Why Border Walls Weaken Workers And Boost Profits

A border wall won’t stop a corporation from chasing cheaper labor, and a viral tweet won’t change the logic of profit. We start by pulling apart the jobs narrative with a basic but often ignored economic reality: capital and goods move across borders far more easily than workers do, and that imbalance can permanently tilt the playing field against labor. If we want pro-worker policy, we have to stop blaming the most vulnerable people in the story and start naming the incentives that make wages stagnate and benefits disappear. 

Then we go deeper into how history still shapes power right now. We talk through why “just get over it” is a political weapon, how the Electoral College is tied to slavery-era compromises, and why it’s more accurate to judge racism by outcomes and systems than by trying to read someone’s soul. You’ll hear analysis drawn from Tim Wise, including the Lee Atwater tape on coded language and the shift from dog whistle politics to bullhorn messaging, plus a clear breakdown of stop and frisk using the numbers that expose what the policy actually did. 

We also make an unexpected connection between public conflict and private life. A segment featuring Dr. Gabor Maté explores trauma, relationship triggers, and how the nervous system and vagus nerve can turn emotional stress into physical symptoms. From there we pivot to geopolitics, using North Korea’s evolving economy, sanctions evasion, and partnerships with China and Russia to question what U.S. power looks like in a changing world. We close with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Other America” and the reminder that time doesn’t solve injustice without truth, pressure, and action. 

Subscribe for more independent analysis, share this with a friend who argues about politics at dinner, and leave a review with the biggest point you disagreed with or couldn’t stop thinking about.

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Question

SPEAKER_10 0:01

Welcome to the Jerome McLean show. I'm your host Jerome McLean. Independent media that we're avoided traveling. We have one at land. Nobody is leaving. Let us reason together. Is there an addiction that is plaguing America? That's the question we're gonna be answering today. Let's get into the episode. Until I have done something for humanity, you should be ashamed to die. If you have not done something for humanity, you ought to be ashamed to die. Let's get into our episode.

SPEAKER_08 0:39

The idea that if you build a wall, jobs are coming back for real. Do y'all like 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 the 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.

Why Walls Don’t Bring Jobs

SPEAKER_08 1:25

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_06 2:48

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. 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 try to keep buried. Watch this.

SPEAKER_08 3:48

As long as we can keep people focused on that. See, that's the divide and conflict 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

Why The Past Still Bites

SPEAKER_08 4:34

little because you know, white folks we love to do this, right? 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. And all right, 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? What 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, the greatest country ever struck off in 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 and 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 around 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. Right? 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 slaveholding 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-slave holding states.

SPEAKER_10 7:02

This is why I tell people a lot of times I don't get shocked when things happen because I'm a student of history. So I don't have to study the markets. I can note history trends to know exactly where to save money, when not to do it, et cetera, et cetera. But here's something that I want people to remember. When you think about history, I want you to break the word down and think of just his story. And so when you see somebody quoting history, listen to them, learn from them, and then think that was his story. Now, what are the stories of all the other people that he named? And go see, you know, listen to them. Listen, I think it's very important if we want to end this cultural divide to learn from the source. You know, we're we are anti-tribalism here, but listen to some of the people that they quote, uh, ask them, you know, for some books and then some resources, right? And then go look at some of the names of the other people that they named. Look at if what they thought about the uh facts. I always say you have to pay attention to what people do, not so much to what people say. So, for example, if uh on one side of our mouths, it's very normal to say, if you don't uh know your history, you'll be doomed to repeat it. And then when it's convenient, we'll say, Why don't you just get over it? Well, I can't just get over it because you just told me that if I don't know my history, I'm doomed to repeat it. So if I know my history and I start to see trends that look like something that looks over here, then then I'll be called paranoid, uh uh warmongering, uh yada yada yada. And so a lot of times you have to see like what they mean by know your history. Sometimes people are speaking of code and they're saying, know my history, yours is a lie. And the whole thing is I always want people to think about the way we tell stories. Imagine if you were you and your uh wife, so in this condition, and we're gonna talk about a a nuclear family, and you went to church, and at your church, when you got there, your pastor wasn't there. There was a uh pastor from Chicago visiting, and the way the wife tells the story is gonna be very different than what the way the husband tells the story. A husband is gonna get a call.

