Resisting Trump - Views from the North American Left, with Dr Jim Stanford and Bhaskar Sunkara

Welcome everyone to this Search Foundation webinar on resisting Trump, views from the North American left. I acknowledge that we meet here in Australia on the land of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First Nation peoples and offer sincere welcome and respect to both elders, both past and present. This land was taken without consent, without compensation, and without treaty. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Our format today is very straightforward. Over the 90 minutes we have available, we'll hear first from Dr. Jim Stanford and then from Bhaskar Sunkara, followed by some conversation between them and a Q&A, and then we'll wrap up at 12:30 Sydney time. You can use the Q&A function to submit questions. At the moment, the chat is closed, but use the Q&A. It does the same job. The event is being recorded with an edited version published on our YouTube channel later.

We welcome two very special guests on a very important subject. It has only been 9 months since Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, but the feeling of chaos and uncertainty that he has engendered makes it feel far longer. He started a tariff war with Canada, one of the first targets, and a war on the US federal public service via his billionaire proxy Elon Musk. Daily outrages and idle threats have flooded the zone and kept the world off-kilter and the focus on Trump himself. He has governed for nobody but his own cronies while giving a masterclass in garnering attention in an era where attention is a commodity. Our guest speakers will help us better understand what is happening from two unique perspectives.

Bhaskar Sunkara is founder and editor of Jacobin magazine, the premier publication of the socialist left in America, and president of The Nation, progressive monthly magazine founded in 1865 by abolitionists. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto, which was published in 2019, and has an upcoming book in the works, as he's just mentioned, with our comrade Mike Beggs from Sydney University, which we hope to hear more about at future events. Bhaskar is right in the belly of the beast, at the eye of the storm. By his work for Jacobin and The Nation, he has an understanding of and connection to the progressive social movements and major figures of the political left in the USA. Welcome, Bhaskar.

First up is Dr. Jim Stanford, economist and educator. He's the founder of the Progressive Economics Forum and director of the Centre for Future Work — firstly the Australian version, which many of us know him from, and now its namesake in Canada. He's the author of seven books and innumerable articles, chapters, speeches, and presentations, which demystify and democratize economics. His book Economics for Everyone has been used to educate and inform thousands of trade union activists since it was first published in 2008, including myself. He comes to us today from Canada, the front line in the fightback against both Trump and Trumpism. Welcome, Jim, and over to you.

Look, thank you very much, comrade, and all the comrades joining us today. That's interesting. You say that we're on the front line of Trump here in Canada, the front line being the 49th parallel, the border that runs about 20 miles or 20 km south of where I am right now. Whereas Bhaskar is at ground zero of the battle against Trump, which means he's in the belly of the beast. So we are certainly, from Canada, feeling the pressure and the danger, but gosh, I have utmost gratitude and respect for the courage of all progressives in America right now who are trying to stand up and stop this slide to authoritarianism and worse. And Bhaskar, it's a great honor for me to join the podium with you today, among my many articles published, two of them in Jacobin, so there you go.

Okay, I am going to talk, I think, largely from the kind of economic angle about what Trump is doing in terms of his trade war, the impact that it has had on Canada, and also what that will mean for Australia. So I think there'll be some good lessons there. I'll share some slides here as we go along and then I look forward to the discussions after. Luke, just give me the thumbs up that you see the title slide there. Okay, Trump's trade wars: debunking his lies, tallying the cost, and fighting back.

Unbelievable that the president of a major country could have his official White House communications team put out silly stuff like this. But it just shows you obviously the depths to which political discourse in America have fallen. And none of us, you know, we can be smug about it in Canada. In fact, traditionally in Canada, we've got a national repetitive strain injury because we spend so much time patting ourselves on the back like this for being, you know, not perfect but better than the Americans. But we're not insulated because these trends, these lessons, of course, these strategies that authoritarian right-wing forces are using are spreading over borders. In fact, they make sure they do. They talk to each other. They share notes. They have a game plan. They share money.

