Who Benefits When Labor Cannot Cross Borders

Walls. Tweets. Tough talk. None of it brings jobs back when capital can cross borders faster than any politician can shout. We dig into a simple but uncomfortable reality of modern economics: corporations will chase profit globally, and a border wall does not stop that movement. What it can do is trap workers in place, weaken bargaining power, and make it easier to blame “those people” instead of confronting the systems that actually shape wages, benefits, and opportunity. 

From there we zoom out to the deeper architecture underneath today’s politics. History is not optional context, because the past is built into the rules we still live under. We connect the Electoral College to the compromises of slavery and disenfranchisement, arguing that institutional inertia keeps old power arrangements alive even when the language sounds modern. That thread leads straight into why the question “Is he racist?” often misses the point, and why policy outcomes matter more than personal labels. 

We also unpack dog-whistle politics with the Lee Atwater tape, where the strategy is described out loud: swap explicit slurs for coded terms like crime, welfare, and states’ rights while still producing racial harm. Then we bring receipts to the “inner city” fear story by walking through crime data and the hard numbers behind stop-and-frisk: millions of stops, overwhelmingly targeting people of color, with tiny hit rates for drugs and guns. 

If you care about economic justice, immigration, systemic racism, the Electoral College, and criminal justice reform, this conversation connects the dots without letting myths do the work. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review. What’s the one statistic or claim you want more people to hear?

Transcript

Walls Trap Labor Not Capital

SPEAKER_02 0:46

The idea that if you build a wall, jobs are coming back for real. Do y'all does anybody understand economics at all? Do you actually think that like the nation's capitalists are sitting around just waiting, they're like, holy, I hope they don't figure out that they could just build a wall? Do you actually think the capitalists are like, we've got them, we've been screwing them for years, we haven't been paying them right, we've been, you know, like not giving them benefits, but if they build that wall, we're gonna have to give them all a raise. Really? Do you think that's how it works? You build a wall and then all of a sudden the jobs come back? No, the wall doesn't stop capital from moving. Neither does a tweet, by the way. An angry tweet doesn't actually cause a company to change its plans. If you think that an angry tweet makes a multinational corporation decide, oh holy hell, well, the you know, he's mad at me on Twitter, so I guess we'll just keep the jobs here. You know nothing about economics at all, right? A tweet's not gonna change, neither is a wall gonna change capital mobilization. Capital's always gonna be free to cross borders. Goods are always gonna be free to cross borders in search of the highest price, capital in search of the highest return. The only thing a wall does is chain labor to its country of origin. And if you have a policy that chains labor to its country of origin but allows capital to move wherever the hell it wants, so I can still move my company south of the border. I can still move to Sri Lanka to take advantage of less labor protection, environmental protection, etc. All you've done is tilt the game against labor permanently. And not just labor south of the border, but labor north of the border as well. Labor in this country would be far better off to have more folks here who were fighting for justice, who were fighting for better wages, who were fighting for better benefits, not something like a wall or a deportation policy that would limit the ability of those folks to mobilize for radical change. That is not a pro-worker policy, but it is very much in keeping with the mentality that says to those non-rich white folks, your problems are those people. And as long as we can keep folks thinking that, we're not dealing with the real problems.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Three-fifths of a human being. That is not ancient history. That is the math still built into the system that put Donald Trump in the White House. What Tim Wise is about to say next got him called one of the most dangerous speakers in America. He is going to call Trump a walking, talking, breathing opioid for white people. He is going to take apart stop and frisk with actual numbers. Four and a half million stops. 97% of people had not done a single thing. He is going to expose a leaked audio tape where a top Republican strategist admitted they replaced the N-word with states' rights and welfare to keep winning elections. He is going to prove with government crime data that everything Trump said about black communities was a lie. Subscribe and turn on notifications. This is a speech they tried to keep buried. Watch this.

Why The Past Still Matters

SPEAKER_02 3:55

As long as we can keep people focused on that. See, that's the divide and conquer mentality that has existed for generations. There is nothing new about it. And we've been falling for it for hundreds of years to our own detriment. So we have to be prepared to actually deal with that. What does that mean? What does it mean to not know that history? See, it's not just a history lesson, right? It also helps to explain what's going on right now. History, sometimes we don't get why it's relevant. You know, we sit in classes learning history and we think like, why do I need to know this stuff? And I understand because a lot of times it's taught in a very sterile kind of way and sort of boring way. And it's like, why do I need to know this? Right? Why is this important? Why can't we just ignore this? Well, a lot of reasons why you can't. Just as one little point, because you know, white folks, we love to do this, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:43

White white folks, particularly around race, we like to say things like, Why can't black people just get over it? Like slavery was a long time ago. All right?

