The Balloon Wars and US China Relations

the FAY two is like God's perfect killing machine. Yeah, and it's thus it is like it is a six was like seven billion dollar aircraft. Completely, it is a it is afect air. It is a perfect air superiority craft, which in modern warfare makes it slightly less useful than an eight hundred and fifty dollar d J i'd drone

with hand grenades. Yea fairly express. I cannot think of like a better metaphor to understand how the U. S. Army works than shooting using using a sixties seven billion dollar aircraft to shoot a three hundred and sixty one dollar missile at a balloon, just like listen several balloons in his life. A really not this high up. It is extremely entertaining. And yeah, I can't fault that pilot.

I am deeply disappointed in rural America that no crazy rich guy with a cessna flew his friend with a fifty cow up to like drop that why the seventeen incinerator was invented for this specific instance. And yeah, we've been let down again. Anyway, what are we talking about today? Mia? Obviously we're talking about the balloon a little bit, and then we're going to talk about something more interesting, which is the sort of history of US China relations and

how it's not what everyone thinks it is. I've been led to believe by the media that there is nothing more interesting than the balloon and that we should be focusing all our coverage on the balloon. That's true. There have been other balloons. There are now a fifth balloon. Has it towers? Okay? So yeah, let's let's go Yeah. So okay, So I want to start off by, like, I want to talk a little bit about the balloon, which is that Okay, So we have the American Army's claim,

but this is a surveillance balloon. There's a there's a chance it which just was a random balloon, Like I don't know. I I don't want to completely discount the fact that it was a balloon. I do want to talk a little bit about sort of balloon surveillance stuff though, because I've seen a lot of people both on the left and also on the right who are just like, why would anyone ever have a spy balloon? It's like, okay,

so it's talk a little bit. In order to do this, we need to talk a little bit about surveillance satellites, which I come from a family of astronomers, and one of the sort of dark secrets of astronomy is that the stuff you point up also be pointed back down again.

And yeah, yeah, so and you know, one of the other things about this is a lot of the companies that make telescopes to make the lenses for that are companies that work heavily with the n r O, which is the National Reconnaissance Office, which is a genuinely terrifying organization with an unfathomable black budget to dedicated to just like spying on people from aircrafts and from space and

more people. More people should be like, we we have a lot of like people are scared of the n s A. People are scared of the CIA, but more people should be scared of the n r O because Jesus Christ, that stuff is who but on the other head. Okay, so the n ROW has a bunch of satellites, right. But the thing about satellites that they move. Okay, you can't prove that. I will, I will prove I will, I will, I will, I will do a war thunder, I will post classic live underneath of dome. And satellites

are stationary. The dome rotates in a clockwise direction around them, and that's responsible for the illusion of motion in the heavens. Sure, yes, there's no competing response today owned so okay, all right, So the satellite satellites move. They move in stable, addictable orbits, and this means a few things, right. One of the things that it means is that a satellite is only over the area you wanted to cover for a limited amount of time because it's you know, the satellites moving

around the Earth, right, um. And this means that you know, you can you can calculate their orbits, and you can calculate when they're going to be in range of whatever they want to look at, and you know, and this means you can do things like, for example, figuring out where the satellite is going to be in hiding whatever you're working out when they pass this. This is how the CIA, that's how the CIA completely missed India's nuclear

weapons program. Is that they do when that they didn't do when the flies the Spice satellites you're flying over, they just hid all their weapons equipment and the CIA never figured out they were building dukes. Well actually not based bad, but but yeah, it's very funny. Yeah, yeah, but what do they do? Did they just painted like a hot dog o something and just be like they just like put torps over it. The satellite came around, and then they build things under ground. It's very funny.

