Once Again...Here Is How Tariffs Work

For anyone who *still* doesn't get it...

Link to original article:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/13/politics/donald-trump-tariffs/index.html

Don't Be Bamboozled

There's not a lot of time left. November will be here soon enough. Don't be bamboozled. Our country is literally at stake.
RESIST.

Big Brother and The Monster

The Washington Post: "The Squad’s’ defenders argue for a better America than Trump does"

From The Washington Post:


‘The Squad’s’ defenders argue for a better America than Trump does
By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer
July 17

President Trump is once again in a rage, because the House of Representatives just voted to condemn his racist attacks on four nonwhite members of Congress. In a new tweetstorm, he offered a new set of claims to contrast the two visions of America that are the deeper subject of the big public argument we are now having.

So, let’s be as clear as possible: The vision of America represented by the “Squad” and its defenders in this dispute is a better one than the vision of America that Trump is defending.

The historian Jill Lepore has a new book out, in which she calls for a recommitment to a “civic and constitutional patriotism” that she believes is required as a rebuttal to Trump’s illiberal ethnic and racial nationalism. Winning this argument, Lepore writes, requires us to “make a case for the nation” on those grounds, that is, to tell a story about a better country than the one Trump is telling a story about.

The reason the new House resolution condemning Trump’s racism is significant is that it tries to meet this challenge. This is also why it’s significant that House Republicans almost uniformly voted against the resolution, going all in with Trump in this dispute.

The new House resolution basically tells a story about this country that is in keeping with the civic patriotism — also sometimes called “civic nationalism” — that Lepore’s book discusses. The basic story is that this country was founded on universal ideals of liberty and equality, and the act of belonging to this nation is defined mostly through a commitment to these ideals, as opposed to being defined by blood, race, ethnicity, religion or mystical devotion to soil.

National stories are always to some degree myths, and our actual history has been an unending struggle to bring us in line with those ideals, a struggle that continues today. As Lepore puts it, those who have been “left out” of this “vision of the nation” have unceasingly battled for inclusion in it, and “our nation is that battle.”

The text of the House resolution generally constitutes a restatement of this view. It outlines a commitment to that vision of America, and condemns Trump for “racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”

To support this, the resolution cites Trump’s labeling of immigrants as “invaders” and his declaration that the four nonwhite lawmakers should “go back” to their countries of ancestry. Those four are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.), the first three of whom were born in the United States.

President Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi both face battles with four Democratic Congresswomen, known as the "squad." Here's what you need to know. (Elyse Samuels, Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
Virtually the entire House GOP caucus voted against this resolution. And some Republicans claimed Trump didn’t engage in racism at all. GOP Rep. Sean P. Duffy (Wis.) piously insisted that he saw “nothing that references anybody’s race” in Trump’s tweets, while also claiming the congresswomen are “anti-American.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) — the top Republicans in the Senate and House, respectively — both stated that Trump is “not a racist.” And Rep. Dan Meuser (Pa.) wept that the resolution was “harassing” Trump, who is always, invariably the real victim.

It’s worth pausing over what these Republicans are really defending here.

WHAT REPUBLICANS ARE DEFENDING

It isn’t enough to just say these lawmakers are nonwhite. The additional point here is that the lawmakers Trump targeted are united by the fact that they are all members of ethnic, racial or religious minorities. Trump suggested that by virtue of this fact — by virtue of their heritage — they don’t belong to the American nation.

Trump tried to fudge this point by claiming — falsely — that they weren’t born here. But the lie itself, which to my knowledge he hasn’t disavowed, underscores his real meaning. And in any case, he has continued to rage that if they want to continue criticizing America, they should “LEAVE,” that is, go back to where they come from, further emphasizing the point that they fundamentally don’t belong.

In doing this, Trump embraced a contemporary version of the illiberal, exclusionary, white-nationalist and ethno-nationalist vision of America, one that has a long and terrible history in this country, one that runs through slavery and through the national-origins quota system on immigration (which was based in part on theories of eugenics) and through Jim Crow.

This vision contrasts with the civic patriotism that the Dem-sponsored House resolution seeks to enshrine. And House Republicans could not bring themselves to condemn Trump’s vision, or even to call it out for what it is. The Republican Party is increasingly becoming a white-nationalist party.

THE NEW TRUMPIST ARGUMENT AGAINST "THE SQUAD"

In his latest rage-tweets on this matter, Trump just echoed a new argument that is revealing about the broader dimensions of this dispute. Trump approvingly quoted GOP Sen. John Neely Kennedy (La.) claiming “the four Congresswomen think that America is wicked in its origins” and that “we are all racist and evil.”