So we're facing very, very similar pressures from scary places here in Canada, and I know the same is true in Australia as well. So what does it mean? How do we fight back? And again, I'll be speaking more from the economics and the trade policy end of it, but obvious implications there for political strategy, including building a resistance movement. So very simply, Luke, I'll run through three broad sections here. I'll challenge just the lies at the core of Trump's trade war. Secondly, review how that trade war has impacted on Canada and how Canada is responding and what we need to learn from it, and then third, draw some lessons for Australia.

Australia is in many ways similar to Canada. My time that I spent in Australia was almost like a natural compare and contrast exercise that you sometimes get in the first year of a university class. Compare and contrast two things because there's so much similarity, of course, between Canada and Australia: the geography, extremes of climate — yours hot, ours cold — resource dependence, colonial history, etc. But also differences. But in this case there's both similarities and differences, and our experience fighting against Trump will inform yours.

So first of all, in terms of Trump's lies on the trade policy front, he's claimed that the US trade deficit destroys good US jobs. This has been part of his political pitch to disaffected working class people that has helped him get elected both times. Secondly, that deficit is the result of unfair practices from other countries. What a victimization story we hear from Donald Trump all the time about poor America bullied and abused by the rest of the world, which is laughable if it wasn't working in terms of internal politics. Third, he has claimed that those deficits constitute a subsidy to other countries. In Canada's case, he just throws out like a game show host — oh wait, he is a game show host, right? No wonder he sounds like one. $100 billion subsidy, $200 billion subsidy, $300 billion subsidy. These numbers are all mythology, and it's not a subsidy anyway, as I'll explain.

Fourth, he claims that trade deficit is an emergency that justifies his use of these unusual powers to set tariffs and do other things in America under a guise of it being an emergency. And this is why he's careful to always use terms like emergency or national security, because as you know, American democracy erodes and the checks and balances that should restrict a president's actions disappear, his use of these terms is his legal pretext for being able to pull out his sharpie and, you know, at 9:00 in the morning sign an increase in tariffs and at 2:00 in the afternoon sign a decrease in tariffs purely unchallenged. Finally, his claim that his tariffs, because they will level the playing field and offset those unfair practices, will lead to fairer, more balanced trade and quote-unquote bring jobs home to the US.

These are all lies, they're all false, none of them have an empirical scientific basis at all. The US trade deficit is not new, it is not large by historic standards, and it is certainly not an emergency. It's more a sign of power in the global capitalist system than a sign of victimization. Secondly, the US trade deficit is a result and is allowed to continue because of ongoing mass capital inflows to the United States from other countries. Every year there's trillions of dollars of capital that flow into the US for various reasons: to buy equities and bonds, derivatives, crypto, property, real estate, private equity these days, shares in incredibly overvalued chip makers like Nvidia that now account for a shockingly large share — Nvidia alone about 6% of the value of all the stock markets in the world put together in that one company. We've never seen an era of corporate wealth concentration like we're seeing right now.

And everyone in the world, anyone with money, wants a piece of that. So this money flows in all the time from rich people, from investment funds, from central banks, governments, commercial banks, from around the world. And that is what gives America — not Americoons, but the American economic system — the purchasing power to continue to buy more from the rest of the world than they sell to the rest of the world, or in other words, to consume more than they produce. And in that regard, it's America that has its hands out. Again, I stress America, not Americans. America has its hands out to receive these ongoing flows from the rest of the world.

The jobs that Trump claims he's trying to capture were never US jobs in the first place. Canada, for example, we're in the middle of a huge fight to try and save our auto industry here against Trump's threats. We've been making cars for as long as America's been making cars. Those are not American jobs. And this lie that jobs disappeared and flowed elsewhere is nonsense. It's American corporations that decided where to put their capital and where to hire people, and those US corporations have put jobs in other places, invested in things in other places that were already there. These are not American jobs.

