Saturday 5th of April 2025
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on penguin island....

X is not real life, but its tentacles slither into the increasingly online landscape that defines real life. It’s not X’s fault; it has merely become an incubator of a trend launched years ago by the 24-hour news cycle. Really, then, much of our modern malaise is the fault of Ted Turner, a man so wise he saw fit to marry Jane Fonda in 1991, well after she had publicly aired her crazy in myriad ways. 

And while information is good, there’s only so much of it that comes out in a day, which leaves lots of hours left to fill. Hence, the terrain quickly shifted from constant news to constant hysteria. Which is fine, if toting a fainting couch around with you is your thing, but there’s really no need to live this way. Take, for example, the latest outrage to animate us all: President Trump’s tariffs. 

 

Whether the tariffs are good, bad, or somewhere in between is immaterial. At the very least, they provide comedic relief in the form of a 10 percent tariff on the Heard and McDonald Islands, an Australian territory occupied primarily by penguins. It also has active volcanoes, which is not something we should want imported, though, so perhaps the tariffs are good. On the other hand, maybe we do need more penguins and the tariff will hinder the supply. In either case, I’m withholding umbrage. 

In this scenario, more people should be like me. It is unhealthy to spend so much time worrying about the daily stories that percolate on X before dripping out into the mainstream, making people panic about world war, their 401(k), or the manufactured stories that provide outrage on slower news days. This is where the concept of touching grass, a meme that remains important even as its popularity has waned, was borne. It is wholly unnecessary to be bothered by every gyration of the world. 

Back to the tariffs, markets, and 401(k)s, a long-held rule of investing is that you shouldn’t pay attention to the daily movements. In the world spawned by the 24-hour cycle, it’s oh so tempting to do so, and it can make for great online dunks to point out that the Nasdaq, S&P, and Dow are down, but when one zooms out to longer timelines, the pictures look much different. 

Such trends are boring, if comforting, though, so we tend not to discuss those, instead focusing on histrionic proclamations about oncoming destruction of biblical proportions. Debate is fun, and it’s important to discuss policy, but it’s also important to remember to stay in one’s lane. 

 

To take an example from my own life, I recently completed coursework to become a real estate agent. Among the things I learned was that not every agent is a realtor, a designation that requires one to fill out some paperwork and pay dues, as with so many titles in life. (Will I do that? Undoubtedly, because they have good marketing, and I don’t want to confuse normal people who don’t know there’s a distinction.) The other big thing I learned, beyond a bunch of legal definitions about tenancy that I will never need in my life, is to steadfastly refuse to step outside my scope of expertise. The practice test was littered with questions to which the proper answer was, “You should talk to an attorney about that.” 

In 24-hour newsrooms and especially on social media, almost no one is responding with, “You should consult an expert about this topic.” This is not helped by the fact that many experts are anything but. Naturally, this does not lessen the collective alarm brought on by the outrage du jour but instead intensifies it. 

Maybe, then, we should not allow ourselves to get sucked into the panics! sprawling before us every day. Being opposed to things isn’t a personality any more than being in favor of them is. Cultivate real hobbies, talk to your neighbors, take a walk without headphones, go fishing. Do something, anything, besides falling for the world Ted Turner built. For he is a man who not only married Jane Fonda when she was well past her prime but also donated $1 billion (!) in support of the decrepit terror sponsors at the United Nations. 

That he convinced people the best way to save an endangered species is to eat it is not enough to cancel out those more destructive tendencies, ones that are currently making us spend too much time yelling at one another.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/04/if-youre-hysterical-about-trumps-tariffs-go-touch-grass/

 

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

soy beans saga....

 

Waleed Aly

Brexit for the US: Trump’s tariffs are the sign of a nation in decline

 

Pop quiz: which country is the world’s leading producer of soybeans? Instinct might say China, or perhaps Japan, given the traditional centrality of soy to East Asian cuisine.

A slightly more analytical guess might be the United States, given it’s a huge country with lots of farms that can sell tonnes of the stuff to a voracious market like China’s. But research will take you to Brazil, which now accounts for 40% of the global market, largely off the back of Chinese demand.

It’s a recent development too, having roughly doubled in a decade. And it’s a consequence of Donald Trump’s first-term trade war with China, prompting China to buy from Brazil what it once bought from the US. America lost some US$27 billion of agricultural business in the process – 71% of that was in soybeans. And yet, despite all this, American farmers, including in the soybean hubs of Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota and Illinois, voted heavily for Trump last year, even as he promised the much broader, sweeping trade war whose culmination we have now seen in “Liberation Day”.

That’s pointing us in the direction of something important: that while the immediate consequences of Trump’s love of tariffs are economic, they are not best understood as an economic policy.

The clue is in the branding. Liberation Day suggests some form of bondage in present arrangements; that the US is somehow entrapped or ensnared. Liberation is not primarily an economic idea, but a political one. Especially in American political mythology, it is its own end to be pursued – even at great cost.

