[Music] Welcome Friends to another edition of economic update a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children I'm your host Richard wolf before jumping in today's very interesting program with my guest Wilmer Leon whom I'll introduce in the second half I want to remind you Charlie Fabian is here charlie.in 438 gmail.com and again about my new book understanding capitalism available at democracy atwork doino along with all our other books but the understanding capitalism is a way of getting more depth in the stories that I develop and present to
you on this program it's kind of a companion volume I think you'll find it useful and interesting the topics we're going to discuss this morning in the first half is are two topics one short one long the short one is about a strike in uh Philadelphia a union election before a strike but a strike is coming and you'll see why and the second topic is tariffs because president Trump insists on using tariffs more more often on more adversaries we used to call them allies but when you hit them with a tariff they become an adversary
and Mr Trump is doing a great deal of that as fast as he can days into his second term so let's get to it the Whole Foods chain that many of you know about has of course stores in many parts of the United States including Philadelphia at one of the Whole Food stores in Philadelphia the workers petitioned for and signed the cards needed to arrange for an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board in which all the eligible workers at that store could vote Yes they do want a union or no they do not
not this is the way many unions in many workplaces come into existence this was established almost a century ago during the 1930s and the workers in this election had this election and 130 voted in favor of unionization 100 against so there was a very clear margin in favor of joining the union the margin of victory of the workers who wanted a union versus those who didn't was much greater than the 1 and a half% margin that Mr Trump achieved over kamla Harris and the workers joined a particular Union the United Ed Food and Commercial Workers
Union and they named their Union Local 1776 in honor of that important year in the history of Philadelphia and the United States having won by so decisive a margin the workers there expected to be officially recognized by the nlrb which is what is supposed to happen if when you win the election however the lawyers for Amazon let's remember Amazon is one of the biggest corporations on Earth they have an enormous amount of money with which they buy the best lawyers money can buy lawyers for Amazon have now filed motions to deny the nlrb to stop
it from ruling why they gave two reasons one was that some election rules were violated the union denies this this is kind of routine companies that don't want a union do this sort of thing in the hope that they can win in front of the nlrb as you'll see that's what the Amazon folks clearly expect but there was a second reason the nlrb now lacks a quorum it lacks enough enough members on the board to make these kinds of decisions they have to have a minimum number of people sitting on the board a quorum why
do they lack a quorum well it turns out that in the very short time that Mr Trump has been president he fired one board member who did he fire Gwyn Wilcox the only black member of the nlrb and he replaced her with no one thereby depriving the nlrb of the ability to make decisions even routine decisions like this and finally lawyers working for Amazon Starbucks and other Mega corporations like that have a lawsuit going challenging the very existence of of the National Labor Relations Board and my guess is they're hoping this will go to a
supreme court that is mostly prot Trump and they will get the end of the nlrb so there will never be again they hope a union that goes through the Democratic procedures has a vote wins the election and then can't go anywhere here's what we see then a system set up so that if a democratic vote yields an outcome corporations and the governments they control don't like well then they have ways avoiding evading squashing the Democratic vote and what's the lesson the lesson is is the one that KL Marx taught us about the class struggle that
is endemic to the core of capitalism since it organizes every Factory Store and office almost everyone into an opposition between the owner the operator the board of directors on the one hand a tiny minority and the mass of the workers the majority so that more profit can be gained the more the employer squeezes the worker this is a recipe for trouble anger bitterness unions strikes all of it you get capitalism you get this and these violations of democracy are something the companies have to resort to and the government politicians they can control have to resort
to it also all we're seeing in Philadelphia at the Whole Food store is one of the little moments that are happening across the country all the time and especially now with a revived labor movement pushing it's important to understand Trump is hitting every body and his brother with tff Canada Mexico China now in addition Europe and the whole world anybody who has a tariff against the United States will be now hit by a tariff from the United States and let me remind everyone what a tariff is it's a tax Mr Trump is becoming the the
most tax using Republican leader in the history of the Republican party remember the Republicans used to be the people always against taxes now taxes tariffs are a kind of tax a tariff is a tax on something imported into the United States from outside just a tax we have sales taxes income taxes and we have in import import tax taxes which have a special name tariffs so here are the goals Mr Trump enunciates the the tariffs are going to raise revenue taxes is what they do they raise revenue why would he be interested in raising revenue
because he wants the tax cuts from 2017 Mammoth tax cuts one of the biggest tax cut Bills ever that help mostly corporations in the rich they expire this year year 2025 he wants to continue then that means all that Revenue which stopped coming to the government will continue not to be available to the government which can't function so he has to raise taxes somewhere else and he's choosing to do it on tariffs why cuz he could look like the big tough leader who is smiting everybody else to raise money for the government which can't get