SPEAKER_03 9:47

Bing bing bing.

SPEAKER_10 9:48

Hey man, how was service today? Oh, it was good. Uh what Reb say. Reb wasn't there. What uh who who uh who did it? You know, some dude from Chicago. That's the way a guy would tell the story. This is the way a woman would tell the story. Ring bing ring, hey pair, hey yeah, mm-hmm, you look so good, Stanter. Uh oh, um, dude, they was kicking today, and that's from the da da da da da, and and the music was good, and you just asked perfume, and the mighty clouds of joy. Same experience, but the way they tell the story is vastly different. Imagine the story we hear all the time about Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson is one of the president, one of my favorite presidents. Um, I like John Meachham's book Um uh The Art of Power of Thomas Jefferson, if anybody's interested. And but and you know, Thomas Jefferson wrote a lot of stuff about himself in his own biography, or autobiography. Now imagine what that would have sounded like if Mrs. Jefferson had written his book, and his wife would have a very different view of Thomas Jefferson than he had of himself. Now let's take this even further. We now know that Thomas Jefferson had sex with Brigley, had sex with the slaves, the famous known one is Sally Hemings. What would she have to say if she was the official uh Thomas Jefferson biographer? Think about that when we think about history. History is always set in time by the people who won the wars and therefore they feel like they get to shape the narrative. But that is not always the truth, or not always the entire truth.

SPEAKER_08 11:41

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're talking about race and racism, right? That I think we gotta 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 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? It's racism 2.0, but it, you know, it's some updated software, but it's running on the whole 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

Electoral College And Slavery’s Compromise

SPEAKER_08 14:21

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 un-racist 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 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? 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 used 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 in 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

Dog Whistles Turn Into Bullhorns

SPEAKER_08 18:11

to describe urban space in like 25 years. So he's still stuck in a mentality of you know 25 to 30 years ago. It'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 scathing 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 worked 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 6% 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. No, 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. Sure as hell wouldn't be me. Because I don't think they let you skype that men 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 applaud that. Like, what is that? Like, I'm a white privilege, drug use. I'm some I'm gonna go get hired at night. No, don't don't applaud that. That's horrible. I mean, it's a laugh line, it's not an applause line. Jesus. 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

Stop And Frisk Reality Check

SPEAKER_08 22:54

were under review in the court case on Stoppin' 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, and I got one right here. I'm sure I could find like at least two-tenths of one percent. Just like flipping a coin, like just, you know, just randomly pointing people out, paintballs, something, 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 got to have radical honesty, which means we got to call both when it needs to be called, and we got to 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. We got to call it what it is.

SPEAKER_06 24:27

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 L.E. Atwater 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 Wai is 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.

SPEAKER_10 27:09

All right, so we got a lot more to get to. We're right back with the Rebel Blade.

SPEAKER_12 27:45

Blessed are you made of creation free?

SPEAKER_05 29:42

I find them attractive, they're humorous, they're fun to be with. That's important. But underneath it, there's something else. When you marry somebody, you're gonna find both your dreams and your worst nightmares. When I talk to couples, they say, I got bad news for you. You always marry somebody that's going to trigger for you every unhappiness that you ever had in your childhood. So when we find somebody to be in a relationship with, it happens on two levels. One level is I find them attractive, they're humorous, they're fun to be with, there's a commonality, you know, so that there's the attractiveness. That's important.

Trauma, Marriage, And Body Signals

SPEAKER_05 30:25

But underneath it, there's something else. Underneath it, there's a looking for the love that we never got in the first place. So, for example, why do so many women, specifically who were abused in childhood, end up with abusive men? Which they do repeatedly. You think what's wrong with them? Well, there's nothing wrong with them. What's wrong is whose love did they most want when they were kids? Precisely that abusive person. So unconsciously, they'll be drawn towards men who've got that abusive potential. Because that's where they're looking for love. But this is generally true. So my wife and I we were married 55 years now. And yes, we find each other attractive and fun, and we had a lot to talk about. But on a deep level, I was compensating for the love I didn't get as a child the way I needed it. And so was she. In other words, we marry our parents' dysfunctions, and then the relationship becomes either destroyed by that or you grow mutually. So relationships are very much a matter of growing up together, if that can happen. But I guarantee you, when you marry somebody, you're gonna find both your dreams and your worst nightmare.