And at any rate, the whole plan — if you actually believe that the question is how to support working people in America, especially people who've been disenfranchised or disaffected from decades of neoliberalism and the global financial crisis and the housing crisis and deindustrialization — if you believe that was what the motive was, then, well, guess what? It's not working. The US is losing manufacturing jobs, not winning them. 100,000 gone in the last year, and manufacturing's been shrinking for 7 straight months, going back to about the time the Trump tariffs started. And his concern for workers, of course, everyone on this call knows it, and we'll hear more from Bhaskar, is purely political. He's manipulated that concern, somehow managed to do it, a billionaire pretending to be a friend of the workers, and a combination of, you know, the flaws in American democracy and corporate domination of the discourse is letting him get away with it.

Here is a graph of the US trade deficit as a share of GDP. The US has had a trade deficit for 49 straight years, and the safest bet you will ever make is that this year it'll be 50. Because it is a structural, normal feature of the US economy because of those capital flows, and it's not even large. It was relatively large in the decades after China joined the World Trade Organization and a flood of Chinese imports came to the US and other countries. But that didn't last, and right now it's relatively small, barely half the size that it was 20 years ago. So this is nothing new, and it certainly cannot be described as an emergency.

Certainly, you can't blame Australia for the problem. Australia is doing its bit to reduce America's trade deficit. Australia is one of the handful of developed countries in the world that actually has its own trade deficit with America, worth $34 billion in 2024. That's US dollars, of course. Canada has a trade surplus with America, that is to say America has a trade deficit bilaterally with Canada, but it's small, 35 billion in 2024, not 100 billion, Donald, or 200 billion, or 300 billion behind door C. And that's small in the grand scheme of things.

America's trade deficits have been concentrated with the traditionally lower-wage producing platforms where US companies have put their production facilities in order to import back cheaper goods to the United States. So China, Mexico, and now Vietnam having the largest trade deficits. And again, that's not a consequence of unfair action by those countries, it's a consequence of profit-seeking behavior by companies, mainly US companies.

In terms of the balance between exports and imports, this is again the funny aspect of Australia, a real outlier. Australia imports more than twice as much from America as it sells to America. And this is in part the legacy of the Australia-US free trade agreement and the hunger in Australia for manufactured products, partly offset by exports of resources primarily back to the US. But for every dollar that Australia sells in America, Australia imports $2.24 back the other way. So again, Australia should be exempt from this whole conversation with Trump, but it isn't.

In Canada's case, it's not one-to-one, but it's close to one-to-one. The Canada-US bilateral trade relationship is the biggest in the world, a trillion dollars a year in goods and services flow both ways across the border. And for every dollar that Canada sells to America, America sells 92 and a half cents back. Not a perfect balance, but on a trillion-dollar flow, that's close. And Canada is America's largest export market of any country in the world. For all countries, it's more like 75 cents basically on the dollar. America sells 75 cents for every dollar of imports that come back in. And what makes up that difference year after year after year after year is that ongoing capital flow from the rest of the world.

Trump always talks about products and merchandise, things that come on trucks and container ships and pipelines. He never talks about services. And the reason is because the American companies have got a lock on the most lucrative services trade going. Services is the fastest growing part of world trade. And American banks and business consultants and financial firms and of course digital and technology firms have dominant, in some cases near monopoly positions over services trade. So the US has an aggregate surplus, a big one, in services trade, and the second biggest of all is with Canada, 35 billion in 2024.

The biggest is with Ireland, but that's a number because the Irish number reflects tax evasion by multinational companies that have set up subsidiaries in Ireland to take advantage of the low Irish tax rate that's lower than other European Union countries. So they manipulate this by charging themselves — the Irish subsidiary charges the parent company and vice versa. So that services surplus for Ireland is fake. The one with Canada is real. The one with Australia is real. That's a significant part, almost half of Australia's trade deficit with America is in services, and this reflects the power of American services companies, especially now in the digital area, companies like Amazon and Meta and Google and Uber, all largely unregulated, uncounted even. Most of those digital trades don't even show up in the official trade statistics, and of course untaxed because they can manipulate where their revenues occur. So that's another thing to think about.

