#123. Josef Gregory Mahoney: The Fix Is In
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What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. I'm Justin. If you've been enjoying the show, go ahead, rate, comment, and subscribe. And as you guys know, sometimes we like to dance around the subject of politics on the show, but today we dive deep, right into the heart of the matter on politics and political science. Our guest is a professor of politics and international relations at

at the East China Normal University, is the Executive Director of the International Center for Advanced Political Studies, is also the Associate Editor of the U.S.-based Journal of Chinese Political Science, and in a former career, he was an epidemiologist working at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. This was a fascinating conversation. So, without further ado, please give it up for Professor Joseph Gregory Mahoney. ♪ She's gonna die, she's living in a mother's body.

Joseph, thanks for being here, man. Thanks for having me. You're drinking Perrier. We're drinking a little bit of whiskey, but you were talking about

um you don't drink alcohol anymore is that purely for health reasons it is yeah about five years ago i i just changed my my lifestyle i dropped alcohol i didn't drop red meat immediately but um during the pandemic i dropped red meat i found that my digestion was better and i slept better and uh and at the same time because i'm 52 and um

You know, I have a lot of friends who are my age, but a little bit older. And some of them were encountering prostate cancer. And it was, you know, the latest research was saying that, and I'm not saying this to anger the beef industry. No, go ahead. No, that beef appears to be significantly linked with cancer. There's a correlation there. With cancer and especially prostate cancer.

Is that red meat in general or particularly beef? I think it's red meat in general, but I think it's beef in particular because of, I don't know the biochemical reason. I'm not that kind of doctor, but I had some friends who, one guy who was just a few years older than me, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And the doctors told him to go vegetarian. Okay.

Right. And these were Southern doctors. This was in Southern United States. These aren't people who casually, you know, make a recommendation. This is in Memphis, Tennessee, the barbecue capital. Well, one of the barbecue capitals of the so-called world. But anyway, and he, because the alternative was, you know, at a relatively young age, he would have to have surgery.

once you have that kind of surgery, it can affect all sorts of things that you may not be ready for it to affect. Yeah, for sure. And so he took the step of going vegetarian, and it went into remission. Wow. Was that all he changed? Or he must have been on other medications, stuff like that? Or chemo? No, no chemo. No. You know, so there's a lot of new research in cancer in recent years, the extent to which it's

It's linked to viruses or injuries or the extent to which it's linked to certain inflammatory properties of the food that you're eating. So I think that there's a lot that we're just really starting to figure out. And so it was funny because I was at a meeting in Yunnan recently. It was a global poverty governance conference.

meeting there are a lot of diplomats and there was this one friend of mine she's a famous media person from Beijing and she's from Pakistan and I and I had just you know I just recently you know discovered my high horse of you know you shouldn't eat beef and so I said well you know beef gives you cancer she said that's nonsense and

And she said, "Look up what the prostate cancer rate is in India," because India, so many Hindus who don't eat beef, "and it is well below the global average." And so then I flipped to Pakistan where they love to eat beef, but they also, if you don't eat beef, they accuse you of becoming a Hindu.

And so it's become like a cultural thing where you have to like, you know, prove your Pakistaniness or whatever it is by eating beef. And their rates of prostate cancer are much higher than the global norm. So then she was like, damn.

But the good news is, you know, she doesn't have a prostate. So... Well, you got me questioning my own kind of diet. Yeah. It's really complicated because, you know, you think, well, if I cut red meat or if I cut beef, you know, obviously I'm losing certain types of nutrition. You know, some people, they need the iron. For example, some women certainly need iron. You can get iron from different sources, of course, but...

Um, the other side of it is, okay, you say, all right, well, I'm going to eat more fish and chicken, which is what I do. But then you have to worry, well, how much or how many hormones am I getting in the chicken? And, you know, um, and mercury and fish and mercury and fish and Fukushima and fish. So you, you don't know that you're necessarily trading, uh, you know, for something better, good for bad or something like that.

Joseph, you're from the state yourself, right? That's right. Where are you from again? It's a complicated answer. I mean, I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and I grew up in many different places, but primarily rural Alabama. Finished high school in Memphis, went to university in Washington, and spent most of my professional career in the states in Washington, Atlanta, and Michigan. Wow.

I didn't know this about you, but I saw in one of your interviews, I think you mentioned that you were formerly an epidemiologist and you worked for the U.S. Center of Disease Control? That's right. My first graduate degree was in public health and epidemiology. I did my research there.

in a cholera hospital in Bangladesh. And then about that time, this was 1994, USAID, which funded the research that I did, started cutting funding for international public health and started bringing money home. And so there was a hiring freeze at that time during the Clinton-Gore administration. And I had an opportunity to do a second master's

And so did that, but quickly, and then accepted a couple of fellowships

at CDC that then matured into a full-time position. And then after a couple of years, I transferred up to Washington to a higher level position in the Department of Health and Human Services, but then became disillusioned with government service and went to live and work in Shenyang for a year before going back to do a PhD. What were you disillusioned about? Was it just like the bureaucracy of it all? No.

Well, I'm going to be careful in how I say this, but quite candidly, it was the corruption. What kind of corruption, if you don't mind talking about that? Okay, so I won't say the name of the group that I was working for in D.C., but it was a group that was responsible for...

doing really big economic studies related to health, right? And these studies would yield all sorts of information because we had access to all the data. And, you know, if you could like find just even a little bit of useful information, you could save millions of dollars in terms of Medicare or Medicaid expenses, right? The U.S.,

federal health supports for old people or poor people. And one of the things that the group found is that a very high percentage of the back surgeries that were being done in the United States were unnecessary.

not only unnecessary, but were very costly and putting a lot of physical stress on people, right? And many people would be significantly diminished by the back surgeries.

And so this paper discovered this and released this finding, and a powerful surgeon who was a member of Congress had our budget zeroed out. Wow. Right? Unless we retracted the paper. And so we did retract the paper. You left without a choice.

I think we had a choice. I think what should have happened is that agencies should have stood up and said, "We're here for the American people. We're not going to let surgeons hack you up and cut you up and have you pay for it as taxpayers." That's, to me, an abomination. I can't imagine working for that type of organization. But out of their own narrow self-bureaucratic interest, they withdrew the paper.

There were other things. There were things related to, since I've named Clinton, Clinton had something called the Children's Health Initiative. And what he did was he was talking about how this was adding all of these resources to protecting children's health.

But actually what we did was we were told to go find every program that already existed that had anything that could be packaged or presented as being related to children's health. And we would repackage that as a new type of program. But at the same time, any place where we found opportunities to cut programs,

We were cutting programs. So anyway, yeah, there were other things. But there's no reason to talk about it. To be honest with you, I had started it off after my bachelor's degree working in finance. And I became disillusioned with that. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll go to work in government. And then I saw, okay, well, it's also corrupt in government. So then I thought, okay, I'll go, I'll transition to academics. And then I ended up...

becoming a political activist and a professor and then getting bought out and blacklisted from my last university position in the United States.

Which is what led me to China. So there's corruption in academics too. That's kind of like, I think everyone kind of just waking up to that now these days. Well, I think what it is, is that, you know, in starting in the 80s, but really accelerating in the 90s, depending on like which school you're at, because it, you know, there's more than 3000 colleges and universities in the United States.

what they call the expansion or the taking over the business model in higher education, right? Where it fundamentally transformed higher education and turned it into a business

It's also where we begin to see the exponential increase in the cost of going to school, right? And there you have these higher education functioning as a powerful lobby, lobbying the federal government to consistently increase

the student debt limits, and this is where we start getting into the student debt crisis, right? So all of that is something that was taking place. And at the same time, universities were getting more and more in bed with business. So, you know, if you work for a university, you can't

really criticize the local government because then you run the risk of the university budget being threatened or something else. You can't criticize industry because they're now funding and have positive financial relationships with the university. And in my case, the first thing that I got in trouble for was we successfully organized a union

because part of the business model is they want to break faculty governance. They want to increasingly rely on adjunct labor and adjunct labor is part-time teachers. And so the one- - Why, is it cheaper that way? - Oh, much cheaper. - Plus you don't have to worry about benefits and stuff like that either. - It's much cheaper. It's basically piece work. In other words, you get paid like maybe $1,500 to teach a class

that students will actually pay more to take the class than you get paid to, you know, like one student will pay more than, will pay like two, $3,000 to take a class. And you know, you it's not just that you don't get benefits, which obviously is a big deal. But the real problem is that when you are a regular faculty member, it's not just that you have benefits, you have rights and you can participate in faculty governance.