SPEAKER_07 31:35

That's profound that we're all seeking, subconsciously, we're seeking our parents' dysfunction.

SPEAKER_05 31:42

Yeah, because that's where we wanted the love. So we're still looking for the love. Now, that's wired into our brains, and it's wired into our bodies. And very often when I speak to people and they're upset about their relationship, and I say, Well, what's in your body? And they'll say, Well, there's tension, there's you know, my heart's beating fast, my throat's tight. I say, How familiar is that feeling? Goes way back to childhood.

SPEAKER_07 32:04

So, in terms of our unhealthy, should I say, when those if when we have those unhealthy relationships, how does that then manifest itself physically? So, whether that be an unhealthy childhood relationship, or even as an adult, if we're in a marriage or we're dating someone and it's it's it's unhealthy and we know it is, how does that manifest itself physically?

SPEAKER_05 32:25

It'll manifest itself in physical states, such as I described, tension in the body, upsets of the intestines. See, people are relational creatures, and we always think of ourselves as sort of discreet individuals. But like in my marriage, if I can be self-disclosing here, when I was being dishonest, my wife would get a neck pain. Literally, she would get a neck pain. So so after a while, she learned, I got this neck ache. Are you lying to me right now? You know? Yeah. Or or uh and I was, you know, or intestinal abstelled. We tend to think of it as all this problem with the individual's intestinal tract. But the intestinal tract is very responsive to relationships because there's a big nerve called the vagus nerve. It's called the wandering nerve. It's the largest autonomic nerve in the body, and it uh connects the organs to the brain. And when the brain picks up a hint of disturbance, the vagus will act up. And now you're gonna have stomach aches and diarrhea and and or constipation, even and so on, because there's something disturbed in the relationship. And the whole point is we're we're wired together as human beings, and so that that'll manifest through our nervous system. So it shows up in the blood. Children are very much creatures of relationships, and they're very dependent on the parents' emotional states. So if you want to know if a couple is having tensions, there's two things you can do. You can ask the mother and the father, or you can measure the child's stress hormone levels, and the child's stress hormone levels will be a perfect readout of the parents' state of relationship.

SPEAKER_07 34:00

So it it it sounds like what you're saying is that we we need to be in touch with how our body is reacting in all of these moments with our partner.

SPEAKER_10 34:08

We need to before um he finishes, and I'll tell you who this uh doctor is. I'm gonna put on my little hat as well, because uh it's a thing that I rarely do. I don't, I I don't believe, I really don't, I'll put it this way. I do not like people who constantly have to brag about their credentials because I I think that arguments from authority are sometimes the uh the weakest argument. But this is kind of what I will say. I am a military veteran. I uh have a degree from American Military University in psychology. Um I have stuff in behavioral science from blah blah blah blah blah. If you want to learn it, you can search me and it'll say exactly where. I have counseling certificates and this, that, and the third. Behavioral psychology, human anatomy, anxiety, addiction. I know when people are lying, and over the years I have picked up on the fact that it may not be the appropriate way or place to say it. So I will have people that are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, who still um are have certain behavior traits, and when you start to hear them tell stories, they expose it to you. Um something as simple as I like my mother more than I like my father. And then so they said that to you, and then you they over time tell you my father was an alcoholic, or my mother, you know, was an alcoholic, or vice versa. Well, then they just kind of gave you the main. You go look at the social psycho social scientists say about it, behavioral psychology, and then you watch them, and so you can see they may have these certain behavior traits, even at this age, and they they will say something like, Well, it's worked for me so long, I just won't change. And it's like that is a even though that is an adult that is sitting there, that is a childlike puppy response, where you telling them to do something, they they revert right back into oh no, this is my my mom, you know, and the fact that you can call them out on their stuff makes them feel so uncomfortable because you're triggering them in ways that they had never had to deal with. Imagine if a child who had every time uh male um came around got abused. So anytime as an adult they hear male whatever, they are gonna do the flight scenario. You will either fight or uh stay. I would say we used to say fight, flight, or fight. But I like to say either you're gonna run, you're gonna stand firm, or you're gonna fight. And and so it it it can it all it all is not sometimes about whether somebody's a coward or they these are just silly things that people who who say that are flippant. This that is their trauma response speaking. This is what I've learned as from a very early age how to survive. When this is happening, you stand still, you don't say anything, you don't get involved. Or it may be when this is happening, you stand still, you're you're you're there as a third party, so you can witness what happened, you can be the third party media. Or it's when this is happening, you don't you stand there so you don't take a stance, whatever. Or it's like when this is happening, you run towards the fight, you put it, you get everybody safe. And those are natural responses. The person that is running is just as brave as the person that is standing, who is just as brave as the person that is running towards it. Um I think a lot of times we like to play this game hero coward, and that's not always the choice of the person you happen to be seeing. You can give somebody as much training as possible, but if you are not a coach who also somewhat uh knows some type of behavioral psychology, it may not work out for you. Luckily for me, or I'll just say I was very blessed that within my military capacity, I was also a field training officer. I was a watch commander, I taught people how to shoot. So my military experience prepared me for my social science experience experience, my behavioral psychology stuff. I would look I would have chiefs try to yell at you and stuff like that, and then you kinda you know, you say stuff like feel better, and then and you can see the reactions they made because one, it did make them feel better, but two, you were gonna get it because you knew too much. And so that is a lot, even though that moment wasn't great when when it was happening, it did teach me about human beings. And and and I'll say this the thing about human beings that we need to really, I want people to if I can get you to remember everything about this, what's your most intimate thing, your most intimate fear, is the same most intimate fear another human being probably has. What's most personal and sacred is universal. I'm gonna let um the you get back to this doctor be aware.

