Today's News - Teflon Carney; Collapsing America; Trump's Shame

Teflon Carney - they keep throwing stuff at him but it just doesn't stick 

One of the most impressive attributes that Mark Carney brings to Canada is respect, both given and taken. 

As he is going across the country, meeting people and giving speeches, Carney shows such respect for all the people he deals with -- he isn't arrogant in the least, he doesn't have to show off how smart he is by putting down ordinary people.

This dude got Carney to sign his jersey. pic.twitter.com/uDlHEqlGum

— Glen E. McGregor (@glen_mcgregor) April 4, 2025

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Carney even shows respect for Trump as the American president, though he doesn't hesitate to call him out for the damage he is doing to the world economy. 

Just as Carney respects others, he also demands respect for himself and his office and his country -- before he would even speak to Trump, he demanded that Canada be respected as a sovereign independent country -- I don't know what Carney said during that phone call but we aren't hearing any more "jokes" about the 51st state and "Governor Carney" crap. 

Poilievre and the CPC are trying desperately to come up with some smear that will stick -- they're tried sneaky, Brookfield, the blind trust, plagiarism, poor French, Jeffrey Epstein, his father's job as principle of an indigenous day school - all stupid and pointless. Carney just rises above it - replying "look within yourself, Rosemary" whenever his character, integrity or truthfulness is questioned - and it slides right off his back, forgotten within a news cycle. 

Scrimshaw points out that Carney just comes across as absolutely authentic: 

Evan Scrimshaw 

Conservatives’ Attacks On Carney Aren’t Landing
Conservatives In Crisis
Mark Carney is in a lot of ways an aesthetically bad candidate, in that he has a lot of flaws that are superficially bad for him. He’s not a world class public speaker, he’s a wonk and a nerd whose brain is clearly having to translate from how he’d talk at a Monetary Policy Committee meeting to how he should talk to Canadians, and he’s open to a lot of mistakes/moments that make it clear he’s not a regular Canadian. But none of that matters for a simple reason - Carney’s not claiming to be an Everyman.
...The problem for Conservatives is that Carney’s flaws as a candidate, as real as they are, are incidental to what voters care about. They’ve yet to make it more than his French sucking or him being awkward - they’ve failed to drive a narrative through the heart of his candidacy...
Conservatives are increasingly desperate because nothing is landing on Carney, events are conspiring against them, and they’re losing, and losing badly. We’re getting increasingly unhinged claims of 6500 people in Oshawa that’s just plainly exaggerated, we’re talking about how polls that show minor Conservative popular vote leads nationally but Liberal seat leads show some form of “momentum” even though Abacus is the same poll on poll if the leak is right. It’s just so pathetic...
Their polls have been going the wrong way for the 2 weeks of this campaign and desperation leads to bad decisions. For whatever chance there is that Carney shits the bed in the debates, there’s an equal or better chance Poilievre makes a big mistake trying to get himself back into the game with one swing.
The CPC’s messaging about Carney has failed, because they’re trying to attack him for things he doesn’t pretend he’s not. And every time they launch attacks that don’t land, they waste time they can’t get back. The CPC are in deep, deep trouble.

And here is a worthwhile point - the way Carney and Poilievre treat the journalists questioning them now is the way they will treat Canadians after the election. Carney answers questions while Poilievre munches apples.

The entire plan is plain as day. Ban the Canadian media from the plane and have the foreign owned postmedia smear Carney.

— Chief Cheemu (@ChiefCheemu) April 4, 2025

Folks, we still have 3 weeks before this election. As @PierrePoilievre fights for his political life it will get dirty! He will work to divide but only the idiots will accept! Ignore his words and actions

— Ontario we are in trouble (@SunshineCityCo1) April 4, 2025

Here is a worthwhile initiative:

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And even though CTV chickened out, Rachel Gilmore will still be doing weekly fact checks of the campaigns for Canada's National Observer. The first one was published Friday.

Collapsing America - its not just the DOW, its everything 

The world seems to be running away from America as fast as they can.

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I'll bet this was a fun meeting:

The Dow went down again on Friday, 2,300 points. Since December it has dropped 15 per cent, representing a loss of trillions of dollars in value.

Parents Gently Explain To Child That Their Money In Heaven Nowhttps://t.co/hWYqSQZAaZ

— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 4, 2025

Now that the economy is collapsing, Trump is trying to blame Biden - "we inherited such a terrible economy" - but the business world knows exactly who is to blame for this mess.  Its Trump himself, of course, but its also America, who twice elected this stupid man:

A German friend tells me Volkswagen has stopped delivering cars into U.S. effective immediately. Audi and Porsche as well. The Liberation Day effect just beginning.

