certainly you can't. So only you, only you, dear listener, can prevent 4,000 more people from getting kettled on fucking bridges. And I am going to keep starting episodes talking about getting Don't get kettled on bridges until this stops This has been Mia's public service announcement of a bridge kettling. Let's get into the nature of imperialism and why Trump's is different

so we've been covering a lot of Trump's sort of I don't know who the trade wars his call for the US to seize the Gaza Strip, a whole bunch of stories about the way that Trump is using the power of the American state to do imperialism. And I think it's worth actually taking a second to unpack this because things are probably going to get worse. There is a non-zero chance that we effectively start a war with Mexico in the next few months. Yeah, it's great. It's banging. Everything's going as well. Yeah, but I want to start with talking about the way that Trump has been using tariffs

as a sort of political weapon and not as an economic tool, but very, very specifically as a political weapon and how this differs from the previous economic regime, because I think there's been a lot of you know as As the terrorists threat of tariffs go up in the markets sort of tank in fear of them There's been a lot of sort of defense of like free trade in ways where I don't think people actually understand What's happening and to understand how what Trump is doing is different from the stuff What's come before we need to actually understand what trade is? how what Trump is doing is different from the stuff that's come before. We need to actually understand what trade is.

Now, when an economist talks about trade, they go, oh, yeah, obviously, trade is when two countries exchange a thing. Right. Yeah. But that's not actually what most of the stuff on Earth that is labeled as global trade. That's not what it is. Right. Look at like U.S. Mexico trade. We're going to go a bit more into detail about what that stuff is. But do you know what most? Not most, but you know what a huge portion of US Mexico trade is? It is the same company, the same company moving an auto part from one side of the border to the other side.

Yes, back and forth across the border. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Yes, back and forth, right? So it's a lot of different people being paid different wages to make the same thing. Right, so it's a lot different people being paid different wages. They can make the same thing Yeah, or someone paid lower wages can make it and then someone paid more can QC it and then they can send it back Yep. Yep. Yep. Very very common Yeah and this is actually a real substantive problem with the way that think everyone thinks about trade because What is happening here and this is an argument that the anti globalization movement used to make you know David Graber like makes this argument a lot.

And they're right, which is that most things that we think of as quote unquote global trade are just a single corporation moving a resource around the world so that they can produce something. Yep, and exploit labor at the maximum possible exploitation rate. Yeah. You know, and this means that using nation states as a way to understand trade is an absolutely terrible way to think about the global economy, right? There are some things we're thinking about specifically nation state trade, like trade is important because, you know, even the same corporation moving goods around, right, that does contribute to how much foreign currency a country has, right?

And so, okay, there's things like balance of payments where if you run out if you're a country you run out of American dollars Suddenly you can't import like fuel anymore in your country like explodes That's a very common way that like this like happens in Sri Lanka. For example, pretty recently This is a way here for your economy to blow up But that's kind of an edge case in terms of how global trade actually operates But the problem is that it is to the advantage of the ruling class for you and everyone else to think about trade as something that's like a war between you and the country next to you instead of a corporation

like fucking over everyone involved in this entire thing. Now, there's a pretty interesting book that I read recently called Border Economies, Cities Bridging the US Mexico Divide by James Greber. Greber makes Greber, makes Gerber. Okay. And one of the things he points out is that the two largest trade relations between any country any two countries on earth are the US and Mexico and the US and Canada. And those are the countries with the highest tariffs that Trump is attempting to apply.

Yeah. And it's worth actually understanding what this does by looking at what actually is traded between, for example, the US and Mexico. And the place I want to start is that one of the largest kinds of goods that is moved from from Mexico to the US is computer equipment. And nobody fucking talks about this ever. No one like zero fucking people talk about this. I am convinced this is because of racism. But Mexico is a huge sort of like assembly place for a whole bunch of things like monitors, screens, like computer equipment in general. And a lot of that stuff comes into the US. And there's also, you know, the thing that we started this episode on that's I think the thing that gets talked about the most now is transportation equipment, right? And this is a combination of consumer vehicles and also like heavy-duty cargo trucks Yeah, which are Unbelievably important for the maintenance of of the American economy, right of the entire global economies