So when you instead are, I think the university where we organize the union, 70% of their courses were being taught by adjuncts. That's how crazy it had gotten. And that figure is not an outlier. A lot of universities had moved to this model.

But in order to enact the business model, what you need is a business structure, which means you can't really allow your school to be ruled by the faculty senate. What you need is a president who can make executive decisions and manipulate, either crush the faculty governance or simply manipulate it, right?

And so I saw that happening firsthand and became part of the effort to try to resist it. And ultimately, that led me down a certain path of activism, which...

Like even like once you, once you start down a path and people become aware that you're going down a path, it's hard to get off the path because you will have people who are constantly encouraging you and saying, Hey, you're our guy, but you'll also have people who are trying to, uh, push you. Like people who are not, aren't necessarily, you know, supportive of you, but are trying to push you into a confrontational position so that they can, uh,

Or is it more people who don't want to be like the face of the movement themselves because, you know, maybe out of fear or repercussion or something like that and are like trying to prop you up so they don't have to like stand so much in front? That's part of it. But the other part of it is, um, um, I think some people, I think some people in academics, uh, certainly in the U S are, are maybe not now, but, but, uh, when this was happening back in, in 2008, 2009, um,

when I was accelerating in terms of the things that got me bought out, there were some people who were still idealistic. They thought, okay, we have the right to have freedom of speech. We have the right to speak our conscience because that's the way the university was set up and that was the model of faculty governance. But in fact, we didn't really have that right anymore.

And since I already had a reputation for being that kind of person, they would say, well, you know, we know who you are. So shouldn't you say, I mean, I was literally being a meeting. Like this is your MO, kind of like. Yeah, yeah. But no, there were other things. And some of them had to do with activism. Sorry, I was teaching at the prison as a volunteer. And that seemed to rub some people the wrong way. Why would that rub people the wrong way? Yeah.

I'm going to be a little bit of an asshole and say, you know, we use the word liberal in China to mean a certain thing, but we use the word liberal in the United States to mean something else, right? So liberal in the United States means progressive, you know, not conservative, whereas in China, liberal means, you know, not committed to the existing political vision or order, right?

um, wanting something more like a Western style democracy. So when I say liberal, uh, liberal progressive, uh, uh, liberal progressives often get criticized and attacked in the United States for being leftist. But in fact, they hate leftist more than the rightist do because the leftists are constantly exposing the liberal progressives for actually being self-serving centrist who, you know, uh,

who aren't really interested in doing something, they free ride on, they have like a structural complicity

what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call they are complicit adversaries with conservatives right I mean you can look at let's let's pick on Nancy Pelosi someone who you know for decades gets to present herself as a as a liberal left-leaning politician and yet you know look at the the tens of millions of dollars that her family has look at the look

look at the alleged corruption associated with the family business. So I mean, I don't know how you can be that sort of part of that system and that powerful and at the same time really committed to helping people overcome oppression and adversity. - Well, do you think a lot of those people, it's more like virtue signaling? 'Cause in the States in the recent years,

It's gone through kind of this more liberal shift, right? In terms of, at least in the media and Hollywood and these type of circles, it's portrayed as a lot more liberal, left-leaning, the values and wokeism and all these things that are going on. Do you think it's, you know, a lot of these politicians, they publicly lean that way to gain more public favor. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they're kind of... I think it's virtue signaling, but it takes place on both sides. Mm-hmm.

Right. So it's clearly you have, uh, they play towards the audience. Well, conservatives virtue signal, but they virtue signal according to certain different ways, certain values. Right. And, and the so-called liberals do the same thing. Um, but you know, if you go back, if you're approaching it from my perspective, which is the, the, the far left, I don't really see a big difference between

in terms of Democrats and Republicans. I mean, if we look at, you have both parties now firmly in the employ of major US companies, you know, major US companies are equally giving to both parties. And as a result, they, you know, they worked together to drop financial regulations and this has accelerated financial crises, but also

accelerated something else, which is a certain form of political polarization where what we constantly do now is circle back to issues like abortion, like LGBT issues, right? As a politics of distraction, because, you know, what's really happening since the early 1980s is the decline of the middle class.

The middle class is getting smaller and smaller. My generation was really already in decline, but 2008 wrecked us. My generation is where you begin to see, in the developed world, the first group of white men that begins to commit suicide at a higher rate.

That's also when we begin to see the acceleration of the opioids crisis as people are losing their job and, and because of depression, but also because they no longer had access to healthcare and they're, they're getting hooked on, uh, opioids because it's also being pushed by corrupt pharmaceuticals and collusion with corrupt doctors. Right. And so really you just have like this, this, uh, vulture society that is, that is, um,

eating the flesh of its own people. There's, okay, so from the minute you started talking and we started recording, like you've been blowing through like all these like things. I'm like, oh, that's a whole can of worms I want to talk about. I got a lot more worms. It sounds like it. So I'm trying to like get my brain on track. It's like everything you're saying is like sparking all these curious questions I want to ask. But like just,

What you just said, is there any correlation between the rates of suicide in particularly white males in the United States? Was there any correlation with that between veterans coming back from war? Is there any connection there at all? Because I read some stories and articles, and I don't know how accurate they are about how the war machine is directly also linked to higher rates of suicide amongst veterans and things like that.

We know historically that this problem has existed after major mobilizations and demobilizations. And where we really saw it hammering American society was in the aftermath of Vietnam, because that was a different type of war, and they were not received well enough.

by either the people who were anti-war or the people who were pro-war. - Yeah. - Right? So there was very little social support or protection, and this is where you start seeing so many of them ending up in prison, on death row, so on and so on, homeless. But in the case of the war on terror, and I observed this in Michigan where I was last,

I was in West Michigan and West Michigan was a place that had been hammered already economically before 2008 because the way that the automotive industry had changed. A lot of companies shifting to the south where they could get away from unions, but a lot of the production going overseas. And so this is where we had a lot of people joining the military from West Michigan.

because I was writing a paper and kind of investigating it, I started going to funerals just to sort of, you know, see the aftermath. And it was a very interesting thing to see how the war was affecting people. And clearly, it was having a very powerful negative effect. I remember I interviewed this one woman who was a recruiter.

And she was a recruiter for the Army and her husband had been sent over and came back with issues, as she put it. And these issues were accelerating with alcohol abuse.

In the meantime, she had two teenage boys who were twins, she said, and they were, I think, 16 or 17. And she said that the moment they turned of age, she was going to recruit them. I said, really, you're going to send your own children into the war machine? You've seen what it's done to your husband. It's led to your divorce. She said, absolutely. So, you know, there is... What was it? Just like being patriotic? Like, what was the motive there?

I mean, I would phrase it in an unexpected way. I would phrase it as just a profound confusion about what it means to be a human being and a mother. But...

You know, I don't know. Was it that she was looking forward to meeting her quota by enlisting her own children? Was it that she was looking forward to the honor of being able to brag that she had continued the family tradition? I mean, people who get involved in the military, and I'm not denigrating. My father was a military man, and I was raised in that type of culture. So I think I understand it, especially growing up in the South. But, you know, I think there were many reasons why.

why she was motivated to do it, but I didn't see any reason that I could acknowledge positively as a parent myself. I think, you know, I'm not a very political person. At least I don't see myself as that. I read the headlines just like any normal person does. And, you know, I try to read between the lines from time to time.

I want to get back to what you were just talking about and still focusing on the political environment in the States. And this is where I get really confused. And I think probably a lot of people are confused as well. Maybe they just don't know it or don't admit it. In terms of a lot of the labels, labeling of left and right, as you were alluding to before, what's the difference?

I mean, what are really the fundamental differences in the American political environment now between left and right? It just seems like people want to attach certain stances on certain topics and issues to whether you're left-leaning or right-leaning or far right, far left. Is that all it is? It just seems very confusing for me now.

