American Anger 

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We focus a lot on this show on international relations and foreign policy from the perspective of what often shapes them – things like wars and militarism, conflicts and perception of external threats – but at least as important is the world economic order: which countries are rich, which ones are poor, which ones are developing and aren't and how that system is maintained as well as the truth about rising economic powers like China and its potential to undermine American dominance and the dollar as the reserve currency. 

Ha-Joon Chang is a leading economist known for his sharp critiques of international economic institutions and their defense of neoliberalism. No matter how often it fails, as well as for his advocacy for economic pluralism, he has become quite a growing sensation online with his lectures. 

He's a professor at the SOAS University of London and a former Cambridge lecturer. He's probably best known for his 2002 book, “Kicking Away the Ladder,” which examines how wealthy nations traditionally have blocked economic progress in developing countries. His recent book, “Edible Economics,” from 2022, uses food to explain economic ideas. 

In addition to these topics, we sat down with him last night and he helped us understand the likely implication of Donald Trump's proposed tariffs and protectionism as a basis for his economic policy, as well as the reason basic economic literacy is so important in democracy and how often it is deliberately made inaccessible through things like jargon and excessive statistics and a reliance on all sorts of terms that are designed to keep people away. He has made it a life work to elevate economic literacy. I found the conversation with him very interesting. I think you will as well. 

The Interview: Ha-Joon Chang

G. Greenwald: Professor Chang, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk. One of the reasons we were so interested in having you is we have a lot of conversations now about geopolitics and international relations. So often it focuses on things people can easily understand, things as wars and various types of conflicts. A huge part of geopolitics in the international order is the scheme of wealth – that various countries have or don't have – and has always been. 

A lot of your work has become quite popular. I think “Kicking Away the Ladder,” the 2002 book, is among your best known and, for me, that provides one of the best explanations to understand why some countries are rich and why some are poor and kind of how there's a system to ensure that stays the same. Can you talk about that for people who haven't read that book or are familiar with your work? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yes, the book was published in 2002, so it's quite a bit old now. But there I was pointing out that this was the high noon of neoliberalism when rich countries were lecturing developing countries “Oh, don't use that stupid things like protectionism, don't use that state-owned enterprises that don't have a government meddle with business.” But then I tried to show that these are actually exactly the policies that the rich countries themselves use in order to get where they are today. Telling the developing countries not to use these policies is like someone using a ladder to climb to the top and kicking the ladder away so that other people cannot follow. 

The most famous and most robust argument for using protectionism is known as the infant industry argument. That argument says the government of a developing nation needs to protect and nurture its young industries until they grow up and compete in the global market. Exactly in the same way that we protect and nurture our children until they grow up and can compete in the adult labor market. Of course, in poor countries, a lot of children work from the age of five or six, but you know, this means that they cannot get educated, they cannot acquire high skills and so on. So, if you can do it, it pays to send these kids to school rather than sending them to work. 

Very interestingly, this logic of infant industry protection was invented by an American and not just any American. He was called Alexander Hamilton, the very first Treasury Secretary of the United States of America. He invented the term “infant industry protection.” Initially, a lot of Americans were not convinced by this, especially people like Thomas Jefferson who said this guy is insane. We can export our cotton and tobacco, of course – I never mentioned the slaves – and import manufactured goods that are cheaper and better – even considering the considerable transportation costs – than what these Yankees can produce. So why should we subsidize these inefficient Yankee manufacturers? 

So, it was initially rejected, but over time the Americans figured out that actually this was what they needed and yeah, from about the 1830s until the Second World War, most of the time over that 120-year period, the United States was the most protectionist country in the world. So, I was revealing this history. It wasn't just the U.S. I mean, Hamilton got his ideas from British practices, Germans later developed Hamilton's theory and used protectionism quite heavily in the late 19th century. The Swedes and later the French and the Japanese and more recently Koreans and Taiwanese and so on. 

So, I was basically pointing out this hypocrisy in which these countries are actually telling developing countries not to use the exact same policies that they used in order to climb to the top. It wasn't just protectionism. It wasn't just tariffs, there were a lot of other policies like the use of state-owned enterprises, strict regulations on foreign investments and other things. So yeah, I mean, that caused a bit of a wave in the international policy debate because developing countries could tell the rich countries, “Look, why are you telling us not to use these policies when these are exactly the policies that you guys used in order to get where you are today?” 