I get it having these trucks is easy if sort of vital Infrastructure thing for the United States you can move stuff around Yeah a lot of that comes in Mexico and then also like a like, a lot of it is, like, whole cars that are, like, finished assembly, like, in Mexico, and they get shipped across the border, right? And there's a lot of things there. And these are also, like, all the same international car

companies that work in the US. So it's like Toyota, it's like Honda. Yeah. I mean, these are your American trucks often, right? Or like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ford does this too. Yeah. What's GM now? like yeah. Yeah. Yeah Ford does this too. Yeah, what's GM now Stellaris?

Yeah, yeah, like Chevy GM like these as well as like Toyota Toyota I think has a big plan I forget exactly where but along the border somewhere if I recall correctly Yeah, this is extremely common. Yeah, and what this is right? Like this is multinational capitalist companies who are moving their products across the border. And this gets counted as Mexico doing trade. You know, one of the things in one of the questions in this book is about why Mexico's economy never had the kind of economic bump that China did from from the amount of industrial production. If you look at like the East Asian Tigers. Right. Right.

of industrial production, if you look at like the East Asian tigers, right? Right. And I think part of that is actually something that is not mentioned in the book, which is if you look at the East Asian economies that developed their economies, like say your South Korea is a country like a lot of those countries like Japan, there was a lot of US military investment there in a way that's just not true of Mexico. Like Mexico is not like a place where you offshore your supplying your supplies to because you need to move stuff to you know fight the war in Vietnam

But you know one of the other reasons is that yeah, okay? So like where is all the profit from the international trade going? It's like well It's going to a bunch of American and Japanese car companies Yeah, because it's those those multinationals are the people who actually reap all of the benefits Yeah to a degree like post NAFTA, right post 94, it has created a class of people in Mexico who have benefited from it. But it has, it has not lifted up like, like the average income, right? It's created a greater disparity of income than at any point.

Yeah, yeah. Previous to that. You'll hear people talk, I was talking to a friend about this yesterday in Tijuana, like how like, what NAFTA did, like if you look at 1994, I was talking to a friend about this yesterday in Tijuana, like how, like, what NAFTA did, like, if you look at 1994, I think it's a really good example of what you're talking about, of like, yeah, we opened up that border to international companies to do tariff free back and forth, right, but we didn't open it up to people. At the same time, we had Operation Gatekeeper, right, like enforced, much harsher border enforcement.

And the two things in parallel really kind of indicate Yeah, what the free trade is going for. Yeah, yeah. And you know, and this is another old anti globalization thing. Like we talked about this is like, yeah, free, like free trade is about the free movement of capital, and the unfree movement of people. Right? Yeah. So it's about locking people down in place. So you can like you can you can dictate wages to them and then moving capital around the world to avoid them. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to get into this more in a second. But I want to talk about some you know, some of the other things that are that are exported from Mexico, fruits,

vegetables, alcohol, or like huge exports. Yeah. And then also, and this is something that I don't think is people don't understand what's happening very well is there's a lot of oil from Mexico that's shipped to the US but the thing that's happening there and this is the thing that's very weird about the oil industry is that the refinery facilities are not in the same country as the extraction facilities a lot of the time so this oil is getting shipped around because they don't have the refinery

Facilities for like yeah refine the specific kind of like crude oil or whatever that they're extracting So like yeah, it's again one of these situations where it's not really like Mexico is sending its oil to the US It's like I mean kind of right. That's like one of the more direct ish Ones but largely what's happening is that like, again, like it's an oil company moving stuff to, to, you know, moving stuff around to do refinement of it so they can sell it. Now there's been some other stuff happening with Mexico. That's a kind of reaction to Trump's previous thing. And I think the extent of this has been overblown to some extent, but a lot of very low end manufacturing stuff has been leaving China for a long time.