— Tom Harrington (@cbctom) April 3, 2025

Sean McKnight / Collapse of the American Center

Trump's Recession
Get ready for the worst recession in your lifetime.
...First, its important to recognize that tariffs on foreign manufacturing is functionally a tariff on US manufacturing, despite what Trump’s supporters among industrial manufacturing might think. US manufacturing is an intermediate goods trade, meaning US manufacturers not only rely on foreign made inputs to build end-products, what US factories produce often isn’t even the end product. Instead, factories in the US build a component that bounces to other countries to become part of other products in a big interconnected global supply chain chasing the lowest possible costs and best value add. What this means is that the tariffs won’t be a flat rate, they’ll compound every time a product jumps the border, leading to insane price hikes even before you get to good old corporate greed.
As you can imagine, this will be particularly bad for any goods going between the US, Mexico and/or Canada as those are by far the most interdependent economies with the United States. Add to this the high tariffs on other high-tech manufactures like Taiwan, Japan, and the EU, it paints a devastating picture for the most advanced industries. The Tech Sector is especially vulnerable with its ongoing challenges, but we should be prepared for an immediate, cataclysmic recession in aerospace, automotive, semiconductor manufacturing, and energy.
Trump’s supporters are hoping that the pain created by these tariffs will be enough to decouple the US from a globalized supply chain it helped build, but to put it delicately: that is the stupidest thing anyone’s ever said. You can’t unravel 80 years of global supply chains and replace them with a home grown counterpart overnight....
In addition to the recession in manufacturing that these tariffs create, they’ll intensify the retail apocalypse, particularly for apparel & shoe outlets. In addition to the tariffs on Chinese goods I previously mentioned, Trump’s tariffs includes a 44% tariff on goods from Sri Lanka, 29% on Pakistan, 37% on Bangladesh, 24% on Malaysia, 32% on Indonesia, 36% on Thailand, 46% on Vietnam, and 49% on Cambodia. Those account for the bulk of clothing and shoe exporters to the United States. Finally, there’s agriculture. Around 1/6th of our food comes from imports, mostly things that the US just doesn’t have the climate to grow at scale, or have to be imported because the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere has ended. So expect price spikes for coffee, vanilla, chocolate, avocados, bananas, shrimp and prawns, canola oil, sugar, etc. This won’t do much to help American growers, because very little of what we import competes with domestic foodstuffs. So the only thing these tariffs will achieve is to increase the cost of living at a time when the personal savings rate is already on the floor.
A true, nationwide recession won’t immediately follow these tariffs, it will take a a few months at least for people to eat through their savings to the point that defaults on loans start to spike. But what was likely going to be a recession starting sometime in mid-to-late 2026 is now almost certainly going to start well inside of 2025. Industry-specific recessions will hit much sooner, leading to a spike in unemployment. With the country facing a labor shortage, this should be a temporary problem, except that the people being laid off first (engineers, technicians, etc.) are not trained to replace people in industries facing labor shortages (trucking, meat packing, construction, etc.) So even if this is supposed to be a manufactured recession to arrest inflation for the sake of billionaire tech bros who’s companies can’t survive without near-zero interest rates, it simply won’t work. Inflation will continue to rise while unemployment spikes, meaning Donald Trump just intentionally created a new Stagflation crisis.
...Globally, the situation gets even worse. As bad as things will get inside the US from these tariffs, export-dependent economies will be absolutely devastated. For all the talk of boycotting the purchase of American goods in Canada or the EU, nobody outside of the US has actually taken legal steps to halt or reduce exports. That would be economic suicide when dealing with the world’s largest importer. The US imports $3.4 trillion in goods and services a year, that’s bigger than the GDP of France. 13% of Chinese imports go to the US, 10% of Germany’s exports go to the US… and 77% of Canadian exports go to the American market. Countries like this are facing the prospect of devastating recessions, because even if they don’t directly sell to the US, some of their other customers do, and a reduction in exports means less money to buy exports from other exporters… and now you’re looking at a global recession the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1929. Side note the only countries on Earth not impacted by these tariffs are Russia and Belarus, and at this point you should not need anyone to explain why.
There’s really no historical analogue to compare to this moment. Its comparable to Herbert Hoover deliberately trying to create the Great Depression when he took office in 1929. Smarter people than I have written about some of the finer points of Trump’s tariff policies, and you should read their stuff, but the bottom line is that Trump has sunk his administration with this policy. A few Republicans are more afraid of their donors than Trump, and we’re already seeing defections emerging from those who take their marching orders from Wall Street. The public at large will grow more confrontational with the administration as the pain of this recession sets in, and the longer it goes on. Trump’s base are unlikely to abandon him, and you should be prepared for Trump to blame anyone he can think of in a desperate search of a scapegoat. This will all fuel a period of increased social unrest, violence, and vigilantism in what will surely be a Long Hot Summer for 2025.

Trump's shame - the most disgraceful moment in Trump's entire disgraceful life, and that's really saying something: 

Four young American soldiers died a horrible death by accidentally driving a heavy military vehicle into a deep bog in Lithuania last week.

Hundreds of rescue workers from the US military, the militaries of Lithuania, Poland, and Estonia, and many other Lithuanian government staff worked night and day for a week to find and dig up the bodies. Thousands of Lithuanians lined the streets in tribute as their caskets were flown back to the United States on Friday. 

But when their caskets arrived at Dover air force base, Commander-in-Chief Trump couldn't be bothered to meet them - he was golfing and having dinner in Florida with the Saudis. 

America should never forgive such a grotesque display of callousness and selfishness and greed.

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