G. Greenwald: You know, it's interesting when you kind of take those principles that you just described, these historical and economic principles, and apply them to specifics, I think sometimes people can see them better in a kind of more modern sense. And one of the things I find so interesting is that you have now a lot of billionaires who became that wealthy because they developed companies in the wake of the internet that became public companies, became very large and successful, who are now essentially insisting that the only way for innovation to happen is to have massive cuts in government spending, even though the internet itself was the byproduct of massive government investment, some of whom will acknowledge that. So, is that the kind of dynamic that you're describing where there's kind of this propaganda that government spending impedes economic growth, whereas so often it's what spurs it? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, I mean, it's in a way the most obvious in the United States. You know, it wasn't just the internet, but the computer itself, microchips. I mean, these are all financed by the U.S. government, especially the U.S. military: the internet, the GPS system, what makes our modern information economy possible, these were all invented with government money. And there's a reason why Silicon Valley is where it is because this is where a lot of U.S. defense research, specially built around the jet propulsion laboratory, was conducted. And yeah, this is like, once again, people rewriting history in the most convenient way. I mean, they lived on government support in the beginning, and then now that they are bigger and don't need the government as much, although they still need government, the U.S. government is still pouring huge amounts of money into military research, which spills into the civilian industries. I mean, it gives a huge protection in the form of the patent system and copyright system, without which these companies wouldn't have the monopoly they have. So, actually, they still need the government, but of course, they only want protection and not the obligations. So, now they say the government is bad. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, in fact, most of those companies, not only exploited the technology developed by the government, but continue to rely on massive government contracts, particularly with the military, but with the intelligence, you know, you have Palantir and all these adjacent companies that are on this kind of austerity kick. Everyone needs to lose their benefits, every government agency needs to be cut, except for our massive contracts with the CIA and the Pentagon that are worth many, many billions of dollars. 

The enforcement scheme – you were describing earlier, how rich countries sort of dictate this economic dogma to poor countries, that they know themselves the rich countries aren't what produces growth. The mechanisms by which they do that have been these kinds of international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Oftentimes the message is, well, we've fostered this dependency, you're relying on a bunch of our loans and bailouts and, as a condition, we kind of demand that you just cut all services for your citizens and investments in your society. We want to see massive austerity and no more government spending. 

Is that done, do you think, with the intention to maintain these countries in a sort of dependence state, or is it just a misguided but well-intentioned way of trying to help these countries grow? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, it's a mixture of things, you know, because there is a lot of misguided goodwill. There are people who truly believe that the United States and other rich countries are developed on the basis of free trade and free market; there are economists who believe that government is bad and so on. So yeah, some of it is misguided goodwill. But you have to ask the question, if it's so misguided and has produced terrible results – because the World Bank and IMF programs have basically wiped out economic growth, increased inequalities, and created all sorts of problems in almost all the developing countries where they were involved – then, at that point, you will have to ask: okay, I mean, misguided goodwill or not, if these programs are not working, why do they keep repeating the same thing again and again and again? I mean, maybe you could say that these people are mad. As Einstein said, the definition of madness is repeating the same thing again and again and expecting different results. But it's not madness that they are doing this. They are allowed to repeat these policies that are not working only because they are basically backed by the rich countries, which benefit from this kind of thing. 

G. Greenwald: One of the more interesting disputes that arose in the last decade, it was about a decade ago now, maybe a little more. I don't focus primarily on economic policy or macroeconomics or anything, but I follow the story quite closely when the Greek economy was sort of on the verge of collapse. The Greeks elected a fairly populist, aggressive government that tried to stand up to primarily France and Germany insisting that the Greeks impose a sort of rigid austerity like we were just talking about. The Greeks tried to be very confrontational and resisted and didn't really work out well for Greece in the end. Are there ways that underdeveloped countries that are put into these positions have to defy these institutions or are they pretty much captive to what they're told to do? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Well, yeah, Greece was really crushed by the European Commission, basically France and Germany. I mean, people say that in that episode the IMF was telling the Germans and the French that they were going too far but what happened there was this mistaken belief that the way to revive the economy is to cut government debt, which means cutting spending. The trouble is that when you cut spending, the economy shrinks and the tax revenue falls and, as a result, even while the spending was cut brutally, public debt, as a proportion of GDP, was still rising because GDP itself was shrinking very rapidly. And there was a huge unemployment –especially youth unemployment reached over 40%. So, it was a total disaster.

