Why Trump is Forcing US Businesses to Move Overseas in a Global Economy (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Why Trump is Forcing US Business’ to Move Overseas in a Global Economy

Hi, Bob Barney here with The Plain Truth today, brought to you by the plaintruth.com website, and I want to get into the breaking news this morning that we put on the 7:11 AM show. The breaking news is that there is a rumor going around, and it’s a pretty substantial rumor, that Amazon is moving their headquarters to Dubai, to the United Arab Emirates. And that’s saying a lot about Donald Trump’s Make America Great strategy, the tariff strategy that is backfiring something miserably, and I’ll get into that.

The other big news that probably is not going to make too much hay because people are not into the paint industry. I always say that, you know, if you listen to this show, my wife and I own a paint company, an automotive paint company mainly. We also make paint for airplanes, for boats, for large fleet equipment, and caterpillars, stuff like that. But BASF, one of the big five coatings companies in the world, a major player in the automotive paint world, as well as a major manufacturer of paint resins, I use a lot of the BASF resins, for example, announced they wanted to sell, or they’re going to sell out for 6.8 billion dollars. And the funny thing about that is, if you go back just three or four years ago, big paint companies like that got bought out by two to three times sales. Take Valspar, for example, in 19, I think in 2019, they did about 4 billion in sales, and Sherwin-Williams bought them out for 12 billion dollars.

3:33 That’s three times sales. Everybody at the time even thought it was kind of crazy, but that became the norm. Now you have a case last year where PPG sold their architectural business, which was a billion dollars, mainly the name Glidden for house paint. I think most people are familiar with that. Well, that was owned by PPG Architectural Coatings. Well, they sold that business out for only 500 million. They actually took half of what their global sales were because they were losing so much money. And now you have BASF looking, and they’re just asking for this. It’s not maybe what they’re going to even get, but they’re asking for about dollar for dollar for sales.

And that hasn’t been the case in the paint industry for many, many years. And I think what you’re seeing here is a reaction to the Trump economy worldwide, tariffs, the idea of trying to make America great again, which is failing in my opinion, and what big companies now want to do. We’ll take the Amazon situation in a minute because I think that is what a lot of companies are going to be doing soon, and I’ll explain that.But I want to get back to the BASF announcement. Yes, it has a lot of importance to me. Like I said, I use a lot of their resins in my automotive paints and in my fleet paints. They make some very, very good resins. And I don’t know what’s going to happen with that company because believe it or not, the two companies that are showing the most interest in buying BASF is Sherwin-Williams and the company called Carlisle, which owns Exalta, formerly DuPont Automotive Paint. Well, Sherwin-Williams in the industry is not well received by people who know what they’re talking about in the industry.

5:32 And for the most part, when it comes to automotive paint, you’d have a better chance selling Zelenskyy to Putin than you will selling Sherwin-Williams to most body shops. And when it comes just as a company in general, I would say within the industry, most people do not have a very good opinion of Sherwin-Williams. So them controlling one of the best paint resin manufacturers in the world would be kind of scary to somebody like me, number one. Exalta, which is owned by the Carlisle Group, a Bush family group, just to let you know, which was the former DuPont paint group, automotive paint group, has also showed an interest. And they may want to get into the resin manufacturing business, but I would assume that both companies are looking for BASF for different reasons. I think Sherwin-Williams would love to have the BASF resin technology. I know for an example, a particular resin that I use, used on John Deere at the factory, is sold by Sherwin-Williams and they have to use the BASF resin as a part of that formula, because that resin is so durable and it lasts for 20, 30 years without losing gloss. It’s impervious to chemicals. We call it amorphous.