This conception of the country does have a role in the historical debates involving various forms of nationalism and the historic injustices that have defined the nation. But as Gary Gerstle’s book “American Crucible” details, the tradition of civic patriotism or civic nationalism has throughout our history regularly repudiated the idea that the American founding is irredeemably tainted by its origins amid slavery and white supremacy.

Instead, at the core of the tradition of civic patriotism is the essential idea that the country can, and will, be continually improved, and further brought in line with its ideals.

The argument Trump just tweeted tries to separate the four members of Congress in question from that tradition. But in fact, many of their criticisms of Trump — over his racism, over his abuses of migrants, over his contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law — put them squarely within it.

This is the tradition the House resolution reaffirmed. And it’s the one that Republicans are in the process of breaking from, while increasingly embracing Trump’s white nationalism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/17/squads-defenders-represent-better-america-than-trump-does/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.501407a41b38

Trump Stains Democratic Ideals by James Cook

Sorry to darken the holiday spirit, but we are living in dark times...

Embracing the far right, Trump stains a history of democratic ideals
By James Cook
North America correspondent/BBC News

One of my cherished possessions, which I cart with me around the world, is a tattered paperback copy of the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches.

On the front cover, John F Kennedy stands gripping a lectern, in full flow; on the back, Martin Luther King raises a hand before the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

As you gaze at that second picture, you can hear his preacher's voice, resonant and rhythmic. You can hear the cadences rise and fall, a hint of vibrato, as he describes his dream.

On the pages in between, the speeches shine brightly with democratic ideals, many proclaimed by American presidents.

There is Woodrow Wilson, promoting the League of Nations in Pueblo, Colorado in September 1919: "There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace."

There is Herbert Hoover's great rallying cry for conservatism in New York in October 1928: "The march of progress" founded on "ordered liberty, freedom and equal opportunity to the individual."

The Wall Street crash of the following year brought that march to an abrupt halt, and by the spring of 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration speech crackled across the radio airwaves, the nation was in the desolation of the Great Depression.

Roosevelt's watershed inaugural is best remembered for its signature line - "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - but it contained much else besides, not least a warning of the "false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit".

A Democrat, Roosevelt might have abjured the "rugged individualism" of his Republican predecessor, but the two presidents shared a commitment to liberty, characterised by Roosevelt in his 1941 address to Congress as "four freedoms": namely the freedoms of speech and religion and freedoms from want and fear.

"Enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom," he declared.

Roosevelt had a year earlier started his country on the long, slow turn away from isolationism and toward engagement in the fight against fascism, with his "arsenal of democracy" speech, in which he urged reluctant citizens to lend their vast resources to the British war effort.

Thirteen presidents later, the debate about whether to turn inward or to engage with the world has been resurrected by Donald Trump. He insists that he is not an isolationist but he describes US foreign policy in unilateral, transactional terms and has championed "America First" — a phrase originally associated with opposition to Roosevelt's desire to fight Hitler.

The most prominent spokesman for the 1940s America First Committee, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, accused Jewish groups of "agitating for war" and was himself accused of being pro-Nazi.

Embracing the phrase "America First" does not in itself indicate fascism, but there is more to the picture than that.

For Lindbergh and Roosevelt, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. In 1944 American troops waded through the surf of Normandy's beaches and into the path of Nazi bullets.

Half a lifetime later, at Pointe du Hoc on the English Channel, Ronald Reagan commemorated their sacrifice with the words: "Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history." That's in my book of speeches too.

Of course, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals.

This week marks the 153rd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, when US troops murdered and mutilated women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado, just one atrocity among many as white Europeans vanquished the native peoples of the New World.

Then a country founded on genocide and slavery covered its ears for shameful ages before it heard Martin Luther King's insistence that it "make real the promises of democracy" for African Americans. Woodrow Wilson, for one, used fine words but he introduced racist policies too. Even now, that promise of democracy remains only partially fulfilled.

The US has been guilty of bombing civilians, of torture and imprisonment without trial and of subverting the very democracy it professes to hold sacred when it does not like what democracy delivers.

The 45th US president appears to recognise some of this. Shortly after taking office, Mr Trump told Fox News that he respected the Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The interviewer objected: "He's a killer though. Putin's a killer."

"There are a lot of killers," Mr Trump replied. "We've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country's so innocent?"

He may have been correct, but for an American president to casually and publicly equate his country with a murderous kleptocracy was nonetheless a stunning and revealing moment.

For much of its history, America's leaders have, at the very least, paid lip service to upholding the virtues on which their nation was founded - often in the face of existential totalitarian threats, not least from Moscow.