SPEAKER_05 39:58

We can't be aware of it. And and and the more body awareness we have, and realizing that our bodies are responsive to the environment, uh, the more more of a clear map we have to our relationship. Okay. The rest of medicine that I'm trained in tends to separate the mind from the body. People, women might go to, or man for that matter, might go to a physician with certain physical symptoms, and the doctors will look for the source only within the body itself. Whereas very often the source is interactional and relational.

SPEAKER_07 40:27

Now, correct me on this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 40:29

Because I've always said who we choose as our partner is one of the most important decisions. There's so much more to it that is unconscious. And then in any successful relationship, the task of the relationship really is to make the unconscious conscious. Because what we all want is freedom, but there's no freedom without awareness. So if I'm unaware of all these things that are motivating me, how can I talk about being free? You do believe that's true then. Who we choose as a partner is one of the most important decisions of our life. Well, it's the most important decision, right? You know. And and and again, it's the one that we're very often the least conscious of all the factors that go in.

SPEAKER_10 41:08

And the voice of the doctor you heard was Dr. George Mate. Hopefully, I pronounced that correctly. Uh, he has some amazing work, a lot of very um good deep thinker uh about uh mindset, um, especially if it's around how you feel. I would highly um um recommend his work. Again, that is Dr. uh Gaber Mate.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

A look at so we wanted to take a bit of a look at what is going on in North Korea, and there are a number of reasons to do this. So, first of all, let's put C3 up on the screen. Uh, Xi Jinping actually visited North Korea on Monday. This was a very significant visit. It's been quite a while since uh the Chinese leader has traveled to North Korea and comes at a pivotal moment uh for obviously both China but also for North Korea. Led to several articles in major newspapers about what exactly is going on in that country to a lot of American or Western viewers. They are economically doing quite well at the moment. So we can put C1 up on the screen. This was an article from the Wall Street Journal about the uh world's most surprising economic success story in North Korea. Effectively, what they lay out here is how the country was really struggling under the uh dueling uh challenges of COVID and also US sanctions, of course, which are you know fairly devastating to the economy. And during COVID, uh they instituted a severe lockdown, you know, really close the borders. Um, there were limited ability to get media in and know what's going on. There were some dissidents who uh who left and were able to sort of tell the world about smuggled in goods as they look to transition the country to really focusing on and requiring that all goods that were sold internally would be through state-sanctioned channels. Now, of course, in the immediate term, that caused a lot of hardship. But now, what North Korea has done is they have partnered up with, they've long, you know, had this partnership with China, and China continues to be sort of their most important ally and um, you know, providing them with a lot of trade goods and also aid. But they have now this very important partnership with Russia. Um they saw that there was a huge opportunity with Russia's war in Ukraine. And they not only sent troops as mercenaries to go and fight for Russia, many of whom uh died, but you know, the state received payment for the um fact that they sent these these troops over on behalf of Russia, but they also have become very important to that war effort. They've taken that money that they've made through their. Partnership with Russia. And they have plowed that back into their own economy through major construction projects, through building out factories, not just in Pyongyang, but throughout the countryside that was much less developed. And apparently, this whole direction sagar is really bearing a lot of fruits.

