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Welcome Tock It Happen. Hear a podcast about things falling apart and them continuing to fall apart. I'm your host, Mia Wong with me as James Stout.
Hi. Miya glad to hear about whatever's going to shit today.
Yeah, so before we start talking about imperialism, we're starting everything episode with this until you people stop, until you stop doing this. It is the year two thousand and twenty five. We are a quarter of a century into this millennia and people are still getting kettled by cops on bridges. They did this occupy in twenty eleven. They did it in twenty eighteen during the Occupy Ice protest. The people did it in twenty twenty. People did it last year during the Dream of the Power sign and
Cambus people are doing it again this year. Simply do not lead a march onto a bridge, yep or a tunnel to dai reasons. We would also include a tunnel. Yes, don't do the tunnel either.
Yeah. If there's no side exits, just don't.
Yes, here's the thing. You walk onto a bridge, all the cops have to do is take both exits and everyone on the bridge gets arrested. You can simply not do this. If you must do it, you need to like make one thousand percent sure you can hold both sides of the bridge. Yeah, both of them. You need to hold both of them. Yeah, and almost certainly you can't. So only you, only you, dear listener, can prevent four
thousand more people from getting kettled on locking bridges. And I'm going to keep starting episodes packing well, get it, don't get kettled up bridges until this stop. All right, this is this is this has been me as public service announcement of a bridge kettling. Let's get into the
nature of imperialism and why Trump's is different. So we've been covering a lot of Trump's sort of I don't know, the trade wars, his call for the US to seize the Gouzel Strip, a whole bunch of stories about the way that Trump is using the power of the American state to do imperialism. And I think it's worth actually taking a second to unpack this because things are probably going to get worse. There is a non zero chance that we effectively start a war with Mexico in the next like few months.
Yeah, it's great, it's spanging, everything's going as well.
Yeah, But I want to start with talking about the way that Trump has been using tariffs as as a sort of political weapon and not as an economic tool, but varies very specifically as a political weapon, and how this differs from the previous economic regime because I think there's been a lot of you know, as the terriffs, the threat of the tariffs go up, in the markets
sort of tank in fear of them. There's been a lot of sort of defense of like free trade in ways where I don't think people actually understand what's happening. And to understand how what Trump is doing is different from the stuff that's come before, we need to actually understand what trade is. Now, when an economist talks about trade, they go, oh, yeah, obviously trade is when two countries
exchange a thing, right, yep. But that's not actually what most of the stuff on earth that is labeled as global trade, that's not what it is, right, look at like US Mexico trade. We're gonna go a bit more too detail about what that stuff is, but do you know what most not most, but do you know what a huge portion of US Mexico trade is? It is the same company, the same company moving an auto part from one side of the border to the other, back.
And forth across the body. Yeah. I was gonna say, yes, back and forth.
Right, So it's a lot of different people being paid different wages can make the same thing. Yeah, or if someone paid lower wages can make it, and yeah, someone paid more con Q see it and then they can send.
It back yep. Yeah, very very common.
Yeah. And this is actually a real substantive problem with the way that I think everyone thinks about trade because what is happening here and this is an argument that the anti globalization movement used to make. You know, David Graeber like makes this argument a lot, and they're right, which is that most things that we think of as quote unquote global trade are just a single corporation moving a resource around the world.
So that they can produce something, yeah, and explore labor at thes some impossible exploitation rate.
