TYT Hour 1 April 27, 2017

In The Young Turks Hour 1 - On Demand by Gigi Manukyan29 Comments

Ana, Michael Shure, and Brett Erlich. Trump renegotiating NAFTA. GOP moving to remove exemption for Congress in healthcare. Flynn subject to felony. Trump breaking 9th circuit. Liberals trolling Trump hotline. Airline passenger busted with coke.

0 seconds of 50 minutes, 3 secondsVolume 90%
Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts
00:00
50:03
50:03
 

Comments

  3. They totally butchered the NAFTA story, repeating tired bullshit tropes the mainstream is peddling right now. NAFTA was and is a fucking disaster for labor, essentially the TPP of the last millennia, and Trump going back on his promise here is huge. Man, we need aggressive progressives on the main show regularly.

    1. Agree. I love this panel it just needed Cenk or Jimmy. I kept yelling at the screen too! Thinking that damn it. Cenk needs to be there to speak the TRUTH about nafta

  4. I love Michael Shure. Even if I disagree with his positions I always appreciate his perspective and the educational conversations that result.

    2. It’s often a muddled bunch of nonsense. His evaluation of whether going back on NAFTA is going to hurt Trump is the example. He said going back on his promise would help him politically in the same sentence, as he said that his bombastic claims of abolishing NAFTA help him politically under election. Well, which is it? Will removal of NAFTA help him, or will changing his mind on that help him? Michael can’t tell you directly, because going back on abolishing NAFTA is Michael’s position and it is deeply unpopular, of course. Trump just went back on that and is now anti-labor on that point as well. And describing labor as “mid-west white” is fucking preposterous.

    1. I would rather have more information, than waiting for Brett to come up with a joke. He has his moments though.

  7. Love whoever comes up with the titles for the pieces and the background graphics. Love the cleverness and the puns. Great job!

    1. Wynsong, you have good taste in humor. I believe Cenk and others have commented on discussing the segment titles in their staff/story meetings. I remember once, John Iadorola lamented that his suggested title was not selected at such a meeting. Their use of false-coloring somehow adds to the effect of the graphic. I can’t imagine this type of graphic design being used on 60 Minutes. The graphics artists is probably the unheralded participant. I agree: Great Job!

  10. The tax reforms benefiting the rich, both republican and democrats are sure to be passed. How can a “successful businessman ” keep removing income while spending more? I wonder how many elected officials are living in the $250,000 year and above.

  11. NAFTA was a huge mess. There was nothing good about it. The bad things that NAFTA did not become better, just because they set a new normal that we’ve now become accustomed to 20 years later. It was terrible for American jobs, for environmental law, for Mexican workers, for everyone but for American corporations.

    These so called “protectionist” measures the panel was talking about today was how every modern rich country today built their wealth and became rich countries. the so-called “free trade” policies is why every third world nation is poor. Opening up all your resources to foreign “investment” must means those investors get rich off your resources. Already most of the transactions we call “international trade” is just movement of money between subsidiaries of the same corporation, in and out of holding companies and dummy corps, in and out of tax havens, and stock buybacks to falsely inflate stock prices.

    1. Absolutely correct on NAFTA! This is a centrist panel, to say nothing of ignorant panel. Rarely post on the main show any more because of the centrist positions found here.

      1. I second that sentiment. I think Michael said something about “the good things about NAFTA” and I was like, what? I better listen here, cuz apart from Corporations, I was trying to figure out who thought NAFTA had its sunny-side that I had never heard of.

        I was wondering where the Neolib commenters (who generally write long essays) were on this first story.
        Maybe they can explain the “good” part of NAFTA that no one else seems to know about.

    2. Nope, NAFTA was one the best deals the US got in the post-war era and dare I say for 10s of millions of rural American’s it was particularly great. This can easily be proven by empirical evidence.

      As for protectionism being a wealth creator I am afraid you are greatly mistaken. It was precisely because of the Free Trade policies that were pursued by UK governments in the 1st half of the 19th century that the UK became the largest economy in the world until over taken by the resource rich US with double the population in the 1890s. The UK remained the richest and then the 2nd richest country until WWII precisely because of free trade. All European governments as well as the US followed heavy protectionist policies against the UK and still could not compete.

