Ep 325 - Tariffs, Tooth Fairies & Trade with Fadhel Kaboub

“When you are a dominant empire like the US, economically, militarily, geopolitically, and you make bets that are exclusively based on power rather than technology, innovation, research and development, education, a growing prosperous middle class, history tells us that you will eventually fail. And that's the ugly reality.” 

Like most media nowadays, we seek to make sense of the confusing, contradictory, and often absurd Trump policies. So of course we turn to our best friend and most frequent guest, economist Fadhel Kaboub.

Fadhel suggests that Trump has two missions: reinforcing the US imperialist-dominant position that is currently under threat, and reinforcing his legacy, the MAGA movement, and the supremacy of the Republican Party for years to come. Ironically there are even two Elon Musks in the White House: 

“There's Elon Musk, Twitter, and there's Elon Musk, Tesla, and the other tech stuff. The interest that the Trump administration is going to serve is not Tesla. It's going to be the Facebooks, the cloud technologists ... the techno-feudalists who run the world today.   

“The importance of the techno-feudalists is that they don't actually manufacture things, they don't produce things. They control the cloud, they control the mind, they control your feelings, your choices... not just consumer choices, but political social worldviews are controlled and manipulated by social media and by the big data centers that collect and analyze and feed you choices and filter the news and filter information for you.” 

In their discussion, Fadhel points out the absurdity of thinking tariffs will “bring back jobs” to the US. He also explains that companies like Apple aren’t manufacturing in China for cheap labor, but because China has the high-skilled workers. Instead of investing in education in the US, Trump boasts of making cuts.

Fadhel explains that Trump’s negotiation strategy relies on creating chaos and confusion. In comparison, China’s path is starkly different, including creation of the digital yuan as an international payment system to bypass SWIFT and the dollar.

Fadhel and Steve remind us that both US political parties are guilty of perpetuating the false narrative of fiscal constraints. As always, listeners are challenged to question the prevailing mainstream rhetoric and look for the deeper motivations behind it.

Fadhel Kaboub is an associate professor of economics at Denison University (presently on leave) and the president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He’s the author of Global South Perspectives on Substack.

Find his work at globalsouthperspectives.substack.com 

@FadhelKaboub on Twitter