Yeah, you know. And this means that using nation states as a way to understand trade is an absolutely terrible way to think about the global economy. Right there, there are some things we're thinking about specifically nation state trade, like trade is important because you know, even even the
same corporation moving goods around. Right, that does contribute to how much foreign currency a country right, right, And so okay, there's things like balance of payments where if you run out of it, if you're a country and you run out of American dollars, suddenly you can't employ like fuel anymore in your country, like explodes, And that's a very common way that like this happens in Sri Lanka, for example, pretty recently. This is a way for your economy to
blow up. But that's kind of an edge case in terms of how global trade actually operates. But the problem is that it is to the advantage of the ruling class for you and everyone else to think about trade as something that's like a war between you and the country next to you, instead of a corporation. Like fucking
over everyone involved in the this entire thing. Now, there's a pretty interesting book that I read recently called Border Economies Cities, Bridging the US Mexico Divide by James Gerber Gerber Nix Gerber, Okay, And one of the things he points out is that the two largest trade relations between any country, any two countries on Earth are the US in Mexico and the US in Canada, and those are
the countries with the highest tariffs that Trumple's attempting to apply. Yeah, and it's worth actually understanding what this does by looking at what actually is traded between, for example, the US and Mexico. And the place I want to start is that one of the largest kinds of goods that is moved from from Mexico to the US is computer equipment. And nobody fucking talks about this ever, No one, like zero fucking people talk about this. I am convinced this
is because of racism. But Mexico is a huge sort of like assembly place for a whole bunch of things like monitor screens, like computer equipment in general, and a
lot of that stuff comes into the US. And there's also you know, the thing, the thing that we started this episode on, that's I think the thing I guess talked about the most now is transportation equipment, right, And this is a combination of consumer vehicles and also like heavy duty cargo trucks, yeah, which are unbelievably important for the maintenance of the American economy, right of the entire global economies. Like having these trucks is is if sort
of vital infrastructure thing for the United States. You can move stuff around. A lot of that comest in Mexico. And then also like a lot of it is like whole cars that are like like finished assembly like in Mexico, and they get shipped across the border, and there's a lot of things there. And these are also like all the same international car companies that work in the US.
So it's like Toyotas like Honda, Yeah, I mean these are your American trucks often, right or like yeah, yeah, yeah, four does this too, Yeah, what's GM now Stalares.
Yeah, yeah, like Chevy GM like these as well as like Toyota. Toyota I think has a big planet. I forget exactly where, but along the border is somewhere cool correctly, Yeah, yeah, this is extremely common.
Yeah. And what this is right, like this is multinational capitalist companies who are moving their products across the border. And this gets counted as Mexico doing trade.
You know.
One of the things in one of the questions in this book is about why Mexico's economy never had the kind of economic bump that China did from the amount of industrial production. If you look at like the East
Asian tigers, right. And I think part of that is actually something that is not mentioned in the book, which is if if you look at the East Asian economies that develop their economies that you're talking like Sey, your South Korea's, et cetera schedule like a lot of those countries, like Japan, there was a lot of US military investment there in a way that's just not true of Mexico. Like Mexico is not like a place where you offshore you're supplying your supplies to because you need to move
stuff to you know, fight the war in Vietnam. But you know one of the other reasons is that, Yeah, Okay, so like where is all the profit from the international trade going. It's like, well, it's going to a bunch of American and Japanese car companies. Yeah, because it's it's those those multinationals are the people who actually reap all of the benefits.
Yeah, to a degree, like post NAFTA, right, post ninety four. It has created a class of people in Mexico who have benefited from it, but it has it has not lifted up like like the average income. Right, It's created a greater disparity of income than at any point. Yeah, yeah,
previous to that, and you'll hear people. So I was talking to friend about this yesterday in Tijuana, like, how like what NAFTA did, Like if you look at nineteen ninety four, I think it's a really good example of what you're talking about of Like, yeah, we opened up that border to international companies to do taraff free back and forth, right, but we didn't open it up to people. Yeah. At the same time, we had Operation Gatekeeper, right like
enforced much harsher border enforcement. And the two things in parallel really kind of indicate what the free trade is going for.
Yeah. Yeah, And you know, and this is another old anti globalization thing, like we were talking about. This is like yeah, free like free trade is about the free movement of capital and unfree movement of people, right yeap, is that it's about locking people down in place so you can like you can you can dictate wages to them and then moving capital around the world to avoid them exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, And we're gonna get into this more in a second, but I want to talk about some you know, some of the other things that are that are exported from Mexico fruits, vegetables, alcohol, or like huge exports.
Yeah.
And then also, and this is something that I don't think is people don't understand what's happening very well. Is there's a lot of oil from Mexico that's shipped to the US. But the thing that's happening there, and this is the thing that's very good about the oil industry, is that the refinery facilities are not in the same country as the extraction facilities a lot of the time, So this oil is getting shipped around because they don't have the refinery facilities to like refine the specific kind
of like crude oil or whatever that they're extracting. So like, yeah, it's it's again one of these situations where it's not really like Mexico is sending its oil to the US. It's like, I mean kind of right, that's like one of the more direct ish ones. But largely what's happening is that like again like it's an oil company moving stuff to you know, moving stuff around to do refinement of it so they.
Can sell it.