Perhaps the low point in the insanity of Trump's whole tirade was the Liberation Day tariffs that he announced back in April with this whole set of charts, scientific-looking charts, where he explained a very specific, frighteningly specific, tariff rate applied to each country under guise of national emergency. This is where the national emergency rhetoric had to come from, and it was frankly bizarre. And even, you know, very few economists support what Trump is doing, but even conservative ones were just shaking their head at this absolute insanity. He had this amazing formula that Trump himself approved to explain what the tariff rate was going to be on each specific country.

So this shows you what the tariff change should be. And it's a function of the difference between bilateral imports and exports. That's the X and M in the numerator of this equation as a proportion of the overall imports flow. That's the M now in the denominator plus these two mysterious parameters in the denominator. The two mysterious parameters: the epsilon is something that measures the purported extent to which tariff changes flow through into final consumer prices. And they scientifically ascribed the number four to that parameter. The other parameter, the phi, is in theory how elastic consumer spending will be to a change in the price of the imported good. And they ascribed a magic number 0.25 to that parameter.

Well, friends, I have a PhD in economics. I can do the math in my head here. 4 times 0.25 is 1. And if you put one as a multiplicative factor in the denominator or the numerator of any fraction, it disappears. It has no impact whatsoever. So those two scientific-looking parameters were there purely for decoration. And then the whole thing is divided by two. Divided by two. Why? They asked Trump, 'Why are you dividing it by two in this formula?' And Trump says, 'Because we're nice.' He literally said, 'Because we're nice.' Which, of course, the rest of the world did a giant facepalm at that one.

So he approved this formula. The formula applied a magic, very territory-specific tariff rate to every jurisdiction in the world, including uninhabited islands. The uninhabited islands near Antarctica got their own tariff, or countries that have an internet domain. You know, there's some sort of bespoke internet domain country. So somebody in the White House obviously just went through and Googled every internet domain and called it a country and gave it a tariff, which is astounding.

Here's a good one for Australia because you have a trade deficit with America. You have a trade deficit. Take this formula and apply it to them. This very formula would give you a 28% tariff on all US imports into Australia using Trump's own language. So I beg Albo to please, in his meeting with Trump whenever it occurs, pull out that formula and say, 'Does this look familiar, Donald? Here's the math. You owe us 28% on every dollar you sell in Australia.' So it's madness, but it's not madness because it's of course a carefully calibrated political strategy by Trump to win support and consolidate support and consolidate authority and justify the erosion of democracy in America. And that's the part that is not a joke.

Our experience in Canada is kind of déjà vu all over again. Canada has long faced threats to sovereignty from the United States. In fact, there was a great 19th century doctrine called Manifest Destiny that American expansionists promoted for a few decades, which said that it was basically God-given right for America to take over all of North America, including expropriating lands from Mexico, which they did, and challenging for territory from Canada. And right in his inauguration speech, he mentioned Manifest Destiny and started talking about Canada becoming the 51st state. At first, people said, 'Oh, he's just blustering.' But he kept saying it. Then he started applying the same sort of logic to other places in the world like Panama, Greenland, Gaza. And clearly it's not a joke.

The US ambassador to Canada, who's an absolute Trump lackey and just an absolute... he obviously missed that being an ambassador is a field, an occupation called diplomacy. That isn't the occupation he pursues. Says we should be flattered that it's a gesture of affection, but of course it's nonsense and it's part of misinformation and part of just disrupting things, a part of flooding the zone and catching all the attention that Trump has mastered.