6:56 And there’s no paint like it. We actually improved that resin by adding a Poly aspartic resin to it, which nobody else has ever figured out how to do. And we have a product that will last on an automobile or a truck or a boat or an airplane for 40 years with very little loss of gloss. And so I think Sherwin-Williams would like to have BASF for their resin technology, and they would love to run their resin plants and incorporate that into the Sherwin-Williams family of businesses, which are a lot of businesses, by the way. They are, I believe, still the largest paint company in America. I think PPG is, of course, the largest paint company in the world, and also the largest automotive paint manufacturing company in the world. But Sherwin-Williams is still a major, major company when it comes not only to homeowners, but when it comes to industrial paints, the kind of paints that you see painting big water towers and great big gasoline tanks at the airports and things like that. These are special coatings that Sherwin-Williams has a pretty good lock on. And I think Exalta really wants the business in order to compete against PPG worldwide, because Glazerite, which is the top line brand name of the BASF automotive line worldwide, Glazerite is probably considered, I don’t believe this is the case from the inside, but by most people in the industry, they would consider Glazerite the finest paint made on the face of the earth.

8:01 And it has a very high dollar. I mean, a gallon of certain Glazerite colors sell for $3,600 and $3,700 a gallon or more. And I think there’s a lot of fluff to that, but I’m not going to disparage any other paint company, never knock a company, you might be working for them. But the idea that what I think Exalta wants to be able to do is break into that European market. That’s what PPG did many years ago. They bought out AutoColor, which was a very large European automotive paint company. And they bought out AutoColor for two reasons. AutoColor had very good water-based technology for water-based base coats on cars. And they also had a European distribution market that PPG had tried with a product they called Global, but it failed quite miserably in Europe. And once they were able to get ICI, AutoColor, they really took off. And they’re pretty dominant even in Europe now. And they’re probably giving places like BASF a run for their money, especially at the OEM level.

9:32 Remember, all the cars that you buy are painted with the same type of paint. There’s a little bit of difference at the factory because they bake them at high temperatures and powder coat like that. But it’s basically the same manufacturers, the big five making the colors and the paint for the big manufacturers. PPG basically has a worldwide market for their epoxy, what they call Eco, which is the primer system below your paint job on almost every car made in the world. That’s their forte. And of course, PPG and Glazer and Exalta fight for the refinish business on top of that ecosystem at the factory. Some of them are painted in Exalta at the factory, mainly American cars like General Motors. And a lot of them are painted at PPG. And a lot of them in Europe are still painted with Glazer. And that is how these companies’ kind of dominate in the automotive field. I often say when I got into this business in 1980, I was one, I worked for a paint company, but there was 115 or 116 automotive paint manufacturers in America. Today, there are 15 or 16.

10:01 Temco paint is only one of 15 or 16. But the big five have a 99% market share, where in 1980, the big five had a 20% market share. So that should tell you a lot what’s happened to this business. And that’s what’s happened in the business globally. We’re seeing a centralization of businesses where you’re going to see one or two major car companies in the future. You’re going to see one or two, maybe three major food companies in the future. You’re going to see one or two or maybe three major banks in the future, and the regional banks will be gone. And you’re going to see a lot of companies become global and go worldwide and start what’s the right word, start not looking at America where they want to sell their products to. Because the truth of the matter is, there is more people in the middle class in China who are willing to buy products at good prices nowadays, because they make better money than people think they do. There are more people than the Chinese middle class and there are total citizens of the United States of America. In fact, I had a friend, won’t mention any names here, but I had a friend who worked for the PepsiCo Corporation painting their trucks, and they own Frito-Lay and Pepsi-Cola and a lot of other businesses. And their chairman of the board at the time, we’re going back 10 years, was a woman from India. She had Indian descent. And she made the decision, and they all sat in on this meeting, and she made a decision, they weren’t going to really advertise anymore or really go after the American market. It was too competitive, and it wasn’t worth it.

11:25 They were going to go after the market in India and the market in China. And she said, do you want to have a potential of selling 3 billion people, or do you want to sell 350 million and have to give it away through your profits through all this advertising we have to do, which we don’t have to do in China and we don’t have to do in India. And it really ticked my friend off because he’s one of these Make America Great guys, and he didn’t like hearing what she had to say. But more and more companies are going to say, we’re kind of sick and tired of American politics. One president doing one thing, another president doing another thing, and we’re just going to become global in nature. Now, I want to tell you, my little company, we decided last year, and we kind of decided because we thought Trump was going to really bring back America like he did the first time around, and he has not, at least in my business.