Well, I'm going to approach this question from a, let's just say, a stronger position. So fundamentally, if we want to look at what are the two major different directions you can take in terms of resolving problems,

American problems. All right. And to be fair, we could say there's three, but the third one doesn't appear to be working. And the third one is that you find some middle ground, some form of pragmatism and people kind of work together and resolve things. But what we found is when people started working together, like when Republicans and Democrats started working together, they started working solely for the interest for, for corporate and special interest. Right. And so that hasn't really,

Worked well like the centrist model the centrist model didn't work well not because people didn't lean towards centrism but because the economics The real economic relationships were obvious Yeah, and So that's so so we could say okay Maybe there's this middle approach or what what Tony Blair would call the third way or what the Democrats called the New Democrats or whatever But it it's been a disaster

So, and as the Democrats and as the so-called left moved further and further to the right, the Republicans moved further and further to the right. And so what you've seen as a result is that there have increasingly become sort of two radical wings. One which is a radical left and the other which is a radical right. And the radical right, so for example, you can talk to a lot of Americans who voted for Trump.

And they didn't vote for Trump because they thought he was going to fix the problem. Like many of the people that I've talked to, they said, no, I voted for Trump because he was going to break it. In other words, that they no longer believe that the current system could be reformed. And there's good reason to believe that. I mean, we're unable to reform the constitution at this point. We're unable to effectively reform

advance significant economic reforms because they're too disruptive. And the way that the

the way that the American economy is structured now, the way that it is depending on the dollar as the super national currency, right? If you take the dollar away, the, the, the, the power of the dollar away as a global currency, I think the, the U S economy is a house of cards. I think we see this in 2008. I think we see it again in 2020 when they increased, uh, uh, the money supply by 27%. And then, um,

Which has global implications, right? This is what really sparks global inflation. What is it like the weaponization of the dollar? No, what it is, is it's two things. It's, it's, so they did two things. They increased the money supply by 27%. That's what the Fed did in terms of monetary policy. But in terms of fiscal policies from the government, they did $5 trillion in stimuluses.

direct stimulus, the majority of which went to businesses and corporate interests, right? But most of it, which had very little to do with sustainable investment,

In fact, I remember I was doing a lot of TV at that time with a local studio that was owned by a Republican businessman. And he was getting his stimulus checks. Even though his business was good, he was getting his stimulus checks. And he was a very pro-Trump guy. But he knew that I had some knowledge about China and he was asking me for advice because he wanted to invest his stimulus checks in China growth funds. So...

Like all these ironies that abound, right? But in any event, there are two basic... The system is unable to reform itself and it's dependent on...

on the hegemony of the dollar. And so this is why we see these new efforts towards de-dollarization. And we see that happening in China, India, Indonesia, Russia. Right before the conflict began in Ukraine, you had the EU, Russia, and China talking about alternatives to the petrodollar, right? And there's some questions about, well, we can get into that sort of thing. And I think we can touch it without getting into conspiracy theory. We can talk about a lot of facts there. But nevertheless,

The US has reached a position where it's unable to really reform, right? And this has allowed its special interests to further entrench themselves in ways that are continuing to undermine the middle class and create all sorts of other social problems.

And so as a result, what you see are two sort of radical movements or solutions that are beginning to fester within the American polis, right? One of them is the radical left, the other is radical right. And the radical right is increasingly, not everyone, and not everyone is, I think,

as clear minded in terms of what they are actually thinking. But what I see is more and more people kind of fantasizing about a military dictatorship, some type of one party rule. And, you know, I think people, there were some people who hoped that Trump would break it bad enough that that would be

you know, the obvious solution to it. So one of the things that really delighted a lot of people about Trump is the extent to which he stacked his cabinet with generals.

and how he had to get all these, because if you take flag officers or military officers into your cabinet, you have to get special exemptions for them, right? If it's been within too short of a period since they served, right? And so he brought a lot of military in. Now there's another reason for that, but it appealed to these people who were looking for a more

militaristic or military oriented thing. But, but to say what other people would say is you have to look at the growing right wing political movements that we're seeing in Europe, Italy, for example, Hungary and other places, Poland and so forth and so on that were certainly intersecting with Trump, Bolsonaro and, and,

In fact, there are people who talk about Putin being more a mirror image of Trump or vice versa than this outlier. I'm not so sure.

I'm not so convinced of all of that because in many respects, I think Biden has been a much worse and much more damaging president than Donald Trump. And I have absolutely no affection for Donald Trump. And it absolutely horrors me to think that these two jokers might, or they're currently the front runners and, you know, we're going to go through this again. Yeah.

The left side, and you can see, I think, this a little bit with Bernie Sanders, but then also moving a little bit further with Antifa.

and some of the stuff that we saw in Seattle, right? And some of it goes back a little bit to the Occupy Wall Street movement. So there's been this growing leftist movement that is saying, okay, no to the military direction because, by the way, military government never works long-term. It always fails. Every time you look at it in history, it does not have...

there are reasons why you don't want your military running things, right? The number one reason is your military becomes really bad at doing what its primary job is once it becomes responsible for managing the affairs of the state, right? There,

This is something that Jiang Zemin did in China many years ago, right? Going back to the Yan'an period of Chinese history, the PLA had to take responsibility for feeding itself.

And so, you know, this is back when they were really poor and they were really struggling. And so the PLA would start, you know, cultivating crops to feed themselves and getting into businesses. And even into the 1990s, you had a lot of PLA owned businesses around China, right? But in the late 90s, the party said, "No, you gotta get out of business," right? And forced the military to sell all of their assets.

And the term in Chinese was, from henceforth, the army will eat imperial grain. In other words, we will feed you, you don't feed yourself. And instead, you will focus solely on your mission. And this was really sort of the start of a new era of professionalization in the Chinese military.

It was interesting because in the West, there were all these pundits who said, oh, you can't push the military out of business. They'll push you out of power. But that didn't happen, right? The military actually left business in ways that I think surprised Western pundits that the party had that kind of command and still do, and even more so today. And certainly you can find radical totalitarian impulses and even movements on the left that

But they're usually disguised. It's not so in your face. You know what I mean? Like these more social, cultural movements that happen, that they disguise it. Well, the main problem in the United States, again, this is me approaching it from a radical leftist position, is that the first principle of the American system is...

uh, private property rights. And, uh, a lot of people, they don't understand what, what that means, what, what are private property rights. And so, um, so for example, I have my, my phone here. Um, I'm wearing a coat, uh, clothes. Um,

I don't own a house now, but if I did, I... So some people would say that's my private property. No, no. In fact, if we're speaking properly, that's personal property, right? Private property is very strictly the right to own the means of production. And this is something that really begins to emerge today.

in a way that is economically and politically significant. So the problem is a lot of people conflate private, personal, and public property. Public property is that which is owned by the state, and hopefully in a way that actually benefits the populace and not some narrow group that characterizes themselves as a state.

But because of, I think it's, I don't want to say it's so simple that Americans conflate private and personal property, but you do have a lot of people who own absolutely no private property who mistake the very meager things that they have, which is private property, which is personal property as private property, right? And so you have like this metaphysics of private property

that exist as a cultural phenomenon, but is absolutely entrenched in the constitution and the legal system in ways that make it very difficult to enact the sort of reforms that may deal with problems from the perspective of the left. Okay. - I want to cut you off for a second because I'm still a little bit confused. - Sure.

with the difference between personal property and private property. Okay, so the difference is easier to understand in the sort of original historical meaning of the word. In the early days of Henry VIII, all of the country is owned by the king. He owns all the land. And what he does is he gives titles.

to various people that he acknowledges and he gives them, "Okay, you can be the duke of such and such, or the viscount of such and such, or the earl of such and such." And they get a certain amount of land. And on that land, there are peasants. And those peasants live in a subsistence, feudal mode of production, right? And then, you know, they get to keep enough to survive and whatever else is left over gets passed up. Okay?

Henry VIII was starting to discover what David Ricardo later called the law of comparative advantage, right? Which becomes one of these central values in capitalism, which is you should produce that thing that you have the advantage to produce and then trade it for the things that you don't have the comparative advantage to produce, right? And what the British were starting to figure out that they had that was better than anybody else in the world was...

- Oh, okay. - Okay. And the value of wool, because this is pre-synthetic fabrics, right? The value of wool, as many of you know, is that it can get wet and you still stay warm, right? So it's whoever has good wool, they have good uniforms, they have better soldiers, remembering that most of your soldiers would die from disease.

So having access to good wool and indeed the best wool was a huge... I mean, we talk about people today worried about, do you have access to high-tech chips or whatever it is. That was the chips of then. That was the technology of then. It was something unique about, I don't know, the genetic quality of British sheep or something. The density of the wool. I don't know. I'm not an expert in fabrics. But...

