Fascism, Corruption and our National Security – Bob Barney Details America’s Death Spiral (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S 7:11 BROADCAST: Fascism, Corruption and our National Security – Bob Barney Details America’s Death Spiral

Hi, Bob Barney for the Plain Truth today and brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the one place to go to get your news every day and what it means for you and your family. I’m going to play a breaking story from Monday about the Nvidia AMD deal, and we’ll talk about it in a second.

30:21Today’s top corporate story reports say Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of the revenue that they generate from exporting AI chips to China. In return, the companies will receive export licenses to sell chips in China. The news followed, or follows a report that meeting between Nvidia CEO Jensen Wang and President Trump at the White House last week, 15% of Nvidia’s revenue from selling H20 chips to China could amount to billions of dollars.

Okay.

I have thought of everything you could possibly say and then you probably have some more concerns even

1:02than I’ve come up with.

1:03No, I’ll tell you my thoughts.

1:04Well, you don’t really. I mean, I’ve come up with. No, I’ll tell you my thoughts. But you don’t really. I mean, I’ve already thought about left versus right and who thinks what. I mean, you know, we need money, obviously. But if it was a security concern in the beginning, this doesn’t change anything if you get a little blackmail money to allow it to happen, obviously. Why?

1:34Well, that’s the question. Was it a security concern or not? And once again, Donald Trump is doing things that just simply is, I don’t believe, necessarily the right business moves. Now we got to decide, are these chips being sold to China a security risk for us, as he said it was just a few months ago, last year, and the last four years he was out of office, or is it not a security risk? Now, if it’s not a security risk, making 15 percent going towards the federal government deficit, which I doubt that’s going to happen, you know, with what Trump’s doing.

2:10He seems to want to give every dollar he saves away to some person that doesn’t deserve it. Like waitresses, for example, not paying money on their tips or not paying taxes on their tips when 90 percent of their income comes from their tips when they’re, 90% of their income comes from their tips and they’re only paid a minimum wage of about three dollars or less. It’s just not fair to all the other workers in this country who have to work and slave for the same amount of money but they have to pay

2:38tax on everything. Well the same thing here Is this 15% going to mean something for us, or is this 15% going to be just given away as ways to buy votes from people, which is the Democrat strategy. And Donald Trump has become the Democrat’s Democrat, in my opinion, in his office. And he’s also, I think, just surrounded what I consider corruption. And this is a corrupt deal because is this 15% going to the government

3:12somehow gonna go to the people in government or the agencies in government that are helping Donald Trump do his other things? This is all the kind of information we gotta ask. But I wanna get into the rest of this interview because I think it’s very important today.

3:26If it was a security concern in the beginning this doesn’t change anything if you get a little blackmail money to get to allow it to happen obviously. Why just chips? Are you gonna do this with it? Why just AMD and Nvidia? I mean there’s so many and it’s more industrial policy which Republicans don’t really like.

3:48You just want to steal all my lines at one time.

3:49I know you. Okay. I’ve already thought of all the things, and I’m sure you have other concerns, and instead of just embracing that we’re basically taxing a U.S. corporation and getting great revenue to try to reduce the deficit, suddenly even the left is going to have problems with this.

4:08So here’s where I stand.

4:09The left and right are going to have problems. Well I would think the right should have a lot of problems. Industrial policy. The industrial policy piece of this is now we’re not even macro managing, we’re micro

4:17managing. I hear you.

4:19At a sort of profit level. I thought of this, I told you I’m working through it. No, I know working through it. I like the money I

4:31Guess I like the money too for the coffers sure, but I think the issue is there’s

4:36The pause for a second. He says he likes the money and the money is gonna be a lot But I doubt if it’s gonna go towards the deficit I really do I haven’t seen anything that this administration is doing trying to do anything to solve the 37 trillion, which will soon be $45 trillion deficit. The next thing is, who is going to pay this 15%? The corporations. China’s not paying this 15%. Do you think that Nvidia or AMD can sell the chips for 15% more to China?

5:02No. They’re going to take it off, and they’re going to raise the chips to American people buying items. The consumer in America will end up paying this 15%. Just like they’re paying for this tariff. If it’s 20%, 50%, 100%. Who do you think is paying for the tariff? In the short run, businesses like my own business will cover the cost of tariffs, but we’ve got to make money.

5:29And contrary to what people out of business do not own their own business, do not understand about business, is corporations for the most part, unless you’re the drug corporation or you’re some big monopoly, and there are monopolies, don don’t get me wrong and I’m against monopolies but if you’re the average business out there you’re not making two three four hundred percent profit like people think they are a lot of places are working on an eight nine ten fourteen percent net so if you have a 15% there if you’re in a hole right there well I want to go on with what

6:01what they’re talking about here and we’ll have some more to say.