Now, there's there's been some other stuff happening with Mexico that's a kind of reaction to Trump's previous thing. And I think the extent of this has been overblown to some extent, but a lot of very low end manufacturing stuff has been leaving China for a long time. This is one of my media things on the show is that this has been happening for a while because labor price has been rising in China and one of the
places that these things went to is Mexico. So there's been a lot of like direct investment from trying to
et cetera, et cetera, and all of these things. You know, like these these kind of movements, I'm talking about them because these kind of like seismic global economic shifts, right of the kind that we're going to be see are driven by a lot of things, you know, I mean stuff like currency evaluations, like local tax laws, like state corporate planning policies, like demands or just blah blah blah
blah blah. But one of the single most important things is the state of class struggle in a country and what effect that has on wages or like you know, like straight up uprisings. Right.
Yeah.
The geographer David Harvey, he gets credit for popularizing the term the spatial fix, though other people were already using it, and I don't like his work much, but he did. He is the guy who gets credited with this. He describes, you know, the sort of free trade regime that that persisted roughly through like now. I mean it was it was taking shape in sort of the eighties, like the eighties through like roughly now, as the spatial fix for
declining profitability. Right, you know what else has declining profitability?
Well, I don't know. The worst things get the more people listen to our podcast, and you can say that we are back.
Okay, So let's talk about this, the sort of declining profitability and the fix that capitalism sort of finds fit this, right. You know, through the seventies there's this sort of spiraling unemployment and inflation and the economy is sort of going to shit and it's happening everywhere because they're sort of like structural overcapacity and manufacturing. And the solution to this is a spatial fix, right, which is destroying some manufacturing
capacity and just moving it to other places. Yeah, and you know, and this is this is sort of what James was talking about earlier.
Right.
The goal is to sort of weaken the power of the working class by locking people down into their countries and then moving capital to poorer countries, the weaker labor protections, and also a weaker level of sort of like workers organization, right.
Yeah, and then it leaves like the previously well organized workers, Like if you look at the industries and the places where my grandparents come from, the dog workers and minors, right, those are not really jobs that are employing large numbers of people in the UK anymore. And like as a result, those working class towns are just destituting, you know that
previously thriving a well organized working class. So we had Northern England, it's have to kind of like it has to relocate or reorganize, right, and it destroys those like nexuses of working class power that existed in Britain up until the eighties with a minus strike, right.
Yeah, and this was this was done deliberately, yeah, right, I mean there's there's always a debate in the literature about to what extent, like neoliberalism was like planned, or to what extent it was you know, a sort of
reaction to a bunch of crises. But specifically this kind of like offshoring and they get the container ship is a big part of this, but like this specific kind of thing and even the transition called oil was like was a very deliberate thing done by like done done by sort of American and British politicians in order to sort of break the power like minors unions. And you know, one of the major places that this went obviously like
a lot of these things go to Mexico. The sort of first round of these go to like the original like Asian tiger economies that I was talking about, I mean places like it like Indonesia to with a lot of those comomies sort of like Thaighland, those coconomies kind of blew up in the nineties. Yeah, but you know, one of the largest, most important ones was China. And you know, it's important to sort of remember I've talked about this on the show before. A lot of this
is also the product of Tianman Square. Because the thing that's important to remember about Tianneman is that contra both sort of liberal histories of Tannemen and also the sort of CCP line. Most of the people who died at Tannama were workers, right, Most people who were executed after words, were workers. They were like students died, but it was
mostly workers who were killed. And a lot of what happened there was that, you know, Tianneman was like the last time that China's like trade union federation, which is like now such a joke that it's like it's genuinely a subject of academic debate and discussion as to whether you can even literally consider it a trade union. Like that's it, that's how fuck it is. And the last time that Chinese trade unions took a political stand was
in favor of the Tianaman protests. And then the army shows up and just like like slaughters their base.
Yeah.
And what this does is it makes the old Chinese working class, right, it breaks the alliance with the students that they'd had that was you know, and that was a durable political force dating back to like the nineteen twenties, right, And it breaks this extremely militant, well organized Chinese urban working class, replaces them with a more exploitable and less
organized like migrant working class. And that is the class that like to this day right now is like the engine of global capital or like those like three hundred million migrant workers yea.
And they can be in different parts of the world, right like, well, the.
Other way, the three hundred million number, that's just the microantworkers in China Jesus. To be clear, there are a lot more internationally. Yeah, but yeah, China's market working population is like almost the size of the US. It's like the fourth largest country in the world just by like itself.
