Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Week That Changed the World with DW Gibson

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

This week, Anthony talks with award-winning author DW Gibson about his new book, One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. With the 25th anniversary approaching, DW discusses the angst that marked the end of the millennium, why the lessons learnt are even more applicable in today's society, and reveals the many missing pieces the media left out... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is OpenBee. book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do

better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. It's late 1999 and more than 50,000 people have converged on Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization's conference. I was 35 years old at the time, which seems like a lifetime ago, but I remember it well. 25 years on, and we're still seeing many of the changes brought about by that week in our current systems. My guest today, D.W. Gibson's new book, finally tells the whole story. I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Astroy's great podcast in the back room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests.

I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout out. So joining us now on Open Book is D.W. Gibson. It's an award-winning author. You've got a couple other books I want to talk about. But the book I want to talk about today is one week to change the world. And this is an oral history of the 1999 WTO protests. Before you get into this, before we get into your background, you're a young man, but I'm going to throw this at you. Have you ever heard of Studs Terkel? Oh, yes. I know Studs Terkel very well. Yeah, his work very well. Yeah. Okay, so who is Studs Terkel, D.W. Gibson? Oh, man, Studs Terkel was a really important writer and oral historian for much of the 20th century sort of focused on chronicling the daily experiences of Americans, what their lives look like when they wake up in the morning and how they go about their day. And he wrote a great book about the Second World War of which is a oral history. And so when I read this book, I was like, wow, you are the Studs Terkel of your generation because, This happened 31 short years ago. I remember like it was yesterday, and I want to talk to you about it because I want to tell you where Wall Street was at that moment.

Wall Street was shrugging this off, and Wall Street was thinking that these protests were a bunch of nonsense, but it turns out that in some ways the protesters were right. So let's get started. Great to have you on. Give me a little bit about your background and why you decided to write this book. Yeah, well, I mean, Stutz Terkel is a great place to start. I'm a huge admirer. his work and I've always wanted to focus the work I do on sort of the daily grind of the average

human being, right? How they sort of meet the world as they go about their day. So I write a lot about work people do about housing issues people face and the sort of the big ideas that we all live under, right? So I've written about gentrification and unemployment and these sort of things that hang out there as stats and I try to just breathe some life into them, give them some names and give them some blood flow and bring them to life. So, I mean, the protests happened in 1999, 25 years ago. Okay, so I was sitting around 35 years old on Wall Street, at my own firm, and the Wall Street people were saying that the protests were ridiculous

and that it was important to let China into the WTO. We had already gone through the fight with NAFTA. We had Ross Perra fighting Al Gore, and we ended up signing the North American Free Trade Agreement, we lost 65,000 factories in America since the signing of the North American Trade Agreement. And this, you know, you had 25 years here. In late 1999, more than 50,000 people went to Seattle to shut down, or at least to protest, the World Trade Organization.

Explain the motivations, DW. Yeah, the motivations were sweeping. You had a right-left coalition that is unthinkable today. So let's just start with the fact that you had Ralph Nader there and Pap Buchanan there as well, right, fighting the same cause. People were pushing back on corporate governance, right? The idea that democracies, that governments were shrinking to the control of the corporations were building. And there were so many ways in to caring about that. You could be an environmentalist caring about how the planet was being treated by corporations.

You could be a union guy seeing what happened with NAFTA a few years earlier. You could be an anarchist sort of upset sort of with the idea of globalization. and further sort of coalescing sort of world order. So there were so many different. You could be church groups. One big presence there was the Jubilee Movement, right, addressing third world debt, trying to get some of that relieved. And that was led by a lot of Catholic priests.

