Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #11 - podcast episode cover

Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #11

Apr 11, 202546 min
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Speaker 1

Cool media.

Speaker 2

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This week we're covering the week of April third to April ninth. We have we have recovered from the Liberation day, fully liberated. Yeah, and now the economy is back to normal.

Speaker 3

Right, Yes, everything's really good. Everyone's four oh one k's have been normal and stable and stable and stable. That's what's important. Just line go up. The economy runs from stability. I mean one of the things the line did was go up. So yeah, lines, God, why should anyone complain? Yeah?

Speaker 4

Yeah, line's gone in a few different directions this week.

Speaker 3

Among the different directions the line went up, was you know a portion of that time?

Speaker 4

Yes, yeah, durrection that hasn't gone is left. I guess which you know we're waiting for that one.

Speaker 3

And related news, A dead cat can bounce. I don't know why they picked the cat for the dead animal to bounce to refer to that stock market term, but.

Speaker 4

I think this is a term that's new to Garrison, just judging by the facial expression.

Speaker 3

Yeah, you don't know what that is. So basically, when when a stock price for a company or whatever collapses right there will generally be it will straight a line down and then it will bump back up and it will look like it's rallying. But this isn't generally a rally. What it is is that when people like short a stock, there's a point at which they have to like buy back the share like shares, and that artificially inflates it

briefly before it then begins to decline again. So it's not a real it's the result of how short selling works that there has to be this thing that makes it temporarily look like it's rallying, but that's really not what's happening.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with this concept.

Speaker 4

And they call it a dead cat. It's referred to as a dead cat bounce.

Speaker 5

Yere.

Speaker 3

I don't know why it's referred to as a dead cat bounce, but it is.

Speaker 6

Stockbro because are not normal people then why these these are Wall Street guys. One of them has probably done it like that's that's probably why it's called that, Like.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I've thrown a lot of corpses at a lot of things and they don't really bounce.

Speaker 2

Speaking of corpses, Robert, you have some exciting news on the army.

Speaker 4

To pronounce Col Garrison.

Speaker 3

Yes, Yes. The good news is the army is going to be more lethal and efficient than ever before, which President Trump announced while sitting in the White House next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin net and Yahoo, who had to take roughly at twice the length of trip he normally has to take to go here because so many countries that he would normally fly over or stop in have arrest warrants out for him. For all of the war cries. Oh, we love to see it, but you know,

it's not about the journey. It's about you know, the people you journey too. And Netanyahoo met with Trump, you know, someone whom he clearly feels very safe, and you know, I dare I say loving with and the two of them shared the most intimate bond that two elderly men who have committed war crimes can share, which is announcing a record budget for the United States military of one trillion dollars. Well, I should say, Trump stated it would

be in the vicinity of one trillion dollars. Now does that mean possibly that very little is changing about the military budget. Yes, it does, and we'll get to that in a second. Hag Seth, our Secretary of Defense, made a post on Twitter right after saying Trump is rebuilding our military and fast. He also really bragged about that trillion dollar amount and said, ps, we intend to spend every tax payer dollar wisely on lethality and readiness. Now

here's the thing. Trillion dollars shitload of money. Current amount of funding allocated to national defense programs eight hundred and ninety two billion dollars, so trillion dollars about a ten percent bump right for you know, the national defense programs.

But it's actually unclear the way in which he phrased things and the way in which we like talk about the funding for national security, this could mean that basically the military will have pretty much the same, you know, something of an increase but not a mass, not really a significant difference from what it has now, and there will be more money into other defense related programs. So this is not like as massive a thing as it

might necessarily sound like. I think one thing that's sort of significant here is like how this comports with the way a lot of the folks and what we'll call the shit had left had talked about where there was this discussion that Trump's actually going to be you know,

bad for imperialism and the war machine. And you know, there was even talk as of a couple of months ago that they were going to like half the Pentagon budget, Like you know, you know, all these whatever else happens, you know, it's worth it if the military budget comes down in this imperial juggernaut of hell gets finally neutered, and just all of those people are always wrong. They were always going to just make the army bigger. They

were always going to put more money in events. They were always going to put more money into the hands of defense contractors. Like anyone who knows anything about these people or about how Republicans have worked knew that was going to happen. There was never any chance that they

were going to cut the actual amount of money. Now they're probably going to cut the number of people in the military because despite what heck Seth said, there's a lot of evidence that a shitload of this is going to go towards modernization, and in fact, armed services each branch is being our arm services are all being asked to cut about eight percent of their individual budgets in order to put money into modernization efforts, which obviously any

military needs to regularly modernize different systems. But this is also a thing where if your country is run entirely by grifters and conman trying to shotgun money to their political supporters, have a lot of money in different defense companies. What this means to me is you are probably going to see them continue to trim numbers of actual troops and put more money into bullshit that gets a lot of money to contractors. Yeah, that's that is my expectation.

