Note-taking: Global Capitalism: What Trump 2.0 Means – Democracy At Work on YouTube

01.27.25 - Starting a new segment on notes I take on interesting content I'm watching or reading. I'm just providing notes at this time, and not my own perspective, but I invite discussion and feedback! I also encourage checking out the original source material.

This lecture seeks to answer the question of what the election and new administration is doing, why they’re taking these actions, and what we can expect.

 

We live now in weird times. We live in the decline of the Empire.

 

Sign of Decline 1: The United States lost the war in Vietnam, lost the war in Afghanistan, lost the war in Iraq, and are losing the war in Ukraine. Losing the war is defined by the Communist Party in Vietnam continuing to run the country. Same with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

 

Sign of Decline 2: Indonesia, with a population of 280 million people (US has 330 million), has joined the BRICS as a full partner. BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. This is an alliance of ‘Global South’ nations in purpose of independence from the domination of the United States. The People’s Republic of China is the largest economy in this alliance. The BRICS, with Indonesia, have 22 countries and 55-60% of the world’s population. In comparison, the United States is only 4.5% of the world’s population. “In the words of Mickey Mouse, uh-oh!”

What is the total output in goods and services of a country in a year? This is a measure of a country’s importance and footprint in the world. The BRICS are about 36% of the world’s output. The United States and its major allies, the G7 (US, Japan, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Spain) used to be the dominants in world trade. G7 now accounts for about 28% of the world’s output. The BRICS is what the US used to be and no longer is.

 

Wealth is sought in the East, not the West. You go to Beijing first to finance your railroads, then maybe London. Everything is changing in the world, but the United States is experiencing a severe cognitive dissonance in processing this shift.

 

The Make-Believe: How many people in the US even knew about Indonesia joining the BRICS? How many people even know about the significance of China’s growing economy?

 

Sign of Decline 3: 15 years ago, every automotive manufacturer was trying to develop the ‘next wave’ in the car business – moving from gasoline cars to electric vehicles. Sidenote: Professor Wolff believes that this is stupid and a waste of resources, because it doesn’t address the fundamental waste of private car ownership. Rational would have been going from private car to rational and functional public transit system. Cheaper, more efficient, better for the environment. Who invented the electric car as the solution to the gasoline consumption problem? Elon Musk. He found a way for automobile companies to generate a profit from switching to electric. 3 years ago, the winners were clear. The BYD Company won the electric vehicle production, but we have no clue because we don’t see them in the United States. Trump’s tariff, raised by Biden. A 100% tariff on electric vehicles from China.

 

Understanding tariff: A tax on an imported good. A 100% tariff on a $30,000 vehicle means you would have to pay $60,000 in total, split between the government and the company. No one will buy the Chinese-made vehicle. Ford and General Motors domestically sells a vehicle for less. So who benefits? American companies, at the expense of the American public.

 

“Whenever you hear a capitalist tell you about what they’re doing to protect jobs, hold onto your wallet – someone’s reaching.”

 

Say you are an American producer, of shirts, of chairs. We’re competing with global enterprises. Brazil gets to buy better electric vehicles from BYD for $30k. We have to buy inferior vehicles from Ford for $40k. In the economic game, China is winning and the US is losing. The game is not different, but the US refuses to acknowledge this truth.

 

Mr. Trump is a problem – his rise from New York playboy to President was because he understood that America’s masses are remarkably alienated from both the Republican and Democratic Parties, that the people know that we’re not being serviced by our representative parties.

 

Everyone’s budgets are squeezed and everyone is in debt, even our corporations and our government. We are a debt nation. The name of a corporation so in debt that they can’t even service the debt is the zombie corporation. Endless debt.

 

The United States owes China $850 billion dollars. A portion of all the taxes we pay is collected by the US government is shipped to China to pay the government’s interest. Same with Japan. These loans enable the US to fight our wars. It doesn’t make any sense.

 

The situation on Ukraine is that war would end almost immediately if Americans had to pay for that war. However, it is being financed through loan money from China. China, which supports Russia against Ukraine. What a foul system. The empire is declining.

 

We don’t produce the bulk of the world, we don’t control the bulk of the world’s trade. The US dollar, which used to be the dominant global currency in the 50s-70s, is no longer the case. Central banks went from holding 70-80% US dollar to just 40%.

 

So back to Trump – who could recognize Americans being financially squeezed. Every empire follows the same procedure to responding to the decline. The rich and powerful always offloads the difficulties and burdens of the decline to those beneath them. The emperor in Rome didn’t suffer the same way the common people did. One way or another, the working class becomes squeezed for money. So in naivety, we turn to the political parties, who cannot help us. Either party will tell you whatever they want to hear, but both refuse to speak the truth.

 

The only rational response is to be honest about the decline and come up with ways to get through together, but that’s socialism. And we can’t do socialism in this country.

 

Squeeze 1: we’re going to demonize unions, painting them as crooks who steal your dues. Our labor movement is slowly reviving, but it is coming LATE in the game of decline.

 

Squeeze 2: inflation, that mysterious force. Inflation has gone up faster than average wages and salaries. If the money you have to spend is not going up as fast as the prices, there will be things we’re not going to be able to afford anymore. Real special things, like eggs. This is a type of squeeze on the working class. You will not find a media outlet that will honestly admit that inflation is a decision made by certain individuals to set prices to goods to a point you cannot afford. The employer sets the price of the goods. 3% of Americans are employers. We, the 97%, have to pay up. Inflation is a way for an employer to give you less goods for the same amount of money.