So you genuinely had people, Papua Kinn and Ralph Nader, you had priests, anarchists, environmentalists and teamsters marching arm in arm. And it was all about pushing back on corporate control and trying to maintain some sense of democracy on a very local level. City ordinances, state laws, and national laws that could be respected and the WTO is trying to infringe upon. I mean, I want to test some theories on you after reading your book. So they were pushing back because they felt that this corporate control would cause resource allocations outside of the country and it would cripple middle class jobs. It would cripple working class families. And so they wanted to stop that. The corporations

and Wall Street, and I confess my sins here on Open Book, wanted that fluidity of capital. We thought that that was the David Ricardo idea of free trade, that we could lower cost of labor, lower cost of capital, therefore you would lower the cost of goods. It would be beneficial to the society. But it turned out that we can buy cheaper goods in our Walmarts, but we've hollowed out a good part of America. Am I getting this wrong, DW? Tell me what happened.

No, I think that's absolutely right. And this is sort of the tricky balance. We're always looking for this sort of relationship between democracy and capitalism, right? We mistake capitalism for our political system often, I think, and we forget that democracy's job is to somehow hold it in check. And I realize we can have good policies and bad policies. But I think NAFTA and the accumulation of power, at least the accumulation of power that the WTO was pursuing in 1999, shows that capitalism unchecked that system without any guardrails for it to protect workers. to protect families, to protect local governments, is going to go to the moon. It's going to go as far as it can go. It doesn't care about the individual. It cares about all of the efficiencies that you just pointed out. That's what it cares about. So all of this effort was to coales against that sort of worldview, that efficiency is all that matters, that growth is all that matters. We got it wrong. I mean, let's just face it. We got the entire thing wrong. These 50,000 protesters were right. Wages, middle income jobs have gone down. We took economic. aspirational, blue-collar families and turn them into economically despirational,

if we could go back in time, and I know we can't, but if we could go back in time, what should have happened? You know, it's hard to say because it's important to point out that the protests, which were a week long over the course of the WTO meetings, they were successful. And I think, especially in the context we're now where we're seeing so many protests across the country, and we're thinking about historic models for protests and looking at 1968, tell me what protest in the last 50 years besides Seattle in 1999, had a stated goal and achieved that goal. The stated goal was to block 13 intersections so that all the delegates couldn't get into the convention center to hold their meeting and they achieved that goal. And the WTO walked away

at the end of the week without reaching an agreement. So the protests were successful. And I don't know that you can find another model on that scale that achieved that. So I think the protesters sort of got it right. I think there were a lot of world forces that came upon us in the year and a half afterwards. So much energy was coalition. People like John Sweeney, who was really hesitant to sort of engage in civil disobedience with union support, was coming around on that point and planning big IMF protests in the fall of 2001. But then, you know, 9-11 hits. And that's a major factor, I think, in terms of the historic significance and historic roadmap for how we sort of dissect what happened in Seattle. And I think that was something to put a lot of, redirected

a lot of the energy that we saw in Seattle. But I think it's coalescing again now. So I think your question is sort of really suited for today's landscape. How do we build upon the success of Seattle? And I think that a starting point there is looking at what a bigger tent can be, what a bigger coalition can be. Because I think that, you know, we're living in pretty dire times, politically speaking, but sometimes that rock bottom can come in handy because we don't even have a chance to debate policy issues we want to debate right now. We're dealing with fundamental issues around sort of democracy and the health of our country. And I think we can build a big tent around that, especially as it pertains to trade and globalization. Okay. I mean, I think it's an outstanding. I mean, this book is going to be

a huge success for a number of different reasons. It's very easy to read. It also, it grips you by the personalities that are in this book. And there were several things that are going on at the same time. So what are the common misconceptions of what happened? And talk a little bit about the fight clubs and the doomsday scenarios and sorts of things that you wrote about. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, it's an important story historically. But on the other hand, it's just a damn good story. I mean, it's a really riveting story. Again, a week-long protest of people coming from all backgrounds and all kinds of conflicts, even within the organizing.