So what do you need in order to increase your wool production so that you can sell more money and make it? You need more land. And so where are you going to get your land from? You're going to start trying to claw it back from the church because you've given so much land to the church. And so you start a rift with the church and then you repossess the land. And then whatever noble families don't go along with it, you repossess their land, right?

And then you start to create what are called the acts of enclosures, where you start closing in the common areas of these various feudal places and turning it over to grassland. And that starts pushing the peasants off the land and into the cities. And about that same time, you have these new businessmen who are saying, "You know, we could actually make more money instead of like selling the wool raw to other countries.

we could process it here and we could force them to buy it as fabric. As a finished product. As a finished product, right? And that way we can add value. And so the king begins to grant these charters so that people, this doesn't exist previously, you might have small businesses, you might have people who provide services, but this is really the advent of what we would call

private property, right? Because before that, all the land, all the stuff is really owned by the king. His body is legally the same as the territory of the state. So that's, to understand, that's where it starts off. You now have the right, under Henry VIII, to own a factory, to own the machines. You have the right to hire labor, and you have the right to set their wage,

and you have the right to own what they produce. And so this is a legal right that was being granted by the king, that didn't exist before. And again, you can find scholars who will say, oh, well, there was some example of private property maybe in the Roman times or something like this. But just like we have slavery that still exists in the world today, slavery is not the dominant contributor to global GDP.

It's not the same scale. It's commodity production that is the dominant contributor to global GDP, commodity production and consumption.

So, you know, we no longer live in what is called the slave society or a mode of production. We no longer live in the feudal mode of production, even though there are still some people living in a subsistence mode of production around the world. There's still islands of slaves, you know, people who get caught coming out of certain parts of the world that are

hoodwinked into these slave islands, apparently, and they're worked to death. That still happens. I remember when, what's his name?

Colin Powell was the Secretary of State. He released a report, which has since been deleted from the government servers, saying that there were more slaves in the United States while he was Secretary of State than during the run-up to the Civil War. See, this is what you do, Joseph. You talk about one thing, and then you drop a bombshell of worms. And it's just like, it completely detours us.

into like a whole new thing that I really want to get more into. I was talking to one of my friends on the way over here and I said, you know what? I'm going to have fun with these guys. So to go back, you were trying to say, I was trying to answer your question. Like, how do we understand the difference between private property and public property? Right. And personal property. So very, so you ought to be able to see from, from what I was describing in terms of the development or the emergence of private property in the early days of it. Of course,

What is now private property and how it functions is a lot more sophisticated and complicated. Well, I don't want to just let you get away with this. Can you bring a little more insight into these modern-day slavery? Is this conspiracy theory or where are you getting this from? No, no. There were...

I haven't looked at it in a couple of years, but if I recall correctly, so the first dramatic example is I believe that there were cases of Rohingya coming out of Myanmar that were, you know, basically getting transport with illegal carriers, and they were being carried to

with the promise of being taken to Australia, but instead they would be taken to some island where they were put to work as slaves. I think there were several. - What kind of things are they being put to work for? - I don't know. I don't know if it was,

agricultural work or manufacturing, but these were stories that were circulating in mainstream media a few years ago. But when Colin Powell was talking about it, when he was Secretary of State under George W. Bush, he was talking about not just slaves, because we know that there are several cases of people

who actually hold people in slavery, in domestic labor situations. But also, I think he was including in this sweatshop workers who were illegal and had their passports taken from them, and they were being forced to work at a certain rate and had no freedom. They weren't able to freely move. There were a lot of problems. - It was like the exploitation of illegal immigrants. - And then that was the next big issue.

Well, it wasn't there like a few months ago, a headline in the States, I think it was near the Southern border. I'm not sure. Uh, don't quote me on that, but it was like, they found a whole like trailer full of a container full of, um, migrant workers were like locked up and like all of them died. Right. I know that happens quite a bit. And then do you have, we had a force, a problem with sex trafficking, a lot of women coming out of Asia, uh,

For that, we had a lot of migrant workers coming out of Latin America, Central America, that were providing a lot of the labor. I mean, one of the things we don't talk about in the United States right now is why we have a labor shortage.

And there are two or three reasons. I mean, what the right says is, oh, it's because people got all these benefits and they don't want to work anymore. Actually, it's because a lot of people found that their employers were really nasty and the way they were subject to certain things during COVID that sort of broke them. And people, a lot of people got sick.

You know, we saw that there were spiraling psychological issues, drug and alcohol abuse during the pandemic. Some people were diminished by long COVID. So a lot of people lost their jobs and lost their health. So there are all these things. But it's also because, you know, since Trump, we have been pushing migrant labor out of the country.

And it's almost a quantification, an indirect quantification of the extent to which the American economy was dependent on the exploitation of undocumented workers. In fact, there were five or six things that I did, and I'm not gonna go through all of them, that got me bought out in Michigan. But the last thing that I, one of the things that I did that really irritated them had to do with this

We had a, where, where my university was, we were surrounded by orchards and most of the workers in the orchards were migrant workers. Right. And, um, the state representative for the state house, right. Who had my district, he was a right-wing Republican and, um, he sent around a brochure to everyone in the district and he was highlighting like all the conservative things he stands for and, you know, how he's fighting to protect you.

And it was really dog whistle tactics, you know, appealing to sort of white nationalism and so forth and so on. And one of the points that he had was that he would never allow, that he would do everything he could and use all of his power, which was considerable because he was chairman of the State Appropriations Committee, that migrant workers would never get access to state IDs, right? Now, about that same time,

in the orchard that was closest to the university. There was a fire in the barracks. We don't know how many people died. We know they took their bodies and left before the emergency crews got there because they didn't want to get caught. Okay? Now, I looked up on the state database where this guy got most of his campaign donations. Where did he get them from? The orchards.

So the very people who are exploiting that labor, and can exploit it because it's undocumented, that's their guy in the statehouse who's telling us, who's pandering to white voters and saying, I'm going to protect your jobs and make sure these people never get a state ID. What she's actually doing is contributing to the structural oppression of everyone. So there was never an official death count for that? Or was there an official death count? No, there was none. Okay.

So the thing is, he sent this brochure around, okay? And I got it in my mailbox and I saw it in the morning and I was, you know, young and stupid. And you could like tear off the back page

and write a comment to him, okay? And mail it back. And so all I, this is exactly what I wrote. I said, stop being an asshole and learn how to love people, okay? That's all I wrote, okay? I didn't sign my name. It was anonymous. My name isn't on the brochure, okay? Not the part that you turn off and mail back. And I mail it back two weeks later.

I get a certified mail delivered to me and CC'd to my dean and the provost, who already is a little irritated that I've considered her to be a violator of academic integrity. And he's saying that the university really ought to rethink employing someone who's so rude and disrespectful.

Wow. So they knew exactly who you were? Because they... The address? The barcode. They used a... There was a barcode and they found out who I was and they found out where I worked and then they came after me that way. The guy who abstained. The abstainer. Yeah.

And so then literally he's in charge of the State Appropriations Committee, which oversees the budget for the university. And now you have an issue, right? But this was something that I said as a private citizen, I didn't sign my name, I didn't publicize it. But to answer your question, to not open the 10th can of worms. No, please. No, but this was, I think this was part of the type of phenomenon that Colin Powell had in mind when he was talking about sort of modern slavery. Yeah.

Other people talk about the prison labor system. Yeah, prison labor. Yeah, yeah. But what's fascinating is that you just shared something anecdotally that you experienced. And if you never said that, we would never know. It would just be out in the wind. Even if we thought it, it'd just be like conspiracy theories for us because we have no... And it's just scary. If you really think about it... Let me just back up for a second because...

I don't want to shift immediately to China, but... Well, there's a nice segue to China. Well, maybe we're on the same page because right now we've been talking a lot about your experiences in America. Because we were talking about in America, you know, the left and the right, right? And the deconstruction of the left and the right. Now, in China, we don't have a left and a right here, you know? Right.

We do. We do have. But not like visibly in terms of one party system, one voice. So let me weigh my words carefully. It's certainly the case that the party wields power, right? And if you don't understand that, they will make it clear to you. And it's certainly the case that the party talks about unity and being unified and so forth and so on.