This is one of my media things on the show is that this has been happening for a while because labor prices have been rising in China. And one of the places that these things went to is Mexico. So there's been a lot of like direct investment from China, etc, etc. And all of these things, you know, like these these these kind of movements, I'm talking about them because these kind of like seismic global economic shifts, right, of the kind that we're going to see are driven by a lot of things, you know, I mean, stuff like the currency valuations, like local tax laws, like state corporate

planning policies, like demands are just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But one of the single most important things is the state of class struggle in a country. And what what effect that has on wages or like, you know, like straight up uprisings, right? The geographer David Harvey, he gets credit for popularizing the term the spatial fix, though other people were already using it and I don't like his work much, but he did, he is the guy who gets credited with this. He describes, you know, the sort of free trade regime that persisted roughly through like, I mean, it was taking shape in sort of the 80s,

like the 80s through like roughly now, as the spatial fix for declining profitability, right? You know, what else has declining profitability? Well, I don't know. The worse things get, the more people listen to our podcast. I don't know if you could say that. How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious, 1 in 10 kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure like yourself. Not the seriously know-it-all sports dad, or the seriously smart podcaster.

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Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself, there's a guide for that too. The ability to approach somebody and make them experience desire for you in minutes or even hours is a rare and rather unnecessary skill, historically speaking. The Happiest Labs how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why would you do that to me when I thought we were friends? We are friends.

Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. Bloom generally targeted people with money.

And I was not alone. He took over 100 people for over $15 million. One of the victims was his own grandmother. I was married to David for almost 10 years. It was insane. I was barely functioning. And I just had this realization that he will not stop until he kills me. Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy.

I'm Caroline D'amore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con, starting February 12th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Goes lower. I met Santi at a luau party in October.

I'm Santi. Damien. Oh, it was bizarre. The guy just disappeared one day. Santi has been missing ever since. The Hook Up. What is that? I'm solving a mystery through sex and haven't made a private dick joke until now? Like, no matter how hard I try, all roads lead to...

The Hook Up. You think it's causing people to turn aggro? I'm gonna rip your arms off and use them to- Yeah, that's a word for it. causing people to turn aggro? I'm gonna rip your arms off and use them to- Yeah, that's a word for it. This is such terrible representation, I'm so sorry. Poppers? These aren't just any poppers. Mama always used to say,

God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. No, my psychiatrist didn't laugh at that one either. Listen to The Hookup Up starting February 14th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We are back. Okay, so let's talk about this, this sort of declining profitability and the fix that capitalism sort of finds for this, right? You know through the 70s. There's sort of spiraling

unemployment and inflation and the economy is sort of going to shit and it's happening everywhere because it's sort of like structural over capacity and manufacturing and the solution to this is a spatial fix right which is destroying some manufacturing capacity and just moving it to other places Yeah And you know and this is this is sort of what James was talking about earlier, right? The goal is to sort of weaken the power of the working class by locking people down into their countries and then moving capital to poorer countries, the weaker labor protections and also a weaker level of sort of like workers organization, right? Yeah.

And then it leaves like the previously well organized workers, like, if you look at the industries and the places where my grandparents come from, dock workers and miners, those are not really jobs that are employing large numbers of people in the UK anymore. And as a result, those working class towns are just destitute. Previously thriving, a well-organized working class that we had in Northern England, is left kind of like it has to relocate or reorganize, right? And it destroys those like nexuses of working class power that existed in Britain up until the 80s with a minor strike, right? Yeah. And this was done deliberately, right? I mean, there's always a debate in the literature about to what extent like neoliberalism was like planned or to what extent it was, you know, a sort of reaction to a bunch of crises, but specifically this

kind of like offshoring and the container ships a big part of this, but like this specific kind of thing. And even the transition from coal to oil was like, was a very deliberate thing done by like done, done by sort of American and British politicians in, in order to sort of break the power like miners unions and You know one of the major places that this went obviously like a lot of these things go to Mexico The sort of first round of these go to like the original like Asian tiger economies I was talking about but I mean places like it like Indonesia to with a lot of those companies sort of Thailand those economies kind of blew up in the 90s

yeah, but you know one of the largest, most important ones was China. And, you know, it's important to sort of remember, I've talked about this on the show before a lot of this is also the product of Tiananmen Square, because I think it's important to remember about Tiananmen is that contra both sort of liberal histories of Tiananmen and also the sort of CCP line, most of the people who died at Tiananmen were workers, right? Most of the people who were executed afterwards were workers. They were like students died,

but it was mostly workers who were killed. And a lot of what happened there was that, you know, Tiananmen was like the last time that China's like trade union federation, which is like now such a joke that it's like, it's genuinely a subject of academic debate and discussion as to whether you can even literally consider it a trade union. Like that's, that's how fucked it is. And the last time that that

