I think Trump should put a 25% tariff on every single thing coming out of China, from shoelaces to steel beams like the ones in the new I-80 San Francisco Bridge. And yes, that includes medicines and other medical equipment. At the same time, he and Congress should lower the repatriation rate from 15.5% to 5.5%, to make it more likely that affected companies can beat feet out of China and bring the supply chain back home.
In the meantime, because this stuff won’t happen all at once, we should draw up and ratify a much-scaled-down version of the TPP, without all the globalist, open-borders, environ-MENTAL gobblygook, and that plays fair with the USA, similar to the USMCA. That way, until we truly get our economic house in order, certain things can be manufactured offshore without being manufactured in China, while benefiting other countries (and us in the bargain) that are under threat from the CCP.
what do they want?
VIDEO/TRANSCRIPT: 15 Jul: Democracy Now: The Left Remakes the World: Amna Akbar on Canceling Rent, Defunding Police & Where We Go from Here
Presenters: Amy Goodman, Juan González
We speak with Amna Akbar, law professor at Ohio State University, who wrote about how to respond to all of this in her op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times headlined “The Left Is Remaking the World.”...
AMNA AKBAR: But it might be worth taking a moment to talk about private property, which is also everywhere and structures our everyday lives, but is arguably a bit more subterranean in how it does. Private property is the basis of our legal regime. It’s a settler regime, a capitalist regime, a racial regime. It creates these relationships where some people own property and most people don’t. And if you don’t own property, you have to pay for it. This is pretty weird, if you think about it. We are human. We have physical bodies. We need space to exist, to sleep, to eat, to take care of one another. But we live in a society where you need to pay for space to live. The private property regime then creates a direct contradiction with meeting people’s needs...
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor Akbar, I wanted to ask you, though: What is singular about this movement compared to movements in the past that also believed that they were remaking the world? I’m speaking, for instance, of the anarchists, the Magonistas, in Mexico; the International Workers of the World in the early 1900s; the communist and social movements of the 1930s, right after the — in the wake of the Great Depression; the New Left movement of the 1960s, which I was a part of. Our slogan then was not “defund the police”; it was “off the pigs.” And yet, each of these movements thought that they were going to remake the world. However, capitalism proved to be a lot more resilient in its ability to co-opt and to adjust to the threats. I’m wondering how you think that this is going to be any different? And also, are you taking into account the potential for a fascist or right-wing response to the current movement?...
AMNA AKBAR: And so, whether this is a more powerful formation or powerful moment than any other one across the — you know, in the history of the United States or around the world, that I don’t know. But I do know that over the course of my life, this is certainly the strongest the left and working-class movements have been. And I feel hopeful about where we are. And, of course, I feel apprehensive, because our opponents are not going to pack up and go home, as Rachel Herzing put it the other day when I was talking to her. We are going to see, and we are seeing, state repression all over the country, whether it’s federal prosecutions of protesters or all sorts of local and state prosecutions, not to mention the ongoing criminalization and prosecution of working-class people for their survival. And so, the odds against us are long, but we are also stronger than we have been over the last few decades...
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/7/15/amna_akbar_on_canceling_rent_defunding
11 Jul: NYT: The Left Is Remaking the World
“Defund the police” and “cancel rent” aren’t reforms, but paths to revolution.
By Amna A. Akbar
(Ms. Akbar is a law professor who studies leftist social movements)
Or consider the environment. The Green New Deal does not merely call for less pollution. It requires that we restructure our economy so we can move to clean, renewable energy sources and net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
To get there, the Green New Deal calls for enormous investments in public transit, universal health care, free public college tuition and millions of high-wage green jobs. It emphasizes that everyone ought to carry out its projects, with a central role for working-class people of color. The bill’s vision is so counter to the actual practices of the state, and to the talking points of the Democratic and Republican Parties, you have to stretch your imagination to understand it. And that is the point...
The way to respond is to stay focused on building mass movements of ordinary people who are serious about restoring and redistributing social wealth, as the Red Nation’s Red Deal puts it, to those who created it: “workers, the poor, Indigenous peoples, the global South, women, migrants, caretakers of the land, and the land itself.” Here, too, you see the connections — among Indigenous resistance, environmental justice and more.
Leftist movements today see our crises as intersectional. Police violence, global warming and unaffordable housing are not disconnected, discrete problems; instead, they emerge from colonialism and capitalism...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/opinion/sunday/defund-police-cancel-rent.html
No, we must be COMPLETELY SELF SUFFICIENT IN EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING.
You cannot be a partial nationalist. You have to be ALL IN.