That is what I see happening. More than anything here, we'll see. But I think a lot of this additional money is going to go towards buying shit that may or may not be useful. But the primary purpose of putting the money into that shit is because somebody who is somebody gets a veig. Yeah.

Speaker 4

I mean, if we look at fascism as a concept too, it kind of it has this troubled relationship with modernity, but one of the things it likes to do is flex it's new little weapon systems and toys, and we're going to see some guys posing with some weapon systems that probably never get used, right, like probably some AI targeting shit stuff like that.

Speaker 3

Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, it's Rallery does that.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Well, we got to find some way to reallocate the alleged fifty billion dollars in DOGE cuts, which is certainly a fake number. Absolutely, we might as well send over two hundred billion more to the Defense Department.

Speaker 3

Based on early IRS filings, there's something like half a trillion dollars that we might be losing in tax income this year. So you know, net, I don't think we're

doing great. I should also know to hear a big part of the money that they're going to get for modernizations coming from cutting fifty to sixty thousand civilian jobs, many of whom are veterans, but also just in terms of like military readiness, guys like hag Seth, who's primarily a push up dude, and people who don't know anything about the military see it as like, well, you know, the military, you just want as many door kickers as you possibly can, and you actually need very few of

those guys would need a lot of is guys that can move things to different places and fix things when they break, and do a lot of the paperwork that's necessary to make both of those things possible, which is why you need those jobs, and cutting a shitload of them is not likely to increase readiness. It's also worth noting that the US Army is looking at a forced

reduction of up to ninety thousand active duty soldiers. This is based on an article from April fourth, which is a significant reduction, and again like, we're not.

Speaker 6

Is that real?

Speaker 3

Yes?

Speaker 2

Why why are they doing a ninety percent reduction?

Speaker 3

In part because it's very hard for them to find new active duty soldiers. It is not easy to get people to do this, and it is not the priority of anybody in charge of anything to actually get more soldiers. The priority is to put more money into systems AI and all this shit, Like, I don't think they have a vested interest in actually helping with that.

Speaker 2

How are we going to take Greenland with drones? What do we do it?

Speaker 3

Yeah? Probably? I mean there's not a lot of peace.

Speaker 2

Probably, how we're going to do it?

Speaker 3

There's not a lot of people in Greenland.

Speaker 2

Garrison excited for the naval blockade of Greenland to yeah, kick off at about two months.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it's it's going to be great anyway. They're going to make part of why I think they feel confident trying to make you know, they're calling this making the army smaller and more agile, is because Trump is doing his best to make friends with Russia and we're certainly not going to whatever happens with Taiwan, the US military is not going to be involved.

Speaker 7

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Yeah, we ain't going to go back for them.

Speaker 8

You know.

Speaker 3

His attitude is like what do we need this for? We need an agile military that we can use to fuck with Greenland and Panama. Like that's that's what we're going to be doing, two very.

Speaker 4

Similar biomes where like everything is very similar.

Speaker 3

Yeah, and there's a lot of people like you know, the folks running Palenteer who have an increasing amount of say in what happens to the military, and you know what Trump does, who are basically advocating for, like we're going to have this whole kill chain automated soon. We barely need people. You can't trust people, you know how untrustworthy your generals have proved. Donald Cool.

Speaker 2

Well, I'm excited for some more Arctic camo surpl us to hit the mark at once. Yeah, Greenland situation is resolved.

Speaker 4

I'm excited to be fucking around wondering who a drone's going to kill next. That has been a really life affirming experience for me, and I'm excited to have it again soon.

Speaker 3

It's going to be great.

Speaker 4

Robbie, you mentioned the IRS and irs maybe maybe get less money, So I got to talk a little bit about the IRS. I guess let's let's start with like a little summary of this week immigration news. This week child Rachik, who is the person who runs libs of TikTok yeah, joined Ice on a raid.

Speaker 3

She is, shall we say, the Julius Striker of our modern fashions.

Speaker 4

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess you're right.

Speaker 3

Damn sorry, I'm just no. I mean, like, I wasn't joking about that. That's the most direct comparison that. Yeah.

Speaker 4

Sorry, I just took a moment to reflect on that, and it's not a great thing to reflect on.

Speaker 3

It's really not. Now. It doesn't make me feel good, yeah, No.