So you had sort of establishment, D.C. people there trying to organize. and you had a free agent rogue anarchists in small collectives and big collectives. And you have these stakeholders that come from very different organizing traditions working together. So I think that's something that's really important to highlight in terms of what came together. But you had people, I mean, consider this. You had the actress Julie Christie there, right? You had Tom Hayden from 1968 there in Chicago, right? So it was Van Dane Shiva from India.

And I think one great person to highlight is Jose Bouvie. This French farmer was there because, you know, Farmer Coalition was a big part of what came together in Seattle, and Jose Bouvier was a French farmer who was upset about globalization in his small village, and he ran his tractor into a McDonald's. They were trying to build and ran into some trouble with the government there. Snuck 500 kilos of Roquefort cheese into Seattle, past customs, because it was one of the items the WTO wanted to tax,

and handed it out in front of a McDonald's in Seattle. Later it went on to become a member of European Parliament. So you had visionaries like that from all around the world, and I think global alliances that were there. And I think that's sort of part of the drama of the story. And you had so much drama within law enforcement. Sheriff's Office not getting along with police department. I mean, let's remember Seattle is where we see so much that's familiar now. It's where we see the beginning of the militarization of police departments in an American context. It's the first time we see the Internet as a organizing tool, very rudimentary organizing tool, but one that was very important. is the first time we see the people's microphone, call and response, right, that's become so familiar now.

So you have all these things that trace back to Seattle. And again, one of the few protests of its, the only protest of its size and scale the last 50 years to succeed. And somehow we've lost sort of track of it. I think it holds a lot of lessons for us in terms of how we might, again, organize today and respond to the conditions we're living in today. So I want to put you in charge. You are not only the President of the United States and you're not only the trade representative, but you're actually a guru. And you could wave a magic wand over the United States, and you could recalibrate and reset the trading dynamic for the country that leads to higher middle income wages, greater prosperity, and a calming of this wonderful union that we have. So go ahead, DW. What are we doing?

What are we doing? Well, I think, you know, I think we have to look for more of a balance between corporate power, corporate governance, and power to the power. people, power to workers, right? I know this is not a very popular argument in Wall Street circles, but I think that the movement we've seen in terms of organizing and union work across the country is really heartening because we have to have some equanimity when it comes to those conversations around wages and quality of life. I mean, let's face it, when we talk about capitalism running unchecked, that's what's led us to this place where we have so much asymmetry between housing costs and wages. in food costs. That's how we have six companies, a handful of companies controlling all food costs, right? So I think the encouragement of the empowerment of labor organizing, I think, is a big

thing that we can continue to do and support. And I think that both parties can do that. I mean, really, I want to emphasize, you know, there's not a clear roadmap here in terms of good guys and bad guys when it comes to the political parties. The Clinton administration is what really opened the door to so much of this, NAFTA and empowerment of WTO. So we can look at both parties and look at things they've done over the years, look at what Reagan did to sort of of go after the air traffic controllers, right, and sort of further weakened labor. So we can look at all these historic markers in both parties, right? So I think we have reason to be upset with both the parties. And I think that's why it's important for people on a local level, on a city

level, on a state level, to recognize what they have in common in terms of these struggles, in terms of putting food on the table and finding housing. I think that's really important to be able to look at that. I think to do that, what we need to do is be in the same room together. One thing that we over romanticize is the ability to organize over social media. And one of the key organizers in Seattle, who's done organizing for the last 25 years, and he was involved in some of the climate resist coalitions and organizing that put together 2,000 events across the world at one time. He said, you know, Twitter made organizing worse because we stopped getting in the same room together and dealing with each other face to face. We started to look at the internet as, you know,

is the end-all be-all, but it's one tool in the toolbox. We need many, many tools. And so I think that if we're going to get to a place where we improve the conditions we're living under, we have to find a way to organize and get together on a very local level. I'm talking about town halls. I'm talking about union halls. Do you even know where your union halls are? I'm talking about Elks Lodges. I'm talking about seeing each other in the same room. That's the first and most vital step. If we can marry that with the tools of social media, I think we're going to go a long way. I've gotten so many things wrong in my life. I mean, you don't have enough time, but you are cheaper than my therapist, so I'm just

going to regal you. I'm here for you. I'm here for you. I'm just going to regale you on a few things that I've gotten wrong. So I misunderstood that corporate efficiency yields greater wealth for the country. I misunderstood that. And I got that wrong. I mean, it's better earnings, maybe, and maybe its stock price will go up.