6:11The national security issue which was already on the table, they decided to overlook that issue or to decide that it was actually in the best interest of the country for Nvidia to be selling into China, right? If that is true, that it is in the best interest of the United States to be selling to China for competitive reasons because we don’t want China to ultimately be able to own the AI business, the industry. That could be a fair and valid reason. I’ll go along with that. Once you start to get into a mode where there is an additional payment for that sort of

6:41reading, if you will, that’s where it becomes, because it undermines the credibility of the national security argument.

6:49Oh, it definitely undermines the credibility.

6:50And that’s to me-

6:51But I took it one step further.

6:52Okay, you go.

6:54We’re not stopping China and AI. There’s no way. And I don’t know, it’d be nice to win, but we could use some of this money to prepare to deal with China.

7:08For UBI?

7:09No, to prepare for the security we’re going to need to compete against China. For the government. We’re going to need to defend ourselves theoretically from powerful AI

7:26and what about open AI what about Microsoft what about any company

7:31hopefully we’re gonna win but we’re not gonna hold China back and I guess we

7:34might we’re gonna hold our companies back by charging them a tax and that’s

7:37the question that I have who’s gonna pay this tax like everything else when we have pharmaceuticals that you can buy in Africa for a tenth of what you pay for over here, you can buy it in Europe for half of what you can buy it over here. What happens with all this? Why does the Americans pay more for the same pharmaceuticals that other countries don’t have to pay? It’s because the American consumer, because of American politicians, and Donald Trump has turned into a democratic American politician in my opinion, are too busy

8:09stealing money from the American citizen who’s already broke. I did a story, a show, and I hope you all have listened to it in the past because we’ll probably replay it again, but America is in trouble. America is in decline because the American citizen is broke. People live from paycheck to paycheck. They’re broke, and nothing is changing here. Unlike World War II, when the Americans were way in debt in order to fight that war, where

8:40did that money come from? It came from savings bonds bought by american citizens who had money saved up americans used to save money they used to be able to make enough money in their job especially after unions and i’m not a pro-union guy but i’m not anti-union

8:59either but after we went to a five-day work week and ford paid the best wages in town and

9:04the middle class was able to buy ford cars that’s why he did it we went to a five-day work week and Ford paid the best wages in town and the

9:05middle class was able to buy Ford cars, that’s why he did it. He wasn’t some philanthropist wanting to pay all his people good money. He understood that the people that needed to buy his cars were the people making them too. And so what back then the American people had the money to buy the debt of the government. Now we don’t have money, so what are we doing for our debt? We’re going to China, we’re going to Japan, we’re going to Saudi Arabia, we’re going to Kuwait.

9:31That’s who owns our debt. More and more and more and more. This country is in

9:34decline. Let’s go on. I would think that’s another that’s something to work but that’s something to worry about. I would rather have NVIDIA and AMD reinvesting that month.

9:47In their own business.

9:48But now I sound, that’s what a conservative, that’s what a Republican would want. They need to do it, this is like, there’s a buyback story today. There are actually people that say, companies shouldn’t be able to do what they wanna do

10:00with their own money if they wanna do buy, they should be hiring more people. They should be raising, they should be raising, they should be raising salaries for people. That’s not the way it should be. They should be able to do that. And companies, I’m saying I have problems.

10:15I have, I. The payoffs, to me the thing is it just looks like a payoff.

10:20That’s actually, for me. That’s the only thing and I’d rather have companies but then again

10:26And I don’t know where this goes That’s it So to me it’s the payoff and I don’t know where this goes because our other company is gonna have to start Paying off the United States government to all sorts of things forget about the foreign corrupt practices. I just it’s that’s what it is

10:38It should be all or nothing it nobody should do this or you should just raise taxes if that’s the way you want to do it. I guess, corporate taxes. I know, I thought of all these things. But then again, we come down to, be nice to have 40, $50 billion to do all the great things that liberals want to do.

11:02But to stop it here, we don’t have the 40 or 50 billion dollars or really the 40 or 50 trillion dollars we need because the American citizenry has been destroyed by the politicians giving away money, stealing money to line their own pockets, being corrupt, and breaking the back of the middle class of America which could pay for all of this.