Chinese trade unions took a political stand was in favor of the Tiananmen protests. And then the army shows up and just like, like slaughters their base. Yeah. And what this does is it breaks the old Chinese working class, right? It breaks the alliance with the students that they'd had. That was, you know, and that was a durable political force dating back to like the 1920s. Right. And it breaks this extremely militant, well-organized Chinese urban working class

and replaces them with a more exploitable and less organized like migrant working class. And that is the class that like to this day right now is like the engine of global capital are like those like 300 million migrant workers. Yeah. And they can be in different parts of the world, right? Like the 300 million number that's just the migrant workers in China. Jesus. To be clear, there are a lot more internationally.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. internationally. Yeah, but yeah, China's market working population is like almost the size of the US It's like it's like the fourth largest country in the world just by like itself. It's Yeah, that's mad. Yeah, I was just thinking of today like the Scam compounds which exists on the border between Myanmar and Thailand like they actually Thailand just cut cut power off to them today I mean I can see that the strategy there

But it's just gonna end up hurting the people who are in those compounds more, of course it is. Of course, those people who are in those compounds used to be able to escape and go to places where they could like get back to their lives, right? Like be re taken care of and of course, those were funded by USA, so they don't exist as of this week, which is pretty brutal.

But like, these people, right? These migrant workers who come from all over the world, hoping for a chance at the things that capitalism had promised them are the people who have to be exploited so that people in wealthy countries can have their treats. Yeah, and those workers are the basis of modern global capitalism, right? Like, you know, like those Chinese workers, for example,

like it is illegal for them to form an independent unit If you try to form an independent union, you will go to prison so fast that like the dust clouds like Like Wiley coyote will take you to prison Yeah like even trying to get your union to like do something like trying to have your own independent people elected to you to that union like Canon will get you arrested and like and even like So Chinese labor oppression like is pretty intense, but it's like, you know, we're also talking about countries like Colombia It's like well, yeah, okay. So what happens union organizers in Colombia?

It's like they get being shot by paramilitary machine guns Yeah, right and that's that's that's what the sort of spatial fix was right was moving jobs to places where? The the ruling classes sort of control was more firm and their ability to use violence was higher. Yeah. And so this is what the American imperial system sort of had been, right? It's based on American capital flowing around the world. And this is also like international capital too, right?

Like we've literally been talking about like Japanese corporations, right? Doing like the same shit, right? But you know, it's like international capital flowing around the world extracting resources and labor from other countries and accumulating it in American corporations Like that that's what free trade is. Yeah, and it's also you know, secondarily, right? It is a debt system It's based on forcing countries to like payback loans that were taken out by dictators go go read Drabber's debt last 5,000 years. Yeah, that's very good But yeah, it's it's it's based on like turning entire countries into just debt servicing engines We're like all of the wealth that is produced by the entire nation is just going to like pay debts to Bank of America

Yeah, and you know the thing about this is that this is actually a very, very efficient model of empire. It's one of the most sophisticated imperial systems that the world has ever seen, right? It works extremely well. It makes the U.S. an unbelievable amount of money. It protects global capitalism. And the people currently running it don't want it to work like that. Now, do you know who else doesn't want the current system to work like it does because they can make more money? I can guess. It's the products and services.

I'm excited to hear which one we get. You know, it could be anything at this point. Who knows? How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious, 1 in 10 kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure like yourself. Not the seriously know-it-all sports dad, or the seriously smart podcaster. It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you.

No, seriously, the best person to talk to your child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit TalkAboutVaping.org, brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council. I'm Dr. Lari Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy to digest, actionable tips. It's about never feeling good enough. I feel like I'm always failing.