But it's not necessarily better health, economic, political health for the country. And there has to be a harmonic between the people and the corporations. You know, Henry Ford once said, you know, he was a despicable guy in many ways, but he was brilliant in social engineering. He was like, we've got to pay these people enough money so that they can afford the car. And also I want to, you know, the car that they themselves are producing, but I also want to put them in situations where they have little single family homes, a good school system.

So they don't descend on money. Dearborn Michigan mansion with teary torches and pitchforks and blow my house up while I'm trying to eat my champagne and caviar. So there's sort of this no police oblige or whatever they call it about the upper class in a society making sure the lower middle class or at least moving in the right direction. So what you described is our ability to do that. So now that you gave us this description, DW, is it possible? And what incremental steps could we take as a society to move us in that direction? Yeah. I mean, so what you just described with Henry Ford, who's doing that now?

Tell me a big corporation that's doing that. We can find smaller companies around the country that are doing really good sort of employee shares and so forth. But those are exceptions, right? I mean, I'm going to do my own over a second. So since I started, I'm Italian. So everybody gets a free meal here. I've served more meals in my companies than McDonald's. also pay 100% of people's health care, and I 100% match their 401ks because I'm worried about

their health. I'm worried about their retirement. We've also spent a lot of money on IVFs here. Despite the Republicans, I believe in IVF, and we've got no less than six babies that have been made through IVF sponsored by our firm. But we're a small company, and it's, frankly, our private company. We do whatever that we want. But these corporations are on missile lot for profits. So, no, I don't know any, but they're making a mistake because I don't want to live in a McMansion in a bob-wired security perimeter why my fellow neighbors are suffering. I think these people are generally making a mistake. Yeah.

And look, what we're looking for is two serious stakeholders at the table between, you know, labor and corporate leadership, right? And let's be honest, there's no reason for corporations to not pursue efficiency, to not pursue profits. That's sort of what they do by design. workers, if they were in control of the universe, they'd take all the profits, right? We want to have for ourselves abundance, right? So that's where democracy has to play a part in terms of making sure that everybody has footing and everyone can legitimately come to the table and make an argument for themselves and reach at least fair agreements like we've seen with auto workers in the last few months. And there was some sort of, you know, democracy involved there with

politicians from both parties to some extent. Certainly Biden going to the picket line, but to to intervene there and say, look, we need to have a serious negotiation. That's the role that democracy can play because every stakeholder in the game of capitalism is going to try to take as much as they can because that's what the game is about. So we need that mitigation. We need that force of sensibility. And that's what democracy can bring to the table. The other thing I would bring to the conversation that you kind of touched on there in terms of what you're providing for employees, you know, proximity matters. And we can we can figure out trade. We don't have to close off to the world. We can figure those things out. But when it comes to ownership, when it comes to management, when it comes to the employees that you're, that are working for you, do corporate leaders know their names? Do they know their families? Do they know anything about their communities? Or are they numbers on a spreadsheet that's looked at two sit states or two countries away, right? So proximity. You know, I always think about DeWitt, Nebraska, where they make vice grip blocking pliers for years. The Peterson family, they patented them there and they made them there for generations. And workers in that factory said, you know, there were a lot of hard times over the years where the Peterson's had to let people go and all of that. But they always knew the people they let go.