The irony — this is a similarity with Australia — Trump talking this way completely changed the trajectory of the Canadian federal election that happened in April. No, in May, sorry, in May of this year. And the right-wing populist conservatives, who, you know, not quite as bad as Trump, but certainly singing from the same hymn book, had been way ahead in the polls and then they lost. And it's the most astounding reversal of political fortune in Canada's history, I think. And so we got back our Liberal government as the centrist government. Our Liberals are different than your Liberals in Australia. And they have a minority government once again, and it is solely because of Trump. But the right-wing populists in Canada are banging at the door.

This was the elbows up moment in Canada. This was of course the Canadian comedian Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live telling Canadians to get their elbows up, which is a reference to a famous ice hockey reference in Canada. Ice hockey, of course, our national sport. And this is Gordie Howe. Gordie Howe, perhaps the greatest hockey player ever. We used to think it was Wayne Gretzky until Wayne Gretzky showed up at Donald Trump's inauguration. Now Wayne Gretzky is off the list. In fact, America can keep him. But Gordie Howe, we're still damn proud of. And he was one tough cookie. He'd get his elbows up in the corners, and this is the slogan for kind of a resistance sentiment.

Now, it's a very diffuse resistance sentiment in Canada, and how long this kind of passion will last is anybody's guess. We need to know that we're moving in the right direction, not just kind of spouting rhetoric. What Canada has faced under Trump: there's a 35% across-the-board tariff on all imports from Canada, except for the stuff America really wants, namely our energy and other minerals and critical minerals, and so on. They get a 10% across-the-board tariff, but the interesting thing is most of those tariffs are exempted — not all, but most — under existing rules of origin under the Canada-US-Mexico Free Trade Agreement.

And now this is interesting because it means in a way some of the pressure is deferred. The whole North American deal is supposed to be reviewed and in theory renewed next year. And so for now, Trump hasn't blown that up, which means maybe he still wants it, we're not sure. If he was to apply the 35% to everyone, we'd be in an economic catastrophe right now. As it is, we're just in an economic tough spot, and the biggest danger is from a different set of tariffs that come under Section 232 of the US trade law, which allows him again to apply tariffs unilaterally just because he woke up in the morning and had a sharpie in his hand. Apply them unilaterally on grounds of national security. That's the excuse for the 232 tariffs.

And he has gone after all of the high-value, high-tech, value-added industries in Canada, including primary metals, automotive, heavy trucks — a new one coming next week — aerospace, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, industrial machinery coming soon. And on those ones, there's no CUSMA exemption. It's the full force of it, and those tariffs range between 25 and 50%. So we have a situation where several of our major export industries are getting hammered right now, including auto and steel would be the big ones.

Big negative decision this week: Stellantis, which is the global company which bought out Chrysler, a major North American automaker, Stellantis announced that they're taking production of one of their important new products, pulling it out of Canada and putting it in Illinois. Shamefully, shamefully, the UAW president, Shawn Fain, who was celebrated in various locations for a while as being a revolutionary force in the labor movement, he has endorsed Trump's tariffs and he was celebrating this move this week, showing how effective Trump's policies are at getting jobs back home. But of course those aren't American jobs. They're jobs that exist anywhere in the world, but again, that someone of Fain's caliber would get sucked into this is testimony to the powerful politics that Trump has unleashed.

But certainly anyone with a left-wing internationalist bone in their body should be very, very concerned and outraged, not just at what's happening, but at how some US union leaders have bought into it. So every time Trump attacked Canada with one of these measures, he had a storyline about it, about, you know, this mistreatment again, this narrative of victimization, whether it was because we were supposedly letting illegal immigrants in — that wasn't the case, there's more of them that come north than go south. Illegal fentanyl, likewise, way more of it comes north than goes south. Inadequate defense spending. We have marketing boards to stabilize prices of dairy products and chicken and other key agricultural commodities that they hate. Limits on US banks — we have limits on foreign operation of banks. We had a digital services tax, 3% on all of those digital giants that I mentioned earlier, Meta and Amazon and Google and so on, companies that can afford normal taxes. Just last year we started collecting a 3% revenue tax on them. That Trump hated and blamed for the whole thing.