But there are instances where the countries defied these international institutions [audio failed] …the Asian financial crisis and yeah, instead of signing these austerity agreements with the IMF, Malaysia suspended capital outflow for like a year. And yeah, there was a huge uproar. You know, they said, “Oh, when this ban is lifted, you know, 70, 80 billion dollars will flow out of the country.” But what happened was that because of this ban, because the money couldn't flow out, they stayed and then started doing something, so the economy got revived. When the government lifted the ban one year later, only six or seven billion dollars flowed out, which is a kind of normal amount. 

So, you know, there are these instances. And also, you know, look at the successful economies in East Asia: Japan first and then Korea, Taiwan, now China. I mean, these countries never really followed the advice of the World Bank and the IMF. (laughs) So, the proof is that they're steering you right into your face but apparently, you know, the people refuse to understand it. Was it the Canadian American economist John Kenneth Galbraith who said that if someone's salary depends on not understanding something, you can never make that person understand anything? It might have been often unclear but, basically, these institutions, these governments, they are refusing to accept this reality because it means that they have done wrong, it means that they have to do something that benefits them less. 

G. Greenwald: That is interesting, this emergence of this kind of new economic power based in Asia, obviously led by China. As you might know, our program is based in Brazil. Brazil had for a long time been kind of under the thumb of the United States. It's in what the United States considers its backyard, which is all of South America. But then Brazil became a founding member of the BRICS alliance and the Brazilian president Lula da Silva has said several times now that he wakes up every day dreaming of de-dollarization. Is the emergence of things like BRICS or the attempt to move away from the dollar as the dominant reserve currency potential paths to undermining this system that you're describing? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yes. Of course, if you zoom out, the history of Capitalism has been a history of domination and resistance and military invasion and colonization, gunboat diplomacy that led to unequal treaties. And so, it's been a constant struggle between different countries and societies that are located in different parts of the global economic hierarchy. 

So, yeah, I mean, in the '60s and '70s, with decolonization, a lot of developing countries that wanted to be kind of independent of the U.S. and European domination, they wanted to be allowed to change their positions in the global economic hierarchy and, yeah, they called for the new international economic order, they organized a non-aligned movement. Unfortunately, all of this was crushed in the '80s and '90s with the third world debt crisis starting with the Mexican [  ] of 1982 and, yeah, especially countries in Latin America and Africa basically kind of being forced to implement these World Bank-IMF policies, which basically created decades of stagnation and social unrest. 

Now, with the recovery from that phase and with the rise of China, with the kind of revival of some of the developing economies in the 21st century, these countries have started demanding a different arrangement. So, there's BRICS, also G20, which was created when rich countries were in big trouble, after the 2008 financial crisis. There has been the creation of new developing country-focused financial institutions, very often led by China, the Asian Infrastructure Bank and the New Development Bank. Yeah, so things are quite different. 

In the '80s and '90s, if you didn't agree with the World Bank, you didn't get money because there was only one bank in town, and it was called the World Bank. Now, there are different banks. Now, there are different countries with slightly different views about development, like, say, South Korea giving foreign aid and China is rising, Brazil is becoming quite assertive and South Africa, in its own way, is trying. So yeah, I mean I think this is a time of great global geopolitical shift. 

But when it comes to dollar dominance, I'm afraid that it's going to be a while before it can be changed because once you become the dominant currency, it gives you so much kind of extra power even without you trying. So, it's very difficult to change that. It has been changed only once with the rise of the U.S., you know, Britain had to see the position of the home of the dominant currency. But even that took decades. And this time around, even with the creation of the euro and the rise of China and so on, it will still take some time before the currency domination can be changed. But in other respects, the World Bank is now almost irrelevant, the IMF is kind of less domineering, [  ] credits changed its practices a little bit, not massively. So yes, I think the world is in a very interesting place. Unfortunately, it means that it can be a very dangerous place because now the Americans and Europeans are desperate to stop China's rise and they are doing a lot of things that could create quite a lot of collateral damage for weaker countries in the process.