But people keep falling into the trap of believing that the party is a monolith. It's not. It has, you know, until a week ago, the biggest population in the world. It is the biggest political party in the world. It's been ruling for one of the longest periods of history in terms of its contemporaries.

It is a tremendously diverse country. You know that. I mean, a lot of Americans don't know that, but you aren't normal Americans. You know there's a big difference between Shanghai and everywhere else. And there's a big difference between, you know, even in leading cities, there's a big difference between Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, blah, blah, blah, so forth. And there's a huge difference if you go between the interior or rural areas. Yeah.

There's a huge difference between, say, the special interest of Shanxi, which is going to be very, very oriented towards coal, versus other areas that are going to be very, very oriented towards renewable energy, right? Or if we go back to last year, you know, let's just speak theoretically that the Ministry of Health

was very much invested in the COVID control policies and acquired a lot of power and resources at other ministries' expense. Okay? The Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Education, right? So it's natural that these ministries compete with each other.

I work with a lot of different media, both media in China and outside China, but I work with a lot of state media. I work with Xinhua, CGTN, CICG. They all compete with each other. You know, they're all interested in their own intellectual property. If you're telling a story with one person and someone else copies that story on a different platform, that's trouble, right? Yeah.

So there is a competition that takes place even within government. Now, certainly before there was a bigger problem with factional politics, that was cleaned up along with the anti-corruption campaign, which if we phrase that properly in the old Chinese Marxist terms, it's a party rectification campaign.

which is you have to do if your system is based fundamentally on democratic centralism, which is the theoretical construct at the heart of the Chinese system. So the idea that there isn't a whole lot of difference or competition or, you know, you can be loved by one part of the government, but hated by another part of the government. And I had a friend some years ago who was doing some research about a case where the government was trying to build an incinerator

in Songjiang district, one of the outlying districts of Shanghai. And there was this huge, what in English we call NIMBY movement. You know, what a NIMBY. No. Not in my backyard. Oh. It was this NIMBY movement, okay? And there was some evidence to suggest that, and it was like, oh, that's, you know, because people protesting and, you know, getting involved. And there was some evidence

evidence to suggest that that was being encouraged. I don't know that this is true, okay, but according to my colleague who was doing the research, that that was being kind of tacitly or even secretly encouraged by the Environmental Protection Bureau there because they also have an interest in

in keeping the pollution rates low, because that's how they get assessed. And so you can have commercial interests that are at odds with environmental protection interests. Now, fortunately, we've seen in recent years, environmental protection interests become stronger because now party leaders are evaluated in terms of the number of green days or green water, or excuse me, clear water sort of thing. So the paradigm has shifted. And as a result, we have a lot cleaner environment. I'm sure if you've lived here since 2000,

I've been in Shanghai alone for 13 years. It's a lot clearer. Huge difference. Huge difference. And the same for Beijing. Beijing, unfortunately, just still has the dust storms. Well, that's a geography thing. That's a climate change thing. But I feel like just right there, if I was a listener, well, our listeners from America who may not have as much...

information or research on China's political system are already going to be like, oh, okay. You know what I mean? Just right there.

And we're just touching a little bit. Well, yeah. Well, going back to kind of the point, I think, or the question you posed, Howie, and this is like, I mean, Joseph, you explained it in much further detail than I understood, but I always believed that, of course, the government isn't a monolith. It's like so huge. And the operation and tasks that are confronted with them, you know, I think to Howie's point,

People, especially people in the West, but even some people here, want to oversimplify and draw a straight line from the president of China to a straight line directly down to what happens on the ground. And it's like a straight line. Like, oh, you did this and now that. But in between, there is so much bureaucracy, so many different levels. All this internal things, whether it's collaboration or competition, competition,

Going on that it's not it is a governmental system It's not just one person on top telling everyone else what to do It's I mean, that's like a lot of people but a lot of people still feel that way Well, you know because it's intellectually simple to frame it that way Yeah, there are two ways to to two sort of things to add to it that I think will help elucidate the first is the biggest impediment

to policymakers is the government itself. In other words, bureaucracy. So bureaucracy is slow and effectual, right? And keep in mind, it was the Chinese who invented bureaucracy, right? For better or worse, right? So

One of the things that you see is that when, you know, the government, the top leaders, they always talk about reform, reform, reform. And there are basically two types of reform in the context of our current conversation. One is, okay, we need to do something new because things have changed, right?

And the other type is we need to cut down bureaucracy. We need to cut down red tape. And you'll often see these, these like chop retirement ceremonies where they, you know, like I think there was, if you could, you know, go to Baidu or Google and, you know, periodically they'll have this ceremony where they'll like take all the chops that you, that, you know, the red stamps that you needed to open a business, right?

Right. And I like maybe it was 37 stamps you needed in order to open a business. And government is pleased to report now. I'm not citing a real example, you know, that's been cut in half or something, you know, that bureaucracy has this way of like it's like a cancer. It keeps like growing and growing and protecting its own self-interest. Right. And the party knows this.

This is one of the reasons why Mao Zedong says you have to have a revolution every 10 years. Against whom? Against the state itself. Because the state becomes the biggest impediment to progress. And if your job, and this is really the job of the CPC, this is what they use to validate, really, if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of it, their validation comes from the fact that they can make the argument, and they make it all the time,

that they have been responsible stewards of the national interest by accelerating development in order to close the gaps that had opened between them and other countries that those countries were using to exploit and give us the century of humiliation and so forth and so on. And so why does the party so adamantly support the current leader? It's because, and why did they get behind his anti-corruption campaign?

Because who's really being targeted in that campaign? The party itself, right? They have to cut their own wrist. It's a witch hunt within the party. Yeah. You have to clean it up and nobody really wants it, but you have to do it. Otherwise you've reached a critical point where your whole project risks falling apart. And so we find this in fact, periodically the party reaches for this existential crisis and they have this tremendous capacity to

for self-change. And this is, we find this going back to the earliest years. But my point is that the party had to learn to change itself

before it could learn how to change China, right? And so you had the Qing dynasty, Qing now with a G, unable to reform. When they finally do try to reform, it's the thing that actually leads to their fall. And then you have the Kuomintang, which was, for various reasons, it's an omnibus party. All these people rush in to join that political situation when it becomes clear that the Qing is going to fall. And so they inherit all of these things

old interests that are not actually interested in change. And so they get stuck in a certain paradigm and unable to make substantial progress. And then you have the Japanese problem expanding. And it's within this milieu, of course, the Chinese communists are going to survive and then find their footing and be able to

to move forward. But they do this because they learn how to change themselves. And each time that they've approached an existential crisis, they've had to learn how to survive that and change them. So there's a long history of the party doing this. It's not, there's no like

Future promise that they'll always be able to do it. But you know, that's what they've been doing so far So it's funny because in the West we have this thing called the collapse thesis and the idea that that all the parties gonna collapse at a certain point any day now and If you've been in I mean, I'm not that old you can find people who are older than me But I mean I remember these discussions. I was educated by some of the top China people in the US and

They've been saying it in congressional reports since I've been listening since the 90s and you know and and it's true every once while we reach sort of a crisis point, but what's interesting is how China turned the corner but it was creating it was encountering new challenges from within and how it was able to turn that corner and solve those problems with the current generation of leadership, but how that in turn

led to more aggressive policymaking from the US. Once it became clear that he was going to complete the anti-corruption campaign and consolidate and reconsolidate the party position, that's when they launched the trade war. I suspect, I haven't seen any papers, and I know that it sounds a little bit like conspiracy, but the moment that he consolidates the anti-corruption campaign,

This is the moment when they're supposed to start moving to reform the state on enterprises, which is really going to help fix some economic issues. Okay? And so that's the moment when the US launches the trade war, which then makes it more difficult

to reform the state on enterprises. I would think, given what I know of Washington, and I don't, and this is really sort of a double-edged point, given what I know of Washington, there are some smart people there, but goddamn, they do a lot of stupid shit too. So I don't know, like if there was a smart person there, I would have said, okay,

Start a trade war because that'll undermine their ability to make the reforms and then we need to advance that towards tech decoupling because where they really close the gap is is You know by by closing the technology gap that we were really exploiting previously Tech finance there. They're now on par. So I see I I suspect that there's a broad strategy starting with late Obama and

Moving through Trump all the way up to Biden, there's a lot of consistency across the board. And that's bipartisan, by the way. Yeah, it's really driven by the defense and intelligence establishment, which doesn't really change. It's not, you know, you can find partisan elements in those things, but that's an institutional structure that has consistent. It's the only part of the U.S. government that's

that sort of consistently has and acts on long-term planning. You know, this is getting into an area that has, you know, in the recent years has been very top of mind for me in terms of

my own personal anxiety. From your vantage point, where do you feel we stand now in terms of the US-China relations? Obviously, it seems to be going in the wrong direction. I mean, that's easy to say. Very contentious. But I feel like you probably have a deeper insight into this behind the curtains of

Where do we stand now? Like how screwed are we? Regardless of what side you're on. You know, like how close to war are we really? - That's a good question. And it is the most important question. There are two most important questions in the world right now. That's one of them. The other one is what about climate change? And to what extent is the first question related to the second question, right? That's from my perspective.