      Protectionism is what made the mild 1929 crash (stock prices returned to their pre-crisis levels by mid 1930 most corporations still made a handsome profit) turn into a deep recession because other countries also used protectionist policies and these ended up with the US practically running out of gold by 1932.

      It was the GATT that made the US into what it is today because it banned European countries from pursuing protectionist policies after WWII under the guise of protecting the nascent industry and by 1950 the US exported 52% of all the world’s exports and was practically the only country with a trade surplus.

      I know what I will say next is cruel but here it is: NAFTA was good because it finished off the leeching industries that should have died already and freed the money leveraged by those dying leeches to finance the tech boom and services boom. The average unemployment rate during the “good ol’ industrial era” rarely dipped below 7% and believe it or not there was more unemployment in the 1982 depression than at the height of the financial crisis and in terms of every other metric the people were far worse off then than at any time between 2007 and 2010. Unfortunately people have short memories and nostalgia is strong.

      If I had to rewrite NAFTA I would scrap the agriculture protections altogether because agriculture is the last frontier and it is capital intensive and just as old industry was finished off the leeches of the Great Plains States need to be finished off.

        1. I provided it it in other posts throughout the elections when this was an issue but here is a link to a meta-strudy by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service:

          https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R42965.pdf

          It is a heavy read but the study does a really good job giving context excluding Oil Imports (which is why the US has a deficit since Oil went from average $13 to averaging $50 in the last 24 years). It also accounts for the 1 million net manufacturing jobs lost directly to NAFTA and put it into perspective with the nearly 7 million new jobs that depend directly and indirectly on the supply chains created by NAFTA.

      2. Here’s the empirical evidence showing the exact opposite of the nonsense you peddle here: http://www.citizen.org/documents/NAFTA-at-20.pdf

        From the loss of jobs, over increased inequality to legislation that had nothing to do with trade and everything to do with deregulation, NAFTA wasn’t so much a complete clusterfuck, but an aimed attacks at labor across the board.

        1. So an organisation that opposes free trade wrote a political pamphlet (this was definitely not an analytical report) citing earlier reports by them opposing free trade that and take one set that agree with them (which no one denied except extremists like Brad DeLong) and ignores an entire database of figures that disputes their truths.

          Read the Congressional Study, it is more detailed and more analytical.

      3. Sounds like you’ve been poisoned by libertarian nonsense.

        In the first half of the 19th century, the UK was a colonial empire. Are you calling the wealth they extracted from their colonies “free trade”? I need a definition, since this phrase basically has no meaning anymore. By free trade do you mean the stuff the IMF and world bank has done to the third world, extracting wealth from their national resources to benefit US corporations? That follows the same model as the British imperial model. Do you mean the corporate protectionism of NAFTA, GATT and TPP? Is that free trade?

        When I was talking about the early wealth creation of the US, I didn’t mean 1929. I meant at the founding of the country, where high tariff walls protected early US industries so they didn’t have to compete on global markets while they were still getting started. Of course, the wholesale imprisonment of a race of people for free labor also created a lot of that wealth too. In fact the American revolution was fought over something similar, because Britain was using its imperial position to force British East India Company products onto the colonies at the expense of American products.

        Yes, European protectionism protects Europe, not America. That’s the whole point of protectionism. It protects the national economy, at the expense of whatever power is running the global economy. The US funded all of that growth in Europe post world war II through the Marshall plan just so Europe could buy US products. The gold standard is an absurd thing to base an economy on. It doesn’t matter that gold flight happened in 1932, because the US went off the gold standard in 1933. The depression didn’t end after that, because that wasn’t the problem. The problem was a deregulated financial system, which was creating fictional wealth based on nothing just as it is today. Instead of finance as a tool to enable growth in tangible commodity production, it becomes a gambling inflation game. And Yes, GATT did make the US what it is today combined with a world war destroying all but one major global player, and the Marshall plan creating a system set up to purchase US commodities. Because by 1945, the US was the richest country on the planet and had a mature industrial economy, unlike when they were under the early protectionist systems that allowed them to build that strength.