11:27But now we are the brokest country of the world. We are a third world nation living in a first world mindset. But we are a third world nation. Most people in America live paycheck to paycheck. Many don’t even make it from paycheck to paycheck. Many don’t even make it from paycheck to paycheck. That’s why you have those those check cashing companies that will loan you money on your paycheck for that coming Friday. This is the America of today. This is not111:54the America that won and fought and won World War II and the America that everybody thinks we still live in and too many MAGA Republicans thought Donald Trump was gonna bring us back to. The truth is we are getting worse. We’re in worse shape now than we were before. Now let’s go on with this because there was a couple

12:15more points that I’ve been making and I think somebody else is finally, a pro-Trumper by the way, Joe Kernan on Squawk Box pretty much has swallowed all of this Trump BS about what he’s doing, but listen to this.

12:29Forget about what liberals wanna do.

12:31Do childcare, give people a rebate, you know? Do all these things, that’s the way Trump thinks. I don’t think he, President Trump, I don’t think he thinks necessarily, money is money, money in the federal government’s coffers.512:46But now he wants to give it back, and we’ve been talking, we have this debt we gotta deal with, I mean, it’s just, it’s a lot of issues here.

12:52Now suddenly, liberals are worried about the debt.

12:54I know. Not liberals. I’m worried about the debt. I don’t know what liberals are. Well, they would, Democrats were worried

12:59for the last four years. That’s true, they weren’t. They should have been. I know. I don’t know. But Republicans were worried in the last four years, the last 24 years, but they’re outspending the Democrats. So don’t say the Democrats are the problem when you want to outspend them and give rebates back to people who do not deserve the money back. I’m sorry, there are too many middle-class people paying a lot of tax money, living paycheck to paycheck that are not waitresses. It’s just you can’t pick winners

13:31and losers in a free system of government. And that is what Donald Trump is doing, picking winners and losers, even in business. If you’re a big business, you can afford 15% as a kickback, then you get this deal. But if you’re a smaller business like my can afford 15% as a kickback, then you get this deal. But if you’re a smaller business like my own, and you can’t afford paying off kickbacks, then you can’t deal. This is a disaster coming for America.

13:55I mean, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says anything, but you’re going to hear

14:00people say it’s not constitutional. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the US government can ask right has to be upon steel for golden

14:07shares in their in in the company either that’s that’s true too so I would think that they’ve talked to lawyers about whether you can even do this when you

14:17think or well the question is who’s good I thought about this you ask your dad no who’s gonna sue who Who has standing to sue? I don’t believe the taxpayer, just like a random third party, has standing to sue. The only person who could sue is the company. And given that we are-

314:36They’re the one agreeing to do it though.

14:37Correct. And they’re agreeing under some form of duress.

314:41To be able to do it.

14:41And they could not go public and say we hate you mr. president we don’t like this we’re not doing this right right because we now live in a universe they’d rather have 85% than nothing that’s the

14:53position they’re taking I understand that and they’re gonna be able to overcharge the Americans buying these same chips and make up all of that money

15:00wink wink wink with Donald Trump here I thought about all this and dreaded this whole conversation. How’s it going so far? Better than you thought. No I mean I knew what all the concerns would be and I’m grappling with them.

15:16I don’t know what the answer is. So that’s the Joe Kerning show and I want to get on to one other show that I’m going to play some excerpts from from Gordon Chang. I’m not really a Gordon Chang fan. He’s somebody that finds that every problem in the entire world and every problem America has has to do with China because he’s so anti-Chinese he can’t find anything good to say about China. And so when you listen to him on TV you can just replay his record over and over and over again.

15:47 But he had some pretty good statements here that he said, and I want to play those in a second. This is from Fox Business, the Maria Bartolome show and Gordon Chang.

15:57 Joining me now, Gainesville Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang. Gordon, your reaction?

16:03 Well, certainly the vice president was right. The FBI does need to investigate. You know, Mr. Tam, when he was CEO of Cadence, he was CEO for 13 years, but through six of those years Cadence sold, had 56 sales of chip making, and other tech products to a Chinese entity that is essentially the Chinese military. And this was a crime, clearly. And Cadence actually pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate…

16:39Wait a minute, it was a crime then, but now it’s okay to charge 15% and it’s no longer a security risk.

16:46Amazing. Export controls agreed to pay a fine of more than $140 million. You know, Tan is one of the most capable U.S. executives. He certainly has the right vision for Intel. He can turn Intel around, but he should be nowhere near Intel’s offices because last decade he put the life of every American at risk with this series of sales to the Chinese military.