G. Greenwald: Your work has become quite popular in various sectors online, as I'm sure you know and one of the viral clips that I saw circulating several times was one where you were talking about how modern-day economic thinking and language are sort of comparable to Catholic theology in the Middle Ages. 

And the thing that I thought of when I heard that was the very first U.S. presidential election that I really paid close attention to – it was in my young adulthood – was the 1992 presidential election where you had the Democrat Bill Clinton and the Republican George H. W. Bush who were in full agreement on the virtues and the sanctity of free trade. And then this was the time of NAFTA and the like. And then you had this third-party candidate who was kind of treated as a crazy person, Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, who was saying NAFTA will gut out industrial jobs and factories and good paying middle-class lives for Americans. And then, you know, 20 years later, everyone agrees that the major problem is that we have massive deindustrialization, all these towns are shuttered, the middle class has kind of withered. Very prescient. 

At the time I didn't know who was right, but it seems very clear that the NAFTA opponents were. And yet any attempt still, even after all of that, to question the tenets of free trade and the necessity of having full-scale free trade drives people insane like it's some kind of an outrage.

Is that the sort of thing you were talking about with this “Middle Age theology”? And can you kind of expand on what more you mean by that? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, well, yeah, Ross Perot's giant sucking sound from the South. Yeah, no, no, absolutely. 

Well, it's not just in relation to free trade that economics has become the modern equivalent of Catholic theology in Medieval Europe. I mean, it is basically now a doctrine that justifies the existing social economic order. So, it's basically telling us the world is what it is because it has to be. However, unjust, irrational, or wasteful, you think that it might be the “science of economics” is saying – or in the old days, “the words of God,” especially as interpreted by the Vatican – it is something that you have to accept. 

So that now, you know, I mean, of course, that, you know, in the capitalist economy, economic considerations have always been dominant, but especially in the neoliberal age, when, you know, economic considerations are the ultimate and very often the only logic that you have to accept. I mean, economics has become basically the language of power. 

Of course, when I say economics, I must qualify that. There are different types of economics, you know, not all economists believe in the free market; not all economists think nothing else matters other than the market. But, you know, economics as it is practiced today is like that. Therefore, it has become a very important kind of obstacle to changing the world because it says that this is the best of all possible worlds and that anyone who tries to challenge it is either misguided or has a hidden agenda to enrich himself, empower himself, but really don't care about the rest of the world. 

So, yeah, I'm afraid that it's become like that and to extend the analogy a bit further, you know, economics as it is practiced has become basically impenetrable to ordinary citizens because it uses a huge amount of jargon, lots of mathematics, you know, lots of statistics. And yeah, I mean, ordinary people find it difficult to understand. So, it's become the Latin of the Middle Ages. I mean, it's the language of the ruling class. And if you don't know Latin, you are not even allowed to debate anything and the Vatican made sure that no one other than the priesthood and sons of some very rich people understand the Bible, by preventing the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. So, later during the Reformation, it became a big deal that the Bible was translated into English, German, French, and so on. Because now it meant that a lot of people could read it. So, yes, I'm afraid that this analogy is not as frivolous as it might seem. 

G. Greenwald: Well, it's interesting, though, because although that's clearly accurate in terms of how economic theory and economic thinking has gone, especially in the West and in these institutions we've been describing, probably even globally, you now have a new American president who ran on a campaign very hostile toward free trade and very favorable to protectionism and tariffs and explained it in a way that enough people could understand it. They voted for him, believing that tariffs would protect American industry, would enable its reemergence, the return of jobs and you have these establishment economic outlets like The Wall Street Journal and those types – the neoliberals and sort of, you know, classic conservative economic dogmatists – who are horrified and outraged by what is coming out of the Trump White House with regard to protectionism and free trade and tariffs. What do you make of his administration's approach to these questions? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, well, first of all, most of his tariffs are used to get concessions on other things than straightforward economic things, so, the use of the threat of tariffs to Canada and Mexico to kind of intensify their border controls. But insofar as it is used for economic purposes, I think it's very poorly conceived and will backfire most immediately, it is going to increase inflation. Especially if you impose a tariff on Chinese imports, which account for a big proportion of U.S. consumer products, then it will have an immediate inflationary effect. 