Electoral College Built On Slavery

Stop Asking Who Is Racist

Lee Atwater Explains The Playbook

Trump Turns Code Into Bullhorn

Crime Data Versus Fear Stories

Stop And Frisk By The Numbers

Radical Honesty About Systems

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Why can't they just move on? Well, uh, this is sort of precious coming from people who set off fireworks every July 4th. Because that's some old too, right? Like Independence Day, that didn't happen last week, right? We didn't break away from the British last Thursday. That's some old but we're still celebrating that. So when it's stuff that makes us feel good, we love it. When it's stuff that makes us feel better than others, superior, like we're the greatest people and the greatest country ever struck off from the forehead of God Almighty, oh, we'll remember that forever. We just don't like the stuff that brings us up a little short, makes us look a little less than superior, maybe not quite as good as we'd like to believe. If you don't understand why the past affects the present, particularly on issues like enslavement, putting aside the inheritance of wealth and the lack thereof, part of which is certainly an explanation for why currently the median white wealth is 15 times the median African American wealth and 11 to 12 times the median Latino wealth, certainly that has something to do with history, who had access to resources and who didn't. But putting aside that, let's just understand something. The only reason Donald Trump is president right now is because of a little thing called the Electoral College, which was put in place by folks. See, we got this revisionist history that we've been spinning for the last couple of months about the Electoral College. Oh, you know, it was put in there to prevent tyranny. For real, you think? Do you really think that? Because I don't think that. That might have been one of the things that folks were concerned about, but it was also put in because folks like the folks in Virginia, in the bigger slave holding states, right, didn't want direct democracy or anything even remotely like it, because it would have hurt them because so much of their population was not enfranchised, right? So much of their population in some areas, 40% or over half of the people in some of those slaveholding states were what? Disenfranchised, counted as three-fifths of a human being, not considered people. And if you had anything remotely resembling direct democracy, those states would have been harmed by that. So in fact, the Electoral College was in part a compromise with slaveholding states, states who were dependent upon enslavement as a mechanism of economic development so as to improve their political position vis-a-vis non-slaveholding states. So if you don't understand how slavery, because this is the point, right? Even if you don't think racism was key to Donald Trump's own campaign, which, you know, suggests to me that you might have been asleep for the last several months, even if you believe that, understand that racism in the 1700s, white supremacy embedded in the structure of the country, at the founding of the country, is most definitely implicated in his election because without the obeisance to the Electoral College, without that compromise, we know he would not be president right now. So that is why we have to think about the past, and that is why the past affects the present. See, inertia is not just a property of the physical universe, it is also a property of the socioeconomic and the political universe that we have to address. And it's important for us to address that as a systemic matter. See, this is the other problem we talk about race and racism, right? That I think we got to move through if we're gonna be effective. Because ever since the election, it's been very, you know, it's easy, I suppose, for people to, and they ask me this a lot, and you've probably, you know, sort of come up upon these kind of conversations where people are, you know, do you think Donald Trump's a racist? Donald Trump a racist? Are all of his supporters racist? All of these are the wrong questions, right? It isn't really about whether he's a racist or whether his supporters are racist or not. I would never, first of all, assume that all of anybody's supporters are anything, right? I mean, that would just be ignorant. I would never say, like, oh, the only reason you would ever vote for Donald Trump is because you're a bigot. Look, not only are not all of Donald Trump's supporters racist, not all of Hillary Clinton's aren't racist. Let's be clear about that. And in fact, in 2008, look, in 2008, I remember there were polls that came out like a month before the election, right? Where something like 28% of white Democrats who said, and I assume they were telling the truth, that they were gonna vote for Barack Obama in a month or six weeks or whatever it was, 28% of white Democrats, six weeks out from the election, said, Yeah, I'm gonna vote for that guy, but they acknowledged to pollsters that they still believed at least one, if not several, racist stereotypes of black people to be true. So what does that mean, right? It means like, yeah, I don't like a lot of them, but that one's okay. Right? That's racism 2.0, but it, you know, it's some updated software, but it's running on the old mainframe. You know, it's some of the same old, you just sort of repurposed it, you know, repackaged it. But if I believe that the larger group is dysfunctional, the fact that I carve out an exception for one guy, right, or a handful of people doesn't change that it's still racist. So this isn't about like, oh, this person is awful and this person is great, and these people are awful, and these people are great. We're all a mix of awful and great. It's the reality, right? We've all been conditioned to be racist and to be sexist and to be classist and all of this stuff, right? We we've been hit with that stuff ever since we were kids. So none of us are completely free from that. That's that the idea that we can divide ourselves into like the racist and the unracist is just nonsense, right? It's not about that. It's like if we ask if Donald Trump is a racist, it's sort of like asking if a drug dealer is also an addict. I don't know. And I don't care, right? It's like with Donald Trump, it's like I don't know if he gets high on his own supply, but I know what he's selling. Right? So at some point, whether or not he's a racist, if he's actually manipulating on the basis of race, if he's using race and racial resentment and racial anxiety in order to get elected, the action is racist. It's not about somebody's core character. And this is something that the right has been manipulating for a very long time. Go back to 1981. There's an audio recording. You can Google this and listen to it yourself. 