Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: September 4, 2026 (Transcript)

Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: September 4, 2026

 

Hi, Bob Barney, Plain Truth Today brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and this is another Friday wrap-up for Friday, September 4th. This is Labor Day weekend, and maybe I’ll get a little bit of time to talk about. We always do some Labor Day articles on Labor Day weekend.It’s a day you can thank the unions for, because really it’s a day that commemorates what unions did for America. Now, I know a lot of people today are not keen on unions, but there was a time, especially when children were in coal mines and women were locked in factories in New York City and burned to death, there was a time when trade unions did have a purpose. And again, with what’s going on today, they may have a purpose again, because there just seems to be a lot of union-like need for some of these oligarchs out there in America as well.But we won’t get into that today. The first thing I want to talk about in this first segment of the week’s news is the ongoing problems we have with China. And as you know, I keep saying, China is not necessarily our best friend, but they’re also not our biggest enemy.And China does not have the ability, nor do they have the will, to actually make war with America. What you are listening to whenever you hear this idea that China is our enemy—we heard that before, by the way, with other countries that we wanted to go to war with. We pick a fight with them, then try to go to war with them, because it helps our military-industrial complex.But China survives off of trade and off of manufacturing that they do in their country, trying to keep a billion people employed. And that’s their job, if you’re a leader of China. And so now, even though Europe has now surpassed the United States as China’s largest trading partner—you can thank that to Donald Trump—but the United States is still a very close second.And so two-thirds of all of Chinese trade goes to either Europe or America. Now, I have a question. If you were a manufacturer, if you were a salesperson, would you want to kill the person that’s your biggest customer or your second biggest customer? Would you want to do them in? Maybe what you’re hearing is a lot of propaganda by our own military-industrial complex, basically, to give us the reason to build more and more armaments, which we don’t even seem to have enough to build.Maybe we just should build armaments to go fight Iran, since we seem to be out of ammunition and missiles and rockets, that I know for a fact. But we want to make boogeymen out of people, that when you really hear the other side of the story—and I have the other side of the story. I do a lot of dealing with China, because if you’re in the chemical business, most raw chemical manufacturers have moved out of the United States.And they didn’t do so because of labor costs, like people think. The labor cost in China actually is starting to catch up with the labor cost in America. People don’t realize that.The fastest-growing middle class in the world is in China. In fact, the middle class in China represents about 680 million people. That’s twice the population of the United States, and that’s the middle class of China.They’re paid a lot better than people think. Now, the reason that these chemical companies ran away from America is really EPA. OSHA had a lot to do with it, but EPA had the most to do with nonsensical rules that absolutely have nothing to do with protecting the environment.It has to do with an agency run by a bunch of bureaucrats that absolutely hate capitalism. Just remember that. They are communist-type people in our government, in the deep state, who do not like people who are entrepreneurs, little guys like myself in the paint business, or anybody, any big company in the paint business or in any other kind of manufacturing business.They want to put them out of business. Now, the top of the EPAs over the years, now if they’re a Democrat or Republican, now they allow big chemical companies and big manufacturers to buy them off, but the underlings that do a lot of the investigations, they are the true believers of communism, and they try to practice it all the time. But what I want to play now is an interview on CNBC’s morning show at five o’clock a couple of days ago, and it’s a Chinese expert just giving some facts about our dealings with China and how we have not been the honest broker in our dealing with China.Listen to this, and I’ll comment about it after the fact. …telling Reuters this weekend that the U.S. will also urge G20 members to re-examine their trade relationship with China, to press Beijing to rebalance its economy away from exports, saying the world can’t have a China with a $1.2 trillion trade surplus. Joining me now is Sean Ryan, founder and managing director at the China Market Research Group.This is a strategic market intelligence firm based in Shanghai. Sean, it’s great to have you on the show. Obviously, a lot of details are still coming out from this G20 summit in real time here, but do want to get your thoughts on this evolving relationship between the U.S. and China, especially since you are joining us from Shanghai and can give us a perspective that we don’t necessarily get here domestically.It’s great to be here, Morgan. Well, on the first hand, China actually almost feels betrayed by the United States over the last 10 years since Trump first started the trade war. I mean, 20 years ago, the Americans would always criticize China for producing cheap products, for IP protection.So what did