This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Like everything else, Trump’s Xenophobic trade policy has been a disaster, and has led to a collapse in our exports market, a manufacturing sector in recession, and rising farm bankruptcies.
And as the US continues to isolate itself economically and upend existing relationships and alliances, the rest of the world is moving on to forge new trade agreements that do not include us.
Increasingly, America First has meant America Alone.
The news media, both television and print, here in Germany are following everything very closely.
The general view is, the US has lost its collective mind, the US is not longer a trusted partner, and the poison is spilling over into the rest of the world (yes, QAnon is now a thing with the RWNJs here too).
It will take a long time, if ever, for us to clean up the mess BLOTUS and his evil minions have created.
The first step is to get Biden in there.
VOTE!!! Your life may literally depend on it.
From conservative catholic prep school to georgetown to Covington & Burling to Skadden. Goodness. It was interesting that no one seemed willing to slag him, even anonymously.
How does someone as smart as Lighthizer and as skeptical of free trade interdependencies as Lighthizer come up with an outcome that increases our trade deficit and foreign dependence still further? Simple, by carrying on the swamp traditions Trump promised to stop and instead has aggravated. Tech’s pay-to-play relationships have ensured that the trade crackdown has come against raw materials, depriving our economy of materials we need and triggering international retaliation against our exporting farmers and making it more expensive to produce finished goods here, while letting finished goods get off scot-free, padding the tech company profits and allowing business as usual with China where the big money is. This is the precise reverse of what we needed, which was protection with regard to finished goods, but continued open access on raw materials.
Drain the swamp for real this time. Republicans out.
Yes, Trump’s feckless isolationism has advanced Chinese expansionism and Russian adventurism.
It’s amazing how fast it came. In just a couple short years we went from the trusted, respected and recognized Leader of the Free World to something akin to rogue superpower.
But Trump offered him a shot at a lifelong dream: curing what he saw as America’s unhealthy reliance on China
I didn’t know that he was closing Target and Walmart.
Yes, NOW they are concerned about China.
For 50 years, we have been told that we don’t need Certain core industries in this country, that we can better manage production if it is located in poor, exploitable developing nations that provide multinational corporations a haven from a guaranteed minimum wage, and enforceable labor rights and environmental protections.
That we can play one poor country against the other in competition for jobs and investment in the interests of squeezing out as much “efficiency” as possible.
We allowed lobbyists and other hired guns from Big Business to write laws that crushed labor unions and gave companies tax credits for moving jobs and factories to those poor countries and exploiting their impoverished citizens for starvation wages.
We lowered trade barriers with those countries and signed trade deals with no enforceable standards whatsoever, which gave these powerful firms an incentive to undercut the interests of American workers.
These people have written off the American workers, and put their money into building their most advanced production facilities in poor countries run by authoritarians. They have no loyalty to this country, its workers, or our system that allowed them to grow and prosper. They only see us as another market to sell to.
Rising levels of inequality that we have witnessed the past 40 years attests to the willingness of these firms to deny a living wage to what were once their customers.
And now we are being asked to confront China which has benefited from decades of Big Business investment while our captains of industry have pursued a policy of disinvestment in their host country.
The chickens have come home to roost.