Speaker 4

Other things that make me feel good are the sixteen Minutes report, seventy five percent of people since Siko had no criminal conviction, which seems to leave open the possibility of there being a crime for which it would be okay to be sent to a foreign goo lag with no hope of return, which I don't believe is the case. Like, yeah, I'm very disappointed at any reporting which focuses on guilt, as if one could ever be guilty of anything which

would make this justifiable, you can't. The government is also soliciting for proposals this week to massively increase migrant detention, which again is not surprising, right, we talked about this last November, but it's also not great. But where I want to focus today is on the IRS and the

Abdegogatia case we spoke about last week. So well, it's see inter reporting that the IRS has said it will hand over information of people who are subject to criminal investigation to DHS or ICE right, ICE being under DHS.

Speaker 3

They so they say they.

Speaker 4

What happened here is that part of court filings and memorandum of understanding between ICE and the IRS was released in the MoU or in the court finding. Actually they cite an offense of failure to depart the United States after being ordered removed. So Essentially anyone who they're saying like you have to go right, you know that they could They could then ask for their tax return information.

Exactly what the IRS will disclose to ICE is covered by a big black reaction in the court documents, so we don't know that the entire emmaus submitted, but like there's significant reactions in it, ICE has to hand One thing that's not redacted is that ICE has to hand over the person's name, address, and the crime of which they're for which they're investigating, and it has to be a non tax crime.

Speaker 3

Not that that matter is Huguely.

Speaker 4

This is more limited than a lot of people have feared, and it's more limited than a lot of the reporting I've seen. It's possible that there's something else going on. I saw the acting director in ICE was going to quit over this. I saw that this morning. But the fact that they have to have their address suggests that they couldn't locate them using the tax return form right, which which is a good thing. It is one last

step towards fascuistrom. I guess I'm also aware of ICE having memorandums of understanding with other agencies, to include HUD right, housing and urban development. All of this is going to reduce the amount that migrant communities engage with the federal government to any degree. Right, Contrary to what you might have heard undocumated to people do to pay their taxes, it's actually relatively rare for them not to do that. And this might change if the RS starts handing over

people's tax returned information to ICE right. Obviously, if HUD starts handing over people's information, that's going to lead to people not being as willing to take housing benefits, more people landing up living on the street.

Speaker 8

Right.

Speaker 4

On the other hand, Houston City in Texas, for that, you who an't familiar, have I Have I pronounced that right?

Speaker 3

Robert Tehause, Yeah, I thought it was. I wasn't sure of it. It was Houston.

Speaker 9

Houston, Oh house.

Speaker 3

Soon understood. It's a it's a place we just don't go. That's that's that's how I refer to Houston. Okay, beautiful.

Speaker 4

So this Texas No Man's landtown has turned over information including addresses and license paids for people charged with driving without a license, even though some of this under Texas law is supposed to remain confidential.

Speaker 3

So that's great.

Speaker 4

They are also now making immigration detentions at regular traffic stops. Some aware of one incident where a man was arrested after being stopped for a cracked windscreen and he's now an ICE detention, so that there was I presumably an ICE warrant for this person that the Houston police then acted upon.

Speaker 2

I mean, and this is this can just be racial profiling, right, Like if they're going to pull someone over and then send them to ICE, like they're just going to start pulling over as many people that they don't want to be in Houston.

Speaker 4

Yeah, Like we already know that police departments have a tendency to pull over people who aren't white more often, right, and then like if you give them this, that's just going to exacerbate that further. Again, it's also going to stop migrant communities interacting with the police in any way.

Speaker 8

Right.

Speaker 4

This obviously has look not a big police fan, but like in cases like domestic file, right, sometimes people need to go to the police to be safe, and they're not going to do so they think that means they or people they love will be deported and this will have negative consequences, and specifically in cases like domestic violence, and we know this. There is plenty of evidence for this. Nonetheless,

this is continuing anyway. What's also continuing is our obligation to pivot to act, which we should do.

Speaker 9

Now, Okay, we are back.

Speaker 4

We're back, and it's time to talk about the Supreme Court.

Speaker 3

Do we have to?

Speaker 4

Yes, yes, we do, Garython, because it's the biggest court. It's the big one, and they've been crushing it all week, just just sending down decisions. The two big ones, I guess I want to talk about are a five to four ruling that it was vacating Boseberg's trro Bosberg being the judge who had intally told the United States government that had to stop sending people to set court right.

And then the US had ignored Boseberg and done it anyway, and then they had this whole court case about how they hadn't ignored him in any way.

Speaker 3

It was a secret.