I passioning the world's biggest hot dog eyed day in case someone else does. Yeah, I think Jamie Loftus actually might if you beat to that. Don't have to do all to the deaths and think we're not supposed to talk about in the podcast. Well, look, it's it's it's it's like the Israeli secret Arsenal. It's it's an open

secret and not a closed secret. So okay, you can solve this problem of of sort of telescope go move um, either by having just a bunch of satellites going constantly, or by having a geosynchronous satellite, which is in which is in an orbit where it's like basically over the same spot of the Earth at one time. The problem

is that both of these are like unfathomably expensive. And that doesn't mean that governments don't do that, Like the US is a multi spy satellites, like lots of countries by satellites, but you know, it's really really expensive, and that there's there's you know, there's a few other reasons why you would use a balloon um, which are you know some of the reasons the US uses that use

them in Afghanistan. One is that you have really limited space on a satellite, which means that there's the you know, you can only fit certain kinds of equipment onto each satellite. There's another issue, which is that okay, um, if you're putting spy stuff on a satellite that has to work in space and it turns out that space sucks, and I mean wanting to kill you, I didn't like it.

It's a it's a mark of how like bad people are at strategic thinking that they would ever ask why would you put spy stuff on the balloon, especially like it's a little weirder to float it over the US

if that's what happened. But like if you are the US or China or Russia engaging in most of the conflicts those countries engage in where they're not dealing with state level actors, a balloon provides perfect surveillance, very cheaply, it doesn't require refueling, Like, it's an incredibly reasonable platform

to spy on people with. Yeah, and I think that there's another thing which I think has been less talked about, which is that, Okay, there's an equipment gap basically between when you design a camera for a satellite and when the satellite goes up. And this means that whatever you whatever kind of cameras and technology you're putting in a satellite are going to be by definition a few years out of date, because that's just how long it takes a design the equipment and putting it and put it

into the air. But you know, for a balloon, you could you can you could use sulf that's more modern than what you would have on a spy satellite. Now, you know, and and also like you can you can also just put other stuff on the balloon that's not a cameras, like you can do sig and stuff you can use. So okay, the moral of this story is that, like, the spy balloon is not like a completely implausible thing.

If if you like put a gun to my head and said, Mia, what happened here, my guests would be it was like the spy balloon went off course, so ship and they's lost control of it. Now, yeah, it probably was not meant for the continentally United States, because that's a weird move. But it's happening. So Hi, this is Mia in post. So. But back when we recorded this episode in the heavy days of early February, there had been but two balloons. There have now been so

so many more balloons. Oh my god. There the US just has balloon mania. We we now know a little bit more about the sort of suspected Chinese balloon. It does that that balloon seems to be an actual balloon at the very least. The U. S Government claims that they've recovered an enormous amounts of sort of technical and

observational equipment from it. They said it was, well, what was the exact line, the size of three school buses, a bunch of signals intelligence stuff, which is something we didn't mention an enormous amount, but yeah, like that, that's an Everything you can use the balloon for is intercepting phone communications, at radio communications, etcetera, etcetera. Okay, so, like it seems like they're like they're the first balloon may

have been an actual balloon. Every subsequent balloon, however, we have learned more so at least one, and my my assumption is this is every single subsequent balloon after the first balloon. Um, we have confirmation that so one of the balloons is shot down over for Canada by n F twenty two and this seems to be a Pico

balloon from the Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade. Uh, these are just like these are these just like tiny balloons that people send out so they can serve can navigate the globecause these people are just like balloon hobbyists.

They just they just like balloons, and you know, it's just honestly really sad, like these are just people who like they just like putting balloons up and watching them go around the world and they were met with the entire aerial bite of the world's greatest superpower, which spent literally more money than I have ever seen in my entire life to annihilate literally like about a hundred or

two hundred dollars worth of essentially foil and some GPS equipment. Uh. These people apparently tried to contact the U. S Government and tell them what was going on. In the US government was like, so, yeah, congratulations to the US government which has uh, it has one, it has one an important geo strategic victory over the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade. Uh. This is this has been this has been breaking news from me uh in in in the in the balloon War. Yeah,

enjoy the rest of the episode. But you know, I wanted to use this to talk about something more interesting, which is again like the sort of arc of of U. S. China relations and what actually drives it, because I think people have a really really not very good understanding of how it works and why. Okay, I think it's reasonable to ask you, why why are you talking about the arc of US China relations. Aren't US shininga relations always bad?