I mean, this is why initially he talked about a 100% tariff on Chinese goods, but now it's only 10% because even he and his people know that could spark inflation. But, you know, in the long run, this importation of cheap, good-quality consumer products from China has been one of the most important factors in the modern neoliberal American political economy, because wages have been suppressed for the last 50 years. The U.S. median wage fell from the mid-70s till the mid-90s, and then it started rising again but it recovered to the ‘70s level only a few years ago. And in that story, of course, another important role was played by the ballooning of credit cards and other consumer debts, but the availability of these cheap Chinese goods was very important. 

Now, if you impose a tariff on Chinese goods, you'll have to pay your workers more. How are you going to cope with that? So, it actually could undermine the whole neoliberal economic system. 

Now, he says that this will rebuild the U.S. industry, but I'm afraid it's not going to happen like that, because protection, as in the infant {industry} protection story, protection only creates this space in which improvement can happen and in order for that to happen, companies need to invest, they need to do research and development to innovate, they need to recreate the skill base of the American workforce and so on. And there's no plan to do it through deliberate industrial policies. 

So, he's basically leaving it to American corporations to do it, but then these corporations are actually not interested in rebuilding the economy because the U.S. now has – yeah, this really started in the '80s, but that really came into full being in the 21st century – the U.S. now has a parasitic financial system, which is not interested in long-term investment. 

In the last 25 years, the American stock market sucked out money from corporations rather than putting money in, which is supposed to be their job. Now these companies, in order to satisfy these short-term-oriented shareholders, have to do huge stock buybacks, sometimes borrowing money to do stock buybacks, because they want to do stock buybacks that are bigger than their profits, giving away huge dividends. So, in the last 25 years, 90% to 95% of U.S. corporate profit has been given back to these shareholders. 

So, these companies are like leaky buckets. You create more water by temporarily protecting your economy from foreign competition. These companies get more resources because of that because now they don't have competition, they can charge higher prices and so on. But this money is going to leak out of these corporations. I mean, look at the way that Boeing has been destroyed, all because of this parasitic financial system. 

So, I'm afraid that it's not going to work. It's not to go back to the infant industry analogy, although in the current U.S. case, it's not an infant, it's the revival of an old person. I mean, it's not enough to go to school, the kid has to study. You have to provide incentives and punishment to the kid so that he puts adequate hours and concentration to study. I mean, what Trump is doing now is sending the kid to school, but letting the kid decide what he wants to do. So, when he goes to school, he will skip classes and not concentrate. So yeah, I mean, good luck with the revival of the U.S. industry. I'm afraid I don't see it happening. 

G. Greenwald: I just have a couple more questions. I want to talk about what you just said and what you talked about before in this comparison to Catholic dogma and theology and the like, which is that if you had a set of pieties or orthodoxies in a particular field that was producing positive outcomes, you could almost understand why there weren't a lot of people questioning it or challenging it because it's working. 

Here in economics, especially international finance, you have not just the destruction of jobs and the middle class throughout the West in the United States, but also the 2008 financial crisis, what you were just alluding to, in a lot of ways, that wrecked the economic security and future of a couple of generations of people and countries all over the world. And you would think it would prompt a reexamination of a lot of these unchallenged premises and yet one of the things you describe is this kind of oligopolistic system of economics to prevent these principles from being challenged, I suppose, because they actually have worked well for a certain group of people who have an interest in perpetuating them. But how does that work, this oligopolistic system to preserve these pieties and make sure there's no challenge to them? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, so the most shocking is how poorly the neoliberal system has performed. I mean, of course, it benefited hugely a tiny group of people at the top. But, you know, compared to the days of the so-called “mixed economy,” the period between the 1950s and '70s, when there was a lot more government regulation, you know, the U.S. was 92% in those days – and there was a lot of strong state involvement in economic development, industrialization, all over the world, not just in developing countries, in the U.S., in Europe. Compared to those days of the so-called mixed economy, neoliberalism has not only produced higher inequality and more social problems, which even many of the advocates of neoliberalism admitted might happen, but it has produced much less growth. In the earlier period, the world economy was growing at about 2.8%. In the last 40 years of neoliberalism, it has been growing at half the rate – 1.4%, 1.5%, both in per capita terms per year. So, if it cannot even produce growth, why do we have this? That's the biggest mystery. 