China do? They started buying a lot of American products like semiconductors. Before the trade war, China was buying $300 billion U.S. dollars of semiconductor chips from the United States every year. But poof, that basically evaporated once Trump and Biden launched a trade war against China and put on export controls.So now the Chinese can’t buy chips which they want to buy from the United States, which is why we now have a $1.2 trillion U.S. dollar trade deficit, because all the stuff that China wants to buy from us, we are not willing to sell to the Chinese right now because of what I consider to be exaggerated hype and fears of a national security threat, Morgan. Why do you think it’s exaggerated? Well, I haven’t seen why there is necessarily a security threat. You know, as Scotty Besson just said, he thinks that there’s more things in common between China and the United States on Iran than things that are differences.So if you look at it through the war in Iran, China has not gone to Iran’s defense by sending a lot of military weapons. They have not sent a lot of military weapons to Venezuela. So China has actually acted like a good actor.They’ve actually reduced the amount of oil that they’ve consumed by about 50 percent month on month, which in many ways have saved the world’s oil markets. So they’ve actually been a good player and they haven’t been acting militarily like maybe Putin has, you know, against the Ukrainians. So I want to be clear, China is not militant in the same way that Putin’s Russia is.So in light of that and given some of these conflicts that that we see playing out here in real time, is there, I guess, a larger opportunity opening up for the U.S. and China to work together than to come to some sort of conflict resolution, whether it is the Russia Ukraine war or whether it’s what’s going on in Iran? And I guess just as importantly, the central role that China plays as a consumer of oil from some of these places. So there should be a detente because both the United States and China do better by working together. You can look just how many Chinese, about 400,000, go to the United States to study every year.You’ve seen that many former presidents like Deng Xiaoping, his grandkids, went to the United States to study at Duke. Hu Yaobang’s grandkids went to Yale Law. And the current chairman Xi Jinping, his daughter, went to Harvard.So a lot of Chinese actually have a natural affinity for the American system. I actually haven’t heard of any elite Chinese sending themselves or their kids to Russia or the Soviet Union since the 1980s. They all went to the United States.What I would like to see happen is we lessen some of the export controls against China so that the Chinese start buying more semiconductors, start buying more agricultural products. In 2022, they’re buying about 30 billion U.S. dollars a year of ag products. That number is only down to seven and a half billion because they’re smarting from the trade war.And so they don’t want to buy from us right now. If the two countries work together, we might not be friends and allies, but we could be strong, friendly competitors and get a lot more business between the two countries and have job creation in the United States. And importantly, Morgan, I was just in the United States last month, and inflation is really crippling the American consumer.And you have to be honest, that’s because of the trade war. The high tariffs is causing high tariffs at Walmart and Target, and it’s being transferred to our fellow Americans. And too many fellow Americans are hurting.We need to stop the trade war now. Yeah, I know both of these companies have also said they’re taking tariff refunds and reinvesting into lower prices. We’ll see how all of that plays out, including how this summit between this expected summit between the two presidents goes here later this month.Sean Ryan. Well, I have to agree with what this guy said. I’m actually going to go a little over and after this commercial for theplaintruth.com and come back and finish up about this so-called China trade deal and the enemy that we’re making out of the Chinese people.And I think when I give you some of my take, and I do deal with China because the business I’m in and with the Chinese people, I think there’ll be some surprises. Hi, Bob Barney for theplaintruth.com. It’s the place to go to to figure out what’s happening in today’s world. What’s it mean for you, your family, your friends and your future? What’s it mean for the United States of America, Western Europe, Russia, the Middle East, which will always be in your future, the Far East, China, Japan? What’s going to happen there? Well, you know, the Bible talks about a lot of things that’s going to happen in our future.It may not be in our lifetime. It may be in our lifetime. The Bible is not clear about that, but it is clear about what your future is going to be like at a certain time in the future when the Bible will be the headlines of all the major TV shows, if there’s TV shows then, and newspapers, if there’s newspapers then.But all of these headlines are going to come right out of the prophecies that you can read today in the Bible. You can find a lot of that information by going to theplaintruth.com. Thank you. And I’m back, and I just want to go over my seven-minute slot that I had for this segment.I want to go over again the Chinese people. If you deal with the actual Chinese people, like the ones working on our plant in China, our raw material place that we are partners in, they love America. They think America is the greatest country in the world.They all try to dress like us. They try to listen