Speaker 4

Even though we're tweeting it, you can go back a couple of eds and hear about that. In this decision, the Court was unanimous in asserting that people removed under the Alien Enemies Act do have a right to due process, but that they have to bring a habeas petition. So like the reason they vacated to tro was that the case shouldn't have gone to Bosburg, right, that they should

have bought this Havieu's petition. In practice, that's going to be very hard given the fact that many migrants, even under the current system, even and the Biden, most migrants wh didn't speak English didn't have access to legal representation. So this ruling is still pretty bad. The only thing that people in the court case wanted to stop was their rendition to L salbadare right. It wasn't even like opposed to other forms of removal, it was specific to

this El Salbador situation. The court also sort of cited k crime all cases as precedent, which is a very different thing. And it gives us very narrow ruling of the due process available to migrants rate and it relies on my having access to a legal team, which could be expensive and complicated for them.

Speaker 2

So this ruling allows Trump administration to send people to El Salvador as as long as they have the quote unquote right to do process, which is narrowly defined as something that not many people will have access to anyway.

Speaker 4

Yes, yeah, well, summarized. Yeah, you would need to have like a lawyer on retainer to file your habeas right leg straight away.

Speaker 2

So if that just doesn't get filed, then you are basically in their view forfeiting your due process and they can deport you anywhere.

Speaker 4

Well, they can deport you anyway. Yeah, I guess you have the right to appeal it, like by saying like I'm going to file this habeas petition, but most people an't going to do that, so in practice that they

haven't explicitly ruled on this setcot thing. Right, the Aberigo Garcia case, which is the other case, a Fourth Circuit judge required the US to return Abergogarcia to the US, and then Chief Justice Roberts on his own issued in an administrative stay, so he is effectively telling them that Fourth Circuit judge, you can't order them to have him return right now. We need to take a time out. We need everybody to get their evidence in order and

then bring that to us. So that case like remains ongoing. Right in the brief for that case, the government referred to Abligo Garcia as an enemy alien. But I don't think MS thirteen is covered by the evocation of the Alien Enemies Act. I think it was specific to trend deer Ragua. And then they also claim that they removed him under the Immigration Nationality Act, not the Alien Enemies Act. So like, none of this, I guess is hugely surprising.

We're seeing this like sort of post hoc justification of what they did, right, which is kind of how they operate. Case still remains ongoing, so we're still we're still going to hear that one, which presumably will reflect on the constitutionality of sending people to said cord. But like the fact that, yeah, they ruled the other case right, the one that was five to four. It wasn't about whether

seid Cock was legal. It was about where the Bosberg had the right to make a decision on this particular case. But it's still not great. Like it looks like the Supreme Court is doing everything it can to avoid a face to face showdown with the executive branch because they don't want to deal with the consequences of be ignoring them. Nope, and like we said before, like maybe the only court that they will listen to is a Supreme Court. Whether the Supreme Court doesn't make them, then they won't. So

that's where we're at with that. Not great, not exactly great at all. Well, do you know what is doing great? The economy? And for more on that, I think it's time for Tariff Talk with mia Wan.

Speaker 3

Wait wait wait, Tariff Talk. Jazz Rocky Jazz, bart Lack rocky jazz, rocky.

Speaker 6

Jazz bo.

Speaker 3

Ah, yeah, every day, every time we do it.

Speaker 8

The only band that matters is the only band that matters. The Narcissist Cookbook doing a very brief refrain from Rock the Chasm, the worst clash song by a white margin.

Speaker 4

The only clash song from hm plagar in Operation Desert Storm, which major stach Strummer cry, a real catastrophe.

Speaker 2

Do you know what is in a catastrophe?

Speaker 9

The economy?

Speaker 3

Yeah, how's it going?

Speaker 6

So I just I just saw a wonderful chart where someone was like, ah, this is this is one of the eight best days the SMP has ever had, And every single other one of those days is like nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty one, age.

Speaker 4

To Whooh, it's one of the best days. From Mount Saint Helen's Equality. Yeah, yeah, it's so good.

Speaker 3

So all right.

Speaker 6

The teriff situation as of two forty three pm Pacific time on April ninth, is that there is.

Speaker 4

Mine going good. It's gotta be cool. Guys, don't worry about it.

Speaker 6

Okay, So there isn't one hundred and twenty five percent tariff on all goods from China?

Speaker 9

Is that bad?

Speaker 6

I uh, you know, there's a bit that I cut here where I was gonna say about how like at fifty four percent, I was like, we've entered the part of the map where it just says here there'd be dragons, and one hundred and twenty five percent there's not even dragons there that they didn't even think to put that on the map as an unknown region.

Speaker 1

Hi, this is Mia from the future. It is now Thursday. One of the problems with attempting to do this episode is that we are learning the teriff rate from in real time. So it turns out that the actual tariff right on China, as as clarified by by Donald Trump today, is one hundred and forty five percent. And also it has become clear that the twenty five percent turf tariffs on both Mexico and Canada are also still in effect.

Speaker 3

So yay. In medical terms, it means what happened to the global economy is equivalent to you getting hit directly in the spine by an F two fifty going forty five miles an hour. That's that's that's what's happened to the base of the global economy.