It's yeah, that's mad. I was just thinking of today, like the scam compounds which exists on the border between me and mahar and Thailand. Like they actually Thailand just cut power off to them today. I mean, I can see that the strategy there, but it's just going to end up hurting people whore in those compounds more, of
course it is. Yeah, of course those people who are in those compounds used to be able to escape and go to places where they could like get back to their lives, right like like be re taken care of,
And of course that's were funded by USA. So they don't exist as of this week, which is pretty brutal, but like, yeah, these people, right, these these migrant workers who come from all over the world hoping for a chance that the things that capitalism have promised them are the people who have to be exploited so that people in wealthy countries can have their treats.
Yeah, and those workers are the basis of mono global capitalism, right, Like you know, like those Chinese workers for example, like it is it is illegal for them to form an independent union. If you try to form an independent union, you will go to prison so fast that like those dust clouds like.
Hey, like Wiley Charyot will take you to prison.
Yeah. Like, even trying to get your union to like do something like trying to have your own independent people elected to you to that union like canon will get you arrested and like and even like Chinese lbor repression like is pretty intense. But it's like you know that
we're also talking about countries like Columbia. It's like, well, yeah, o, because what happens to union organizers in Colombia's like they get being shopped by paramilitaries with machine guns, right, And that's that's that's what the sort of spatial fix was, right, was moving jobs to places where the ruling classes sort of control was more firm and their ability to use violence was higher. Yeah, And so this is what the American imperial system sort of had been, right. It's based
on American capital flowing around the world. And this is also like international capital too, right, Like we've literally been talking about like Japanese corporations right doing like the same shit, right, But you know, it's like international capital flowing around the world, extracting resources and labor from other countries and accumulating it in American corporations like that. That's what free trade is.
Yeah.
And it's also you know, secondarily, right, it is a debt system. It's based on forcing countries to like pay back loans that were taken out by dictators Gogury de Draber's debt least five thousand years. It's very good. But yeah, it's it's it's based on like turning entire countries into just debt servicing engines or like all of the wealth that is produced by the entire nation is just going to like pay debts to Bank of America. Yeah, and you know the thing about this is that this is
actually a very very efficient model of empire. It's one of the most sophisticated imperial systems that the world has ever seen.
Right.
It workstremely well. It makes the US an unbelievable amount of money, It protects global capitalism, and the people currently running it don't want it to work like that. Now, do you know who else, it doesn't want the current system to work like it does because they can make more money. I can guess it's the products and services for this point, excited to hit which one we get?
You know, it can be it could be anything. I really at this point, who knows?
We are back? So we've entered I guess what you could call the phase of mask off imperialism US imperialism usually at least sort of like war human face. And and it did it for good reason, right you know, Ronald Reagan did not give a single shit about democracy and human rights, right like, like you know, and this is this has been true of the US for like ages and ages and ages, right you know that like
they prop up right wing military dictatorships constantly. But the thing is democracy and human rights are things that like people like, and so you know, it was it's it's a weapon that he and and his sort of brand of conservatives, like anti communist conservatives like, wielded it against communism. And it was a very very powerful ideological weapon because if if if your choice ceases to be between like communism and capitalism, and your choice is now between like
do you want to live in a dictatorship? But do
you want to live in a democracy? Like that's a very different question, and it's it's a very very important question for sort of how how the Cold War was won and how international power is wielded, right, because there's there's always been an illusion that there's an international community in that countries are like working together and this is this is a very very powerful ideological thing, you know, I mean, and this is something like you live through this,
God probably listen to you didn't leave to this now, dear God. But like like the Iraq War, right, the US didn't unilaterally invade Rock now. Now. It was called the quote unquote Coalition of the Wilding and included like like they dragged Australia in the war by threatening to like destroy their like milk shipping contracts with the Iraqi government.
Like so you know, yeah, you had all kinds of people running around in the Rock for a while there, I guess. Yeah, obviously the United Kingdom played a big role in it, like an outside troll, given being a relatively small country.
Yeah, and you know, and this this, this is the way that you do you know, even just overtly straight up imperialis stuff like it like invading a rock right was still done under the auspices of like multinational like coalitions.
Yep.