And the answer is no, In fact, you have shad a relations to sometimes actually quite good U. S. China relations are driven by these two sort of interlocking forces. Right on the one hand, you have the internal domestic and also kind of global balance of class forces inside the country, and that plays a huge role in a lot of the things that are going to happen in the US Hina relations. And the other thing that happens

is what you, I guess would call geopolitics. And we're going to kind of start with the geopolitics sign and then move back and forth between that and the sort of class angle on it. You can get get get a kind of understanding of how how this suff actually works and how to think about it in ways that

are just sort of incredibly simplastic and useless. So, all right, I'm not gonna go all the way back to the US or whatever, because there are US China relations with we we actually invaded China at one point in like the eight hundreds for some fucking reason. Uh, then we

actually we did again the next hundred two. Yeah, But okay, So but in terms of dealing with modern China, dealing with the U. S U and modern US China relations is about the US's relationship with the CCP and weirdly dream world War two it was the relations were actually really good. Um, you know because obviously China, China is the U s IS ally and World War two I were there were also allies with China's nationalist party, the KMT.

But you know what, what what's interesting about this is that there's a faction of the U s RM that is anti KMT and pro CCP. And they're not pro CCP because they're communists. Uh, they're pro CCP because a they're kind of racist and they really don't like the KMT kind of out of racism. And the second thing that that's going on is that the k m teed as we've talked about elsewhere, it's just like incredibly corrupt

esquad party. And that means that, you know, some of the people who have to like the people who have to work with them on the ground to World War two or like, these are literally the worst people who have ever lived. Why on earth are we doing this?

That means that when when the civil war starts, right like, the US takes the nationalist side but like nowhere near as strongly as they could have, and this creates this sort of like this myth around like the loss of China that becomes this massive thing in the US is because this is one of the things that triggers somelth McCarthy ism, etceentric cera is like everyone becomes convinced it was like oh my God, like Truman, like like they

lost China, Like we could have kept China for the communists, but like they lost it, and it's like wow, okay. But this has another massive impact, which is that it

creates this thing called the China Lobby. And the China Lobby is this is this sort of bank of these like incredibly psychopathic right wing like anti communist gouls and some also people who had some also people who were like had been rich in China and then got owned by this ec P, and they start pushing incredibly aggressively for like regime change in China for just the US and trying to not have a diplomatic relations and this this start starts to sort of like tank relations between

the US and China. And then obviously like so we we we fought, we fought a war with China and Korea, a thing that I feel like doesn't get talked about as much as you would think it would. The Korean War is the memory hold war in yeah, and in the UK. It's when I was America. But it's still war that I mean, the Forgotten War is literally like it's it's most common nickname. There's a pretty good book

by that title too. Yeah, but you know, like like that war, like there there are there are U s and Chinese troops like shooting the ship out of each other, like oh yeah, yeah, like across the entire peninsula, like there are there there are Chinese troops doing bayonet charges

through the road artillery the American lines. My my, the last before I bought my place, my last landlord was a Chinese citizen um living in the US on a green card, and during a pandemic condre station over some wine, we kind of figured out that both of our grandfathers wound up at the same battles and made very shooting each other. Yeah, so that's the melting pot, buddy, she became a landlord. Mm hmm. Well, I mean, I mean that's a dream the you like there there was a

reasonable argument that they were and back again. A landlord story is the entire course of the of the sort of like Chinese Chinese politics in the twenty century any respect to the United States. Yeah, well, and also trying to writ because lead landlords are back now it sucks. Oh yeah, yeah, land yet not all Chinese people have

become landlords, but yeah, many a subject to landlord ship. Yeah, you know, Okay, So like obviously it's really interesting too because when people like when people write about US China relations, they normally like the thing that they think they picked from this period tends to be like the Twiny Straight crisis, and it's like, okay, yeah, there was there was this race crisis, but again, like the U. S And China were like shooting at each other like before this, like

why why is this that? Why is this the thing that you pick for the downturn of your China relations like we were at war? Okay, but baffling stuff, right, But you know, and relations are not good to like the sixties either, like sort of sort of based on very very similar sort of lines that you've seen in the fifties, Like this is a period where people sort of take communism anti communism seriously. Uh, that stops being true very quickly. On the other hands, these these sort

of geopolitics things have real material consequences. Right. You can look at this in the American side, where, for example, the industrial build up of the Japanese and Korean economies, and also the industrial build up like the industrial build of California, right, has to do with these sort of trade linkuages that are that are being set up in order for us to run the war in Korean, run

the war in Vietnam. And China has its own sort of version of this, where which which starts getting more and more apparent by it starts around the mid sixties.