I'm going to make you unhappy by giving you a convoluted answer. Okay. So on the one hand, it's absolutely apparent that the relationship is way off track, that it hasn't yet reached its nadir, and it threatens possibly war, right? There are...

not unreasonable concerns that the United States may try to turn Taiwan into Ukraine, right? We can put this in factual context, right? On the one hand,

The U.S. has advanced the Indo-Pacific concept in which it's trying to draw India into an alliance. It has South Korea and Japan into alliance. They have troops, they have weapons in both of those countries. The U.S. has now admitted that they have troops in Taiwan.

They have recently expanded access to Philippine military bases. That's most recent, right? Yeah. And in fact, that was done a few days before Biden's ridiculous spy balloon thing. Oh yeah. I want to get into that too. Okay. And there's AUKUS too, right? Then AUKUS, which is of course the really dramatic thing where you have the United States selling, or what I would prefer the word proliferating, nuclear submarines, nuclear weapons to, um,

and some people say, "A nuclear submarine isn't really a nuclear weapon." I go, "Well, yeah, it is. Yeah, it is." - Yeah, how is it not a weapon? - Yeah, and it's not just that, but it's also, you know, the US is now stationing B-52s, nuclear-capable B-52s in Northern Australia, right? So you have all of that, and you have, what was it? Was it 2021 or 20? I think it was 21.

the American nuclear submarine that wrecked on a seamount in the South China Sea. It was a huge scandal. The commander was sacked and so forth and so on. But how close did we get to a major, because they're all swimming around there now, frantic, churning the waters. As someone once joked, they feel sorry for the fish.

But the key issue is you have the U.S., which is upgrading a controversial missile system in South Korea. You have all of these things that are taking place while the U.S. is also trying to convince European countries to expand NATO's remit to include China. Wait, NATO's what? To include China? Remit, that they would not only be focused on

in Russia or other immediate threats to Europe, but that they would also be include China in there. And this is where you have the weather balloon situation. So right as the United States is concluding the negotiations to expand access to the Philippine military bases. So all of that's taking place.

And you had this incredible demonization of China, right? Yeah, we talk about that all the time. Yeah, and just remarkable. And all that nonsense about Xinjiang, which by the way, accelerates the moment Trump decides to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban. The Taliban, who the United States created in the first place,

back in the 1970s, they founded with the ISI in Pakistan, the Talibs, to go in and fight the Soviets who were there to support the socialist state. And so, you know, we governed that state so poorly that they

let the Taliban come back into power, right? And what did we do? We left them all the weapons. - Overnight evac, right? - Yeah, we left them all the weapons. And then we turned around and said, "Oh, you know, they're going to hurt the women." No, no, we're the ones who created them in the first place. You know, Afghanistan in the 1970s, early 1970s was the most secular Islamic country in the world.

They were so secular, they elected a socialist, inclusive government. And that's what sent off the alarm bells in Washington and in Pakistan, because they were worried that this would lead them into a natural alliance with India and the Soviet Union. And if anyone knows anything about the geography of Afghanistan, they sit on massive mineral wealth. A lot of those minerals, which are related, of course, to strategic defense interests.

And so, you know, there's this concern that whoever gets control of Afghanistan has a competitive advantage in terms of strategic positioning.

Anyway, I promised that I wouldn't go that far off track, but here we are in Afghanistan. I love it. I'm here for it. But you asked the question. Take me back to the question. Oh, God. War. Possibilities of war. You were going to get to the balloon, too. Yeah, the balloon. So all of this is taking place, right? All this garbage is taking place in the same week that...

So demonization, China this, China that. And in the same way that the U.S. does something which really should have set off a lot of alarm bells in Asia with expanding military access to bases in Philippines, what does the U.S. do? It accuses China of violating American sovereignty, threatened American sovereignty with a balloon. Now, was it...

A spy balloon, how do we define spy balloon? Weather balloons collect information. They collect them in real time. Could some of that information have strategic value? Maybe. Okay. Apparently, according to the US government, a lot of these balloons have come over China. Apparently, the US sends a lot of balloons over China.

Um, was this the old rules of the game? Um, do countries do most of their spying through hacking and satellites and human? Yes. So, uh, the extent to which I think their spy program rely on balloons, which, you know, don't have, they don't have much control over. Right. Um, it's something that, that, um, boggles, uh, the, the, the, the intelligent imagination. Nevertheless, he, he,

He makes a huge deal out of that, derails the Blinken trip, which I don't think he wanted anyway. This was something that he had to promise during the G20 because he was facing a revolt in the G20 because he was trying to push the G20 into a position against China.

China, right? And so you saw all these countries, including the host country and others in Southeast Asia saying, we're not going in that direction. And this is where Schultz and Macron begin to break ranks and they're going to come to China. And so Biden has to get ahead of that

and try to also have a talk. So he meets Xi on the sidelines and then promises that we will see high level exchanges. And so Blinken is gonna be the big high level exchange. But before that, I don't think Trump ever, or excuse me, that Biden ever wanted Blinken to come here. I think he was just forced by changing geopolitics to try to get ahead of it.

exploited the balloon situation to A, derail the visit with Blinken and B, turn that into a talking point to the State of the Union speech that followed a few days later where he mentions China more than any other country, even more than the United States. And then immediately after that, you have the meetings of NATO where they go to NATO

And they say two things. Number one, China is now a direct threat to the sovereignty of the United States. And this is a NATO issue because... And they make the false allegation that China is thinking about selling lethal aid to Russia. Therefore, China is a direct threat to the security interest of Europe. And so these are going to be the two motivating factors that are supposed to push NATO. In the meantime, the Norwegian head of NATO,

and this is not a conspiracy, he's a Norwegian. And the two countries that have benefited the most from the war in Ukraine are Norway and the United States in terms of the massive increases in energy sales that they've achieved as Russia has been cut off from being the main supplier of Europe. - Well, the whole Nord Stream thing is a whole another. - Yeah, and Hirsch says that Norway and the United States collude on this. And you see a lot of conflicting accounts

I'm inclined to believe that Hirsch is probably on the right track in so much as I don't think the Russians would have blown up their own pipeline. And I don't think anyone else had the operational ability to do it. And then we point to the fact that the people who benefit from it the most, who have benefited the most from it, who...

are the people who have the operational capacity to do it. So in fact, I, I, from what I understand in talking with colleagues in Europe, they know who did it. They know who did it.

And the fact that they're not saying who did it suggests that it's somebody on the Western side of the equation. Well, that's the thing. I think, like, I mean, a lot of what I'm getting out of it is whether it's like the timing of it all or the circumstances around it or things that aren't being said, it's

I mean, everything's like just so suspicious when you kind of start piecing it all together. Right. So, but we had to be careful because the other side of this thing that I was going to say, because I said it was convoluted and what I've said so far is not convoluted. It's very straightforward. Yeah, that's true.