Speaker 6

Yeah, and I mean it's it is very funny that like a lot of people have been focusing on the bond stuff because you can just look at the tariff numbers and it's like like, yeah, okay, seeing a one hundred and twenty five percent tariff on all goods from China and then looking at the bond markets to figure out if that's bad or not is like like is like walking outside into a blizzard and being like, whoa my need the weather rather tell me if it's knowing, like, what are we doing here?

Speaker 1

What are we doing here?

Speaker 3

The reason I'll explain, like briefly, treasury bonds are the underpinning of every country, the entire global economy. Every single country has a shitload of money in US treasury bonds because they are the most reliable thing. And what a treasury bond is is you give money to the US government and they say, in a period of time, you can take this out and it will have grown by a set percentage. Because treasury bonds have been for the

last basically a century so incredibly stable. This is where you put your money that you don't want to gamble, so you have money that is in stocks and stuff that can go up and down, but you also head your bets by having a bunch of this. And you know, generally treasury bonds are hopefully enough to about keep pace with inflation or beat it by a little bit. But usually the rate is not all that high because there's a shitload of demand. People are always buying treasury bonds.

When the treasury bond rate, which is the percentage you get back, raises, that may look good, right, they're like, wow, you get five percent now on if you put money into a into a thirty year TA bond. But what that means is that everyone is selling their treasury bonds. So demand is down and the rate is higher, and everyone is selling them because entire countries at a time are pulling their money out. Nations are pulling their money out of the US economy.

Speaker 6

It's great, yeah, and we are going to get more into how throw administration wants to fuck with that later, But first off, programming note, programming note. I am going to be from this episode forward referring to all of these as the turf tariffs, because fuck them and because these tariffs are in a large part also about a bunch of really weird fucking masculinity bullshit.

Speaker 3

So God excited for that.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And when you make most of your election ads being about yeah, trans people, and then and then and then the economy goes to the toilet. This is this is what was voted for.

Speaker 6

Like, if if you wanted transphobia, this is what you wanted. You want you wanted to lose your job, You wanted everyone to lose their fucking hope.

Speaker 3

Speaking at Tea Bonds, am.

Speaker 2

I right, let's skip over that immediately.

Speaker 3

No, no, no one law for him, go away? Okay, okay. So, so the most the most chaotic.

Speaker 6

Thing happening here, other than Robert randomly saying things, is that nobody knows what the tariff situation is going to be, just even just on Friday when you're listening to this, right you, By the time you were listening to this, there could be two hundred percent terriffs on Indonesia. There could be four thousand percent terrorists in Vietnam.

Speaker 3

We don't know. No, Trump could have dissolved the US dollar and we're all using the fucking d whatever, like I know, I don't.

Speaker 6

Know, yeah, and like you know, so, so it's all really unstable. We can talk about the other things that are still in effect, so that there's a general ten percent tariff on all countries except for China are just supposed to have a general ten percent tariff. There's also the per Megan Cassellos, a CNBC reporter, there are twenty five percent tariffs on steel, aluminum.

Speaker 3

And cars.

Speaker 6

There's probably going to be more. He keeps talking about more tariffs, and it's like, who knows where they're gonna happen, like maybe pharmaceutical semiconductors. But the Liberation Day tariffs, turf tariffs are currently on.

Speaker 2

Hold for ninety days at least as of right now.

Speaker 6

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and the and the quote unquote reciprocal tariffs have been lowered to ten percent for me at least, it's unclear as of recording. On Wednesday, Trump said that this is a fact, this is in effect immediately. It's unclear if those ten percent tariffs are also on hold for ninety days.

Speaker 6

No, I think the temper said ones are in effect right now, but it's really hard to tell because he's just saying shit.

Speaker 2

And yes, it's very hard to tell, which is I ain't saying it, he's truthing it, because yes, sorry, he is.

Speaker 4

He is true social ing that this information that is how we have to work out the global economic future. It's based on posts. I'm true social Yeah, so so okay.

Speaker 6

And one of the things, one of the things that's been happening with with the turf tariffs is that like the media is just is reporting things as true that are just clearly obviously a lie. So one of the ones that's been going around and that the media is reporting a Trump has said is that he said he's going to pause tariffs on countries that don't retaliate, except we know that's a lie because the EU already imposed retaliatory tariffs. But the EU's turf tariff rate is like

already down to ten percent, just like everyone else. So we know that Trump is lying about his rationale for the rollback of the turf tariffs, right, and every single fucking media outlet is still just reporting it because nobody fucking knows how to do freaking reporting anymore, we should move to what this is going to do the supply chain, And to put this in perspective, when I learned about the one hundred and four percent tariff on China, that

was before it was one hundred and twenty five percent where it's at now, I was writing an episode called the Old Economy is Dead, which will probably still be coming out on Monday. Again, that was the fifty.