to our music. And they thought, I’ll give you an example.In 2019, if you were to poll the average Chinese person, they would say the greatest president in their lifetime was Donald Trump. Even with the trade war of 2017 and 2018, they understood that China was doing some unfair trade practices with America. But at the same time, they also would admit that there should be a better relationship and not to try to make them into some militant enemy, because they do not have any intentions of taking over their customer.They want their customer to keep buying, and these people work because we are their customer. I told you a few weeks ago, I have some very good friends that are farmers down here. I have one friend.I just call him Paul. I won’t give his whole name. But he lives around here.He farms some 3,000, 4,000 acres. And he was telling me that these tariffs have absolutely decimated farmers in America that depended on selling soybeans, corn crops, and other products, pork, to China. And China is now boycotting a lot of the farmers’ products.You heard on this television program, they’re down to $7 billion from $30 billion. And if you go back 20 years ago under Obama, it was up, I believe, to almost $100 billion they were buying from farmers alone. The farmers in the last 15 years have lost a lot of their profits because they made good money selling soybeans and other products to China, which is now buying those same products from Brazil, Argentina.And Argentina and Brazil, by the way, that Donald Trump removed the tariffs on beef. These people have replaced our farmers when it comes to soybeans, wheat, right? And now these same countries are replacing our beef ranchers by undercutting the beef prices that Donald Trump just signed. Tariffs are a bad deal.Tariffs are not capitalism. And capitalism is still the best form of government, true capitalism. I’m not talking about crony capitalism, which we’ve had for the last 50 years, where big companies control your politicians, which controls prices, which makes inflation, which makes the little man even poorer.I’m not talking about that kind of capitalism. I’m talking about true capitalism. Take the gloves off of little businesses like mine.Let us really compete and see how we can help. 70% of businesses in America are small businesses. 70% of the people employed in America are employed by a small business.And yet 70% of those small businesses gets the short end of the stick when it comes to our government playing favorites with big corporations like Walmart, like Exxon, like Amazon, like all of these big companies. They get every break. You know, Walmart got their tariffs back.Target got their tariffs back. Amazon got their tariff money back to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. I’m owed $180,000.I haven’t gotten one word how I can get my money back, and I’m not going to get it back. Now, what do you think I could have done with that $180,000? I could hire five people and pay them good wages. But this is what happens when you have tariffs, when people implementing these tariffs, and I’m saying Donald Trump, do not understand basic economics.They do not. They don’t understand American economics. He is acting like a Democrat.If you go back in history, we played all the Ronald Reagan videos on this. If you go back in history, it was the Democrats who always favored tariffs, and it was the Republicans who said tariffs just cost the consumer a lot of money, and it protects bad businesses in America that aren’t very competitive. One example in our own business is the price of tin cans.You know, you put paint in cans. Well, Trump put a 25% tariff on all imported steel. What did the can companies in America do? They raised their prices by 35%, not 25 even, 35, because they realized that 35 is the true cost of that 25% tariff, because it costs about 10% shipping to get steel from foreign countries to America through shipping.So the 25% plus 10% of shipping is about a 35% difference in price, which allowed our steel companies to inflate their prices by 35%. Did that make them better competitive around the world? No. It just rapes us, the consumer, buying, and I buy literally tens of thousands of cans every other month.Think about, I’m paying today for cans last year about $150,000 more than I did in 2020 for the same amount of cans, basically. Per can, they’ve gone up some 32.5% to 35%. This is the effect of tariffs.Who pays for that ultimately? You do, the consumer. So we’re going to move on to the next subject. And I didn’t realize this until last night when my wife mentioned this to me, but Maria Bartolomeo from Fox Business News, I guess has been missing in action since August 8th.I don’t watch that too often because I just, all I ever do when I listen to her show is listen to how great Donald Trump is, the greatest president of all times, and everything she reports about what’s bad economy, she just ignores it. And then when it comes to China, all she can have every day is, every morning when you watch a show, you go through a 35 to 45 minutes of China bashing that China is responsible for every bad thing that’s happened to Donald Trump’s administration. We have inflation because of China.I don’t know how that is when we’re the one to put the tariff there. We have China spying on everything because they want to defeat us militarily. I don’t know why.They ain’t going to sell us anything if they defeat us militarily. We’ll be broke. But this is the kind of nonsense going on.But anyway, there’s speculation why she was dumped by Fox or she left Fox. I don’t think she was dumped by Fox. There’s a good possibility in my humble