We put retaliatory tariffs on his tariff. He had the tariffs. We put retaliatory tariffs on some of them, and then he said the retaliatory tariffs were the problem. And believe it or not, we took them off, just to try and suck up to him a bit. Every time that happens, this is important for Australia, and I'm sure you've experienced it already: there's a little group of quislings at home in Canada, closely associated with the corporate interests, of course, who say, 'Yeah, Trump's got a point on every one of these things.' There was a group of Canadians who said, 'Yeah, Trump's got a point and we should get rid of that and then we can get back to a normal trading relationship.' So again, the alignment between right-wing forces across national borders is very, very, very important.

I wanted to just mention this digital services tax because it's just a case study of extraterritoriality, where Trump is using his power and the blackmail — the blackmail based on US market and US capital — to dictate policies in other countries, even big serious countries like Canada. So this digital services tax was a very cautious reform to address the well-known problem of tax avoidance by international companies, particularly in digital technology. It applied to everyone. It wasn't just an anti-American tax. Now, the American companies dominate these industries, so they are the major opponents of it, but there were Canadian companies that were hit by this tax as well. And Canadian corporate leaders never liked it. So when Trump comes along and says get rid of this, they jump on the bandwagon, and the Carney government, in order to try and get some talks going with Trump, made that concession along with many others. But again, that did not save us, and we're still getting hammered.

Important to point out that in aggregate, the American economy has as much at stake in the two-way trade as Canada does. We're very uniquely dependent on the US market for our exports, but the US is uniquely dependent on what we sell the US economy as key supplies and key materials. So this is clearly true in oil, for example, a strategic commodity. Over half of US oil imports come from Canada, way more than come from OPEC and the Persian Gulf and so on. So this is one reason why the petroleum industry in Canada, which is politically very powerful, wants to kiss ass with Trump as much as possible because they just want to keep selling oil. They don't care about sovereignty.

But it isn't just oil. There's all kinds of other basic industrial supplies and raw materials and critical minerals and agricultural commodities and parts, other things that show up not on the shelves at Costco with a made in Canada sticker on them like a bottle of maple syrup. They actually are purchased by American businesses for their own production process. And this is where Canada, even as one-tenth the size of America, actually has some leverage. In aggregate, the Americans get as much out of this two-way flow as we do. But proportionately, of course, in Canada it's bigger. But we do have some leverage if we were willing to use it.

China has shown how they can use leverage to back Trump off of things. They're the only country that's done it. But if others did it, particularly if they did it collectively — you know, imagine if you had the Europeans and the East Asians and Canada and Mexico all standing up to Trump rather than, you know, trying to appease him on a one-on-one basis — we'd have a chance. And this is why American manufacturing is shrinking, not growing. American manufacturing jobs are disappearing, not being created. 22 of 50 states, according to Moody's analysis this week, are already in recession. This is why inflation is rising in America. So this is again not about strengthening the American economy, and it's backfiring.

And recognizing and acknowledging the pain that's happening in America would give other countries more leverage to deal with them. Meanwhile, Trump shoots himself in the foot by making stuff that US businesses need more expensive. That's the main reason why US manufacturing is shrinking. And the vast majority of US corporate leaders acknowledge that the Trump tariffs have hurt their business, not helped it. He's shot himself in the other foot as well, both feet at the same time, because Canada is America's biggest export market, and he's damaging Canada's economy.

Right now we're in a bit of an impasse. There's huge corporate pressure on the Carney government to appease Trump, to try and preserve whatever profit-making opportunities there are, and to double down on more exports of fossil fuel. They're arguing that if we had more pipelines that could sell oil to other countries, not just the United States, we could survive a Trump. It's all nonsense. We're suffering significant pain, but we're not in a recession yet. America might go into a recession before we do, and America's lost far more manufacturing jobs than Canada has.