And the thing about different about Trump is Trump doesn't give a fuck about any of that, right, absolutely not. He has turned on Rob Ford, a man who is like who boldly answers the question what if Trump smoke crack like that is Rob Ford. Like he's he's turning on his allies, like like right wingers who should be his allies in Canada, right, who are exactly the kind of people who you would expect to do sort of
like right wing multilateral interventions in countries, right. Yeah, and you know he is caused with his like threat to put terifs on, like he's caused these people to become anti American. And this is the same thing with Mexico. Right, Even the sort of like the nominally center left governments in Mexico like have cooperated with American impulism. But Trump doesn't want to fucking do that anymore. He wants to run everything just very purely and very openly as as an American empire.
Yeah, Like America's always bullied Mexican. Right, when we talk about the deployment of troops to the border Biden absolutely bullied Amlo into into bringing those troops to the border because they came before Donald Trump even came into office. But now Donald Trump's just doing it on true social Yeah, like it's it's it's different or Panama fuck. Like, you know, I was in Panama September of twenty four and I went to the Canal Museum, and Panama like is very
proud of its history of independence. Right it's relatively short, yeah, and hardened and paid for in blood. But like, yeah, I traveled. I'm a US city Cinea traveling. You know, one gave me any shit. It was fine. Everyone's very nice to me. Now the burning American flags in Panama City, like yeah, yeah.
Because CRUP is trying to take the Panama Canal back. And before we get into like you know, I mean, I guess we can get into. Hear some of the stuff that he's doing. Right, He's pulled out of the
International Criminal Court and it's putting sanctions on it. He has been trying to use the sanctions that he's been threatening to apply to Canada to get Canada to join the US, Like he is trying to conquer Canada, right, fucking silly, Yeah, he's he's been trying to he's been trying to force the government of Denmark to buy Greenland, sell Greenland, right, like he wants to purchase Greenland from them. Yeah,
he wants to buy Greenland. Yeah, there was. There was the whole sort of showdown with Colombia over Columbia's like being pissed off about the treatment of deportees to Columbia and he used sanctions. There there is again him saying the US is going to take over Gaza and this is a very very substantively different thing than the than the kind of American empire that we've had before. Right, Yeah, the last time the US tried to take Canada was
eighteen twelve. Right, it's been like two hot years. This is how Britain returns to the world stage, right, And the thing is last time, the last time in the US try to take Canada, they burned the capitol down, so like you know, but like like this is something that even even under like like people like Bush, right, who is like a Bush is like a very very vert American imperialist. Right, Yeah, Bush would never try to invade
Canada like that. Yeah, that's that's completely unhinged, right, and this is this, This is just a very very different kind of imperialism than than what existed before. And I wanted to go into I think why this is the case? Yeah, and I think the reason why this is the case. Okay, So the reason that there's been such a defensive free trade is like people being like, oh my god, he puts tariff in place, it'll raise prices, and like, yeah,
that's true, right, we'll crash the global economy. The global economy has been turned into a very very efficient engine of extracting profit from countries and putting them in the hands of corporations. Right, it's working exactly how Trump wants to work.
Now.
If the US wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that is technically possible. Right, Reagan was able to do this. But what Reagan did instead of doing tariffs is that well, I mean kind of you. But like the main thing that he did was this thing called the Plaza Accords. And the Plaza Accords was this this thing in the
eighties where he forced Japan. Japan was the important one, but like Japan, West Germany, I think there are a couple other countries like he forced them to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar, because like you know, so if if you have a currency and it's worth a bunch of like another person's currency, so like you know, you have like the dollar and it's worth like a million, like yen or whatever the fuck, right,
the currency that's worthless has a more competitive manufacturing economy. And Reagan was able to like restart the American like manufacturing economy for a while by doing this. But the problem is that it blew up the entire world economy.
And so to save the world economy, Clinton rolled back the accords and it, you know, and that was the thing that actually finally sort of like a viscerated American manufacturing and the exchange here was you know, and all the stuff that I've been I've been talking about for the last like a few minutes. So there's a very very good essay written right after two thousand and eight called What's good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America
by the economist Robbert Brenner. And what the strategy became, and this is a strategy that was originally pioneered by Japan that we took was instead of having like a manufacturing economy like actually a production based economy. You have an economy based on the value of assets, right. So assets are things that you own, right, It's the stocks, bonds, like real estate, which is important for our purposes, and the goal is to make the value of those things
go up. Right. And so what you do is you speculate on you take out loans, You speculate on the prices of stocks going up, the prices of houses going up right, and you know, you make it very easy to borrow money. Now, obviously this produced a series of like staggering economic collapses, including like the dot com collapse two thousand and eight with you know remember that one. But the thing is, in the wake of the financial collapse, the US mostly figured out how to sort of stabilize
the system. But the thing is, you know, they were sort of able to stabilize the system economically, right, what they couldn't stabilize was the political sector. Where if you look at the two people who are currently running the United States, it is Elon Musk, who is the human personification of the stock price goes up bubble economy, right, and the other one is Donald Trump, who is the
human manifestation of the real estate class. Right, whose wealth like believe enormously and the thing is right, But because Elon Musk is like a tech bubble, go up guy, right, those people don't think like the people who built like American financial capitalists, right, like the people who designed the tratism. They don't think the same way Trump does. Trump is a fucking real estate guy, right, And this is how he sees the world.