But we made plans to take our Tamco paint brand worldwide. We already bought into a polyester putty, what they call a body filler line in Italy, and they also had a unique paint stripper, and they also had a great line of solvents, and they could make my catalyst for me, and they could make my reducers for me. And I bought into that company. And we started thinking, I did that four years ago, and we started thinking, maybe we could take the Tamco brand, because President Trump was very popular throughout the world in his first term. You went to China, for example, you went to Europe, for example, and the working people really thought Donald Trump was a great thing. The Chinese people loved Donald Trump the first time around, because the American economy boomed, and guess who got all the benefits of that boom? Chinese workers were making all the products that was buying from Amazon. And so we, like I think a lot of businesses, assumed that when Trump became president, it was going to be a wide-open field to sell American products worldwide. I invested in a huge warehouse in Petersburg, as well as one in Wildwood, Florida, and that we could ship out of worldwide. And guess what happened? The tariffs.

12:59 And my partner in this particular avenue, the person that was going to go out and sell all these countries, he has 40 years’ experience of selling paint products in all the world, Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East, you name it, Eastern Europe. He went out in January, just as Trump was getting ready to take office, and he started calling on friends of his that he has sold to for some 40 years, explaining the Tamco brand, and it was coming from America, it had better quality than they’re used to having, and it would be a good price. And we had, because we make everything from A to Z, we make everything from the polyester putty to the primers, to the paint systems, and even to the polishes and the waxes after the fact. We make the whole surbang that Tamco Paint does. We’re the only paint company I know that makes everything that goes on a paint job, from the body all the way up through the polishing compound. And he had a lot of people that was interested that they could buy one container load of everything they need in their country.

And today, because there is no company that had what Tamco Paint, this little old Tamco Paint has, they could buy one container of mixed products, where today they got to buy basically three containers. They got to buy a container of polyester putties, they got to buy a container of paint products, and they got to buy a container of polishes and compounds and waxes. Well, now they can get one container, more often maybe, but they don’t have to put out 900 to a million dollars out front. When you sell worldwide, these people pay before you ship it. You’re paid, and they’re out that money, and it takes, 30, 40 days to get there, and then they got to sell it to start making their dollars. So if you can say, one container is $300,000, you don’t have to buy the million up front all the time, and you just do more containers this way, and you can mix and match, we thought we were going to have an advantage in this system that nobody had.

14:46 And it was going well until about April 1st and April 2nd, and you know what happened. The tariffs around the world, and everything we did was canceled. Canceled. We lost probably more than a million dollars’ worth of business in the first three months that we were really hoping to get. We thought the international trade market coming from America, with Donald Trump as president, would actually bring us a lot more business than we already have in America. The whole world would want our product. Now the whole world does not want our product. We can’t even sell our product to Canada, which we sold a lot of products to Canada just a year ago. The Canadians, if Donald Trump didn’t make anybody proud of their country, he made Canadians proud of their country, hating America.

You took the right-wing Canadians, who was probably a shoo-in to win the elections this last time here, this spring, losing to a very liberal Democrat, not Democrat, but liberal, all together, all over again, another Trudeau type, all because of Donald Trump’s tariff policy to Canada, which was insane. But anyway, let’s get on to the Amazon story that we broke this morning on the 7-Eleven show. Amazon moving to Dubai is the same reason why Tamco Paint has actually thought about moving to Dubai, because Dubai is a very modern country, and it has wooed the Trump administration, and I’m a little suspect of why they wooed the Trump administration, but the tariff is very low from Dubai, and I can see why Amazon, and even our company, thought about putting an operation in Dubai. My partner is from Kuwait originally. He’s an American citizen, but he has businesses in Dubai and in the United Arab Emirates, sandpaper businesses and other businesses, and it made sense that we might have to move there because of the tariffs in order to sell worldwide. That’s what Amazon is doing, and you can bet your boots that this tariff thing, when they realize the American economy and selling to the American citizens for products that we cannot make here with high tariffs, is not worth the problem.