1981, Lee Atwater, who was for a long time, probably before Carl Rove, the most prominent conservative Republican consultant of the modern era. He had worked for Reagan, he worked for George H.W. Bush, he worked for all the sort of leading conservative Republican candidates through the 80s and into the 90s. He has since died of cancer. And um but before all of that, before he got sick, when he was still very much embedded in Republican conservative politics, 1981, there's an audio tape of him where he actually admits this as a strategy, right? He actually is on the tape saying, listen, you know, back in the 1950s, you could say, and he, you know, it's the n-word, I'm not gonna say it. He says it in the tape like three times. You know, he says it over and over and over again. And then he says, but by the 60s, you know, late 60s, you can't say that word anymore. It gets you in trouble. So you start using other words like states' rights and crime and welfare, right? And taxes, right? And he says, and now you're getting so abstract, it sounds like it's all just about economics, but the real purpose and the point here is that black people get hurt worse than white people. So he's admitting this isn't what this isn't me saying this about right-wing folks. It's not me saying, like, that's what they're doing, right? It's not Ian Haney Lopez, the author of Dog Whistle Politics, saying this is what they're doing. It's the guy who's actually originated the theory and the practice who's saying, Yeah, this is the that we do. We just make up words and make up concepts and we sucker people with these ideas to actually hurt black folks. That is what we do. Now, Lee Atwater apologized for some of that before he died. Other folks have not, they keep doing it. Right? And so when Donald Trump gets up and says, now see the difference, right, is that like there's a difference because Atwater was all about the dog whistle, and Trump is like about the bullhorn, right? Like the dog whistle is a use coded language, but Trump was just like, screw it, Mexicans are rapists. Right? And we're gonna stop Muslims. He didn't really learn all Atwater's lessons. Like Atwater would have been like, dude, just like could you could we talk a minute? Like you're not, you're not really doing this right. Like you you need to pull back. But by the end of the campaign, he was learning, right? He sort of he would he would talk about uh when he when he would address black folks, right? Of course, he never actually addressed black folks, he would he would go into white suburbs around black cities and talk to white people about black people. So he went to the suburbs of Milwaukee and had an all-white audience where he talked about the inner city, which is just an interesting phrase, right? Because we haven't used that phrase to describe urban space in like 25 years. So he's still stuck in a mentality of you know 25 to 30 years ago. He's like, the inner city is full of carnage and it's falling apart, everything's terrible, you can't walk out the street without getting shot. Now, at the time, remember everybody said, Oh, you know what he's trying to do? He's trying to signal to people that he really cares about the black folks. He's trying to signal to those suburban white folks who might want to vote for him, but they're sort of like, oh, I think he's racist, that he's not, because he cares about the black. That wasn't what he was doing, right? What he was doing by reminding white folks about how dangerous and dysfunctional and pathological and horrible black folks in the city were, was he was reinforcing their stereotypes and saying to them, I'm the one that can solve this problem. He wasn't signaling concern for those communities. He was scaping and he was lying. He was lying because, in fact, violent crime in this country, including in black communities, is roughly half of what it was in the early 90s. That is a fact. And you can look it up and you can argue with him, and he will ignore it because facts are fungible to him. And yes, there's been an uptick in the last two years in about half of the large metropolitan areas, but the other half, there's been no increase or even a decline in violent crime. Overall, violent crime down, violent crime even in Chicago, a third below what it was in the early 90s, violent crime in Los Angeles, 40% below what it was in the early 1990s, or 50% below crime in Washington, D.C. at a level it hasn't been seen since 1965. Black male homicide rates lower today than they were in 1950. Now that is what is factual, but we don't want to know about that because we want to paint certain communities as inherently dysfunctional, out of control, filled with carnage, because then we can turn our will over to the great man who can solve all those problems. How? Because he says we're gonna do stop and frisk, we're gonna turn the police loose, just like we did in New York, because it works so well. Stop and frisk, he says, works so well in New York. Did it really? No, it didn't work. First of all, it's unconstitutional as hell, that's why it was thrown out. But more importantly, it didn't work at all. 88% of the people that were stopped were people of color, right? And only six percent of the people stopped even got a citation for jaywalking. Right? 94% of the time they hadn't done anything. 6% of the time they got a citation for something, usually a very minor offense. Half of those got thrown out in court because there wasn't enough evidence to sustain the charge. So ultimately, 97% of the people stopped, and we're talking millions of people over a 14-15 year period, hadn't done anything. But Donald Trump says it worked fabulously. Now that fabulous is too big a word. He said it worked wonderfully, it was awesome, it was amazing, it was great, it was fantastic, it was the best. I mean, there's a thesaurus, it has other words. I'm sure there's one in the Oval Office. He says it was great, it worked wonderful. It didn't work because hardly anyone was guilty of anything. The theory was it was a good way to get drugs off the street. Well, they only found drugs in 1.2% of all searches. It's not very effective. They actually found drugs more often on the white folks they searched than the black and brown folks they searched. So, in other words, the hit rates were better when you stop white people, but they kept stopping black and brown folks disproportionately. So that's some pretty crime control, right? Tells you that the war on drugs ain't about drugs, right? But actually, we know that, right? Like, I know that, because if the war on drugs was about drugs, I don't know who'd be giving this talk to you, but uh sure as hell wouldn't be me. Because I don't think they let you Skype that in from prison. And I can tell you this now because the statute of limitations has expired and they can't touch me, but oh Jesus, don't don't applaud that. Like, what is that? Like, oh, white privilege, drug use! Awesome! I'm gonna go get high tonight. That's no, don't don't applaud that. That's horrible. I mean it. It's a laugh line, it's not an applause line. Jesus. Right. But it's true, right? So 1.2% of the time they found drugs, not a very good anti-drug strategy. The other folks, like the chief of police who brought the program in, said, Oh, it's a great way to get guns off the street. Really? Okay, so in the nine years that were under review in the court case on Stopped and Frisk, they had four and a half million stops under review over the nine-year period. You know how many guns they found out of four and a half million stops? They found 4,500 guns. Do the math. It's one-tenth of one percent of the people whom they stopped actually had a gun on them. I could do better at finding guns in New York by just walking down the street and randomly tagging people, right? Just like walking up and being like, you, you got a gun? You'd be like, Yeah, I got one right here. I'm sure I can find like at least two-tenths of one percent. Just like flipping a coin, like just, you know, just randomly pointing people out, paintballs, some, right? That's not a plan. It's not about crime control. It was about black and brown people control, right? That's what this is. So we have an individual who whether or not he is racist isn't the question. It's about whether or not the policies, the practices, the procedures, the systems that he would put in place would further racism. That's the issue. It isn't about personal stuff, right? It's about systemic stuff. And we need to understand it that way, also for the sake of the people that did vote for him, because we got to have two things that happen from here on. We gotta have radical honesty, which means we gotta call both when it needs to be called, and we gotta name things when they are, in fact, um, fascist and authoritarian and racist and you know, things of that nature, and sexist and all of that.

