It’s buried at the end, but it’s not shocking that former Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi isn’t a Trump fan. He finds him puzzling, even when discussing issues where he finds agreement. He’s a classic liberal, but on the issue of tariffs, free trade, and globalization, Taibbi had a clear message: it’s time to blow it up.
Both parties are up to their necks in this mess, and the promises made in the 1980s never came true. Taibbi detailed the big sell on free trade from Mr. NAFTA and WTO. Job retraining? Union workers know that’s a red flag when the political class pitches some new trade venture that ultimately benefits them and screws over the working class. For a generation-plus, the working class has been slaving away, denigrated, forgotten, and taken for granted.
Then, they started voting Republican, which led to the Democratic Party’s accelerated hatred and ostracization of this massive voter bloc that once was the backbone of the party, replaced by over-educated wealthy snobs whose go-to line to anyone complaining about the cost of living was to mock these people for not going to college. That’s the equivalent of being mad at homeless people for not buying a house (via Racket News) [Bold text indicates NPR]:
From NPR...
But, by the end of the day, Trump apparently had reached his threshold of market pain. He reversed course, ditching some of the tariffs, because, he said, people “were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”
The market rallied Wednesday, but with Trump increasing tariffs to 145% on China, by Thursday, the Dow was down again. And, remember, China has leverage, too, because it buys a lot of U.S. government debt, and they seem to have every intention of using it.
Translation: a serial trade and human rights violator that with the help of decades of corrupt politicians from both parties polluted, price-dumped, and stole its way to a generation of American jobs and revenue, now owns so much of our debt that we must put up with its shit indefinitely. That’s the point of view of our own federal news agency. We have officially cucked ourselves past the point of no return.
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It seemed obvious that NAFTA, the WTO, and the extension of cushy trade arrangements with China and other unfree labor zones were a gigantic end-run around American labor, safety, and environmental laws. It was an asset-stripping scheme, designed to help CEOs boost their share prices by cutting costs of American parts, labor, and regulatory compliance from their bottom lines. There seemed nothing complicated about this, except the marketing challenge. How could corporate management convince Americans, who fought for so long to scrape their way into the middle class, that it was in their interest to compete against countries that didn’t have to follow any of the same rules we did?
The New York Times early on argued the benefits would come in the form of lower prices. In 1984, when the national trade deficit nearly doubled from $69.4 billion to $123.3 billion, the paper said the effect was “good and bad” because “cheap foreign goods help keep inflation down,” by “giving consumers low-priced alternatives but also by encouraging American businesses to operate more efficiently.”
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We were continually told a new service-sector paradise would replace the anachronism of manufacturing. “What’s happening in manufacturing had its counterpart 50 years ago in agriculture,” Michael L. Wachter, a UPenn economist, told the New York Times. “These deindustrialization guys must have had counterparts saying that the American economy is dying because there are not enough people on farms.”
Something big was coming to replace those old factories, and we were told over and about the benefits of access to the “biggest market in the world.” True, previous efforts to gain access to China had ended in tears, but this time it was different, because as the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour put it in 1994, “after decades of denial and deprivation, the Chinese have money and are ready to shop”
It never happened. China never opened its markets, and the trade imbalance kept ballooning, alongside persistent complaints about violative practices that reminded me of Wall Street fraud cases I covered. Whether after rulings by the Department of Commerce or the DOJ or the WTO, China would admit to currency manipulation or “relabelling” or some other offense, promise to stop, and just keep going. The fact that they were there to buy whenever the U.S. issued debt was clearly a huge factor in us always turning a blind eye.
In the early 2000s, we began to be sold on the idea that globalization was really working, it was just hard for ordinary Americans to see because they were so wrapped up in bitterness and nostalgia. Papers like the New York Times gave top billing to boosters like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman to castigate the lost-in-the-past crowd and extol the exciting new world of borderless innovation.
I don’t remember anyone on the American left complaining about me savaging these ludicrous Milo Minderbinder-esque celebrations of Friedman about the benefits of globalization.
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The global economy created by both parties from the eighties onward was not only designed to be a giant predatory clusterf*ck, but nearly impossible to unwind. Forget “incrementally,” it’s got to be exploded. Would more of the same and a slow death be better?
Janet Yellen: Bringing back American manufacturing is a “pipe dream.” pic.twitter.com/tZSm3m2vj8
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 14, 2025
The old guard says you can’t bring high-skill manufacturing back. You can’t do tariffs. You can’t do this or that—who are these people? The era of the expert again got a punch to the gut, as Nvidia announced yesterday that it would start making supercomputers here in the US. That led to a market rally. They might not use explicit language to say what they feel, but when people say that reshoring jobs that benefit the working and middle classes is a pipe dream, it’s a red flag. I don’t trust these clowns. We have a political class that identifies and idolizes like-minded folks from other nations instead of their own people. That alone should make you want to oppose everything the established class wants.
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