book that she’s going to be replacing Caroline Leavitt as the White House spokesman.She is a very, very loyal, good friend of Donald Trump. And let’s face it, Donald Trump wants television stars in his cabinet. And as a spokes, spokespeople, he wants, you know, people that came from TV and not people who know what they’re doing in each job.And so don’t be surprised if she does not end up somehow in the Trump administration and maybe as the next press secretary. But we’ll see in the next few weeks, in my humble opinion. I will say, President, Vice President Vance kind of poopooed the idea that she was going to be the press secretary last yesterday in his news conference when he was playing the acting press secretary.But anyway, we’ll see how that ends up. The other TV star that shouldn’t have a job in the White House is Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense. There’s no such thing as the Department of War secretary who’s just so far over his head.We’re seeing that how we’re losing the war with Iran. And it’s because of him. It may be a lot of Donald Trump’s arrogance, but that arrogance was really foistered and fertilized by Pete Hegseth’s lies to Donald Trump about what was going on.And 20 generals and admirals have been removed in just a year and a half. And people were really upset when Barack Obama was doing the same thing. We’re being purged.Now, some of these people maybe should have gone. Maybe they were bad. But I don’t think all of them were bad, especially the three that I know of that were advising what would happen if we attacked Iran without any planning, and they were 100 percent right.And when it turned out they were 100 percent right, they were fired because they were fired for being right. That’s not what I call good leadership. That’s all I can say.I’ll be right back after this message about the plain truth. Hi, theplaintruth.com. There’s many places you can go to when you go to The Plain Truth. These podcasts, of course, you just hit the podcast button and you can go back for a long time and listen to my voice or my ideas or many other people we put up on the podcast on the Plain Truth Today program.Then also you have Your Health Today. Never not go to Your Health Today. We have the latest breaking news about what’s happened scientifically with your health, what discoveries you should be aware of.We try to stay on the cutting edge of discoveries. We also do what most other health stories will never or shows will never tell you. We tell you what God has to say about your health because the Bible is full of health ideas and how you should eat, what you should eat.You know there are certain foods you’re not supposed to eat. Well, they’re in the Bible. And if you followed the Bible, you would know what I’m talking about.That’s theplaintruth.com. Go there every day and you will be amazed what you find. Thank you very much for listening. We’ll be right back to the program right now.And we are back. And before we get into what’s going to be on this weekend, if you remember last week, we delved into how your security and privacy is constantly being abridged by our government. Big government is the enemy.Next week, I am going to do a lot of shows on how the next part of the deep state will affect your life personally when you interact with policemen. Because unfortunately, most of us go to school, even myself, and I got burned myself one time a long time ago. But we think that policemen are there to help us.No, policemen are there to find some idiot to cooperate with them so they can get an easy conviction. And here’s one of the shows we’re going to play next week. It’s going to be a video, but I’m going to play just a little bit of it right now to pique your interest and just see what really happens when you are stopped by a cop and he asks you.You get pulled over for something small, a taillight, five over. You hand him your license. And while he is standing at your window, he looks at you a beat too long and says in the friendliest voice he has used all night, are you on any medication? It sounds like concern.It sounds like a man checking whether you are all right. It is not. That question is the opening line of a drugged driving investigation.And the answer most people give, the polite and honest one is the answer that gets used against them. Because here’s what almost nobody knows until it is far too late. Every state in this country has a driving under the influence law.And not one of those laws cares whether the drug in your system came from a dealer or from the pharmacy counter with your name printed on the label. The law does not ask where you got it. The law asks one question only, were you impaired? So when you answer that question at the window by listing what your doctor put you on, you have not reassured anybody.You have handed him the first sentence of his report. I am Marcus Cole. I spent 15 years standing between people in the state in interrogation rooms and on the side of the road.And what I do on this channel is give you the exact words to say when a police officer is looking at you. And I want to be honest with you about who this one is for. If you take something every single day, if there is a pill organizer on your counter with the days of the week on it, this video is about you more than any other video on this channel.Not because you are doing anything wrong, because you are the person that question is designed to catch. Stay with me because there are three answers people give here. Just to hear what he just said.You are the people, good God-fearing people on medication. You are the people they’re trying to catch because you got