They knew their families. They knew the effect they had on it. And when they sold that company to Rubbermaid and Rubbermaid closed down the factory and everyone was laid off, no one came to talk to them. No one knew the consequences. So when we lose proximity, again, this goes back to organizing and protesting. When we lose the ability to get in the same room and know each other face to face, we underestimate how much we lose when we lose that. And so your meals that you're providing for your employees, those are big moments. Those are really big moments because they're humanizing, for the corporate leadership and for the employees. I think it's well said.

I hope I didn't come across like I was tooting my own horn, but I grew up in a family of laborers and my father was in a union. And so even though I'm sitting here in this white collar, currently white collar situation, I think it's important to send a message to people that this is a safe place to work and a good place to work. Talk to me about Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky. And remember, I'm like, you're not old.

You're old enough to remember Alex Keaton? Yes, so yeah, family ties, of course. Okay, all right. So I'm him, except to be like a 60-year-old version of him. You know, I'm like a Ronald Reagan conservative Republican dimwit who missed a lot of the stuff that you're writing about in the book, about where the real cause is. And so I thought the enemies were Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky. It turns out that the enemy was Ralph Nader to the Democrats because Al Gore would have beaten George W. Bush. It had been a different world. But anyway, tell me about these two men. Yeah, Ralph Nader is very important and consequential, right? I mean, the argument is made in the book, and I think it's true that Seattle in 1999 really is what launched Ralph Nader's, let's say, ill-fated 2000 presidential run, consequential presidential run. So there's that connective tissue there. And, you know, Ralph Nader is this somewhat lone voice, isolated voice that's always been pushing back on all these issues we've been talking about. I think that the comment that makes it most clear is someone in the book told me,

you know, look, in China, you can talk about communism. It's this form of government. Everyone talks about it. It's what's there. In the U.S., you can't talk about capitalism. Like, go to a cocktail party and mention capitalism, and just watch everybody slink away from the conversation, right? So we're fearful of having the conversation that you and I are having right now.

And that's a conversation that Ralph Nader's always been trying to introduce to his credit. And I think that that's an important thing to note. And I think the thing that Chomsky brings to the conversation is this, this breakdown between generations, between movements. He talks about, you know, this is someone who's very hardcore left, always a major critic since Vietnam era of the U.S. government and its policies, mainly it's foreign policies, and that extends, of course, to trade. And he makes the point that there's just amnesia, a generation after generation when it comes to building a movement. You know, we'll have a success like Seattle, but then it's completely forgotten because find people

our age and they'll say, yeah, I remember Seattle. What happened there? They something WTO, right? Find someone younger than us. They've never heard of it most like. But, yeah. yet so much is traced back to there in terms of everything I enumerated. And to Chomsky's point, we don't learn those lessons. We don't find ways to build lasting campaigns that can be sustained over generations. And I think that that's something that's really important to note here. And that's a big part of the conversation he introduced. Listen, I mean, you know, it's important for us to have these dialogue. It's important for us to engage because we're talking over each other now. We talk over each other on social media.

that the politicians are talking at each other, not with each other. The book is a guide, I think, on effective activism. Do you think the protests that the students have initiated at the college campuses level or in the public square here, are they an effective form of activism? And if they're not, or they are, what makes something an effective form of activism? I think that's a really great question. So brings two thoughts. One is, I think that the protests we're seeing now, are doing a lot of effective things in terms of civil disobedience, in terms of organizing statements that are released and sort of cogent and getting a lot of people on the same page. But there is a factor of the media. And this happened in Seattle, too, where you had 50,000 people. At one point,

you had about 50 people, 50 people out of 50,000, decided to smash some windows at Starbucks and the Nike store. And at some point during the course of the week, that became the story. The story was entirely about 50 people who decided to smash some windows and break the sort of pact of nonviolence, right? But what the media didn't cover was all of the other 50,000 protesters and their reactions, right? So many protesters banded arms around the Nike stores so they couldn't smash any more windows. The next day, many protesters came back with bags and brooms and dustpans and cleaned up the mess. But that doesn't make for a good story in a newspaper, right? So there's this constant failure of the media to go to the shiniest object, and they've done that with the campus protests.