They have this thing called the Third Front, which is okay, So, having having now been through like I don't know how literally, I don't even know how many wars since the start of this century, the CCP goes, okay, we need to shift ourt we need to shift our production away from sort of the coast and into the middle of the country so that they can't be attacked by the Soviets and they can't be attacked by the Americans. And this this has, this has a really major effect in terms

of what sort of Chinese industriization looks like. Over the course of the mid twentieth centuries. You get, you get this industrial belt that's built up and that is going to be destroyed later on, and it and it's destroyed in part because of of what starts happening in the seventies, which is the sort of warm up between the US and China based on sort of Nick Nixon and Kissinger's attempts to sort of peel the Chinese away from the Soviet Union. And you know, like Robert, you've you've talked

about this ambassadors before. Um, but you know, part part of part of what's going on here is that China like basically gets into a war with the Soviet Union at nine. It's not called that, it's setting just called the border dispute, but like like there are troops like shooting at each other, like all across the border. People are beating each other the death with sticks like people and people are shooting borders at each other. It's it's

it's it's a real war. And it's in a grand British tradition of course, calling like massive conflicts and emergency or the troubles. Yeah, yeah, okay, you know, but this but this, this, this really sort of this this really sort of drives Chinese sort of international like relations to the point where they're like Okay, so I know we're supposed to be communists, but also like the other communist power next door might like marching army across the border

at any point. So you know, you get you you get the sort of trying to triangle diplomacy of of of because when you're trying to sort of bring China into the at least away from the Soviet spirit and then closer into the U. S bear And you know, this starts to work, right, and you can ask you know, there's other there's other things going on here, right, It's

China's not just playing pure Jeo Paul politics. Um there there there, there's there's another factor involved, which is that part of the sort of conditions for US and Chinese sort of like as she called by ladder relations or whatever sort of geopolitical can't bullshit you want to say, for like getting along closer is the US starts sending these technology transfers over to China, like I mean literally like like like taking like sometimes like taking factories basically

and like taking them apart and then putting them in boxes and shipping them over to China. And you know, okay, and this is this is this is a huge deal for the CCP, because like, the Chinese economy in this period has been really bad. And part of this is just, you know, is what happens when you bow. But a secondary part of this is that China's has has had

a real basically it's it's try. China's been dealing with this sort of economic crisis sense like like literally since since they came out of World War Two, which is that Okay, so, most of China's industrial capacity was completely destroying the war. The parchment that weren't were like there's this belt in Macharia that had stuff, and then the Soviets literally loaded loaded the factories on trains and ship them back and ship them back east or back west.

So bye bye bye. By the by the time, by the time that the CCP takes over, like China has less industrial capacity than like Russia did at the beginning in nineteen seventeen, Jesus, So situations really bleak, right, And the other the other thing that's bleak about it is that, Okay, so, in order to build an industrial base, right, We've talked about this a bit on the show. In order to build industrial base, you need food. But in order to

get like increase your agriculture productivity. You need like mechanical goods, but you can't get those mechanical goods unless you can increase yourdustrial capacities. You have this bottleneck, and this winds up being one of the solutions to the bottleneck is getting technology chansfers from the US. And you know, the sort of product of this is that now all of our products and services which we are about to talk

about which you should buy, are made in China. So yeah, go go, go, bug go buy those things that are the product of all of this. That's no problem. Don't don't question it. Just purchase. Go to Ali Baba and just find the Express Express and just wire them seven hundred dollars. Within I'm going to say two weeks to seventeen months, you'll get a package of something by it. Honestly, if you order something from Ali Express, there's no real way to know what you will get. That's the beauty