Of course, those who benefit from it have all the interest in the world to defend it. So, you know, basically, the kind of politicians who support their agenda is more blatant in the U.S. because there's a lot of money flowing around in the U.S. politics legally. In other countries, it's a bit less, but those who have money have a huge influence on government policy, they control the media and they make sure that people are kind of indoctrinated into believing that this is the best of all possible worlds by making sure that the right kind of economists are given the Nobel Prize, the right kind of economists are given faculty positions in top universities, the right kind of economists that write in the financial press and pontificate on what is a good economic policy. And, yeah, above all, they have basically found a trick in diverting people's attention away from economics by creating all kinds of single-issue debates on gun control and abortion and the culture war and wokeism. 

So, yes, I'm afraid that this is why I have been on a personal mission in the last couple of decades to propagate mass economic literacy because in the kind of society we are living in, without everyone knowing at least some economics, democracy is meaningless. It becomes like voting in a talent show. Oh, I like the look of that guy. I mean, he has a beautiful voice or whatever. I mean, that is not about the substance, because those who have power and money do not want people to think about the substance. 

G. Greenwald: Well, with my last question, I'd love to have you back on, because it's been super enlightening, which I expected it to be, but I want to ask you about China. I remember in the 1980s in the United States, or into the 1990s, the overwhelming economic discourse was about fearmongering about Japan and its rising economic power: they're buying all of our buildings, they're taking over our industries, there's no stopping them. Apparently, there was some stopping them, because none of these scenarios that were depicted really happened. 

But now we're hearing the same thing, the same kind of rhetoric, about China – that they're rapidly growing, so fast that they're going to have parity with the United States in terms of purchasing power, they're going to be this unstoppable economic force. There's a lot of talk about them having to be our implacable enemy and at least a Cold War-type competitor or adversary. What do you think from a Western perspective and an American perspective is the right way to understand what one might call the threats or challenges posed by a rising China? 

Ha-Joon Chang: I must declare at the beginning that I'm not a fan of any country. I'm a citizen of South Korea. Korea has been bullied by everyone around us for the last few thousand years, Chinese, Japanese, the Mongols, the Manchus, the Huns, and later Russians and Americans. So, whatever I say about Japan, China, and so on, it's not because I'm particularly fond of or hate that particular country. I hate all the countries equally if you want me to put it that way. (laughter)

The rise of Japan was halted partly because Japan got bullied into opening the financial market and accepting a huge revaluation of the currency in the 1985 Plaza Accord. Once that happened, there was a huge financial bubble, it burst, the Japanese didn't manage the aftermath very well and then the economy went into a permanent kind of depression, and it was seen off in that way. And that happened, well, maybe mainly, if not even partly, because Japan was dependent on the U.S., on the military. When they lost the Pacific War, they were forced to sign this constitution which prevented it from having a sizable army and then the U.S. military is stationed in Japan. 

So, in that sense, even though it was rising economically, [Japan’s] political position was subordinate to that of the U.S. China doesn't have that problem. And actually, from China's point of view, the U.S. is the aggressor because basically China is surrounded by U.S. navy and army bases, almost all across this South border, except the one they did with Russia. You have the U.S. army stationed in South Korea, as well as the air forces; the South China Sea is kind of covered with U.S. Navy presence and you name it. 

So, China is not going to play that game that Japan had to play. So, it's not going to accept financial liberalization, which is the easiest way to undermine the rising economy because China does not have the kind of financial power, and I'm not just talking about money, but the financial institutions and the skills that people who work in the financial industry has and so on, that you can mobilize to fight the American financial power. Whereas you can and it is fighting the American power in terms of production and international trade and so on. 

My prediction is that China will not play that game, which means a big problem for the U.S. because first of all, it's not as if this is, as some people argue, the second Cold War. In the real Cold War, there was no real economic relationship between the Soviet bloc and the U.S. bloc. This time, China and the U.S., these economies are deeply intertwined. China is the biggest trading partner with the U.S. after the EU and the NAFTA countries. I mean, it owns 13% of the U.S. Treasury bills. As I mentioned earlier, the role as a source of affordable, good-quality consumer goods is very, very critical to the American political economy. 