On the other hand, we have a huge problem, a huge challenge on the left in Canada, to try and get our act together and organize a joint pressure back at Trump and at our own government to push back and balance what they're hearing from the corporate side in order to protect the industries that we have, invest in a stronger domestic economy, including non-traded industries, including public services. You know, one good thing about public services: they are not traded. They're produced here in Canada by Canadians and used by Canadians. And they're one step removed from Trump. So we should be doing more of those, not less. But the corporate power is going to be aimed at more austerity.

Now, this is the big structural challenge that we're facing. This shows since the initial free trade agreement with the United States a generation ago, where the key interest of America was access to Canadian energy and other raw materials, Canada had been advancing as an industrial value-added economy through most of the post-war era on the strength of proactive industrial policies and strategies, very similar to the trajectory in Australia. That all changed around the turn of the century, and particularly with the big investments in bitumen — that's the oil sands exports — and natural gas and other raw materials. We've gone from having 20% of our exports being primary products to 50% being primary products. 20% to 50% in just that quarter of a century.

Now, Australia, of course, is even worse. In Australia, it's more like 70%. So Australia has always had a more severe form of deindustrialization during this whole globalization period. Canada had been able to protect some of its value-added industries, but that has been challenged already. And with Trump targeting all of our major industries, it's a huge risk.

Finally, Luke, thanks for your patience. Let me wrap up with just a couple of lessons for Australia. Interesting fun fact here: Australia is a long ways away from America, and there are times in history when that's a good thing. Okay? Mexico has a proverb that says, 'Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to America.' We have a proverb in Canada that says, 'When you're in bed with an elephant, it's always the mouse that gets squished.' So both ways true, but in Australia's case, that A, the distance, but also the history and the nature of Australia's trade flows, you're relatively protected from Trump's tariffs in the sense that your exports to America are quite small.

Now, that in a way is testament to the failure of this free trade agenda. It was always advertised if we did free trade with America, we'd get all kinds of sales opportunities there. That hasn't panned out, but on the other hand, it means your exports to America could get basically cut off and you hardly would notice because of all of the trade diversity that you have. So that's a good thing in your hand right now. Of course, you hear the same arguments that we've heard that a small country can't push back. And I think that we need to think carefully about that and challenge that assumption.

The US reliance on intermediate imports of raw materials and parts and industrial supplies and so on is important, including even from Australia. And also, Australia's got a market, a significant market, and a lucrative market. And American companies want a piece of that. So being willing to make access to Australian resources, Australian supply chains, Australian markets conditional on some kind of fairness and reciprocity in the trade relationship, I think, gives Australia some leverage as well. So as well as having Albo pull out that formula that I showed you, that will give you some leverage when he sits down with Trump.

But of course, we'd be much better off — we all understand this — if somehow there was a unified global response to what's going on. Being nice won't protect you. Starmer from Britain was the first one to fly over and kiss ass with Trump hoping that would protect them, but they've got the same tariffs as everyone else. The Europeans, a great disappointment, have got more strength and independent capacity, yet they have been trying to appease Trump. Our guy, Carney, has been trying to appease Trump despite his rhetoric about elbows up. The Chinese are the only ones who didn't. And they said, 'We'll cut off your critical mineral supplies.' And that backed Trump off for a while, but now Trump's entering another period of enhanced rhetoric with China. And the Chinese are not going to appease him. He's going to lose on that one as well.

In Australia's case, obviously maintaining diversified economic ties with the rest of the world, including China and Asia, very important. So you need to keep doing that. We've got a moment now to rethink the whole premise of free trade, neoliberal globalization. It has not worked. It didn't work in America, and that's one of the reasons Trump got elected. And it's not working in the rest of the world. So trade is important, but we have to have a very different vision of how to conduct trade. And all the work that progressive Australians have been doing through Search and AFTINET and the others, this is the moment for that.