of Ali Express. Look you, on the other hand, you there there were there was there was a non zero chance you get a collection of really really sick Chinese shirts that just have absolutely random bullshit on him. The Chinese shirts or like knockoff versions of military grade optics that work well enough for the Taliban to use the liberating people the world over. Ali express all right and

we're back. So okay. The Chinese swing into sort of like aligned with the U. S. They they start doing things that are like even a lot of the US's right wing allies won't do. Like, for example, China, China is one of the first countries to like to diplomatically recognize Pinochet Chile, and they like send him a ship ton of money, that send the loans they send, they send him direct cash transfers, and like this is a point where even like France and like the UK are like, oh,

we wo that. That's like we're we're not We're not We're not gonna have We're not gonna acknowledge his military kidship. And China is like yeah, this rules. Hell yeah Petochet. And you know, they do other stuff that's very sort of pro US, right. They invade Vietnam in nineteen seventy nine in the war that you know, the only war that's more forgotten than the Korean War. That is the sign of of these war. Um. That was a really good Twitter threats that taught me a lot about China's

non aggression to its other countries last week. Yeah, it's it's a good time. I I can we we could all talk about like the Sino Indian War in the middle of this where they just invade India, which is great, but you know, okay, but like what what what this sort of comes up to is in is like you you you you get a point where the U s and China, by by by the end of the seventies and going into the eighties, are very much on the

same side. Like for example, when when Daniel Payne came to visit the US, he he takes he takes like an hour out of his schedule to make a secret visit to the c i A so that he can set up a joint like us A listening posted in China to monitor the Soviets. We talked about this a

lot in the Kissinger episodes from last year. But folks should generally be aware that like Chairman maw and Richard Nixon legitimately got along, like enjoyed one another's company, as did Nixon and Chow Chessco like they were they were all good friends. Yeah, which is something something one ruling class, etcetera. Etcetera. Yeah, there's almost a class analysis you could make the yeah, but you know, okay, we're we're gonna we're gonna do it.

We're gonna do a slightly different class analysis, which is that like, okay, so US Shanna relations are very good literally like basically until tianaman and then everything gets kind of messed up because Tienamaneman. It's a very it has a set of like very weird and contradictory effects, right, you know, we we talked about some of this in

our Chamman episodes. But it does two things. Right. On the one hand, like in the US, people are horrified, right, you know, the the the entire media classes like watches, this happened other outside their windows. There's just like it is an incredible uproar. It becomes one of the sort of like central like I don't know, like I sort of like it becomes it becomes I think it's like incredibly central to just like the memory of what it is to be an Asian American is to sort of

like remember quote unquote Tianneman. But on the other hand, you know, so okay, what do you expect from there? Is like the U S and China break off diplomatic relations and like the Cold War two starts again immediately with the US and China. And it doesn't happen like that. It doesn't happen like that because the second thing that that that Sandeman does is it finally crushes the Chinese

working class. And you know, once once, once, the once, the old once, the last deal Chinese working class is just gone, right, and all that's left is an incredibly disorganized and incredibly desperate sort of market working class. Suddenly, hey, look we have a very highly educated, very poor I population that you can that you can just you know,

just ship labor too. And this is what this is what actually happens in sort of terms of the US and Chinese relationship over the nineties, which is that you know, you you have these this double D industrialization going on. You have a D industrization in the US where you know, the last field rustbelt falls apart, the sort of like mining industrial boom that had happened that the Reagan just implodes. And you know, some of this is some of this

is the centralization. Some of this is these jobs go to like the suburbs and ship or like in places like decalb that are just incredibly accursed but real call out there. Man. I look, I'm sorry to anyone who listened to CALB. I wish you best luck fleeing that guys at the CALP Tourist Board sponsorship that we've been looking for. Yeah, but you know, but but tetal Tanacly there's there there. There's another wave of the industrial relation happening in China too, which is that that old third

wave industrial belt that I was talking about. Right, those people had worked in like basically the equivalent of like the Chinese equivalent of sort of like good union jobs. Right, They're they're they're working. They're working for state for state on enterprises, so they have housing, they have healthcare, they have pensions, and all of that is just destroyed. Like all these people lose their pensions, they lose everything. There are like millions of people who are pushed out of

their jobs. And you know when when both both of both of these things happen at the same time, and a lot of companies who are watching the sort of v station companies like like economies collapse, you're watching the vo music Sorry sorry, who are watching the South Korean economy collapse or watching the Japanese economy collapse, suddenly start looking at China, and throughout the course of ninety sort

of more and more American capital. I mean there's already has been capital from East Asia sort of flowing in the China, more and more American capital starts flowing in.