There have been some bad apples there. There have been some bad actors, but they are not representative of the whole. I walked on the Columbia campus days before that all came to an end. There were some noisy sections, some things happening. There were people sitting in 10 seeding apples and reading books. And we don't capture that. We give a sense of hysteria across the board, and that's misleading. So I think that needs to be pointed out.

That's a structural problem we're still wrestling with. But in terms of the actual protest, I think if you're going to have protest that are going to be effective, there's a few key ingredients. One, they do have to contain civil disabilities. If John Lewis and Martin Luther King and Gandhi taught us in Rosa Parks, if these people didn't teach us anything else, they taught us that civil disobedience is crucial. But it's important that that civil disobedience have two characteristics. One, it has to be nonviolent. It has to be nonviolent.

And two, it has to have tactical objectives beyond media attention. You have to pursue practical outcomes. Again, in Seattle, they want a media attention. Sure, and they organized around getting media attention. But they organized to block 13 intersections. so that delegates couldn't get to the conference center, and that had a practical outcome, a nonviolent practical outcome.

If protests engage civil disobedience that is nonviolent and has tactical objectives that want practical outcomes, they will be successful and meaningful. I think it's very well said. Okay, so we're down to the part of this podcast. I don't know if you ever listen to these podcasts, but we get to the five famous words. So we put together some words.

I want you to react to them. I'm going to say the word, you come up with something. All right. So let's start with globalization. I say the word globalization. You say what? Important and careful.

We have to be careful with it. Can't ignore it, but we have to be careful with it. All right. So you're not an anti-globalist, but you are an inclusive globalist, I would say. Absolutely. Yeah, anti-globalation is about pro-democracy and finding globalization that works for democracy. Right. Yeah, being inclusive.

Okay, I say the word activism. I think you've made the case for activism, but why say the word activism, you think what? I think nonviolence. Again, I think nonviolence, I think clear objectives. I think those are the most important things about activism. Yeah, and community, community comes to mind. Yeah, and, you know, I mean, listen, the activists helped end apartheid in South Africa. The activists caused the pause in Lyndon Johnson from running for re-election in 1968.

The activists helped to end the Vietnam War. There were activists who were pushing an anti-nuclear agenda in the 80s, which I think did help the nuclear arms talks. Absolutely. That was Arab. So the activists. works. You may not see it right in the beginning, but it does work. 1999. I say that we're going to party like it's 1999. What does the four numerals 1999 mean to you? Oh, man, such a, such a, such a fraught time. It was it was all about sort of excitement for new millennia and anxiety, right?

You mentioned Y2K earlier, but that captures it, right? Sort of this crossing over. We didn't know if computers were going to crash and all of that. So this mixture of anxiety and excitement. And, you heck, to some extent, I think that's life. So, protest. I say the word protest, you say what? Yeah. I say vital. I think that's sort of the first word that comes to mind,

because it's the way that people, communities, families, church groups, civic organizations, push back on the systems in which they're made to live. It's a vital form of being alive and being engaged in the world. All right? I'm going to keep going here, all right? WTO, those three letters. Yeah, WTO, World Trade Organization.

More abundant is the first word that comes to mind because it's really sort of faltered over the last decade with both American administrations not being too enthusiastic about it for different reasons. But I think, you know, reinvention is a word that comes to mind. I think it needs to reinvent itself and recalibrate its place in the world. I don't think it necessarily needs to go away. But it needs to understand that it in the end it needs to be subservient to democracy and it's not going to set rules that are going to infringe upon the rights of communities across this country. All right, well, you made a very strong case in this book. I predict that this book is going to catch fire leading into the election, and it's going to cause a lot of debate on both sides. It's one week to change the world, and it's an oral history of the 1999 WTO protests, and it's a beautiful rendition of what happened, and I learned a lot of DW, and I want to say thank you very much for coming on. Are you working on, before I let you go, are you working on anything else? Yeah, I mean, I'm working on just keeping bringing this conversation forward. I think bringing Seattle forward and bringing into the issues we're facing today because, again, the echoes are numerous and striking and deafening. And I think that there are a lot of lessons to learn there, and I hope we can learn some of them. All right.