        And you’re completely wrong about NAFTA. It was devastating to US labor. That US giant agro-corps can sell their subsidized corn in Mexico at huge profits does benefit the “rural american” if you consider corporations to be people and thus those agro-corps are rural Americans. But it allowed very cheap labor to come across the border and work in those agro-corp businesses as the expense of local rural jobs. They went to work at Walmart and selling meth instead. It also devastated Mexico’s most vulnerable population leading to vast amounts of people becoming food insecure. The pressure on importing cheap labor or exporting manufacturing to cheap labor helped destroy even more of the already weakened union labor force, because all labor negotiations contained threats that should they make any demands or not accept everything that capital wanted, they could always pick up and move to Mexico. Also Mexico’s complete lack of any environmental protection was a huge draw to move corporations south and just start dumping things into the gulf and into rivers systems.

        So, yes, you are cruel, and as usual, with sociopathic libertarian morons, you are happy to be cruel when it’s happening to “them”, some poor nobody’s who don’t matter, and just as happy to laud the sociopathic tech industry of overpaid white assholes who think the economy rises and sets in their cubicle. Let me guess, you are one of these assholes who works in tech. These dickbags that are so amazed with how every job they’ve destroyed through automation is making the world so sensible and good and rational are going to be the ones crying the loudest when all software creation is automated and they’ve automated themselves out of relevance. The ones crying the loudest about the “moochers” who have their hand out are going to be holding their hand out the most in a few years. That will be one tiny consolation.

        1. Well if Eric Hobsbawm was a Libertarian then that is truly news to me. No layman historian to my knowledge gave as excellent a critical reading on the 1st half of the 19th century as he did (The Age of Capital) and he never said Imperialism was part of the UK’s success in that particular stage largely because the colonies were actually a drain on UK resources. Only afterwards did they became profitable but that is a different discussion.

          As for the definition of free trade, I suggest you read about the Corn laws history and the rise of the UK’s liberal party. Free Trade was Free trade, trade without tariffs first and regulatory barriers on the flow of capital second. The UK’s Liberal Party applied this faithfully (Hobsbawm has a better description) fully knowing it would destroy British agriculture (which it did) and later would destroy some of British industries like Steel (which it also did) because the Liberals fully believed that industries that do not adapt should die and capitalists who do not develop the means of production they have should lose their money. Even Eric Hobsbawm, the militant Stalinist that he was, could not dispute the results which made the Americas a “British Economic Colony” because of the crushing level of capital flows to them from UK savers that indirectly paid for the trade deficit with the UK.

          As for tariffs, tariffs did not protect the nascent US industry, the flow of British capital (which paid for the deficit and built the infrastructure of the US especially the Canal and intercontinental railroad systems) did. The US still had a massive trade deficit despite being an insular economy and a protected industry because, as is the case now, no matter how high the tariffs were British products were cheaper. The fact that the US was the largest gold producer for a relatively long period of time was the only thing between it and total collapse.

          As for the Marshall plan, people still do not get that the Marshall plan was exactly what UK Banks did in the 19th century, finance the trade deficit between Europe and America, in order to avert of an imminent collapse of the European economies because Bretton-Woods forced the world back to the gold standards and European countries were shipping gold to the US on a daily basis. The Marshall Plan kept the gold in Europe and effectively reduced interest rates to tolerable business levels and helped the boom.

          In 1932 when the US imposed tariffs all European countries left the gold standard already (except France I think) and the European countries imposed tariffs as well and demanded payment in gold which the US was obliged to do leading to the gold crisis and the Bank Holidays. The crisis that will result from protectionism imposed by the US will not be as severe as what happened in the 1930s but it will cause a lot of harm because the trade deficit that the US has is a real deficit cause by lack of physical industrial capacity. The rest of the world has the industrial capacity, physical industrial capacity, and the US will be forced to import regardless and this time at a much higher price level than they import.

          People think that we still live in an era where the world cannot live without US industry. Wake up, the world has been doing that for nearly 20 years. The only unique industry to the US is hi-tech military products.

          Finally, I work in the fossil fuel energy sector, a sector that I have been advocating its death for nearly 20 years and have participated in making my company move to renewable energy (we now own a number of solar and wind plants). Thanks to the Orange president the company is now rethinking its strategy (under new management of course) which is unfortunate but this is what you get when the government picks winners and losers without having a strategic outlook.

Leave a Comment