And what you get here is you get this battle between geopolitics and economics, right that the sort of geopolitics side and the sort of like you know that this this this society that like the media is on and the side is that this sort of like the sort of intellectual etcetera, etcetera, like anti China classes on is you know, they don't they don't want to let China into the World Trade Organization. But it doesn't work, right, those guys just get destroyed China. China get submitted into

the World Trade Organization. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush support China entering the w t O. And they do it because they can they can see when I'm partially a little bit of it is because they for some like they they've they've been drinking the kool aid and they believe that like if you have capitalism, then democracy will follow, which empirical data suggesting yeah, okay, sure, sure in thee O CON's like whatever, but you know, but it's also it's also because these these these people

have financial backers, and their financial backs are telling them like, hey, look we can you know, if if if if if like if all of the sort of weird sanction regime ship has worked out, and if trying is fully integrated into the capital system, like we can make a lot

of money. And they do that that this is what the two thousands is, right, like Walmart and like Walgreens and Ship like directly integrate all of their supply lines in Chinese supply lines that make deals with Chinese government in order to do this, and suddenly by you know, by in two thousand one, China's i think, like the fourth exporter of goods in the world. By two nine, they are number one by like an order of mons on order of magnitude. But they're like very very much

the dominant export like world's dominant export economy. And this is a problem, right because on the one hand, you know, if if like American Chinese relations get there, they're actually really good at around nine and eleven are actually really good, right, Like the the US, like there were there. There were guys from sing Jong who like China sends the Guantanamo.

It's like, here, take these people in the U S torch with them for China, like you know, yeah, like relations are like relations are good, right, It's like, well, okay, we both have like this like quote Muslim extremist threat that we're like dealing with, you know, and they try to get on the war on terror. But eventually relations kind of degrade, like you have the whole Olympics thing. You have there's like in Tens there's this whole fight

over these islands that the Philippines claim. But you know, but but the problem with this is it like okay, so you get, on the one hand, a faction of the American right that is really and also and also like there's actually American right that's really really hard line anti Chinese based on sort of racism. There's American liberalism, which you know has this thing about like the rule

space international order that like China's violating. They're also racist, and then there's like progressives like Elizabeth Warred who are also racist and um also but you know who's thing is like, oh, well, workers rights in China are really bad. So we need to do like competition with them. It's like, okay,

that's how do you fix it with more capitalism? Yeah? Right, And but they have a political issue, which is that there's another massive section of American capital that has enormous investments moth sort of financially in terms of where their factories are, where the logistics are, where the supply lines are. That makes them incredibly supportive of sort of close to US Hina relations or at the very least makes them oppose any kind of sort of like real like anything

that goes beyond kind of geopolitical posturing. That makes it harder to do business for them. And this is something that I think people have a tendency to forget when they when they try to think about U. S. China relationship terms of economics, is that like, Okay, so there is the U. S has a military industrial complex, but that's not the that's not the entire U. S. Economy. Like there are other people in the US who have

lots of money. There was an entire financial sector, there was an entire tech sector, and those people also have a ship ton of money. And and then and even even sort of tech companies, right who who have a foot in sort of the American contracting business also often have a bunch of their you know, a bunch of

the places where the technology is built is in China. Right, So you know, even even people who could theoretically be brought into a sort of like like amality industrial complex political coalition against China, like have reasons not to do it.