16:25 It’s not worth it. Move to a neutral country that has good relations with every country in the world, with low tariffs to every other country in the world and sell worldwide to an audience of six and a half billion people and not worry about the 300 million Americans. That’s what’s going on, my friends, and we ought to wake up and realize tariffs are never the answer. We played five shows from Ronald Reagan about a month and a half ago explaining why tariffs always lose out in the end. When you protect an industry like Donald Trump’s protecting the steel industry, when you protect a particular industry, you make that industry lazy, inefficient, and not able to sell their products worldwide. They can only sell it in America because of the tariffs, but now they’re no longer in competition worldwide, so a big company in America shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until the unions help with their high wages and their unreal demands put them out of business, even here with tariffs. And Ronald Reagan, if you didn’t listen to those shows, maybe we’ll start playing those shows again next week in the morning time. Just listen to what he said. You know, he had a funny response about tariffs. He says, like, two guys on a boat, and one guy gets mad at the other guy, and he takes his shotgun and he blows a hole in the bottom of the boat, and the other guy gets even and takes his shotgun and blows a second hole in the bottom of the boat. All they have been able to accomplish is sinking the boat faster, but they go underwater, and that’s what tariffs do. Ronald Reagan was an absolute master of threatening tariffs, like against Japan at the time, but then finding ways to make good, fair, and free trade deals with these nations.

18:58 This is just simply not happening with the President Trump administration, much to my surprise, and I’m worried about what the real motivation to these tariffs and these deals he’s making with our enemies. To be honest, making deals with Qatar and some of these Arab countries is almost like, I wouldn’t say that’s the case with Dubai, by the way, or United Arab Emirates, though they have been known to support some terrorist stuff, too, but that might be just, we support terrorist stuff, too, our government and our CIA, so don’t be so smug and think we don’t, but when you’re doing places like Qatar and even Saudi Arabia, you have to be very careful about making deals with these people, yet we are going to be moving the largest AI site to Dubai, and so they’re going to have the advantage over the United States with the AI technology. They’re going to have the key to the whole thing. Are they the next China? There was a report just a few years ago, I think a few months ago actually, that Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, is the new China without the one and a half billion people, but they are the most modern country not only in the Middle East, but in North Africa and probably including Europe. They’re more modern than Europe. A friend of mine, my partner in the export business, was telling me when you go to Dubai or you go to China even, people think China is this backwards country and they live in huts, they’re driving down dirt roads and buggies and on bicycles.

21:45 There are 455 million cars in China. There are 350 million Americans, and that’s including children, 455 million cars. They have the most modern skyscrapers going on in the Orient. They have modern roads, 16 lanes wide. He said you go into their version of the TSA, you don’t get strip searched, you don’t get waned, you don’t have anything. You put your finger, and I wouldn’t ever do this myself by the way, but you put your finger on a pad, and it identifies who you are, and it tells you what to do next, and it tells you in your language. It knows from your fingerprint what nationality you are and what language you speak, and this AI computer starts talking to you in your language. You got to go to the book of Acts chapter 3 before you see where somebody’s talking in one way and everybody’s listening in their own language, and that was a miracle from God doing that. Here we have a miracle from AI doing the same kind of thing, dangerous in my opinion, but my point is the modernization of the whole world.

22:40 If the American people who smugly think that this nation has everything going for it and that we live better than the whole world, the whole world is living in poverty and they’re all running over here to live, well people in poverty in the rest of the world are coming over here to live, but a vast majority of the world would not want to live in America. They have it better. They have more modern technology. They have more modern conveniences. They have more modern everything. Now what they don’t have is our freedoms. They’ve given up their freedoms for luxuries, which I would never do, but you want to know what? Americans are giving up their freedoms for free, for free, no luxuries. They’re giving up their freedoms. You go on Facebook, you give every piece of information you ever do. You give a stranger on Facebook more information about yourself than your spouse probably knows. This is what America does. You know the Bible talks about this. It talks about Israel. America is Israel. It’s lost Israel. It talks about this unique thing about the nation of Israel. He says, unlike prostitutes who charge to sleep with everybody, you do it for free. You give away what you have.