But we're all scared by what's happening. We're going to hear from Bhaskar now. The erosion of US democracy, the risk of outright authoritarianism, and what that means not just for Americans, but for world peace and stability. None of us are safe, no matter how far away Australia may be. And that's where we need an international progressive response that can be as united as it possibly can to fighting Trump and fighting those in each country, including Canada and Australia, who are aligned with Trump and want him to win. So thank you very much. I really look forward to the next presentation and to the discussion. Thank you all.

Thank you so much, both of you. That's incredibly nuanced and detailed from Bhaskar, and as always, Jim, you have demystified and democratized knowledge as always. When introducing you, that's a lot to think about, a lot to take in. But we've got some questions already. We actually got a few on email as well. I was going to give you the opportunity, of course, though, to ask each other a question or respond, if you like, to anything. Not an obligation, but I did say I'd give you that opportunity if you had something on the tip of your tongue, Jim, in response to Bhaskar.

Oh, just that was outstanding and thoughtful and wise, Bhaskar. My question is, are you going to write that up somewhere? I need to have that as a reference for our own thinking on the left in Canada.

And that goes to some of the people who are very interested in how the left and labor movements are responding both in Canada and in the US. So, having given you a break to have a sip of water there, Bhaskar, I might ask that of Jim. You touched on one of the union leaders there being, you know, betraying the cause a little bit. How is the — you know, Don asked, 'What's the state of the Canadian left relative to the Liberals in opposing Trump's machine's impact on Canadian society?' And, you know, how is the union movement there mobilizing and achieving change to oppose both Trumpism and Trump directly? And I might then go to you, Bhaskar, about the left movement in the US as well.

Well, the labor movement in Canada has some advantages. We've got a much more amenable legal climate and institutional supports for trade union membership and collective bargaining and so on. Union density here is about 30%. We have a system called the Rand formula, which is kind of like a union shop arrangement where anyone who's covered by a contract automatically pays dues. So that avoids the free-rider problem that you have in Australia or in right-to-work states in America. And you've got better protections for strikes and other actions.

On the other hand, there's no doubt that the union movement has its challenges and its failures. About half of union members are in the public sector, and in the private sector, union density is declining. It's around 15 or 16% now. And people are feeling defensive, which means, you know, less willing to confront employers and so on.

In the broader sphere of left politics in Canada, a complicating factor from Carney's surprise victory in the elbows-up election was the New Democratic Party, which is our kind of left party, very much like the Labour Party, was decimated. So reduced to seven seats in the House of Commons, lost its official party status, only got about 7 or 8% of the vote because a lot of, you know, otherwise progressive Canadians were voting to try and keep the right-wing populist out. And in our first-past-the-post system, that's not an illogical act, but it has consequences.

So we're in a moment, frankly, of, I would say, confusion and thinking about both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary sides of the left. We're all thinking about ways to try and pull together a common reaction and a unified resistance. We tried to organize that from our center a bit of that. We held a thing called the Elbows Up Economic Summit in Ottawa last month where we got about 40 progressive economists and other progressive thinkers and union folks and social movement folks to come together and think about, you know, what does a fulsome response to Trump rather than the corporate appeasement agenda? What would it look like and how do we fight for it? And we've got a website if you just Googled Elbows Up Economic Summit, you'd find that with all the materials from that.

But we've got no — I'd say we're worried, you know, in a different way obviously than in America, but we're worried about the way the left message is getting drowned out and the need to build grassroots power and pull together different constituencies and different messages. And I really love the way Bhaskar identified those three principles, those three words as, you know, inclusive and very meaningful but non-sectarian ways of defining what we're fighting for. I'm going to take those three words to our group.

Well, you'll be able to rewatch the speech. I'll get the transcript for you, but I was going to have to write it up. That would be one way of doing it. And you're — that work. How — how — I — Yep.