The other side of it is last year, China and the United States recorded their highest level of trade ever. Yeah. Okay. So to what extent are we really moving towards war? To what extent are we really locked into a struggle? Or to what extent is this just a political theater, a political performance that's covering for the fact that all this trade is still taking place? It's just that people have to pay for it now.

pay more for it now through tariffs, which are taxes on the consumers. And so there's three possibilities. One is that it's actually a zero sum fight between two groups trying to fight over who's gonna be dominant. Or at least from the Chinese side, as they say, we're not in a zero sum game, we just don't wanna be dominated, right? Whereas the US is more locked into, I believe, a zero sum approach. And they have to be at this point because the only way they survive is with the dollar.

being powerful and that requires zero-sum approach. Alternatively, to what extent is it just a theater, right? To accommodate the fact that the American middle class is being disciplined and reduced because now increasingly, if we go more towards the Marxist model, the main problem with the middle class in the United States is that it increasingly has to compete with international labor. And so for years, it enjoyed what Lenin would call the advantage of being at the center

So American workers were able to also benefit from the exploitation of Chinese workers. You could go to Walmart, you could buy something cheap,

and you could supplement your standard of living by exploiting cheap labor. So increasingly, that's not the case. Increasingly, American workers have to compete with international labor. And so as a result, they're finding their middle-class position and security has declined, right? It's like double-sided. It's like not only that, but also the cost of goods going up and every side. So to what extent is this just cover for a rebalancing of labor

An American middle class that is no longer really able to exploit that position and now has to compete but American politicians have to shift blame and And try to make someone else responsible for it right or to what extent is it a third possibility which is Things are changing. We are going to decouple we might even go to war and

But in the meantime, people are going to try to make as much money as they can, you know? So out of those three options, do you not lean towards one option in terms of you feeling it might be more likely? Yeah.

Okay, so my biggest concern, my two biggest concerns are climate change. And research, recently published research indicates that China is the most vulnerable country in the world to climate change. It has the three sub-national economies that are most vulnerable to economic losses, according to one study. What vulnerabilities are these?

that extreme weather will cause economic losses. - Is it geographically, geographic vulnerability? - It's two things. It's two things. So first, where do you have your biggest development? That's where you have your biggest risks to economic loss, right? - Yeah. And most reliance on energy too, right? - Right. But also coastal regions that are susceptible to tsunamis,

The number two country, by the way, is the United States. Number three is India. Russia, by the way, is by some estimates the country that benefits the most from climate change. How's that? Melts the ice and snow, gives greater access to the northern seas, extends the growing season so they can produce bigger yields. Yeah.

And above all, that they depend on selling oil, and oil directly contributes to global warming. But there are studies that say that Russia will be devastated by infrastructural losses. As the permafrost melts, it will destroy a lot of highways. My sense is that...

The economic benefits to Russia from climate change certainly, even in the most questionable sense, certainly improve until the mid 2030s.

Thereafter it becomes a question of whether it's a benefit or a loss. Okay, but you have to calculate benefit and loss in relative terms So for example, the United States is number two most vulnerable. We saw the most recent Major hurricane that hit Florida and and and the southeast coast How much was it? I don't want to quote the figure of it was tens of billions of dollars right in losses however the United States

as I've said, and this is my thesis, and not only my thesis, but the one that's central to my analysis here, that the United States economy depends on the dollar, right? The way, the American economy collapsed in 2008, period, and it collapsed in 2020. And the only reason the US economy survived was because of the power of the Federal Reserve to exploit the power of the dollar as the global currency, right? You know, no other country in the world has the ability to increase

the money supply by 27%, right? And basically externalize a lot of those costs onto other countries. Yeah, at the expense of all these other countries. Right. Especially developing countries. At the same time, increase debt.

increased debt to about $31 trillion, right? By giving massive handouts. So no other country could do this. So to what extent is the U.S. economy what we might call a zombie economy? Like certainly there's some real economic growth, there's some real economic activity, but what happens if the dollar is no longer really being used, right? What if it's

What if the trend of de-dollarization continues to advance? What if the petrodollar disappears as the means for denominating oil sales? There are a lot of projections that the US economy collapses as a result. Conservatively, a lot of people don't think that that's right around the corner. I'm of two minds. I generally would think that it's probably not right around the corner

Because nobody wants it to be right around the corner except maybe Iran, Russia, and a few other actors who have had enough and had enough a long time ago. Oh, about China. China too, right? I would suggest that China is in a middle position because no one benefits more from earning dollars.

China's the major trading partner of most countries in the world. But I feel like China gets portrayed as kind of like leading the charge of de-dollarization. I think what you see with China is leading a gradual charge. What you see coming out of Moscow and a few other places is leading a fast charge, the charge of the White Brigade or something, right?

China, as we noted a few moments ago, China had its biggest trade year last year with the United States. It still earns a lot of money from the US. And most of its transactions globally, remember that China is the biggest trading partner with most countries in the world. Biggest trading partner in Brazil. Biggest trading partner in the EU. Biggest trading partner in the United States. Okay? And so with the exception of the few...

Most of that trade is done in U.S. dollar. That's right. So I'm concerned about climate change because I'm concerned that, and this is a paper that I'm working on now, that one of the ways that we should assess the war in Ukraine is a proxy war between two fossil fuel dependent economies that are fighting a currency war. A war over which currency will dominate Ukraine.

and who will be able to control prices. The US has been moving, one of the reasons why the US has alienated Saudi Arabia is because the US has been moving since 2017 towards an energy independence model and that energy independence is based on oil. Why was the United States such a major presence in the Middle East? Why did they fabricate that war to go into Iraq?

But what's changed is that now China, as the US is less dependent on the Middle East, now as it's producing more of its own oil, in the meantime, Saudi Arabia is expanding its relationship with China. Saudi Aramco recently announced they're building these two massive refineries in China. And I think they're doing this because...

I think China is playing a balancing act between Saudi Arabia and Russia. So all of those developments are taking place in interesting ways right now and are consistent with what I think the Chinese call a new era. It almost looks like if you were to take the...

the map and lay it on this table right now and you take united states and china and start carving up the world and you see the alliances of us and the alliance the alliances of china and they do not intersect it's like almost trying to carve up 50 of the world on both sides you know what i mean it's what it feels like from the from from an outside perspective

My guess is that the U.S. is in a position of strategic retreat, and what they hope to retreat to is a Cold War paradigm. They understand that they depend on fossil fuels. They understand that they depend on the dollar. But they also understand that they can no longer hold the global position that they held. And it's—so they have to retreat. But they want to hold on to Europe, as much of Latin America as possible, Israel as an outpost.

And as much of East Asia as possible, Japan, South Korea. I think they realize that, let me phrase this carefully. I think they believe that the only way the U.S. can remain in power is to have a smaller position, but to make sure that position is more secure. And let's assume that this is the strategic vision and it's not clear that it is, but there's talk in Europe.

in circles that this is kind of the grand strategy of the United States right now. - You mean the long-term? - Yeah. - Near long-term. - We're seeing a strategic retreat coming out of the Middle East, pulling back to Europe. Our forward position will be Israel and North Africa and trying to solidify positions in Japan, South Korea, and as much of the Middle East

East Asia as possible and to hold Taiwan as a point of leverage against your strongest competitor, China. And slowly lead a tech decoupling, slowly build a manufacturer reshoring in the United States. And then there will be this two world system. At least the US will be able to continue in a way that

They're still thriving in some way. It allows them to maximize the best of a worse situation, of a depreciating situation. And I think China is very concerned about the US launching something like what we've seen against Russia, both in terms of the financial sanctions, but also in terms of a proxy conflict.

And to be honest with you, I would say that the Chinese government has been extremely reserved and mature because the United States has crossed so many red lines.

in the past couple of years. I mean, it's really stunning if you go back and look at it. And the fact that China, you know, in this period of time where the United States is saying China's aggressive and China's unreasonable and China has yet been extremely reserved. Yeah, rattle the sabers when some asshole comes to Taiwan. But...

But, you know... It's ridiculous. Well, where does China have bases outside of its own borders? There's a few countries, right? There are a few countries where they have assets, but I don't think they don't really position overseas. In fact, from what I understand, most of the Chinese forces that are overseas include the outsized contingent that they contribute to the UN peacemakers or peacekeepers. The key is, this is where I think...

we have our best chance to derail what I see as a dark American path. And that is China now advancing what Beijing is calling the Global Security Initiative,

where the first major fruit of this is the resumption of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which, oh my God, that's a huge... And by the way, it's directly connected to oil and the petrodollar. I'm optimistic. We know that President Xi just spoke with President Zelensky. We know that Macron came here and gave support to the peace initiative. Lula came here and gave even more vocal support.

I think China's vision is the only way we survive this dark transition is that China has to become a global peacemaker. And that more than anything else will expose what the United States is doing, but not just in terms of public opinion and whatnot, but more to the point of what happens if they make peace with, if they effectively or successfully negotiate peace in Ukraine.