 

Squeeze 3: The increase in interest rates to address inflation. That little bit of money you have to pay on your credit cards at the end of the month gets bigger. This does not hurt the rich, only the poor. This is like New York’s congestion pricing. Taxing everyone the same… a truly American solution. It’s not like the increase in interest rates is the only fix. Let’s look to the last time inflation was incredibly bad, which was following the Vietnam War. Money was printed, and a lot of people were suffering. President Nixon, the Conservative Republic president, declared a wage price freeze on the 15th of August. The CHAMPION of anti-communism threatened to arrest any business that raised their prices and the next day, inflation was fixed.

 

Squeeze 4: In the 1940s, the US joined the World War II. At the time, our economists included famous Marxists and socialists, because they were considered to be staunchly anti-fascist. These leftist economists went to Roosevelt and told him that the US would have a shortage of consumer goods because of the necessities of war. This problem of shortage, of not enough ice cream and toasters and clothes, in a market system manifests as inflation. When there is a scarcity of goods in the market system, the market system allocates all the scarce goods to those with the most money. Do you really want to live in the economy that distributes all that is scarce to those with the most money? The rich couple can afford to buy the expensive milk and feed their cat. The poor couple will not be able to afford it to feed their children.

 

“That is what we, in academia, call bullshit.”

 

So Trump could recognize this squeeze, and he could see that the conventional Republican and Democratic parties are failing. He’s going to be outrageous and say all the horrible racist, misogynistic, appalling things. He’s going to be different. And in a situation where you can feel the squeeze and neither party is doing anything? You’re going to vote different. Because why not?

 

We had a leftist ‘different’ guy. We had Bernie. The Democrats shut Bernie down. How well is that going for the Democrats?

 

What to expect from Trump?

He will continue to be ‘different.’ American craziness.

Case 1: The end of Netanyahu – life and career. Israel hitched their wagon to the American horse centuries ago and they’re losing. To the whole world, Israel and the United States will go down in history as complicit in this ugly, failed genocide and war in Gaza. They were not able to defeat Hamas nor fully eject the Palestinian people from their homelands. The ceasefire decision is the United States deciding to pull out of a losing race, and Israel depends on the US. This will not save the declining empire. Hamas will inherit the rage and fury of 2.5 million residents of Gaza watching their family be slaughtered by Israelis, by Americans; generating a bigger threat to Israel in the future. It’s a miserable and silly spectacle that a majority of world nations could recognize as such. 150 nations in the UN on the side of Palestine compared to those in favor of Israel and the US.

 

Case 2: Ukraine, and the problems that began following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After NATO took over progressively, Russia and Putin said no, not Eastern Ukraine. The US spins this as a matter of a big country invading a smaller one and begins the war in Ukraine. Big mistake. What was Afghanistan? What was Vietnam? The United States sounds miserably hollow when it says it goes to war to defend smaller countries from larger countries’ invasions. Everywhere else but the US can see this silly spectacle. The nuclear weapons are useless in the case of Ukraine, because the other sides have them too. In conventional warfare, Russia has the advantage. Think about Napoleon, think about Hitler, their failures in Russia. The United States, fat off of fighting the poorest nations in the world, has decided to fight a war of sanctions. Ruble to rubble, said Biden. A fantasy. Russia is part of the BRICS, and just sold their oil and gas to their alliances. Total failure. The Russian economy is beating the United States economy. Russia can fight forever.

 

Turns out war can help solve economic problems; that’s what the United States did following the Great Depression! The failure to anticipate this represents an empire in decline.

 

The United States is heading into decline and seeing that the decline trumps everything else. Do not become too preoccupied with the circus antics of the presidency.

 

On ICE raids: Say Trump does deport a large amount of people back to Mexico. The US will still be in decline. Mexico’s economy is highly influenced by remittances – the money of people working in the US sent back home. Say this suddenly gets stopped, and it happens at a time where Mexico is also being hit with huge tariffs from its primary buyer of outputs, also the US. So Mexico’s economy will be devastated. This disaster will remind people of Haiti. On a global perspective, this will not be seen as the moves of a powerful nation. This is the chaos that comes from the denial of decline in the US.

 

What is coming is not related to what Trump does or doesn’t do. Our nation of denial is constantly miscalculating, not just with our internal politics but with international actions too. What happens to you and me depends on what the rest of the world does to navigate the decline of the US empire. Watch what Xi Jinping does. Watch what Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo will do to navigate Mexico out of this disaster.

 

The United States is not leading anything with its 2.7% growth. China is growing by 5%. India by 7%.

 

Will the American people allow themselves to be the ones who gets screwed as the empire collapses? We are the unknown variable. Will we make coalitions and demands?

 

There are think tanks all over America asking these questions, and they are worried that the answer is yes. Is the labor movement where it needs to be? Chris Smalls out in Staten Island. Boeing workers in the West Coast rejecting contracts. It is MORE in your hands than you realize. Our elites are denying the reality of the world and the conditions are pretty good for the working class to act. The Cold War mentality is dead and young people are more open to left-wing politics than before.

 

We have a president who’s plan is to be a tough guy and blow shit about things the US can no longer do. Take advantage of this time and work together to make an enormous difference.