Speaker 3

Four percent rate.

Speaker 6

I was writing a thing called the Old Economy is Dead at one hundred and four percent, Like things are going to break in the supply chain that only seven people on Earth have ever heard of before, Like entire sectors of the economy are going to be annihilated.

Speaker 3

We're going to see right.

Speaker 6

Now, we're probably going to see everyone attempt to route like all shipping from China. There's going to be a massive effort to try to reroot it through like literally any other country. But again that's only a solution for like you know, ninety days, and and again it's not

even clear that that can work. I mean, I'm already seeing a bunch of reports swamp business as being like, yeah, we're fucked because and that was the four percent tariffs and at one hundred and twenty five percent, Entire industries

are non viable. Now, it's maybe possible that if it was just these tariffs and an all Chinese shipping was able to be routed through some other country, maybe we would only have a regular economic collapse, like a like you know, like an early two thousands tech bubble collapse, and not like a two thousand and eight one. But again, that's the same thing that note moti war tariffs go

into effect. Now. The problem is that we went through this with the ninety day pauses on the Mexican tariffs and the Canadian tariffs, and then after ninety days everyone assumed that they weren't going to go to effect again, they just went to effect. So the odds are of that the absolutely catastrophic turf tariffs from like Liberation Day are going to go into effect in about ninety days,

right that that's probably what's going to happen. There's probably going to be some attempts to negotiate them down, but like again, those absolutely catastrophic tariffs which are going to just fucking annihilate the entire world economy, are probably going

to go into effect. And you know, part of what's happening here, right, is that so the markets are doing this, they're like dead cat bounce, right, And a lot of this is because they haven't actually stopped to think about, like how much American manufacturing and contra every argument everyone is making about this, there is actually a lot of manufacturing still in the US, but all of it relies on Chinese imports and various stages of invadio stage are

auction and they're fucked. And I haven't even mentioned yet, by the way, the sort of caption to all of this is that China is doing an eighty four percent retaliatory tariff on all American goods, which is going to just fuck massive portions of American agriculture. We've talked a lot on the show about soybean exports. It's going to be absolutely catastrophic. We're going to go more into this

on Monday. But you know, the thing that's clear from this is that these people don't see the economy as real in the way that you and I do, Right. They simply don't, you know, we look at the economy as something where we have to have a fucking job so we can go to work, so we can come home and fucking buy food for our families and pay our rent. And they think it's a fucking joke, right, They think it's a fucking masculinity signifier and they think

it's it. Like they look at tariff rates and they go, this is just a number on a fucking page. And that's why the tariff rate is now one hundred and twenty five percent on China because it doesn't None of this shit is real for them at all. Now do you know what is real? No, the products and services support this. Ye ye, yep, we are back now.

Speaker 3

Okay.

Speaker 6

One of the things that I've been seeing a lot of is there are a lot of arguments about whether there was some kind of plan here. Trump has claimed that he was going to roll back the terrorists all along, and no, he wasn't. Just no, he's just lying. He's just going by the seat of his pants. And I can prove that there is no plan here by moving on to the second thing that I want to talk about here, which is a speech given by Council of

Economic Advisors Chairman Steve Myhren at the Hudson Institute. So this is this is again the the the Council of Economic Advisors is a federal agency that is like their their job is to provide economic advice to the president, right, and their chair gave a speech where he argues, and this is something that like I I Hey, Jesus fucking Christ, we were talking about, okay, the fact that every fucking

country on Earth has US Treasury bonds. We were talking about this earlier, right, the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. This guy is arguing that that is actually a public good that other countries.

Speaker 3

Should pay us for.

Speaker 6

He wants to force countries to fucking pay taxes to the United States for holding US Treasury bonds.

Speaker 3

And again, if any nation on Earth could pay to have their currency be the global reserve currency, there's no amount they wouldn't pay. Like, the degree to which this benefits you was ridiculous, Like the fact that you want to charge other people for it. It's nothing.

Speaker 6

It is like, Look how this like actually works, right, is that every single other country on Earth is forced to buy American debt, which is what a bond is, right, Yeah, And this allows the US to carry out even more spending without inflationary effects every single other country.

Speaker 3

Everything is based on this, Yes, it's just it's.