Right.
He thinks in terms of land and borders and territorial control. And he thinks in terms of like what physical thing can I steal from someone in order to make money? Right, and that you know, this is why he's trying to steal the Panama Canal and and he thinks this way instead of like things that are more abstract like debt servicing and like you know, the sort of lines of power in the coalition building.
Right.
He looks at a map of Greenland and goes, this looks really big. I want it and so and now he's going to try to use the American empire to just seize this.
Yeah, he sees things in terms of like raw power. It's a very uh.
Undeveloped notion of like power, right, Like, yeah, I thinking the other day, like whoever is in the same room as Joseph Nye must be having a fucking field day right now.
At the guy who he was. He wrote books about soft power, right, the idea of the US power to persuade rather than power to kind of whether there rare than like hard power, which comes in tanks or tariffs. I guess Joseph n is no longer relevant.
Yes, yes, no, we're we're back. We're back in pure hard And something I think is renal very alarming that I want to close on is the extent to which, like the US media is just sort of just once. Do you propaganda for it? Yeah, I'm gonna I'm going to read a quote from a CNN artic Again, this is CNN quote. The subject heading is the US has been expanding for its entire history. This is an article, oh, the title of which is Trump is Trump wants to redraw the map of the Western hemisphere for fan's.
Sake, like twenty twenty five Monroe doctrine posting on CNN literally literally literally, Okay, okay, you are so far ahead of this thing, because the next I'm going to read the one I was going to read first, uplift civilized and christianized. What's next paragraph?
The next section heading is and I quote what is Trump's doctrine? And explains the Monroe doctor.
For fox sake, this is I cannot explain how like I have taught this as a thing in history classes for more than a decade from the perspective of like that was fucked up and shameful, and even the conservative suite to like, yeah, hard agree, look at these racists as fuck cartoons about Filipino people. That the way that we're using here to justify this, and now we are back like it is and like, yeah, CNN is just out there like fucking cranking the manufacturing consent.
That's not even the worst part about it, Like I want to read the session. So one of the other sections headings is the US has been expanding for its entire history sick quote expansion. Expansion is built into the American DNA SYS Retired Ambassador Gordon Gray, now a professor of practice at George Washington University and former Foreign Service career officer.
Yeah, like an angel sweeping across the planes, fucking manifest destinies.
Yeah, yeah, it's we're you know, and this is this is this coming all sort of coming into like the way that Trump thinks about which Trump thinks about the US, like like an eighteenth century land empire.
Yeah, yah, yeah, yeh.
Eighteenth century land empires, you know, got money by conquering people and like extracting tribute from them directly. And then also you know they were mercancilst empires, right, so they they got they got a their money. And this is something that Tropic suposedly talks about. It is like he wants he thinks he can raise revenue from like terrorists, which like, no, he can't, but like what he can do is use the threat of tariffs to like force countries to do whatever the fuck he wants. And this
is the kind of imperialism that we're in now. It is a definite substanctive break from what we've seen in the US for a century, more than a century. Yeah, and I think I think it's important for people to understand exactly how this functions.
Yeah, and yeah, it's sick. We're going into the new opium Wars. It's going to be so fun.
Yeah, it's great, Bob, this is this spanikot appen here. Do not get kettles on bridges go out into the world and make trouble.
And people want to read more about the early like globalizing, the previous year of neoliberal globalization, Like Naomi Klein has some good stuff, and I think Joe Stiglitz does as well, so we can Yeah.
Yeah, I also recommend David Graeber's direct action in ethnography, which is him writing about the original like anti like ult globalization protests and his like time in them. Yeah, so you know, if you need direct action ideas, they did some fun stuff. Yeah, dressing guys up like marshmallows and police batons and bounce off the great Yeah, bring back clown Block.
That'll get us through it.
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