North Korea’s Economic Shift Under Sanctions

SPEAKER_01 44:18

And over the past several years, GDP growth has been quite strong. You know, it's still a country that suffers with a lot of um poverty and also inequality between the leadership and between everybody else. But there are much more uh much more wealth going around, much more economic prosperity and the ability to build out these resorts and other projects that bring a quality of life improvement to the population as well.

SPEAKER_09 44:44

Yeah, I think the most fascinating part of the whole story, which belies everything, is the inability of the United States to continue to enforce serious global sanctions. Because the story of North Korea, which effectively economically was crushed both by the United States and the rest of the world, all up until they're obtaining a nuclear weapon. Even then, after they obtained a full-blown ICBM nuclear weapon capable of hitting the United States, they still were not prosperous, or even relatively prosperous, or in some sort of an upward trajectory. Russia enters the war in Ukraine. The United States and the West throw everything we have at the Russian economy. The Russian economy continues to thrive. The Chinese banking system, the Russian banking system, all of these circumventing actions and infrastructure is created. Then North Korea, because it has one of the largest standing armies in the world and weapons production, because that's what their entire focus was on, is able to both use its people and send weapons, manufacturing, all these other things over to Russia, which then they're obviously paid for. So now they go from being a Chinese vassal state to actually having something that another country wants, Russia, of whom it has some reasonable relations. And in the meantime, China is also able to not only backstop their economy, but they're also able to bring in some goods and actually purchase some other types of goods and bootstrap some other industry inside of the country. The single most interesting part of the Wall Street Journal story is about housing, about how Pyongyang and North Korea has been able to build more new housing in a few months in a few year period than Los Angeles and Chicago. Just to demonstrate, by the way, what you can do if you want to do it, if you have the will to build, uh as they say.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

And their abundance killed over there.

SPEAKER_09 46:36

Right. And this is this is the country which, you know, for years they said even had declining population because of malnutrition and famine and poverty. And when they have a little bit of money, they build. They're also, they're saying on the streets of North Korea, you're seeing BMWs, BYD, Chinese vehicles. But I think that the dual story of both Russia and China able to prop up their economy and actually make it not entirely miserable and fake in terms of the way that the you know, everybody remembers what, the Vice Guide to North Korea that came out in 2006, 2007. I remember watching it when I was in A, you know, that was genuinely creepy. This is under Kim Jong il, uh, this is you know, fake hotels, no guests. That's just not the case anymore. I mean, we have some of these images uh that are coming out of Pyongyang. And I mean, look, not the Pyongyang that uh we remember from the propaganda reels and others, even with the tightly controlled propaganda that they had on North Korea, it is pretty obvious that there has been a major increase in the you know in the quality of life on the street. And that is in no way diminishing the malnutrition, the starvation, and all of the other insanity that goes on inside of North Korea. But I just think it's actually a major story of U.S. sanctions. And something I emphasize here on the show all the time is if you have guns and you have if you have guns, if you have bullets and then if you have oil, or in this case, you can sell bullets for oil or some sort of energy, you can survive a lot, actually. And nuclear weapons, obviously, on top of that. If you have those three or two out of those three, you're gonna be at least somebody to be reckoned with. And Kim Jong in Kim Jong-un, the only way he's he's going out, the only way he's going out is if he dies of obesity-related intrigue uh, you know, ob obesity-related disease. No U.S. aircraft carrier Delta Force team is going into North Korea to go and kidnap him. He's gonna die in his own bed whenever he wants to. Uh, and that is the singular look, it shows the singular vision of obtaining a nuclear weapon, of being willing to starve your own people, to destroy your own economy if you must. But in the long run, it will be the most important decision that they ever made, which is which is sending a very strong strategic signal to the rest of the world. That's why I think the Iran situation and Venezuela combined are actually going to prove the North Korean model out, as well as the Ukraine situation in terms of throwing all those sanctions and it just not working.