You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose. We make it this big pie-in-the-sky thing, and then of course we're all frustrated because no one knows how to get there. Struggling with tough emotions, we have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself?

There's a guide for that too. The ability to approach somebody and make them experience desire for you in minutes or even hours is a rare and rather unnecessary skill, historically speaking. The Happiest Labs how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why would you do that to me when I thought we were friends? We are friends.

Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Blum was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. Blum generally targeted people with money. And I was not alone.

He took over a hundred people for over $15 million. One of the victims was his own grandmother. I was married to David for almost 10 years. It was insane. I was barely functioning. And I just had this realization that he will not stop until he kills me. Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy.

I'm Caroline D'amore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con, starting February 12th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Goes lower? I met Santi at a luau party in October.

I'm Santi. Damien. Oh, it was bizarre. The guy just disappeared one day. Santi has been missing ever since. The hookup. What is that? I'm solving a mystery through sex and haven't made a private dick joke? The guy just disappeared one day. Santi has been missing ever since. The Hook Up. What is that? I'm solving a mystery through sex

and haven't made a private dick joke until now? Like, no matter how hard I try, all roads lead to... The Hook Up. You think it's causing people to turn aggro? I'm gonna rip your arms off and use them to... Yeah, that's a word for it. This is such terrible representation, I'm so sorry. Poppers?

These aren't just any poppers. Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. No, my psychiatrist didn't laugh at that one either. Listen to The Hookup, starting February 14th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We are back. So we've entered, I guess what you could call the phase of Vaskov imperialism. US imperialism usually at least sort of like wore a human face and it did it for good

reason, right? You know, Ronald Reagan did not give a single shit about democracy and human rights, right? Like, you know, and this has been true of the US for like ages and ages and ages, right? You know, like they prop up right wing military dictatorship constantly. But the thing is democracy and human rights are things that people like. And so, it's a weapon that he and his sort of brand of conservatives, like anti-communist conservatives, wielded against communism. And it was a very, very powerful ideological weapon, because if your choice ceases to be between communism and capitalism, and your choice is now between, do you want to live with a dictatorship, Do you want to live with a democracy? Like that's a very different question.

And it's a very, very important question for sort of how, how the Cold War was won and how international power is wielded, right? Because there's, there's always been an illusion that there's an international community and that countries are like working together. And this is a very, very powerful ideological thing. You know thing you know I mean this is something like you lived through this probably listeners who didn't live through this now dear God but like like the Iraq war right the US didn't unilaterally invade Iraq now it was called the quote-unquote coalition of the wielding and included like like they they dragged Australia in the war by threatening to like destroy their like milk shipping contracts with the Iraqi government.

Like so, you know. Yeah, you had all kinds of people running around in Iraq for a while there. Like, obviously the United Kingdom played a big role in it, like an outsized role, given being a relatively small country. Yeah. And, you know, and this is the way that you do, you know, even just overtly straight up imperialist stuff like invading Iraq, right? We're still done under the auspices of like multinational like coalitions. Yep.

And the thing about different about Trump is Trump doesn't give a fuck about any of that, right? Absolutely not. He has turned on Rob Ford, a man who is like, who boldly answers the question, What if Trump smoke crack? Like that is Rob Ford. who boldly answers the question, what if Trump's smoke crack? That is Rob Ford. He's turning on his allies, right-wingers who should be his allies in Canada, who are exactly the kind of people who you would expect to do right-wing multilateral interventions in countries, right?

Yeah. And he has caused, with his threat to put tariffs on, he's causing people to become anti-American. And this is the same thing with Mexico, right? Even the sort of like the nominally center-left governments in Mexico have cooperated with American imperialism, but Trump doesn't want to fucking do that anymore. He wants to run everything just very purely and very openly as an American empire.

Yeah, like America's always bullied Mexico, right? When we talk about the deployment of troops to the border, Biden absolutely bullied AMLO into bringing those troops to the border because they came before Donald Trump even came into office, but now Donald Trump is just doing it on true social. Like it's kind of different. Or Panama, fuck, like, you know, I was in Panama September of 24 and I went to the Canal Museum and Panama, like, is very proud of its history of independence, right?