So, the U.S. cannot push it around in the way that it could with Japan. More importantly, what the U.S. has been doing in the last several years – and this is not just Trump, I mean, even from the days of Obama, but more clearly, Biden – it has been actually pushing China into catching up faster. With all these restrictions on the high-grade microchips and key technologies, China – they say this is the model of invention – China has come up with these ways of doing the same things with less resources and lower technologies. 

So, when Biden made the Dutch companies and German companies export lithographic machines that make the circuit board for semiconductors, Americans thought, well, now this will make it impossible for the Chinese to have the latest microchips but, lo and behold, within a couple of years, it found a way to make the latest seven-nanometer chips without using the latest machines from the Dutch and the Germans. I mean, lately, this Chinese AI company DeepSeek has kind of created an economic earthquake by creating an AI with a fraction of the cost that American companies are using. 

So, I mean, if the U.S. really wanted to push back China, it should have started 20 years ago. Now it's too close. Putting more pressure on China will – not necessarily, but most likely – bring forward a day when it catches up with the United States and the rest of the world. This is why the U.S. and the EU are panicking and breaking all the rules of the WTO and other international institutions that they were so insistent on upholding because now they are desperate to [ ] China. But without a coherent industrial strategy and without reforming the leaky parasitic financial system, I'm afraid that they are not going to be able to do that. 

G. Greenwald: All right, Professor Chang, it's always good to have one's economic literacy raised and in the spirit of doing that we will show everybody who's watching where they can follow your work. We really appreciate you're taking the time to talk to us. We'd love to have you back on as well. Thank you so much.

Ha-Joon Chang: Thank you.

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

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There were two main segments on this episode:

First, we discussed the lawsuit filed by Donald Trump’s media company – which owns his social media site Truth Social – jointly with this platform, Rumble, against Brazil’s notorious chief censor, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. 

We were the ones who broke this story on the front page of Brazil’s largest newspaper this morning – Folha de São Paulo – and we’ll explain the story’s significance and its implications for a free internet. 

Tthen: President Trump significantly escalated his rhetoric against the West’s long-time darling – Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy – after Zelenskyy made critical comments about Trump, which in turn followed Trump's endorsement of the need for elections in Ukraine. After all, if you're fighting a war in defense of democracy, that country you're defending probably should have elections. Instead, Trump slammed Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian” who “talked the U.S. into spending $350 billion for a war that couldn’t be won,”. He also accused Zelenskyy of presiding over missing money in Kiev and suffering from deep disapproval among his own people, labeling him, “a dictator without elections.” All of that was in the context of Trump's arguing that the war must end – not only for the sake of the United States but also for the Ukrainian people. 

We have reported many times on the increasingly repressive censorship regime imposed by not just the Brazilian government, but more so by a single judge on the Brazilian court. It’s something we've covered for lots of different reasons, including the fact that your free speech rights, if you're in the United States, are absolutely affected and threatened whenever censorship regimes are imposed and accepted in parts of the democratic world. They become the new bar that other countries can then hurdle over. We've seen that many times. There have been extreme examples of this in Brazil, including the banning of X, forcing them to comply with and obey every censorship order issued by a single judge. And it's just so extreme. 

Now, as you probably know, Rumble had operated in Brazil for a long time and began receiving this tsunami of censorship orders demanding that they close the accounts or block accounts of a whole long list of people, one after the next, always in secret court orders with no due process, no trial, no notice to the other person being censored. Rumble began complying but then got to the point where they said, “We created our site to be a site that defends free speech. We're not going to sit here and unjustly censor” and so Rumble decided that they would not be available in Brazil rather than comply with unjust censorship orders. 

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First: The German-based journalist, James Jackson, has been covering free speech attacks in Germany extensively and he will be here with us tonight to explain all of them. 

Then: Several top national security officials of the Trump administration – including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump envoy, Steve Witkoff – met today in Saudi Arabia with senior Russian officials including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. It was the first real dialogue between high-level officials of both countries – by the way, the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers – that took place in many years and there is every reason to celebrate even, indeed, – to breathe a sigh of relief – over the fact these two countries are now agreeing to maintain open dialog and work together, cooperatively, not only to end the devastating war in Ukraine but on numerous issues of common interest beyond Ukraine as well. 