Numbers That Expose Policing Myths

Connecting Electoral College To Today

Closing And Share The Talk

SPEAKER_00 19:57

We gotta call it what it is. Read those numbers one more time and ask yourself how any honest person can defend this system. Stop and frisk. 4.5 million stops over nine years. 88% of the people stopped were black and brown. 94% had not done anything at all. They found drugs 1.2% of the time. And when they did search white people, they found drugs more often. They found guns on one-tenth of one percent of the people they stopped. 4,500 guns out of 4.5 million stops. You could find more guns by flipping a coin on a random New York street corner, and Tim Wise said exactly that. But Trump called this program fantastic, wonderful, the best, because it was never about crime. It was about control, it was about reminding black and brown people in those neighborhoods that your body is not your own, that you can be stopped at any time, searched at any time, humiliated at any time for nothing. And then Wise played the card that should have ended the entire political conversation in America decades ago. The LE at Water Tape. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is not opinion. This is a senior Republican strategist on audio in 1981, admitting the entire playbook. He said it clearly. You used to be able to say the N-word. By the late 60s, that gets you in trouble. So you start saying states' rights, crime, welfare, taxes, and his exact words. The real purpose is that black people get hurt worse than white people. That tape has been public for over 40 years. The strategy has not changed. The only thing that changed is Trump stopped using the code words. He went from dog whistle to bullhorn. Mexicans are rapists, banned the Muslims, inner city carnage. He did not update the playbook, he just stopped hiding it. And the most devastating thing Y said in this entire segment was not about Trump at all. It was about the Electoral College. The system that put Trump into office was designed as a compromise with slave holding states. States that counted black human beings as three-fifths of a person to boost their own political power. The racism of the 1700s is not in the past. It is the mechanism that selected the current president. They do not want you to connect those dots. Now you have. Thank you for watching. Like this video, subscribe, and share it. See you in the next one.