it any other way and the second purpose of tariffs he says is to lead companies making things abroad and shipping them back home you know like Apple Computers things like that he doesn't want them to have make jobs overseas and bring them here so by hitting them with a tariff the plan is to do what they call roring bringing the production of these Goods back to the United States cross the shore back in to provide jobs so he's going to raise money and he's going to provide jobs two good things every president always tells us
he's doing whether he is or not however this makes no sense as much of what Mr Trump promises doesn't let me show you if the companies come back if we have reshoring if they stop producing in out there which he says he wants well then they won't be bringing stuff in because they'll be producing it here and if they don't bring the stuff in there won't be any revenue from import duties will there there won't be application of tariff because the goods aren't coming in anymore they're produced here so if you reshore you don't get
revenue from a tariff on the other hand if you do get revenue from a tariff if the companies producing abroad agree to pay the Tariff that's a tax put on the import by Uncle Sam that's paid to Uncle Sam if he gets the revenue it's because they didn't reshore they didn't bring production back home so it's internally contradictory if you resure you don't get much revenue and if you get a lot of Revenue it means you're not ruring getting a lot of Revenue and bringing lots of jobs here ain't going to happen because they're contradictory
but let me go further because it's important why will there be no reshoring or not much it costs a lot of money to take a production facility overseas and bring it back home it's also a question will Mr Trump who's very volatile who does one thing one day nullifies it the next day goes back to it a week later you don't know whether you're going to undertake an enormous expense only to discover a month or a year later that it wasn't necessary you wasted all that money wow then also if it works if a lot
of people buy the goods from abroad but at least pay the Tariff then those goods cost more in the United States and we'll have an inflation it doesn't work it's not thought through this is theater instead of real solutions and so my advice is turn the channel nothing's going to happen here because this is all for show we've come to the end of the first half of today's show please stay with us I think you'll find my guess very very [Music] interesting before we jump in to the second half of today's show I wanted to
thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts uh this year and in particular in the last couple of months and in part responding to that we are extending the availability of our limited edition linen covered hard cover version of understanding capitalism the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while if you are interested I will be signing copies of that hard cover and they will be available to you as they have been uh over the last few weeks just simply send an email to us at
info democracy signed copy of understanding capitalism in its hard back and thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do welcome back friends to the second half of today's economic update it is with real pleasure that I bring for the first time to our microphones and cameras Dr William J Leon III who host hosts the podcast connecting the dots he is a political scientist who concentrates on black politics American government and public policy for 11 years he taught political science at Howard University in Washington D.C he teaches now at
Morgan State University in Baltimore Maryland in addition Dr Leon is a nationally broadcast radio talk show host on Sirius XM satellite radio channel 126 he's also a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular commentator on news programs globally so first of all Wilmer Leon welcome to the show it's a great pleasure and honor for me to join you today thank you for the invitation looking forward to the conversation all right I've heard you speak I've been on your show I've read what you written so I want to jump right into something I know you think about
you follow and you have something to teach us last month there was the announcement of the so-called deep seek achievement in terms of the whole artificial intelligence movement or revolution whatever you want to call it it shook up Wall Street uh I believe uh Nidia lost $600 billion worth of its uh shares stock um and it it brought once again this perennial topic that absorbs us more and more the competition the relationship between China on the one hand and the United States on the other tell me a little bit about how you understand that announcement
the whole deep seek phenomena as it's now called and its effects particularly on China and the US well you know the first thing that struck me was the timing of the announcement it was in my opinion it was a clear shot across the bow of the United States and situations or events like this they I they always make me chuckle because China is just always so strategic it does China does not do anything by accident uh president XI Shin ping uh Wang yei the foreign minister they they are so so calculating and strategic in what
they do as much as the United States tries to bait them into responses or bait them into actions they never take the bait uh it was also it was it was it was announced on the day of Trump's inauguration resulting in this as you mentioned this uh Tech sell off and these much wider concerns regarding silicon Valley's uh overconfidence and might I even say overindulgence uh it's it's because it it's much more open- Source than other models uh it has the ability this deep seek AI has the ability to to distill Advanced reasoning capabilities from
massive massive uh computer models into smaller more efficient counterparts uh I think they call this compact performance uh it's it's another indicator or another indication of the shift in the geopolitical landscape from the unitary hedgemon for which the United States has been uh the leader or or the the unitary hegemon uh postor War II to this now ever growing multi-polar dynamic as evidenced by the bricks um the other thing is you you've got this this number of these so-called brilliant Venture capitalists I think they should now have to answer a lot of questions I mean
they had people investing billions into the development of this product over a number of years uh and all of a sudden this competitor was able to develop in less than a year and less than $6 million uh their solution as I said earlier is an open system and it just needs a fraction of the computing power to operate and use I think this is a GameChanger all right this brings me to a question we have dealt with on this show before it seems that every time China makes this kind of a strategic breakthrough the following