SPEAKER_01 48:57

Yeah, and uh the partnership with Russia has obviously, I mean, it's provided them with a lot of money so that they can invest in housing, in infrastructure, in factories, in even, you know, like spa, like resorts and you know, leisure activities for their people, but it also has provided them with the ability to build out their military and um, you know, for Russian technology to help them shore up some of the places where they were more vulnerable and less developed. Um, I I want to read a little bit of this Wall Street Journal piece to people because I think there's a term I forget it.

SPEAKER_10 49:31

Is this is this socialism that they're engaged in? Or is it communism? Or is it uh Marxism or or or what are those fancy terms that we run all the time? Every time somebody talks about community, oneness helping each other. Um I don't know, I forget.

SPEAKER_01 49:56

Capitalism forever. Which is for a lot of Americans, this is kind of mind-blowing stuff. So they talk about this um Australian tour operator who visits North Korea regularly, and it says after more than a hundred visits to North Korea, Rowan Beard had come to expect long waits for a taxi under the Kim Jong-un regime. But on a recent visit to Pyongyang, his first years a vehicle arrived in minutes. His North Korean interpreter had whipped out a smartphone, opened an app called Sam Hung, and hailed a ride with a service akin to Uber. The two tracked the taxi's movements in real time. This was all totally new, said Beard, an Australian tour operator. My mind was blown. It goes on to say that in Pyongyang, restaurants serve up brick oven pizza and chicken wings, diners can play through pay through a mobile QR code system. Chinese electric vehicles whiz through the streets. Pyongyang has new pet stores, an internet gaming cafe, and car dealership selling BMWs. Kim has initiated a nationwide construction boom last year. And this is what you're referring to, Sagar, North Korea built 10,000 new homes in Pyongyang, more than either LA or Chicago. Um, as I mentioned before, he's also had a focus outside of Pyongyang, um, building out as well, trying to alleviate some of the disparity between the city and the countryside. And we can put up, you know, you can see by satellite, this is one of the ways, since it's, you know, such a reclusive government and very difficult for foreigners to gain access, for Westerners to gain access. We can put C1B up on the screen. You can see the differences in the light map from 2019 to 2025. So you can see that there's been, you know, massive development, also just, you know, more reliable electricity in order for lights to be lit and uh, you know, to be able to get these satellite images. So this is one of the key markers that has been long that has long been used to track like how things are going in sort of inside of North Korea. And according to this, um, they are going much better than they were in the past. New York Times had a similar rapport. I can put C2 up on the screen, um, uh tracking the country's development over the past number of years. You know, they spend a lot of time in this piece, which is important as well, talking about the extreme crackdown during COVID, um, both, you know, locking the borders and um also really cracking down on any sort of dissent, any sort of distribution of foreign media, including like K-pop or any sort of like South Korean dramas or any of that was met with execution. So heavy, heavy crackdown on that and on the um economic on the black markets there that a lot of people were reliant on and just to be able to live. So it was, by all reports, a very difficult time. Um, you know, and the the policies were extremely authoritarian. But now here, and not to say the policies aren't still authoritarian, but in terms of the economic life of the country, seem th things seem to have dramatically improved. And so now as Zhi visits North Korea, you know, they're a little bit worried about North Korea becoming too close to Russia and sort of forgetting about their benefactors over in China because North Korea is important for China in terms of their geostrategic interests of um balancing on the Korean peninsula. So uh, you know, this is probably the first time that the Chinese leader, you know, and a North Korean leader visit in this manner for many years, where the North Korean leader really has some leverage here in terms of the type of deals that they could strike. By all reports too, Sagar, uh Trump has wanted to do another meeting with Kim Jong-un and try to, you know, revisit the nuclear issue. And they're like, no, we're good. They don't care. No, we're we're not interested.