Speaker 6

All forced on on like other countries having to stockpow US dollars, like the literally the entire global economy. The US is advantage in the entire global econy is that every single other fucking country on Earth needs US dollars. Part of this is to buy oil. And part of this is again because the dollar is the fucking reserve currency. It's the currency that fucking trade is done in, and the assets that you hold is is like is the

fucking US bond. The anthropologist David Graeber called this in his book Debt the First five thousand Years, a tribute system that again, every country in the world is forced to buy US bonds. The US government has just like fairly explicitly like did this in the Reagan administration, does this other times, like has just fairly explicitly leaned on countries and been like, you're buying a fucking a fucking bunch of US bonds now, right, Like this is this system.

The status of the dollar of the world reserve currency, is the entire lattice that supports and spreads the American Empire, and these fucking clowns one of people to pay taxes on the tribute that they are.

Speaker 3

Paying to us.

Speaker 6

This is not by Trump from Elon Musk right, this is the guy these people brought in to be their economist, to do economic policy.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 6

There there is no limit to their stupidity. There is no rock of sanity upon which the tide of madness will crash. Everything we have seen, we have seen so far is just a prelude to an infinite abyss of stupidity, so mindnumbingly incomprehensible it will shatter our minds like a snowflake and a hurricane. You can no longer think to yourself. They cannot possibly be this stupid. They are thinking thoughts even gods can not comprehend. They are attempting to drain

the sea by shouting at the moon. They are trying to wipe their ass with pine cones.

Speaker 3

There is no five.

Speaker 6

Dimensional plan here. There is not even a man behind the fucking curtain. There is only an infinite sea of cruelty, malicon, stupidity trying to drown us all for the crime of attempting to ext in the world we're born in. The reality of the men who rule the American Empire.

Speaker 9

Is this.

Speaker 6

It is so terrifying that everyone from the most powerful CEOs on the planet to the fucking day traders running the stock markets to broke left the ship posters recoil in horror and try to construct meaning and some kind of like anything, any kind of strategy, any kind of strategic reason why anyone could possibly be doing this, because the existence of a plan, literally any plan, no matter how evil it is, is preferable to this, which is that the largest economy in the world, the most powerful

empire of the world has ever seen, is being run by the dumbest people who have ever fucking lift and they are doing this because they are evil and they're stupid.

Speaker 3

Yes, yes, there's absolutely like yeah, yeah, no, nothing else to say. Really.

Speaker 2

I think one of the things that is underpinning this, which you can pick up on if you are cursed enough to listen to enough of these speeches and enough of their of their talking heads podcasts, is like this reoccurring trend in which these people really need to be victims in order to in order to politically succeed, which is an accuation that's usually thrown against you know, woke sgws.

But like before the election, right, it was this idea that that because because of the dem corrupt elite establishment. You know, everyday Americans are are are victims of this, of this hidden cabal of Democrats that that are ruining everything. But but now that these people are in charge of of of the United States, the people who are victimizing us is just the entire world, right, the entire world is ripping off the United States by using our dollar,

by by doing trade with us. They are somehow ripping us off, like we are the victims of this global scheme. And it's hurting you at the average blue collar worker, and it's making women adopt managerial positions and and this is this is what's actually is the core of of your oppression. And even even even when they win, and even when they control the country, they can't let go of this victim status. They have to have someone ripping them off in order to justify them doing just incomprehensible

stupid power grabs. And it is very much linked to like this like masculine signifier. It's very odd, like like the way that people are trying to trying to justify losing so much money in the stock market. It's by re posting a clip of some like Australian women dancing on dancing on TikTok in like an office building, and they're like, well, you know, tariffs are are are much better than having to deal with women in the office, am I right now?

Speaker 3

Women having a joke?

Speaker 2

This is this is this is how they this is how they justify it.

Speaker 3

At least we don't have woke. It's worth it to not be able to afford food. If THEO is the global long house, that's a deep cut down long house is burnt down. Sure, because the long House is burnt down, we're now exposed to the elements and all of our food story story are gone and it's about to snow eighteen feet. But at least the long house.

Speaker 4

The long house with your am nephew in it, that you hate and owned you at Thanksgiving, it is gone.

Speaker 2

Shout out to your nephew.

Speaker 4

Yeah, I guess what's the nibbling? Nibbling is a correct non binary appollition.

Speaker 2

In other news, last week, President Trump said that he would be quote unquote honored for the President of l Salvador to take US citizens, which he calls American grown and born criminals and put them into SEACOT. The terrorism confinement center, which is essentially a prison work.

Speaker 3

Camp YEP, that no one gets released from.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Trump said, quote, why should it stop just at people that crossed the border illegally? On quotes, But it shouldn't stop that she shouldn't be there at all. And and his James already mentioned seventy five percent of the immigrants sent to sea caught don't have a criminal conviction. These people are not criminals. Now, a few days later, the White House presecretary reiterated that this is something that Trump is seriously discussing, both publicly and privately.

