Saturday, February 01, 2025

Tariff Suggestion Box: Maybe we should just send Trump a few million?

So it looks like the tariffs are on, and the suggestions are coming thick and fast -- some funny, some serious: 

First up, maybe a bribe?
When I read Josh Marshall's comments today, it made me wonder -- since the Trump administration appears to be "open for business" so to speak, maybe Canada can get Trump off our backs if we just give him a platinum Visa card and build him some golf courses near Toronto and Banff? 
I'm sure Ford and Danielle Smith would kick in, too. 

Trump DOJ Rolls Out New Payment Plans (Yeah, In That Way…)
...the dawn of Trump’s second term now sees the rollout of a host of new Justice products and payment plans.
This week, matters took a degree of a step forward (or backward, depending on your metaphor) when Trump had his acting U.S. attorney abandon the criminal case against former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE). Fortenberry wasn’t some high-profile Trump ally. And his crimes weren’t particularly political or Trump-adjacent. He got caught taking laundered political contributions from a Nigerian billionaire and then repeatedly lied about it to the FBI. Pretty generic graft, pretty garden-variety political corruption. 
Then came word that the Trump DOJ is in “conversations” (how do these conversations go exactly?) with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan about dropping charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams. This is a criminal prosecution that is already underway and apparently going quite well. By all indications, they’ve got Adams dead to rights and the prosecutors have plenty of cooperators. ..
...New York City is the center of all Trump’s dreams and grievances. It is another way in which he coincides, albeit from very different points of origination, with the GOP ID. It’s hard to imagine a tableau more appealing to him than having the nominally Democratic mayor of the city admitting that Trump was right all along and inviting ICE in for bouts of wilding across the city.
 ...What’s novel here is that you don’t have to be a Trump ally any more to get protection from the law. You can open communications to become an ally after you get into trouble. And people are already responding to the new rules. The parents of disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried have begun sounding out Trump allies and lawyers about a pardon for their son who only just started his 25-year prison sentence, according to an article in Bloomberg News. They hardly come from traditional Trump stock. They’re both professors at Stanford Law School. 
It’s probably best to see their efforts in the context of the rapidly expanding Trump payment culture. We got a nice view of it in that glimpse of the new relationship between Trump and Mark Zuckerberg when the incoming president told Zuckerberg that a settlement payment (eventually agreed at $25 million) would be necessary to allow Mark to be “brought into the tent.” CBS/Paramount is now also trying to reach an agreement on a similar cash payment to the President.
A payment to Trump’s personal account to be “brought into the tent” isn’t the same as a cash payment for a pardon. But in the world of Trump they are probably best seen as slightly different versions of the same process. After all, coming into the tent is fundamentally about regulatory protection which in many of the most important ways is also centered in the Justice Department. It’s not too much to say that if you’ve got the money or the influencer bullhorn and you’re not asking for a Trump payment plan, you basically want to stay in jail.
Next, a serious suggestion - how about a science fund to lure all the suddenly-unfunded research programs?
Oh, just tariff the Douche-Panzer:
Here's an idea - cut Fox News in Canada:
Even Americans are not amused by Trump's tariff stunt - the stock market dropped 300+ points immediately when the tariffs were announced:
Our federal government is making its plans for dollar-for-dollar response.

Nothing announced yet but I am wondering whether Alberta will go along. Here is some Alberta information:
I also saw a fascinating thread from Max Fawcett on our mis-understood history between Ottawa and Alberta -- you know, I lived through much of this and I had forgotten it, so anyone younger may never have heard of any of it at all.
Whatever happens, North America is broken and it won't be getting up:
   
The End of North America
Trump pulls the trigger on tariffs
...in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.
One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.
But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.
Hence my title, “The end of North America.”
And to think that many people imagined that Trump would be good for business.
And Trump doesn't care whether Americans freeze in the dark, because Jesus....
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2 comments:

Cap said...

Great thread from Max Fawcett! Now remind us again, what did His Harperial Highness Firewall Steve do for Alberta?

6:36 am
Purple library guy said...

We'd have been better off if we did nationalize the oil back in the day like the NDP were pushing for. Aside from keeping the profits in Canada, a nationally owned oil patch wouldn't have been spending masses of cash building a fascist movement in Canada and doing tons of climate change denial propaganda.

9:18 pm

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