Trump doesn’t deny the possibility the US could tip into recession over this. He brushes aside the tanking sharemarket on the basis that “you have to do what’s right”. Aside from its occasional boasts of making America rich, Trump’s rhetoric so often couches this in terms of justice: “For years the globalists, the big globalists have been ripping off the United States… All we’re doing is getting some of it back, and we’re going to treat our country fairly.”

It’s a startling claim from the president of the country which, more than any other, foisted globalisation on the world. The country whose government won the Cold War, and whose academics declared that victory the “end of history”. But it’s also — perhaps most instructively — from the president of a declining power.

The US is now a country saddled with uncontrollable debt. Its schools are getting worse. Its infrastructure is falling apart. Its wages have stagnated for decades. Its manufacturing has long been in decline. Its inequality is widening. For all its defence spending (which adds to its debt), it frequently starts wars it does not win. Even the National Defence Panel agrees that US military superiority has “eroded to a dangerous degree”.

Much of Trump’s support comes from those who lose most from these developments. And much of his policy is directed at these problems, cogently or otherwise: tariffs to protect manufacturing, axing diversity programs in educational institutions, a stated reluctance to fight wars. Trump is famously unpredictable, but his unifying theme is utterly consistent: the retrieval of American power. Make America great again, etc.

The best critique of Trump is not that he is making his billionaire friends rich (they’re the ones losing eye-watering amounts on the sharemarket, or in Elon Musk’s case, watching their businesses tank). It’s that he doesn’t understand the roots of American power, and is handing wins to China at almost every turn. It’s that he thinks a declining power can reassert itself by will and force, and that the world won’t simply begin to find others to rely on.

This is, in spirit, Brexit on a global scale. That, too, was a case of a population voting, knowingly or otherwise, to make themselves less wealthy in order to “Take Back Control”. That too, was therefore not merely economic: Brexit promised its own sort of liberation day, in that instance from European diktat. And that, too, came amid the pangs of decline, in that case the now-comprehensive decline of the British Empire and the existential questions that raises about what Britain is in its wake.

That’s why both these phenomena are ultimately projects of national sovereignty. They are tied to greatness because they hark back to an era where being a great power meant the power to dictate terms. With that comes a mythology that more sovereignty means more power. That is to say, a mythology that paints globalisation — with its logic of interdependence — out of the picture.

Each, then, is captured by the “globalisation trilemma” famously identified by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. Put simply, Rodrik argues you can’t have globalisation, democracy and sovereignty all at once – you can only have two. Sovereignty and globalisation works, but only if the government forces it on the people against their will, by having open borders, for example. Democracy and sovereignty works, but only if you opt out of globalisation and retain the control to enact the will of the people. And globalisation and democracy works, but only if the people get to vote directly on the global institutions that influence their lives, which would in turn make the nation state less relevant and erode its sovereignty.

The trouble is we’ve spent decades pretending this isn’t so; that you can have all three. We’re here because this could never hold. Eventually, the forces of democracy and sovereignty gushed forth. And because they’re doing so in a globalised economy, the economic results will be painful.

Brexit has definitely harmed the British economy – the only real debate is to what extent. Goldman Sachs now puts the chancesof a US recession at 35% in the next 12 months, to say nothing of the possibilities of a global economic downturn.

But to critique all this on economic terms is to miss a large chunk of the point. Sovereignty and control are things people tend to value in their own right. And they’re especially potent for people who feel they are losing their status. People like citizens of mighty nations that are now shining a little less brightly.

As the economic consequences become real, some believers will no doubt waver. But a great many will remain because in the end, we’re watching a festival of sovereignty against a backdrop of lost pride.

 

Republished from The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 April 2025

 

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/04/brexit-for-the-us-trumps-tariffs-are-the-sign-of-a-nation-in-decline/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

wacked by wacko....

...

According to him, since the US exported only $US143.5 billion ($229.5 billion) worth of goods to China in 2024, but it imported $US438.9 billion in goods from China, China is obviously imposing a 67 per cent tariff on US goods.

How else can you explain why the US would have a goods trade deficit of US$295.4 billion with China?

Next, to get the numbers in the second column on Trump's chart, do this:

Take the tariff rate that China is apparently imposing on imports of US goods (67.29 per cent) and multiply it by 0.5 (to halve it).

That gives you 33.64 per cent.

That's how Trump came up with the rate of his "discounted" reciprocal tariff that he'll apply to China.

He's saying that, since China is imposing a 67 per cent tariff on US goods imports, he'll have to reciprocate, but he'll give China a 50 per cent discount.

Do the same exercise for other countries the US has a trading relationship with and that's how you'll generate the numbers in both columns on Trump's fantastical charts.

What about the tariff on Australian goods?

There's one more thing.

When you're doing your calculations, if that "trade deficit/imports ratio" with another country is less than 10 per cent, or if the US has a trade surplus with a country, just put a flat tariff (10 per cent) on goods imports from that country.

That's how Australia got a 10 per cent tariff.

In 2024, Australia was one of the few countries in the world with which the US enjoyed a goods trade surplus, but it didn't stop Australia getting whacked with one of Trump's "reciprocal tariffs" anyway.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-04/how-were-trumps-tariffs-calculated/105136808

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.