I suspect the next, I know they're talking about Israel and Palestine. I think this is political theater. If it's not, if it's not, if it's, I'm sure it's genuine, but if, but, but I'm not that optimistic about it. Okay. Um, because the U S can play such a powerful spoiling role there, but maybe, maybe, maybe they can do something. And certainly I think they have to make that offer. It's on the wishlist for sure. Sure. After the, the, the Tehran Riyadh deal, you know, you have to think anything is possible, but,

I suspect that and this is just me speculating. Okay, I suspect that if if This can be solved in Ukraine Then China will turn around and let Putin mediate a resolution of differences between China and India and then never thought that and then because it's real close anyway Once that happens

the Indo-Pacific concept begins to collapse. Okay. And then just by India becoming friendly and not a threat, that puts all kinds of pressure on Japan. Okay. And that will put all kinds of pressure on South Korea. Yeah. And that'll put all kinds of pressure on Singapore, which is already walking a fine line, but you know, there's a big US Naval base in Singapore that we don't like to talk about. Okay.

And all of that will put pressure on Taipei, right? And then that 20-year stupid-ass nuclear deal that Canberra signed up for, you know...

Well, Joseph, to kind of like wrap it up, because next time we have you on, I think we just need to like focus on like one or two things we want to talk about and dive really deep in. Otherwise, we go for this roller coaster ride, which has been fascinating, by the way. But I kind of want to tie it off with, and I think it's an interesting question to ask you, especially as a professor of politics. I've been finding that

maybe talking to normal people about politics in general, and usually when I talk it's usually something China related or US-China related, that it's becoming more and more intellectually unfruitful to talk about these things because I feel like everyone has already kind of dug in on their positions

And so there's really no... Or even militantly apolitical. Yeah. Like dug in on the position. Yeah, well, no matter where they stand, they're dug in. And I see like kind of two things kind of converging at once. It's the, what I like to call, and I don't know how you're going to take this, but it's like the religion of politics now, where I feel...

Politics is the new religion. You know, back in the old days, religion was kind of like the main justifier of going to war or, you know, certain policies and laws or territorial claims. And I feel like, well, that's basically exactly what politics are today. And people are just as zealot today.

as they were back in the day about you know christianity or any any religion um and about spreading it as they are about politics especially when it comes to you know the key terms of like democracy and freedom they're used almost as like religious ideology um and labels now and then you have the convergence of that of that kind of ideology and religion of politics with

And how media is now designed to really only filter through the most extreme points and headlines and incendiary things. And I kind of see these convergence of these two things creating, I feel like, this atmosphere where...

There is like an intellectual or cognitive decline in terms of how people think about what's going on in the world and reasoning. Lack of thinking about it.

all these little things that lead up to certain things and understanding, but people kind of just take the headline and the snapshot of what's going on now and form like very hardcore judgments and opinions on those. What's your thought on all that? Yeah, I had like, I had like 20 thoughts. And I don't say that in a patting myself on the back sort of, but as a frustrating story, because I was looking around, could I find a pen and a pencil so I could make some notes?

We see in the United States, and this is something the right-wing think tanks are constantly clamoring about, American youth are trending towards the left, and so are Chinese youth. As I said to my students, my undergraduate students at ECNU the other day, I said, you know, the greatest contribution to human progress, by far, by far, is that people die.

Old people... Pays way for the new. Get out of the way, and it creates opportunities for younger generations to change things, not only in a progressive way, because I believe in...

And a basic, so this is my faith in a Hegelian Marxist sense. I believe that humans are oriented towards the good, that that's our basics. Now, all these reasons why people get confused and move in the wrong direction. But if you, I believe that humans now have reached a position that in some respects is worse than, but overall better than where we were a thousand years ago.

So I believe in the positive arc of human development. And I think that this is accomplished intergenerationally primarily. The old generation gets out of the way. New people are able to create real development and progress. Now, so I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic that young people are going to do the right thing because I'm optimistic about people generally. On the other hand, my two favorite things

types of films very very simply absurd comedies and let's get the fuck out of here science fiction, but the Absurd comedy. Yeah, I'm curious about that one. So directly to the conversation Idiocracy, you know this film I've heard of it. Yeah. Okay, so it's this idea that we're all getting dumber, right and I don't think that's true. I do think old people comparatively

are getting dumber, right? - Or is it dumber or more stubborn, you think? Or are those two the same? - You know, in my youth as a scholar, I would have said, "Oh, let's figure that out. Let's categorize those two things." But at this point in time, let's just say they strongly overlap and reinforce each other, right? So there is this concern. There is this concern that maybe technological development is reaching a point

Where through things like AI, not just before AI, but maybe reaching critical breakthrough points with AI, chat GPT, whatnot, where people are being even more reduced, right? So on the one hand, I say, okay, young people are a lot smarter, a lot more savvy. And most of the time, most of the time, they're just ignoring us.

So on the one hand, I'm deeply optimistic and believe in the potential of human progress and above all that young people can do things better. On the other hand, I'm also concerned that technology, if it's not used properly, right? I recognize that it can be used as a tool and that we have to use it as a tool. And indeed, it's a competitive thing at this point. And if you don't use it as a tool, you're going to end up in a Luddite position. You're going to be overtaken by some other place.

So you have to learn how to dance with the devil without getting burned. And my sense is young people will figure that out, that they're not morons, right? Whatever intelligence I have, this is what I firmly believe, and this is not me just being a proud parent. Whatever intelligence I have, like I look at where my kids are today. Mm-hmm.

they're ahead of where I was at their age. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Okay. And so I have to believe that, you know, they can do better than I have done and then better than what my generation, oh my God, I hope so because- - We have to, we kind of depend on them. - Well, but the other side of it is this, right? The other side of it is this. They actually have to. Rising waters, collapsing currencies, you know, they're gonna have to find solutions. - I would, real quick,

In this current time that we're going through right now, it just feels like we're getting hit from every angle, right? Especially from the perspective of the younger generation, right? Like the Lingling Ho, et cetera, in particular, and younger. As they get older, they're going to face not only climate change, right? Not only geopolitical aggravation, but also the technology, right?

You know, these, I feel like these three main... Like all sorts of existential threats, right? Yeah, because technology is just like you said, I mean, I'm on your side as well in terms of... Novel disease outbreaks. Oh, biological, but... Everything, everything, everything. But I just feel like it's just from multi angles that when we grew up as, I mean, I'm around the same age as him, I'm in my 40s. We didn't have these kind of concerns, I feel.

It's almost like they're inheriting all these problems. And just like you, I'm hoping that in their current iteration, when I say them, I'm saying the Ling Ling Ho, et cetera. In their current iteration, they're smarter than where we were at their age. But once again, it's just the current iteration. We don't know what that near future is going to be. So I don't think that civilization or culture has degenerated. I think circumstances have created...

certain and reinforce certain types of behavior but i think once other things change there's going to be this this tremendous new surge in in development because they want to because they can't but because they'll have to right um and if they don't then it'll be a very dark future and we'll be dead anyway so well okay that's it on that note cheers joseph

Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. Sorry I did my grand tour of a thousand topics. I loved it. I loved it. I mean, I could get you back on just to talk about, have a separate podcast for each kind of can of worms you open up along the way. Joseph, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. It was a pleasure. Love to have you back.

I love your studio, by the way. It's a wonderful place. Thank you. Where can people find you if they want to reach out to you or connect with you? For the most part, I really am an old head. And so where my main media presence is, is LinkedIn. I was recently compelled, funny enough, through my association with Chinese state media to create a Twitter account. But I have not really invested in that account. I think I have... Were you slapped with the state media tag?

In Twitter? Yeah, on Twitter. I don't think so, but most of the world... You will be soon enough. But I think most of what I do, most of what I post in Twitter is related to state media because that's where that content is. But in Twitter, I'm at Mahoney Shanghai, M-A-H-O-N-E-Y. And then on LinkedIn, I'm just under my full professional name, Joseph Gregory Mahoney. And...

My affiliation with Eastern Normal is there, so if people start looking for me, they'll find me. But, yeah. I was waiting for him to be like, yeah, I'm an old head, so you can write me in snail mail. Yeah. My PO boxes. I have become overly dependent on WeChat. Yeah, well, as we all have.

But again, Joseph, thank you once again for coming on. It was a pleasure talking to you. Well, that was Joseph. I'm Justin. And I'm Howie. All right, guys. Be good and be well. Peace.