Well, you're terrific to come on and wish you best to success with the book, and we'll be out there promoting it for you. Thank you again for joining us on Open Book. Thanks, Anthony. It's been a pleasure. Well, 25 short years later, it turns out that the protesters at the WTO in Seattle, people who I wholeheartedly admit I laughed and scoffed at 25 years ago, and Wall Street did not take seriously at the time. It turns out a lot of the things that they were saying were in fact true. I think Wall Street at that time, we were looking for enhanced profits for corporations, and we thought it was over.

okay to outsource labor to cheaper places in the world. But unfortunately, that was a really bad recipe for the United States as we hollowed out our manufacturing and we weakened our small cities and the small businesses in the former industrial slash manufacturing hubs of the United States. Put it into context for people. Since the 1993 signing of NAFTA, the United States lost 65,000 factories. And so we can see this all over this country. The country is pocked now with vacant buildings, vacant factories, vacant steel mills. And many people in this country are suffering. They can't find the aspirational jobs or the living wages that we had, which made the country very strong economically and made the morale, frankly, of the country very strong in the

60s, 70s, and of course, in the 80s. And so what's fascinating about D.W. Gibson's book, he's reminding us of what these people were saying about the outcome of the WTO. I guess what I'm saying is think about activists and think about what they're saying and how they can be more effective at getting their messages out and how we should be slightly less cynical and listen because it's 25 years later. And had we listened to those protesters, made some changes, I think our country would be in a way better place. You ready to be on the show? All right.

So, Ma, in 1999, there was a group of protesters that marched in Seattle, and they did not want the United States to let China into the World Trade Organization. They said, if we let China into the World Trade Organization, it would mean bad things for us in terms of us losing jobs and losing manufacturing. Nobody believed them. I agree with that. Nobody believed them, but that's what happened, Ma. Yeah, I agree with that.

So do you think we should be paying more attention? You know, people are protesting now about the environment. You think we should be taking that seriously? We didn't take seriously what the protesters were saying 25 years ago, and now we're living with the truth of what they were saying. All right. Well, we're rebuilding a lot of our manufacturing. It's something called reshoring.

trying to get it back here. But, uh, yeah. All right. So too much manufacturing off the shore of the United States, not enough jobs in our own country related to manufacturing. And we've accidentally weakened ourselves because we thought our relationship with China was probably better than it actually was. It turns out that they're more adversarial than we would have liked to have believed.

And so we're making the adjustment now, but it's going to take a while to totally fix. Yeah, that's why I think someone like you. Okay, Ma. I don't think. You want me to run? You're going to be the campaign manager, ma'amah? Yeah. Okay.

You're going to have to find me a new wife then too, right? Forward, I think. And if it's not safe, then the long run, it's going to get worse. You're right, Ma. I'll have no political opposition. I'll just be able to waltz right into the White House. I won't have to deal with all the Trump crazies, that Trump will be sicken on me, right? No problem, right?

Well, I think Trump because he said the veterans He's a sucker, not the veterans. Right, no. It's hard for me to believe that the people ignore some of the nonsense that he's actually said. It's sort of crazy. Yeah. All right.

I mean, when you... It's got to be really... I think he's low end to tell you the truth. Right. I don't even think you have to even off-the-wall things. Right. I think Clinton... Yeah, no, he did a good job.

I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but I think he was a good question. I think he did basically a very good job, you know? All right, Ma, thank you for joining Open Book. Okay, I love you, Ma. All right, I'll call you later. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends,

and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to hear from me. you. I'll see you back here next week.