"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," President Kennedy acknowledged in Berlin in 1963, "but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."
Mr Trump's rhetoric has been rather different.

Far from prioritising freedom of religion and racial reconciliation, he has repeatedly played to a gallery of the far right. He spread the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the US.

He has sought to undermine the free press, repeatedly dismissing inconvenient or critical journalism as "fake news".

He has cosied up to autocrats, from Turkey's Erdogan ("very high marks") to Duterte of the Philippines (a "great relationship") to Egypt's Sisi ("love your shoes").

His reaction to news of a terrorist attack in London was not to express solidarity with the mayor of the city, Sadiq Khan, but to attack him. Mr Khan is a Muslim.

And now, in perhaps the most shocking move of all, Mr Trump has used his Twitter account with more than 40 million followers to deliver a huge boost to Britain First, a racist group on the far-right fringes of UK politics, and followed up with an attack on the British prime minister Theresa May, in theory his closest international ally.

So much for the special relationship.

It is hard to imagine now that the president's delayed state visit to the UK, scheduled for early next year, can go ahead without howls of outrage from a large section of the British public. Downing Street, desperate for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, insists that the trip remains on.

It is a far cry from the time that the two nations fought side by side to defeat Nazism.

Sprinkled among the fine and idealistic speeches in my book, like granules of arsenic, are the words of fascists and racists. Nazis Adolf Hitler ("my patience is now at an end") and Reinhard Heydrich ("the final solution"), the British fascist Oswald Mosley ("England again dares to be great"), and, later, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell ("the River Tiber foaming with much blood").

Reading them now, a question comes to mind: did American soldiers fight and die on the beaches of Normandy so their president could promote fascism?

It is an astonishing question, absurd even. To many it may seem offensive even to ask.

But it falls to reporters to describe in plain language what we see, and promotion of fascism and racism is all too easy to observe in the United States of 2017.

Mr Trump amplified the fascism of Britain First, sending its message booming and bouncing around the world. It is a message which continues where Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, left off. His huge rally at London's Earl's Court in July 1939 was advertised using the slogan Britain First and he uttered it himself in his speech that night, a speech in which he also defended Hitler and attacked the "corrupt interest of Jewish finance".

According to Wikipedia, citing a now deleted web page, today's Britain First aims to protect "British and Christian morality", to preserve "our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage" and to maintain "the indigenous British people" as the nation's "demographic majority".

Mr Trump insists he wants to put America First for all Americans, regardless of race or religion, but the president's opponents have accused him of using so-called "dog-whistle" politics to appeal to like-minded voters.

The president opened his campaign for the White House by promising to wall off Mexico and create a "deportation force" to expel more than 10 million illegal immigrants from the country.

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best…they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting," he said.

He tweeted (and later deleted) false statistics about the percentage of white people killed by black people.

His initial reaction to the murder of Heather Heyer as she protested about a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was to insist there was blame "on many sides" and to defend some "very fine people" who marched with the fascists. The comments, which appeared to place the Nazis and their opponents on the same moral plain, left members of his own party reeling in horror.

The former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spoke for many when he tweeted: "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."

On Islam too Mr Trump is sharply at odds with his party predecessors, who generally took great care not to link radical extremist ideology with the wider views of a religion followed by nearly a quarter of the world's population, an estimated 1.8bn people.

When, in March 2016, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Mr Trump whether he thought Islam was at war with the West, the presidential candidate's reply was remarkable.

"I think Islam hates us. There's something there. There's a tremendous hatred there… There is an unbelievable hatred of us," he said. Pressed on the subject, he declined to draw a distinction between mainstream Muslims and jihadists. "It's very hard to separate," he said.

On the campaign trail, Mr Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" and he has at least contemplated closing mosques and creating a database of Muslims in the US.

At the end of this century, how will such words sit alongside those from Hoover and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan? Will they look strange or normal? Will the United States again be promoting plurality, or will it be retreating into the supposed security of a white Christian society?

In the past two years I have met many, many Trump supporters who are decent, hard-working Americans with no axe to grind against minorities, but I have also met more than a handful of racists and white supremacists who cheer on the man in Pennsylvania Avenue.

And Mr Trump is championed by the influential new media of the far-right, led by none other than the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.

Mr Trump is far from the first president to diverge from the democratic ideals of the United States, but in doing so as brazenly, as often, and in such a racially and religiously charged manner, he fosters division at home and imperils his country's reputation abroad.

The flame of American idealism, which shone so brightly from my book of speeches, is guttering.


Link to original article
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42197006