17:12So does that mean that Donald Trump for 15% kickback for the United States government and for whatever purposes he wants to use it for is putting the lives of millions of Americans, hundreds of a million Americans at risk. It’s okay to do now if somebody’s gonna pay for it, or was it not a risk in the first place? That’s the question.

17:31I think honest people have to ask themselves, is this a problem? If it wasn’t, then what’s all the hoopla about in the last 18 years against China, and they’re trying to take us all over? I think part of that is true but I also think it’s been way overstated by Republicans who want to

17:47spend a lot of money on the military and industrial complex which they get their kickbacks from. Lockheed and all these companies grumming that support all of the military arms around the world. You know you take this Ukrainian war. We pay for Russia through the oil and stuff, and we pay for the arms going to Ukraine. We’re on both sides of the war. It really is worse when you think about Israel and Hamas. Hamas gets its money from us, which buys weapons

18:19from Iran to shell Israel, and Israel gets weapons from us, which buys weapons from our military. So the same weapons are going back and forth to each other. And what’s the only commonality of this whole thing? The United States military industrial complex gets rich on both sides.

18:40Let’s go on. That’s unforgivable. It needs to be prosecuted. The Vice President is right.

18:46Well, again, the journal reports that his goal is to basically convince President Trump today of his commitment to the national security of the United States. He’s gonna say, look, I was born in Malaysia. I’m a US citizen. But that the manufacturing of Intel’s chips in the US is a matter of national security.

19:06I think the other thing that’s interesting is that, you know, Cadence paid, what, a $140 million fine over all of this, so, you know, because of this DOJ investigation. So certainly-

19:17So this was done yesterday. I just want to end that one right now and we’ll get on to other things here. But this was done yesterday before this morning, Trump announced the payoff. And now I’d like to hear what Gordon Chain has to say tomorrow morning,

19:32because he’s been up Trump’s butt so far that he’s gonna have to come back and renegotiate what he said in this show. It’s just too much to believe. One last clip we’re going to play, and this is from Bloomberg Television, another business news show. And I think the way the guy is answering this question is probably in my

20:00court about what he thinks is going on here.

20:03Legal questions around this, if this is categorized as an export tax potentially there are legal challenges To this but according to our reporting this is what nvidia and amd have signed up for And again quoting some of the analysts in our own reporting pretty unprecedented hard to think of another example of a u.s Corporate signing up to this kind of export demand from the US

20:27government. This stuff is just, I just cannot get over how many people because they supported Trump and I supported Trump as good as anybody. I sent him money. My wife and I sent him money this last time around for his campaign. He was a great president the first time around, in my opinion. He did a very good job with the economy. He did what he said he was going to do. But it turns out that I think the first time around he had a

20:57cabinet around him, advisors around him, willing to trim his ego. And this time around, there’s nobody around him that’s gonna tell him he’s wrong about anything and make him think. And so all he’s doing now, in my opinion, is lining his pockets and his family’s pockets with kickbacks. I think this is a very corrupt administration. I think Hunter Biden and Joe Biden holds nothing above what’s

21:26going on right here. And these, and corporations in America, which love fascism by the way, corporate America, Chinese is not a communist country, Chinese is a fascist country, where the government controls private enterprise. Most of the businesses in China are controlled by the government, but they’re not owned by the government. They’re owned by private, do you realize,

21:52just to make this point, how many billionaires there are in China? There are more billionaires in China than there are in America. Does that say something? You don’t become a billionaire in a Chinese type, I’m sorry, in a communistic type government.

22:09There are plenty of billionaires in a fascist type government. And American corporations, going back to Henry Ford and all of the people before World War II that were in with Hitler, they love fascist governments because they can control the one guy who makes all the decisions, here it’s Donald Trump, and give him kickbacks, give him whatever he wants, feed his ego, and then they can sit there and rape the American public out of their money. Let’s go on.

22:37Meanwhile, yet to officially comment, John, on this development, but they have in recent days pointed out through state media and through blogs affiliated with state media concerns about what they describe as national security risks associated with NVIDIA’s H20, at a time, of course, when China is showing no signs at all of walking back from its doubling down on building out

22:59its own chip sector and ensuring that it has less dependency on those US AI accelerators.

23:07Tom, you’ve spent years in China. What do you think they’re thinking behind the scenes in terms of the US going to corporate America and saying, you can send these chips to China that we originally blocked because of national security concerns,

623:19we just want a piece of the pie.