It's relatively short. Yeah, and and harder and paid for in blood but like yeah, I traveled I'm a US citizen. I traveled, you know gave me any shit. It was fine It's everyone's very nice to me now that burning American flags in Panama City Yeah, yeah, cuz Trump is trying to take the Panama Canal back and before we get into like, you know I mean, I guess we can get into here some of the stuff that he's doing, right? He's pulled out of the International Criminal Court and is putting sanctions on it. He has been trying to use the sanctions that he's been threatening to apply to Canada to

get Canada to join the US. Like he's trying to conquer Canada. Right? Yeah, he's been trying to he's been trying to force the government of Denmark to buy Greenland. Sell Greenland, right? Like he wants to purchase Greenland from them. Yeah, he wants to buy Greenland. Yeah. There was there was the whole sort of showdown with Colombia over Colombia's like

being pissed off about the treatment of deportees to Colombia and he used sanctions there. There is again him saying the US is going to take over Gaza. And this is a very very substantively different thing than the kind of American empire that we've had before, right? Yeah. The last time the US tried to take Canada was 1812, right? It's been like 200 years. This is how Britain returns to the world stage. Right. And the thing is, the last time the US tried to take Canada, they burned the Capitol down. So like, you know, but like like this is something that even under like, like people like Bush, right, who is like

that Bush is like a very, very overt American imperialist, right? Yeah. Bush would never try to invade Canada. Like, yeah, no, what? Absolutely not. Yeah, that's that's completely unhinged, right? And this is just a very, very different kind of imperialism than what's existed before. And I wanted to go into, I think, why this is the case. Yeah. And I think the reason why this is the case. OK, so the reason that there's been such a defensive free trade is like people being like, oh, my God, if he puts tariffs in place, it'll raise prices. And like, yeah, that's true. Right.

It'll crash the global economy because the global economy has been turned into a very, very efficient engine of extracting profit from countries and putting them in the hands of corporations, right? It's working exactly how Trump wants it to work. Now, if the US wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that is technically possible, right? Reagan was able to do this. But what Reagan did instead of doing tariffs is that well, I mean, kind of, but like the main thing that he did was this thing called the Plaza Accords. And the Plaza Accords was this this thing he did in the 80s, where he forced Japan. Japan was the important one, but like Japan, West Germany,

I think there are a couple of other countries that he forced them to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar. Because like if you have a currency and it's worth a bunch of like another person's currency. So like, you know, you have like the dollar, it's worth like a million like yen or whatever the fuck. Right. dollar and it's worth like a million, like yen or whatever the fuck. Right. The currency that's worth less has a more

has a more competitive manufacturing economy. And Reagan was able to like restart the American manufacturing economy for a while by doing this. But the problem is that it blew up the entire world economy. And so to save the world economy, Clinton rolled back the accords and it, you know, and that was the thing that actually finally

sort of like eviscerated American manufacturing and the exchange here Was you know that all the stuff that I've been I've been talking about for the last like few minutes So there's a very very good Essay written right after 2008 called what's good for Goldman Sachs is good for America by the economist Robert Brenner and What the strategy became and this is strategy that was originally pioneered by Japan that we took, was instead of having like a manufacturing economy, like an actual production based economy, you have an economy based on the

value of assets, right? So assets are things that you own, right? This is stocks, bonds, like real estate, which is important for our purposes. And the goal is to make the value of those things go up, right? And so what you do is you speculate on you take out loans you speculate on on the prices of stocks going up the prices of How is this going up right and you know, you make it very easy to borrow money Yeah Now obviously this produced a series of like staggering economic collapses including like the dot-com collapse 2008

Was yeah, you know remember that one But the thing is in the wake of the financial collapse, the U S mostly figured out how to sort of stabilize the system. But the thing is, you know, they were sort of able to stabilize the system economically, right? What they couldn't stabilize was the political sector, where if you look at the two people who are currently running the United States, it is Elon Musk, who is the human personification of the stock price goes up bubble economy, right? And the other one is Donald Trump, who is the human manifestation of the real estate class, right? Who's, who's wealth like enormously. And the thing is, right, because Elon Musk is like a tech bubble go up guy, right? Those people don't think like the people who built like American financial capitalists, right? Like just like the people who designed the Traces, they don't think the same way Trump does.

