The real issue is with auto tariffs is parts since those have more diverse sources across borders.
That doesn’t convey just how insanely complex car-manufacturing supply chains actually are. And the transition to just-in-time manufacturing has meant that stock on hand is kept to a bare minimum, so the impact of disruptions is even greater than it would have been a generation ago.
That’s why Putin picked him.
Yeah, you can make it up in volume!
When you look at the context of the quote, he was cynically using those words to defend a great injustice.
May Reagan burn in hell.
Especially because that quote was to counter pressure to say that trade relations were invalid if one party wasn’t protecting the environment and human rights (for example, by imposing slave-labor conditions on factory workers).
backed by muscle and violence
Also every existing state.
I have been people argue about ‘socialism’ vs. ‘social democracy’ vs ‘communism’ since I was in grade school and none of it has done a drop of good for anyone whatsoever.
If you’re unable to clearly define your terms, you’re unable to think correctly. Knowing what you’re talking about is a good in and of itself.
the people on the Right are voting
That voting is a downstream consequence of a long program of mass manipulation and propaganda, backed with voter-suppression measures. Unless you address that root cause, lecturing people about not voting is a pointless distraction.
and you’re focusing on how I define 'socialism
Making a couple posts didn’t take long, and education is part of the process. There can be no revolution without revolutionary consciousness. If you become capable of thinking more clearly, maybe you’ll someday be in a position to affect events in a more constructive way.
More precisely, to use Marx’s definition: socialism is when workers own and fully control the means of production.
Government services: not socialism, no worker ownership or control.
State capitalism (like China and the former USSR): not socialism, no worker ownership or control.
Historically, the closest things we’ve seen to socialism so far are worker-owned co-operatives and city- or provincial-level anarcho-syndicalist systems such as the Spanish Anarchists before the fascists murdered them. Some grassroots movements like Podemos and Occupy have also attempted to implement such systems, with brief and limited success.
Again going back to Marx, he expected socialism to be an emergent phenomenon as late capitalism in the most advanced economies becomes unsustainable (he didn’t anticipate the transition from feudalism to state capitalism in Russia and China, or its leaders fraudulently calling it socialism). You’ll see more attempts to implement worker ownership and control, and you’ll see those who get fat off the existing system do everything they can to smack those attempts down. That’s where we are now. Then there will be a sort of phase transition that might take the form of a revolution or might be a less brutal change.
Now, whether Marx and his successors are correct in his prediction, only time will tell.
It never has been. US capitalism has always been the kind that actually exists in the wild: corrupt, subsidy-consuming, protected by regulatory capture, and inextricably entangled with the workings of the government.
Libertarians’ ideas of what capitlalism is fail to reflect any historical situation anywhere, since their simplistic models fail to consider second-order effects, non-linearities and human nature. But coupling with other systems is inevitable, and there is no economics that exists independently of politics. Karl Marx got a lot of things wrong, but he knew that key fact.
There are too many steps in that chain of reasoning (more than one) to resemble anything that goes through Trump’s so-called mind. He doesn’t understand comparative advantage, he doesn’t understand global trade, he doesn’t understand what happens when tariffs are imposed. Although he probably doesn’t know the word, he probably thinks autarky works.
His handlers want him to impose tariffs because they damage world trade and put stress on economic alliances like the EU. And whose bloodthirsty imperialist plans would benefit from a weaker EU?
Keep in mind that Congress delegated that power to the President, and (if they were ever to become vertebrates) they could rescind that power too.
Unfortunately he’s not nearly as good as he thinks he is.
Let’s be clear about it: he’s absolutely worthless at it.
And to those who adhere to the lazy “Trump is always transactional” pseudo-explanation: Trump is never transactional when it comes to Putin. The words you’re looking for in that case are “consistently, predictably servile.” And I wouldn’t call his multiple divide-and-rule extortion schemes “negotiations” either. He’s just seeing how much he can get away by strong-arming weaker nations or organisations.
Like he thinks they just fix everything.
Like those who pull his strings know that tariffs are an effective means of economic sabotage.
Trivially solvable by looking, unless we are going to regulate millions of vehicles and add to noise pollution for the hypothetical sake of a few visually-impaired people.
Are you going to force bicycle riders to also put playing cards in their spokes so we can hear them too? Will pedestrians be forced to sing while in public? Or will people instead learn to actually look? Anyway, even a silent car emits lots of tyre noise, and every EV I’ve run across also makes some sci-fi-like noise whenever the motor is running.
I think that’s a form of accelerationism, but I am less sceptical of that position than I used to be. Trump has shown what the system is capable of once the mask is stripped off. Many of the horrors of Trump’s misrule are matters of degree, not of kind. Under the veneer of gentility, noeliberal capitalism was just as rapacious as it is now, inequality was growing rapidly, and US imperialist interference with other countries, including giving support to genocide, was carried out even without Trump’s foul presence.
Is ot worse now? Yes, in every way. But will restoring status quo ante be sufficient to stop the rot? No, which is one explanation for the popular revulsion not only at MAGA, but alos at the mainstream Democratic Party’s gormless money-grubbing lip service.
He was put in to sabotage the US both internally and globally. That doesn’t require him to be a good politician, just a relentless, brutal wrecker.
Well, at least some good came out of it.
If the tapes exist, you don’t know their contents, so there’s no way you can truthfully say that.