story emerges from the United States in which this is not a technical Advance we should all celebrate in the march of Technology into the future clearly the Chinese made use of things developed in the United States as indeed more and more developments in the United States make use of things achieved in China none of that is stressed instead a story is told in which China is an aggressor that word is used over and over again we here in the United States are the good guys being aggressed by this China which wants to and then the
voice Trails off as if we are all supposed to know what it is that this evil Chinese can you tell us a little bit about what's going on here is this just the effort of an an American Empire being outco competed whether it's in solar panels or electric vehicles or now ai search procedures and so on and you hear the belly aing of the competitive loser or is there something else going on here well I think there are a couple of things one first of all I don't think the US is losing the competition I
think the US has lost the compet ition and what you continue to hear in the United States response to me is projection it's projecting its own mindset and mentality onto China uh the the United States is a failing Empire and it's grasping at anything that it can for the s for survival and there's the adage that the last kicks of a Dying mule are the most dang dangerous um to your point the United States should be celebrating these types of advancements but all it knows is militarism especially since it has de-industrialized industrialized um uh its
economy and its major export is Weaponry so all it really knows to do is Stoke fear and confrontation in order to feed the Savage Beast known as the military-industrial complex I think also arrogance plays an incredible role in all of this it takes me back to the um the meeting in Anchorage Alaska uh during the Biden Administration and uh Tony blankin Secretary of State at the time was meeting with the Chinese delegation and they had to get up from the table and tell Tony blinkin look we're not going to sit here and let you lecture
us we're China damn it we're not going to let you talk to us this way and they got up and walked out so I think arrogance plays a major role in this I heard Minister farakhan say once he was discussing the US invasion of Iraq and he said you don't see with your eyes you see with a combination of your heart and your mind and your arrogance blinds you to making it impossible for you to properly assess the realities that are right before you so if your if your only weapon is a missile then then
every action or every every confrontation is that of an enemy where do you see this China us conflict I mean it seems Now everywhere when Mr Trump was pressed to justify as if he could the idea that the United States is going to quote unquote take back the Panama Canal one of the arguments was that somehow the United States is being cheated by the rates that are being charged and the dev hand of the Chinese are behind you're beginning to wonder you know are we going to blame China for the fires in California are we
going to blame them for you know icy streets in in Midwest has this become the kind of caricature that the old Cold War was where everything is translated into a story of the good guys that's us and the bad guys whoever the enemy is well I think in terms of the US narrative yes but one of the differences I would draw between today and the C war is that now there are there are a lot more players on the field and so and and and and Bricks is the example of that uh Brazil Russia India
China South Africa and what about 14 other countries now something like 70% of the world's population is now in bricks so now whereas uh during the Cold War that was a fight between the United States and the Soviet Union and you had two nuclear peer competitors now the United States uh the the the balance of power has shifted and and and and it hasn't shifted uh in favor of the United States so so to a great degree the United States can't scare anybody the United States can't bully anybody uh not nearly to the degree that
it used to because there are other options available to the smaller countries that would have folded by now uh like Venezuela as it relates to the sanctions regime or Iran would have folded by now uh in in years ago uh but but they don't they don't have to uh uh uh acques to to the pressure because there are other there are other offset offsets available yeah you know reminds me of a story I read in a French newspaper this last week which was commenting on Trump's attacks on Canada by saying China has a limitless demand
for energy the biggest thing Canada exports to the US is oil and gas and they will send it to China they they have a you know they have a common ports on the Pacific Ocean they can go from Canada to China will not be a problem and and and the end result is the bully in and the Bluster will end up isolating the United States almost in economically in the way that the that the uh relationship with Israel seems to isolate it politically in the world well that's what India did as it related to to
Russia and when when Joe Biden told us he was going to turn the ruble into rubble and he put all these sanctions on Russian oil India said we'll take it China said we'll take it and and they uh they they we the United States kicked Russia out of the Swift system and they said well we'll trade we'll trade in in in in Yuan and rubles we'll trade so again the world has has this is a truly evidence of the adage necessity is the mother of invention and also this is why you say it's a kind
of historic inflection point or a historic shift here AB there is no question that we have moved moved away from the unary or unipolar to the multi and and and and we're not going back what would you propose would be a better way for the US to deal with China cooperation cooperation is is to me the the the answer the answer to that question the US continues to shoot itself in the foot by thinking it can sanction its way to dominance and control and this artificial intellig Ence issue reaffirms again the adage that necessity is
the mother of invention the US uh alleged controls on highly Advanced uh on highly Advanced microchips That was supposed to limit the resources available to China and what did they do they just made their own Wilmer Leon thank you very very much as always we're just getting started and the time is up than I hope you'll consider coming back resuming this conversation but on behalf of all my audience thank you very much for your insights and to all of you as usual I look forward to speaking with you again next week