24:56 He’s comparing the nation of Israel with a whore who’s not even a prostitute. She’s just a whore who screws, sorry from that word, everybody for free. We know people like that, don’t we? They’re all Americans probably, but God was saying at least these other nations charge for what they do. America or Israel, you give it away, and that’s what we’re doing. We’re giving away our whole freedom for nothing. We don’t even have the modern road system. We don’t have the modern skyscraper system. We don’t have any modern things. We don’t have an airport system that even works that was built back in 1973, yet the rest of the world, even third world nations, have better air traffic control than America has, yet Americans smugly think we lead the world in technology. We lead the world. You listen to these new shows. These people don’t have a clue, or if they have a clue, they’re lying to you.

Amazon is going to move most likely their headquarters to Dubai because what they are signaling the Trump administration and anybody who wants to listen is we’re done with America. America is the Titanic. It’s going under, and we’re not going to sit here and just move chairs around and see how long we can float. We’re going to go somewhere else. We’re going to get on our own lifeboat, and we’re going to go to another boat that has a lot more going for it than what America has because America has become a third world nation, and it’s been led there by politicians who are on the take, and judges who are on the take, and business leaders who are on the take, and unfortunately American citizens who want a free lunch even though there is no such thing, and they are voting for the government they deserve. Do not blame the Democrats. Do not blame the Republicans for giving you what you vote for. That’s the most insane concept in the world that you vote for something, and then you say, I don’t like it. Well, I guess somebody could say that about me.

26:23 I did vote for Trump, and I don’t like it, but you want to know what? I ain’t going to vote for it again, but the American people for years, black people voted Democrat no matter what. Spanish people voted Democrat no matter what, even though Democrats were anti-religion and pro-abortion, the opposite of what a Hispanic believes in, who is a strong Catholic and does not believe in abortion, but they blindly followed the Democrat party. Then you had business people like myself who blindly followed the Republican party because they said they were for a small government and no regulations, when when they get in power, they spend more money than the Democrats, and they pass more regulations than the Democrats. You figure it out, and I’ll tell you right now, this nation has got to wake up. I’m a lonely voice out here in the world, and it’s like John the Baptist maybe, but this world and this country has to wake up to what’s happening. We have to go to God first.If we all as a nation went to God and said, correct this situation, you want to know what? Crooked politicians would be discovered and put out. Everything would change overnight. It’s happened before in this country. We’ve gone to this country before in fasting and praying, and we’ve gone to this country, this country has gone to God before and has been saved. We can be saved again, but we have to do something. We got to get off of our keisters, and we have to hold people accountable for the positions we put them in.

If you were running a business and you didn’t hold your employees accountable, you would go out of business. It’s the same thing. If you’re not going to hold your politicians and your judges accountable, we have the most corrupt legal system in the world right now. We have a judicial system that is badly broken. I do feel a little sorry for the Trump administration trying to get anything through the court system. I do, but I don’t feel sorry for how they go about doing it. Ronald Reagan is the key to understand how you make government work, and Ronald Reagan made his mistakes, and one of the things he didn’t do was shrink the government like he promised that he would, but I think you got to remember Ronald Reagan didn’t have both houses of Congress. Ronald Reagan didn’t have a Fox News helping him out. Ronald Reagan didn’t have a Rush Limbaugh when he was alive promoting the conservative values.

Ronald Reagan faced it alone, and he did a great job for America, and we’ve been living off the Reagan economy now for 40 years. Well, I should say maybe 32 years because the last eight years, well, really the last four years, we’ve gone down the tubes. We’re sinking fast, and somebody’s got to pull us out.

Well, that’s the show for today. A little harsh, I know, but I think there’s a time that you have to tell the people what they need to do to help themselves, and the only hope you can ever have in your personal life and your life as a citizen of any state you live in is to go to God. Go to God in your prayers and go to God with promises that you will obey, and if you do so, God will pull you and your family out of your problems.

Give God a try.

God says, test me. Try me and see if it doesn’t succeed.

This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the one place to go to, to get today’s news and understand what it means in the light of what God wants you to know and what your future is going to be. Thanks for listening again. Until tomorrow, bye-bye.