Speaker 7

So the President has discussed this idea quite a few times publicly. He's also discussed it privately. You're referring to the President's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported. These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly, and these are violent repeat offenders in American streets. The President has said, if it's legal right, if there is a legal pathway to do that, he's not sure.

Speaker 6

We are not sure if there is.

Speaker 7

It's an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly. As in the effort of transparency, now.

Speaker 2

One of the last things we're going to discuss is an update on DHS and ICE efforts to deport students across the country. Me and James did an episode last week which is still pretty relevant, but all of the numbers have increased dramatically since that episode. As of Tuesday night, April eighth, ninety two student visas have been revoked at California University, fifty at UC campuses, and thirty six at

California State University campuses, with six more at Stanford. Also, as of April eight, fifty student visas have been revoked at Arizona State University, with multiple students now in iced attention. Lawyers for these students believe that upwards of one thousand

visas have been revoked across the country. A map on inside higher ed dot com shows four hundred and nineteen confirmed instances of student visas or in some cases, green cards, being revoked by Secretary of State Mark Rubio across thirty four states, and as of Wednesday, April ninth, visas for eighteen international students have been revoked at the University of Utah, with these students and recent graduates received letters from the

Trump administration instructing them to quote unquote self deport immediately. At Utah State University, more than thirty students have been impacted, according to the university administration.

Speaker 4

Yeah, I'm aware of at least one UCSC student who is detained at the border and immediately deported. And also where the UCOP uc officer the president right a statement

about the impact of service terminations across its campuses. But the UCSD Guardian, in a dub for Student Journalism, reported that UCSD convened an emergency meeting before this of faculty and it knew about the revocations or that the service changes, right, they were revocation of their student status, and it was reluctant to act because it hadn't received guidance from UCOP yet. So we're seeing this from a lot of university administrations, right,

they don't know how to respond. I did see that the University of Arizona was helping fund some of the legal fees of their students, which is more than many universities are doing as of now. There seems to be no pattern of prior rest for the people who have had their status has changed, But in some cases, it seems that in some university systems. All of the people who have lost their status are either Chinese, Indian, or from majority Muslim countries.

Speaker 6

One other thing I wanted to close out is episode on So we have an episode out about this already. But one of the things that ICE has been doing has been targeting migrant farm worker labor organizers.

Speaker 3

They have.

Speaker 6

I'm basically just kidnapped, like just straight up broke this guy's window in his car and dragged him out. A guy named Alfredo Quarez is known as Lalo. He is an organizer for Familias you need Us Legisticia in Washington, and there is going to be a protest. This will be Saturday, the twelfth. That will be tomorrow as you're listening to this, on Friday at Portland City Hall at two pm. Organizers are also asking that you call the Washington Attorney General to demand pressure be put on everyone

to release him. Yeah, if you want to hear more about that, there is I have an interview with an organizer who works with them, and yeah, it's real fucking bad. The scale of the repression has been increasing. It's not undefeatable, and this is a this is a tangible thing that you can do to try to stop them. But yeah, it requires movement now, and yeah, do this now before it gets worse.

Speaker 2

To update another topic of the episode me and James did last week, we mentioned that DHS was seeking input for installing a new program to screen the social media activity of people applying for immigration benefits for what would they label as anti semitism. And this policy is now in effect. This applies to quote unquote, aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status, foreign students, and aliens affiliated with

educational institutions, possibly also people applying for citizenship. To quote the DHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs, Trisha McLaughlin, quote, there's no room in the United States so for the rest of the world's terrorist sympathizers, and we are under an obligation to admit them or let them stay here. Secretary Nome has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for antisemitic violence and terrorism, think again.

You are not welcome here. Unquote. The web page for this new policy states, under this guidance, USCIS will consider social media content that indicates an alien endorsing espousing promoting or supporting anti Semitic terrorism, anti Semitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity as a negative factor in any discretionary analysis when adjudicating immigration benefit requests.

Speaker 4

So essentially, this.

Speaker 2

Means that if you've posted anything that is in support of Palestine or criticizes the Israeli government, this will be now used against you if you are applying for visa, if you are applying for a green card, if you're applying for citizenship and already live in this country as a permanent resident lawfully. So just a wider net of

social media surveillance. Four h forour Media put out a good article on when Day about a palanteer system that ICE is using to look for immigrants and people in this country, which allows them to select for specific attributes with a pretty intense filtering system. So yeah, this is ongoing and we will continue to report as such.

Speaker 3

Yeah, all right, everybody, Well until next week, please don't go to an El Salvador in prison camp if you can avoid it.

Speaker 2

We reported the news.

Speaker 3

Great, we reported the news.

Speaker 4

It could happen.

Speaker 5

Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website. Coolzonmedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listened directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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