Plus: there was a bizarre and extraordinary hate crime that took place in Miami over the weekend that you likely heard very little about. A Jewish American man who identifies as an ardent Zionist shot and tried to kill two people solely because he thought they were Palestinian. The two men he shot were actually Israeli. 

For their part, the two victims also mistook the ethnic background of their shooter: they announced on social media that he was Arab and that he tried to kill them just for being Israelis and then added on their social media accounts, “Death to Arabs.” 

There's a lot to say about this incident, especially the reaction to it or, more accurately, the very subdued lack of reaction.

The interview: James Jackson

The issue on which our show has mostly focused over the last year or so has been the relentless assault on free speech after October 7. It resulted in all sorts of executive orders in the U.S., purporting to ban criticism of Israel or activism against it, the shutting of pro-Palestinian groups on campuses and even the shutting of TikTok as one very prominent senator admitted over the weekend: the true impetus for shutting down TikTok in the United States was that it was perceived to permit too many criticisms of Israel. 

Meanwhile, throughout Europe, the targeting of Israel critics and pro-Palestinian activists, particularly people engaged in activism against the Israeli war in Gaza, has been even more severe. While it's taken place throughout Europe, undoubtedly the country where it has been most extreme is Germany, which has furnished immense amounts of arms to Israel that it used to bomb and destroy Gaza and therefore has a very intent motive to prevent anyone from claiming that those are war crimes or genocide because it would make Germany complicit – a strain Vice-President JD Vance did not mention when criticizing Europe for the attacks on free speech at the Munich Security Conference, last week. 

James Jackson is an independent journalist and broadcaster from the United Kingdom who is based in Berlin. He hosts Mad in Germany, a current affairs podcast. He has previously covered news, business and culture in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe for publications like the BBC, Sunday Times, and Time Magazine. He has really become one of my top two or three go-to sources for understanding events in Germany, particularly these assaults on free speech. We are delighted to welcome him to his debut appearance on System Update. 

G. Greenwald: James, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. I know it's late there. 

James Jackson: Hi Glenn. Thanks so much for having me on here. You know, long-time reader and follower of yours. So, really great that you've picked up the free speech cause in Germany particularly because it's not something that has got very much attention until, of course, the vice president of the United States and “60 Minutes” as well brought it to the world's attention. But it's been something I've been trying to get the message out on for a while. So, I'm happy that it's gone global, but as you said, the most egregious attack on free speech JD Vance did not mention and that is the assault in Israel. I think we understand why, you know, politics plays a very important role in this. 

G. Greenwald: Right, sometimes politicians do constructive or positive acts or take constructive and positive steps even if it's always not for the best motives. And who knows, you know, JD Vance is politically constrained. I've never heard him defend or demand censorship of pro-Palestinian activism but in any event, he certainly did end up generating a lot more attention to this issue. 

I want to just step back from current events taking place in Germany which we'll get to in a minute including what happened today at this film festival. I think one of the very first articles I ever wrote when I became a journalist or a blogger back in 2005, 2006, was precisely about the fact that there is a vastly different tradition in Western Europe when it comes to perceptions of free speech than there is in the United States. One of the few unifying views in the United States was, at least until recently, the idea that even the most horrendous political views are permitted to be expressed. The state can't punish you for them. And I remember what prompted my article was a conviction in Austria of the British historian David Irving for having engaged in revisionism and denial of the Holocaust. He was criminally convicted and sentenced to a prison term. I essentially wrote that these things are unimaginable in the United States but they're common in Europe and in Germany in particular. After World War II, you could even say, for understandable reasons, there emerged these restrictions on speech particularly when it came to denying the reality of the Holocaust, its magnitude, trying to revise what happened, as well as praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party and the Nazi ideology. And so, you started off with this kind of exception to free speech justified by these extreme events of World War II and they've obviously, as we're seeing now, have expanded aggressively as censorship usually does. That's its trajectory. It starts off justified by some extreme event that people can get on board with and then before you know it, it's a power that is being used all over the place.