And you know, and this this works down the board, right if you look at when Trump did the trade war, he you know, initially there was a lot of popular support among sort of like American like mid sized businesses who are like, oh, we can bring industrial capacity back to the U S. And then all of them discovered that they had to pay, like all discovered that, like they had to pay more for their Chinese goods. And we're like, wait, hold on, we fucked up. We've made

a mistake. He's actually screwed us. And like, you know, there's there's another kind of guy, right who there's a lot of people who you expect to be really antc CCP who aren't right, And Elon Musk is the best example of this, Like she's the guy I think they'd expect Elon Musk to fully support anyone who can fully stamp on the face of their working class. Because that's true.

He's the kind of person who you would expect, by pure racism to be like a really hard land ant CCP guy, and he's not, because, like he has, there's a class consciousness I think which overades even apart Tepe boys racism well and and and like he has, the Tesla has this like oh god, it's called the Giga factory, which is a name that makes me want to die.

I mean, but the Giga factories in Shanghai, right, and like he ha, he has even even dream when like the media was like like pretending to care about the weaker genocide, like he opened a showroom and Shing John

like dream that period. So you know, and there's also people like Michael Bloomberg who are for very like you know, if you if you if you if you read Michael Bloomberg talking about China, like in the media, he also talking about like how grave leader Jan Ping is and it's you know, it's because of people have financial interests there and you know, and this this means that like you know, even even the sort of media coverage of this balloon bullshit, right, and like China has been like

threatening revenge or whatever for the shooting down to the balloon, But like this isn't gonna turn into anything, right, It's it's the same in the same way that like the last time I watched like straight stuff like didn't turn into anything, in the same way that like less seventeen goddamn with these scandals isn't gonna go anywhere. And it's not gonna go anywhere because there's a there's an enormous like faction of American capital who relies on this stuff.

I think it serves like the manitary industrial complex and military specifically to have China be like Schrodinger's Next World War right, like like that they're always a threat. That like then they're not a threat, you know, like we can justify so much spending and allocation of resources if if we can always like waive this stick of potential

conflict with China. Yeah, And I think there's something that's kind of like this important to understand is that like both the China Hawks and the China Doves are enemies of both the American and Chinese working classes. Like the China Hawks thing is they want to like you know, they want to put the Chinese American working classes against each other, and it's like nationalist fervor in order to get everyone to ignore the fact that, like both the

societies are collapsing around them. And by the way, did did did we We have not? I don't. I don't think it's this has really made the news yet. But Norfolk Southern fucking basically set off a chemical weapon in Iowa by crashing wanted by crashing a train full of toxic chemicals, and it's it's literally exploding like right now as as fucking to recording this episode, it's on fire. Good.

You know. I love how when you deregulate train industry so that you can have just like one guy working a massive train hauling huge amounts of toxic chemicals, it works out great, happens. It's called efficiency. Yeah, look, a train crash like this would have normally taken dozens of people to engineers, so we have we have improved our efficiency markedly well. And also in terms of efficiency, Robert like, I think how bad it could have been if we

hadn't crossed the rail strikes? Yeah, yeah, there might not be there might not be a giant poisoned gas quad. And what is it Ohio. We can't have that. Yeah, it's Ohio, it's it's Palestine. They don't say American solidarity with palestemical Oh, free, free Palestine. That's what I'm saying. That's been done already, the first the first, This will this will seem like it's in bad taste if a

lot of people wind up dying. But yeah, I also want to mention here that I'm I'm gonna take this opportunity to mention that China is the second large Israel, second largest trading partner, and they do like yeah, and they like they do like security exchanges with each other where people trade each other's military is it's great, It's great. Um, Yeah, But but you know because really, if someone is oppressing

working people, they've done a security exchange with Israel. That is like its golden lore of cup beating you in the head with a stick. It's never more than two degrees removed from the idea. Okay, there's one last thing I want to talk about really briefly, which is Okay, so one of the things you will see people talk about who are like pundits, were like people on the

news talked about this thing called decoupling. And the thing you need to understand immediately is at the moment someone says the word decoupling, you can stop listening to everything they're about to say because they are lying to you,

like it is bullshit. So the what in theory the coupling is this thing where like supposedly, like the U. S And Chinese economy is gonna decouple, right and like all of the American firgoms in China are gonna pull out, and they're gonna pull all their supply jays and they're gonna relocate them to somewhere else in the world. And the US and Chinese economy suddenly were like not be coupled to each other. It's like, no, they're not, Like

this has never happened. It didn't. It didn't Like if it was gonna happen, it would have happened to us in seventeen and like doesn't eighteen when Trump was Trump was doing the trade war. It didn't happen. Then. The only time it's ever happened, or the only time American companies ever sort of pulled out of China like on match or tried to was Ironic Quendries two thousand and eleven.