223:21I think if you rewind the clock six months, China is in a much better position versus now. The H20s, the licenses, it seems, will be approved for those. You look at the movements in terms of the equity markets for China. Yes, they have all the concerns about the domestic consumer and about the real estate and property sector. Those remain. The geopolitical tensions, you talked about the fact that this truce is expected to be extended again by

223:4590 days. China continues to invest. You see the developments coming through from the likes of Huawei at 7 nanometres and Xpeng, according to reports, coming through with a chip of 5 nanometres, not closing in on 3 nanometres that the likes of TSMC are churning out, but closing that gap. So they’re going to get access to the H20 but continue to build out their own AI accelerator capacity and try and close that gap. I think China will probably be rubbing its hands at the prospects of potential domestic pushback on this policy as they continue again

24:19to try and funnel investments into AI accelerators that they continue to need that underpin the models of course of Alibaba, DeepSeek and others. And it they continue to need that underpin the models, of course, of Alibaba, DeepSeek, and others. And it’s really high silicon that sits at the heart of Huawei that is leading the charge on this front.

24:31Tom, are you basically saying that China needs the MI308 from AMD and the H20 from NVIDIA just to bridge, to basically, when they’re up to par, where the United States is in terms of these advanced AI semiconductors?

24:45China has not spelt out, Anne-Marie, its policy around this. But it is pretty clear that a reliance on US chips is not what China is going to be comfortable with. And the fact that Jensen Huang has essentially said, look to the US and to President Trump, we should continue.

25:03We should be allowed to continue to supply these AI accelerators into the Chinese market precisely because if it comes to it, we could just pull the plug on those. That gets picked up by China. They’re listening to that. So yes, this can tie them over until they have their own capacity. There’s the other question about national security. The case being made by the Biden administration and by the Trump administration to allies in the Netherlands and in Japan Do not sell your hardware and software into the Chinese market because of national security security concerns

225:31Well that now has put a big question mark over it because if you’re prepared to pay that 15%

25:36Then suddenly national security concerns seem to be being put on the back burner and that’s exactly what it is, the back burner. And like I said, American people should start really wondering if we should be talking about investigation of the Trump administration people and is where their loyalties lie. Because I do not see their loyalties lying with the American public, American businesses. China has won this entire trade war because of the ineptness of this president or because of the corruption of this president. I

26:13made a prediction three months ago. I bet before this whole Chinese deal is over with, we’re gonna see a Trump golf course in China and we’re gonna see all kinds of Chinese investment a la Hunter Biden type deal with the Trump people. And I think I’m going to be right. Now we may not hear about it right away, but this is corruption, my friends. This is what the plain truth is.

26:38We do not take advertisements from people because we are beholden to no one. And I will tell you what I think and I think provably can prove is what’s going wrong with America. America is being sold down the river by our leaders including Donald Trump. You just heard what this guy said, his expert on Chinese business chips, as he said China’s gonna have their own chips, they just need

27:05to bridge it until they can power with us. This is what we have done for the last 40 years with China. For 40 some years now with China, we have constantly given them our tools to bridge a gap until they come up with theirs and go against us. They’re not going to try to defeat us militarily. They’re not the military threat. That’s all our politicians trying to spend more money with military-industrial complex. China wants to be the new United States of America. The United States of America

27:39was the world dominant powerhouse when it came to manufacturing and that is what China wants to do and we are handing them, our crooked leaders are handing them all the tools they need to succeed. They are just following the playbook that America did starting in 1880 and ending, in my opinion, in 1990. This is Bob Barney for the Plain Truth, the one place you go to to get the plain truth without anybody paying advertisers to make sure you don’t hear the plain truth. We have a Message Board,

28:15we have Your Health Today, we have the main page of the Plain Truth, and we have these podcasts. And we try to make these podcasts broad listening topics so people can actually learn something from listening to these that I do not think they knew before going into it. I have a point of view that I think is provable, and I think I have a good argument from my point of view, but I do show other points of view, and I do try to inform our listeners about what is really going on

128:45with America and to explain why because the Bible does explain who we are. Yes, the United States of America is found in the pages of your Bible and who we are and what God says we are going to do to ourselves by practicing lawlessness and refusing to obey the God who gave us everything we have. Our forefathers and our Constitution is not why we became the richest, most powerful nation in the world. It was a promise made to Abraham,

29:18Isaac, and Jacob that we have lived out through no goodness of our own, but we did have a sense of God in this nation for the first 300 years of this nation before we were even a nation, and that in the last 50 years has gone away to where we become a pagan Baal-worshipping nation against the true God of your Bible and there is going to be a payback. Bob Barney for the Plain Truth. Until tomorrow, please keep listening and hope Bob Barney for the Plain Truth. Until tomorrow, please keep listening and hope everyone stays safe. Bye-bye.