Trump Threatens Tariffs on US Business if They don’t produce in the US.

Trump and Elise Stefanik

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
1-23-25

 

I am writing this very quickly so I apologize if it’s a bit scattered but I needed to say something.

 

The headline is just another example of the madness we are entering under Trump. He threatens US business leaders with Tariffs if they don't make products in the US. There are a couple of problems with this. To make such a demand (and it's more likely one of his distractions) violates the right of the capitalist class in a bourgeois (capitalist) democracy to do what they want, where they want with "their" capital. It’s a violation of their rights and the language of a military dictatorship. 

In addition, if US manufacturers were to attempt this, they would have to pay US workers closer to the level of Cambodian or Chinese workers in order to compete in the global market place and no matter all the talk about isolationism, we live in a global economy. 

 

If it were to occur and I don’t believe it will, it would bring US capital in to a major conflict with the US working class including many blue collar workers that may have voted for Trump. One way or another it is a mess and a recipe for disaster. 

I was about to try write some commentary on my blog regarding the developments ahead and have been too occupied with other stuff. But one thing that has to be mentioned is the complete bankruptcy of the heads of organised labor in the US. I went to the AFL-CIO and UAW webpage and not a word. Here we are in a very rare situation and amid a genocide of unprecedented scale that the Biden Administration and the US ruling class has supported and armed and the labor bureaucracy is nowhere to be found.

 

Here is a glimpse from the AFL-CIO website, front page. 

The UAW is just as bad.

 Prior to the election, Shawn Fain, president of the UAW was appealing to members to vote for Kamala Harris as the election is a battle between “the interests of the working class and billionaires.”

 

Fain went on:

“The Democratic party is interested in working-class people and what they have to say and they want to be in our coalition. On the other side, we have the Republicans who, on a national level in particular, have embraced the billionaire class. They embraced their billionaire candidate.”

 

Seeing Bezos, Zuckerberg and Onan Musk sitting in the front at Trump’s Inauguration and the numerous billionaires and millionaires that have ingratiated themselves with Trump is evidence pure and simple that the billionaires have two parties, two capitalist parties. The Democrats have their billionaires too; and they switch from one to the other when needed.

 

Along with Shawn Fain, Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, a favorite of the liberals, came out for kamala Harris prior to the election: “Trump wants to fire striking workers, and Biden and Harris have upheld our right to strike.” She says completely ignoring Biden and Pelosi’s legislation adopted almost overnight denying rail workers the right to strike. Both Republicans and Democrats have no problem “reaching across the isle” when workers’ lives and living conditions are at stake.

 

I will state again that the era of the domination of the two capitalist parties over US economic and political life is over. The trade union leadership, basically agents of the Democratic Party within the organized labor movement, have little credibility when it comes to announcing their recommendations at election time. They have given billions of their union members’ hard earned dues money to the Democratic Party and its politicians over the years. 

 

Aside from money, the labor hierarchy has provided staffers that man phones, walk precincts and get rank and file workers to join them. Afscme, my union, provided 40,000 volunteers for Walter Mondale back in the 1980’s, a period when some union in the private sector were waging a real struggle against the neo-liberal offensive under Reagan.

 

That figure alone is a base for an alternative political party, a labor or workers’ party based on our organizations and communities. After all, the vast majority of us are workers and the obsession with identity politics is an attempt to obscure that and undermine class consciousness. It has us all in little groups trying to defeat the offensive independently.

 

The Service Employees International Union announced earlier this month that it is re-joining the AFL-CIO. This is a positive step but it comes with a warning. The SEIU and AFL-CIO leadership say that:

 “At a critical moment when everything is on the line for the nation’s working people, the labor movement is uniting to challenge the status quo and build a movement of workers who will fight—on the job, in the streets, at the ballot box, in our communities—for higher pay, expanded benefits and new rules that empower them to join together in unions and organize across industries.”

 

Comrades Sisters and Brothers, we have heard this all before. When Sweeney became the head of the AFL-CIO in the early part of the century he talked about blocking bridges citing the methods of Martin Luther King. Sweeney, with Trumka went quite rapidly from blocking bridges to building them, and not with their members but with the employers.

 

When the AFL-CIO split in 2005 there was jubilation among many on the left. But this split was not about anything substantial. It was not about ditching the Team Concept, the philosophy that workers and bosses have the same interests, it was over organizing and increasing membership in order to get more Democrats elected. Plus, more members is more dues money. 

 

Look at the statement above on the re-joining of the SEIU to the AFL-CIO. No mention of strikes. And it’s clear that the move comes about because of the democratic Party’s crushing defeat in the election. It’s the same old failed recipe.

 

The election of Trump and the situation we are facing at the moment has been a long time coming. Working people are not stupid. There are some nasty right wing fascists elements that voted for Trump but there are millions of workers that did too. Black workers have been taken advantage of and abused by the Democratic Party for decades. As one commentator put it, the Democrats know that most black folks won’t vote for the “White man’s party”. Well a significant number did. 

 

But it’s important to remember that only one in four voted for Trump and 90 million never voted at all. 

 

It is a dilemma. The trade union leaders have the resources to offer an alternative electorally and, despite the low union density, the organized working class has the ability to bring the US economy to a halt and draw the millions of unorganized to our ranks. But this is exactly what the trade union leadership is afraid of. They see no alternative. They do not believe workers can govern society That workers can lead. They see no alternative to the market and capitalism and, as I have written a million times, whenever the system goes in to crisis as it always does and always will before it kills us all; they move to bail it out.  That is the cause of the decades of concessions.

 

The delay of a mass movement and an independent political party of the working class means that the coming period will be extremely volatile and at times quite violent. Trump has over the past 10 years emboldened the racists, fascists, Christian nationalists and white supremacists. He has fostered the fear among white Americans that their very identity is at stake. It is a common strategy when dealing with settler populations, Ireland and Israel are prime examples of this. 

 

Let’s not kid ourselves. It will not simply be immigrants that are target for removal or worse. Socialist and communists will be dealt with, Trump has said as much.  And for many of these right wingers, union members are communist as are liberals. It’s not just gays, transgender men and woman or anyone that doesn’t fit the mould that will be targeted. 

 

There may well be a honeymoon period here but it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that with a body politic dominated by the likes of Onan Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg and many more, working people are about to have their pants taken down. That includes those that voted for him. And let us not leave out the climate catastrophe and the threat (though In think unlikely) of a global war. 

 

Sometimes it takes the whip of the counterrevolution force working people to take action even without much of a plan which is worked out through the struggle. Had Harris and the Democrats won, it would have merely delayed these developments. This is the party of war and now of genocide. Harris, Biden and Blinken should be in jail. 

 

We rarely choose the circumstances in which we find ourselves and we don’t choose this. But in the era of capitalist decline we are looking at deepening crises and further attacks on our material well-being. 

 

In my view better to face the music than delay it.