SPEAKER_09 53:37

It really does show uh the power of what a nuclear weapon can give you. I do think I think the story is fast. Look, it's sad too, because you know, a lot of people died. And it's like we're not trying to wash over. We're talking about a country where they execute you for listening to the K-pop, right? And uh and they have all kinds of in insane internal repression uh whenever they want to, and have now for decades basically an entire systematized like gulag type system. But it does really, I think, just show the diminishing power of US sanctions and of US power. And it also, with China and Russia, they're able or now feud, not feuding, but both trying to bolster their status there with North Korea. It's turned itself into a real power with the ability to exchange, not just goes with China, its original client client state, but actually have some leverage. And of course, it poses a huge threat to our own ally, South Korea. So it is uh remains a very, very important geopolitical part of the globe. And to watch this happen over five years just shows how quickly the world has changed. Unimaginable story, even 10 years ago. Absolutely unimaginable to talk about the streets of Pang Pyongyang in this way. And now here we are. It's crazy. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.

SPEAKER_01 54:49

And if you'd like to get the full show, ad free and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com.

SPEAKER_09 54:55

That's right. Get the full show, help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.

SPEAKER_10 55:00

So just imagine how wow that is. Wow, wow, we are focusing on something um what somebody's sexuality is. So you know, something's nobody's damn business. We're focused on uh whether somebody's transgender or not, or something that's nobody's damn business. We're focusing on trans athletes, something that's less than 0.7% of the population. Um these countries are focused on uh real issues. We're obsessed with cultural issues, and I'm not trying to say that they're perfect, but they have a long-term strategy and we have a election two-year term, what happens in the next uh eight-year strategy. I'm not trying to romanticize the dictators, but I want you to think about this. We think that uh these people are dictators because they only that one person uh run the country. What do you think I feel when the only option that I have are Democrats and Republicans? Oh, we're we're much better because we have two people running. And we all know the system is right. Uh that's why I tell people I'm not tribal, I'm a man without an island. Uh the the political uh philosophy that I believe in anarcho-syndicalism is never gonna happen. So it's not even worth uh talking about sometimes. But it and anyway, uh we're gonna have our uh intellectual pass. Um, and then uh thank you for tuning in, and we will see you on the next episode.

SPEAKER_00 56:46

I want to discuss the race problem tonight, and I want to discuss it very honestly. I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, and I do not see how we will ever solve the turbulent problem of race confronting our nation until there is an honest confrontation with it and a willingness to admit the truth when we discover it. And so I use as a title the other America. Because there are literally

Culture Wars Versus National Strategy

SPEAKER_00 57:42

two Americas. One America is beautiful for situations. In this America, millions of people have the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality flowing before them. Children grow up in the sunlight of opportunities, but there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this other America, men walk the streets and search for jobs that do not exist. Millions live in substandard housing where they end up with wall-to-wall rats and roaches. Thousands of young people are deprived of inadequate education, not because they lack intelligence, but because the schools are overcrowded, inadequate, and segregated. And the most critical problem is the economic problem. There are millions of people working every day and still living in poverty. They receive part-time wages for full-time work. And so the Negro finds himself perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

MLK And The Other America

SPEAKER_00 59:26

This has caused bitterness, despair, and we have seen the angered expressions of this despair in violent rebellions. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. What is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. It has failed to hear that large segments of society are more concerned about tranquility than about justice. And so we must face the fact that our nation's summers of unrest are caused by our nation's winters of delays. As long as justice is postponed, we stand on the verge of social disruption. The first thing that must be recognized is that America is still a racist country. However unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. Racism is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior, and its ultimate logic is genocide. And until this is removed, there will be people walking through life, feeling that they are nobody. Now there is another myth, the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. But time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts of dedicated individuals. And so we must come to see that the time is always right to do right. There is another myth that legislation cannot solve the problem. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may not make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and that is important. And when you change the habits of men, attitudes begin to change. That is why justice requires both legislation and conscience. Now there is another illusion: the idea that people can lift themselves entirely by their own bootstraps. No other group has been enslaved for centuries and then freed without resources, without land, without opportunity. It is like releasing a man from prison and giving him no way to begin again. And yet at the same time, this nation gave land, resources, and support to others. That is a contradiction that cannot be ignored. So we must reorder our national priorities. We cannot spend billions on destruction while neglecting the needs of justice at home. Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We must come to see that our destinies are tied together. We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as foods. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny, by working with determination, by sharing power, by confronting truth.