Trump is a fucking real estate guy, right? And this is how he sees the world, right? He thinks in terms of land and borders and territorial control, and he thinks in terms of like, what physical thing can I steal from someone in order to make money, right? And this is why you're trying to steal the Panama Canal. And he thinks this way instead of things that are more abstract,

like debt servicing and the sort of lines of power in the coalition building. Right. He looks at a map of Greenland and goes, this looks really big, I want it. And so now he's going to try to use the American empire to just seize this. Yeah, he sees things in terms of like raw power. It's a very undeveloped notion of like power, right? Like I was thinking the other day, like whoever is in the same room as Joseph Nye must be having a fucking field day right now, right?

The guy who he was there, he wrote books about soft power, right? The idea of the U S power to persuade rather than power to kind of, rather than like hard power, which comes in tanks or tariffs, I guess. Joseph Nye is no longer relevant. Yes, yes. No, we're back in pure hard power. And something I think is very alarming that I want to close on is the extent to which, like the US media is just sort of just wants to do propaganda for it. Yeah. I'm going to read a quote from a CNN article. Again, this is CNN quote.

The subject heading is the US has been expanding for its entire history. This is an article. Oh, the title of which is Trump is Trump wants to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere. So for fuck's sake, like 2025 Monroe doctrine posting and CNN. Literally, literally, literally. Okay, okay, you are so far ahead of this thing, because the next, I'm gonna read the one I was going to read first. Uplift civilizing Christianized, what's the next paragraph?

The next section heading is, and I quote, what is Trump's doctrine and explains the Monroe Doctrine? For fuck's sake, this is, I cannot explain how like, I have taught this as a thing in history classes for more than a decade, from the perspective of like, that was fucked up and shameful. And even the conservative students are like, yeah, hard agree.

Look at these racist as fuck cartoons about Filipino people that we're using here to justify this. And now we are back. Like it is, and like, yeah, CNN is just out there people that we're using here to justify this. And now we are back. And like, yeah, CNN is just out there, like, fucking cranking the manufacturing consent machine. That's not even the worst part about it.

Like, I'm going to read this section. So one of the other section headings is, the US has been expanding for its entire history. Sick. Quote, expansion is built into the American DNA since retired Ambassador Gordon Gray, now a professor of practice at George Washington University and former Foreign Service career officer. Yeah, like an angel sweeping across the plains, fucking manifest destiny. Yeah, yeah.

It's, you know, and this is all sort of coming into like the way that Trump thinks about which Trump thinks about the US like an 18th century land empire, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 18th century land empires, you know, got money by conquering people and extracting tribute from them directly. And then also, you know, they were mercantilist empires, right? So they got a bunch of their money.

And this is something that Trump explicitly talks about. He thinks he can raise revenue from, like, tariffs. Which, like, no, he can't. But what he can do is use the threat of tariffs to force countries to do whatever the fuck he wants. And this is the kind of imperialism that we're in now. It is a definite, substantive break from what we've seen in the US for a century. More than a century.

Yeah. And I think it's important for people to understand exactly how this functions. Yeah. And, yeah. It's sick. We're going into the European wars. It's gonna be so fun. Uh, yeah. Can't wait. It's great. This is the spinnaker dappin here. Do not get kettled on bridges and go out into the world and make trouble. If people want to read more about the early globalization, the previous year of neoliberal globalization, like Naomi Klein has some good stuff.

I think Joe Stiglitz does as well. We can... Yeah, yeah, I would also recommend David Graeber's Direct Action and Ethnography, which is him writing about the original like anti-ultra globalization protests and his time in them. So if you need direct action ideas, they did some fun stuff. Dressing guys up like marshmallows so police batons would bounce off of them. Great thing. Bring back Clown Block. That'll get us through it. Yeah.

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