But in two thousand eleven they are trying to pull out because of the Wukan riots and this like massive surge of strikes in China, and suddenly all these companies were like, oh my god, trying them, might not be able to keep our might be not be able to suppressed the working class hard enough. And then they, yeah,

they got horribly crushed. And one the other thing that happened was like company they like companies tried to go elsewhere and they couldn't do it because no one, like no other countries had the combination of like like things like a stable electrical grid and like working roads, like an actually highly educated population. So like they didn't have all of these things at once. So they all came back and you know that that was that was close

as ever came to happening. Everyone talks about this all the time. They're lying to you ignore them. Yeah, it's it's it's not it's not gonna happen. The the U S And Chinese economies are inextorably bound to each other

and they're going to continue to be. Yeah, I mean, we can't run like our economy to a loge extent on an economy, but our society runs and like providing treats to the working class just enough to prevent them from a battle angle from trying to ractually change anything, and like we can't keep the constant stream of treats running if if we decouple from China, right, like cheap

consumer goods. And also like the Chinese economy relies on like as an expert economy, right like they've they've they've been trying to turn to an internal consumption economy for a decade. It's like not really working because hilariously, it's not working because they don't pay people enough to buy ship and surely no one will ever do that because yeahomy, yeah,

so you know, but yeah it's great. But you know, okay, I guess like the gist of what I wanted to say here is that, like, like us trying to relations are driven by forces that are more complicated than man on TV yell at balloon, and as as powerful as man on TV yell at balloon, seems like in the moment, it's not actually the thing underlying what's going on here, And you need to be able to look past man yell at balloon on TV in order to look at

the sort of the broader, the broader political and social forces that are that are going on here. And I think beyond that, what we need to do is recognized that there's a deep emptiness at the center of American society that should have, in this case been filled by rich people in Cessna's and their friends with high caliber precision rifles flying into the sky and a noble cahote is uh quest to shoot that fucking balloon down? Just

having Sancho Panza, I'm so disappointed in this country. Um, I expected forty or fifty people to die, but that balloon to be taken down. There was a time when we had a country. Yeah, found our founding fathers would have dropped that son of a bit. Yeah. Joe Brandon has forced some mode into retirement. Yeah, and China has revealed anyway. I hope China sends another balloon. Yeah, what else we gonna do? I feel be like a Mickey Mouse fucking Frozen balloon. You know, if they do, like

the girl from Frozen, it'll be cool. I'd like to see that. They should stop pranking us with character balloons. I'd fucking love that. Oh God, but but but but then the US would start sending like the balloon would commissioner Moana balloon to legal for raising fun to happen.

We would have like a balloon based Cold War where the United States starts shooting over balloons across China and the Russians start floating, and it's just yeah, we got a closer balloon Gap becomes the number one world power, green Chili jack boots stamping over the face of humanity some minutary capacity. The developers of Balloons Tower Defense get hauled before a Senate committee for supposedly doing the future God. Yeah, yeah,

we've got a nationalized MYLA production in order to monopolize it. Alright, well the balloon pause. Yeah, I think that's our episode. Yeah all until next time, everybody go forth in balloon. Yeah yeah. Float a balloon into the airspace of a sovereign nation just to talk with them a little bit by Cameron all express, put it on a balloon, send it somewhere. But you can be the c i A. You want to see in the skies over a sovereign country on the balloon spredated on the side. Why not?

Why not? What's the harm? What could possibly go wrong? Let's send up now I'm going to listen. On an unrelated note, I'm finally going to listen to the song Red Balloons for the very first time changes my opinion on what people should do with balloons. All right, everyone out. It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcast from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone meda dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,