money. You’re in your 60s, 70s or 80s.You probably got some money and you’re an easy person to get arrested by cooperating with them because they’re not looking for the truth. They’re not looking for justice. They’re looking for quick arrest, bolster their career.And prosecutors, hey they can run for governor if they get enough of these. All three of them feel reasonable and all three of them make it worse. Then I’m going to tell you the four states where the rules are genuinely different.And then I’m going to give you the sentence. Let me start with why he is asking it all. An officer at your window has a very short window of time and a very specific job.He is looking for a reason to move this from a traffic stop into an investigation. He needs something. Watery eyes, slow speech, a hand that fumbles the insurance card.And in a lot of people, particularly people who have been on the road a while, particularly people who are tired, those things are just Tuesday. The medication question does something clever. It invites you to explain yourself and people explain themselves generously when they have nothing to hide.Here is wrong answer number one and it is the one nine out of ten people give. You tell them the truth in full. You say, well I take something for blood pressure and a pill for cholesterol.Sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it? But you know what? Every medication you have has side effects and now you are telling your doctor and you’re giving up your HIPAA rights to an officer on the side of the road who is not your friend, who’s trying to arrest you to get a feather in his cap. And you’re helping him along. Because anything you take from a drug store has side effects.It may not be side effects against you, but it gives him the legal right to start doing things. This is what you say. I’ll give you a real quick thing here and then we’ll end up with what’s going on this weekend.It is not a magic sentence at the roadside. Saying I have a prescription to the officer at your window does not end the stop anywhere in this country. It just tells him he was right to ask.So here’s what you say. Officer, I follow my doctor’s directions and I am not comfortable discussing my medical history at the roadside. That’s it.Don’t go any further and give up your constitutional rights. You’re losing them every day as it is by this government. Don’t volunteer more.Okay, tomorrow is the Sabbath day. We got four minutes here. Tomorrow is the Sabbath day.It is not Sunday. We always say that every week. And tomorrow’s a.m. Sabbath show is Is Germany the Modern Assyria of the Bible? And I’ll give you a brief hint.It is the modern Assyria of the Bible. It’s a good half hour video to watch and you will be amazed when you learn the identity of the German people and who they are in the Bible. And from now on, whenever you read a prophecy concerning the future and it’s talking about Assyria, you know it means modern day Germany.Just like when you see a prophecy talking about Jacob in the future or Israel in the future. It never, never, never has to do with the Jews. It only has to do with the lost tribes of Israel.And if it’s talking about Judah, then it’s a prophecy for the Jews. So many people, so many Bible experts don’t even know that concept. Well, tomorrow night we’re going to have a Edward G. Robinson’s movie called The Woman in the Window.I watched this movie with my wife a few weeks ago and it’s a 1940s flick. It is black and white. It is fantastic.Edward G. Robinson is a phenomenal actor and it will have you stitched to and glued to that TV set if you can just cast this to the TV. It is a YouTube. So if you can’t do it from here, you go to YouTube on your TV and watch this movie.It’s free. And it’s called The Woman in the Window. And the woman, by the way, is very beautiful.She’s one of the prettiest stars that I ever seen in a 40s type flick. She could be beautiful today in anything she did. And I have to admit, with the Hollywood censors of the 1940s, I don’t know how she got away with the things she was wearing or what you could see through of what she was wearing.They were able to do that with biblical flicks, believe it or not, but not normally with film noir, which means black film or mystery suspense type movies. Somehow they got away with it. But anyway, it is a great movie.Yeah, I think it’s about 92 minutes long. You can watch it tonight or tomorrow night. I mean, and it always plays again so you can watch it.And then, like I said, you can always go to YouTube and see if you can’t cast it from the plain truth. Many people know how to do it. But any TV, any modern TV can play anything on YouTube.If you know what you’re doing, just do an AI search on Google and it’ll tell you if you have a TV in the last 70 years, it’ll show you how that TV can get you YouTube for free. So that is the Friday wrap up for Labor Day weekend. We hope everyone has a safe and blessed Labor Day weekend.Stay safe. Don’t go drinking and driving. Don’t get yourself in trouble on that roadside cop looking to arrest you anyway.Stay home, have some hamburgers and hot dogs and good old potato salad. Invite people over and don’t leave and watch some sports, maybe on TV, but have a great time. Realize there are a lot of people who have fought and died.This is not Memorial Day, but it’s the same idea who have fought and died. Even union people fought and died for your rights to work and not to be enslaved by your factory owner. This is Bob Barney for theplaintruth.com saying thank you for listening.We’ll be back Monday with a new show. Until then, have a great weekend again and a good Sabbath. Bye-bye.