#Trump trade

[coinxpense]

Bitcoin 'Trump trade' over until BTC breaks crucial $98K resistance

[destiel-news-network]

(Source)

Among other imports, America gets ~30% of its coffee from Colombia.

[batboyblog]

To be clear I don't want a trade war with Mexico (or even China)

but Trump breaking our relationship with Canada, Canada, our ever friendly, dependable, helpful brothers to the north, is particularly hurtful. It feels like an abusive step-father banning you from a favorite cousin's house because they want to isolate you to keep beating you. It's painful and heart breaking and your cousin keeps asking you to explain and you can't.

sorry Canada, I didn't vote for him, I campaigned against him hard, but a bunch of idiots voted to blow up everything and hurt everyone so do what you have to do, maybe if you inflict maximum pain some people will wake up.

and to Americans reading this, I can't over stress we have FOREVER damaged our relationship with our neighbor, biggest trading partner, military and strategic ally, we fought WWII with them guys, and they are NEVER gonna look at us the same way again. We might repair the relationship in future but it'll never be as full a friendship as it was last month.

[davidaugust]

Eggs are now scarce and expensive, and he's placing tariffs and sanctions on Colombia, the largest trading partner with the US for coffee. So coffee prices will skyrocket.

Did he forget he's president of a country that started a revolution over taxes on our breakfast beverage.

He's not sharp. ☕ 🍳

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

45 states do a majority business with Canada, Mexico, and China (& Hong Kong). All those states will be severely hurt by Trump’s tariffs. Five states and DC do majority business elsewhere but are all heavily dependent on tourism and trade with those other 45 states. Lose - lose.

[victusinveritas]

As well they should. America will remain a laughingstock at best as long as Trump and his cronies are in power.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canada shouldn’t retaliate with its US tariffs

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Five years ago, Trump touted his "big, beautiful" replacement for NAFTA, the "free trade agreement" between the US, Mexico and Canada. Trump's NAFTA-2 was called the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and it was pretty similar to NAFTA, to be honest.

That tells you a couple things: first, NAFTA was, broadly speaking a good thing for Trump and the ultra-wealthy donors who backed him (and got far richer as a result). That's why he kept it intact. NAFTA and USMCA are, at root, a way to make rich people richer by making poorer people poorer. Trump's base hated NAFTA because they (correctly) believed that it was being used to erode wages by chasing cheaper labor and more lax environmental controls in other countries. Neither NAFTA nor USMCA have any stipulations requiring exported goods to be manufactured by unionized workers, or in factories with robust environmental and workplace safety rules.

The point of NAFTA/USMCA is to goose profits by despoiling the environment, maiming workers, stealing their wages, paying them less, all while poisoning the Earth. Trump's "new" NAFTA was just the old NAFTA with some largely cosmetic changes so that Trump's base could be (temporarily) fooled into thinking Trump was righting the historic wrong of NAFTA.

However, there was one part of USMCA that marked a huge departure from NAFTA: the "IP" chapter. USCMA bound Canada and Mexico to implementing brutal new IP laws. For example, Mexico was forced to pass an anti-circumvention law that makes it a crime to tamper with "digital locks." This means that Mexican mechanics can't bypass the locks US car companies use to lock-out third party repair. Mexican farmers can't fix their own tractors. And, of course, Mexican software developers can't make alternative app stores for games consoles and mobile devices – they must sell their software through US Big Tech companies that take 30% of every sale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Shamefully, Canada had already capitulated to most of these demands. Two Canadian Conservative Party politicians, Tony Clement and James Moore, had sold the country out in 2012, throwing away 6,138 negative responses to a consultation on a new DRM law (on the grounds that they were "babyish" views of "radical extremists"), siding instead with the 54 cranks and industry shills who supported their proposal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

When Canadian politicians are pressed on why these anti-interoperability policies are good for Canada, they'll say that it's a condition of free trade, and the benefits of being able to export Canadian goods to the US without tariffs outweigh the costs of having to pay rents to American companies for consumables (like car parts or printer ink), repair, and software sales.

Sure, when Canadian software authors sell iPhone apps to Canadian customers, the payments take a round trip through Cupertino, California and return 30% short. But Canadian consumers get to buy iPhones without paying tariffs on them, and the oil, timber, and minerals we rip out of the ground can be sent to America without tariffs, either (oh, also, a few things that are still manufactured in Canada can do this, too).

Enter Trump, carrying a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods, which he has vowed to impose on his first day in office. Obviously, this demands a policy response. What should Canada do when Trump tears up his "big, beautiful" trade deal and whacks Canadian exporters? One obvious response is to impose a 25% retaliatory tariff on American exporters:

https://mishtalk.com/economics/canada-says-it-will-match-us-tariffs-if-trump-launches-trade-war/

After all, Canada and the US are one another's mutual largest trading partners. American businesses rely on selling things to Canadians, so a massive tariff on US goods will certainly make some of Trump's business-lobby backers feel pain, and maybe they'll talk some sense into him.

I think this would be a huge mistake. The most potent political lesson of the past four years is that politicians who preside over rising prices – regardless of their role in causing them – will swiftly feel the wrath of their voters. The public is furious about inflation, whether it comes from transient covid supply chain shocks, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or cartels using "inflation" as cover for illegal, collusive price-gouging.

Canadians are very reliant on American imports of finished goods. That's another legacy of NAFTA: it crashed Canada's manufacturing sector. Canadian manufacturing companies treated the US as a "nearshore" source of non-union labor and weak environmental and safety rules, and shipped Canadian union jobs to American scabs. Canada's economy is supposedly now all about "services" but what we really export is stuff we tear out of the Earth.

Countries that are organized around resource extraction don't need fancy social safety nets or an educational system capable of producing a high-tech workforce. All you need to extract resources is a hole in the ground surrounded by guns, which explains a lot about shifts to the Canadian political climate since the Mulroney years.

Since Canada is now substantially reorganized as an open-pit mine for American manufacturers, cutting off American imports would drive the prices of everyday good sky-high, and would be political suicide.

But there's another way.

Because, of course, Canada – like any other country – has the capacity to make all kinds of things, including high-tech things. Sure, it's unlikely that Canada will launch another Research in Motion with a Blackberry smart-phone that will put the iPhone and Android in the shade. The mobile duopoly has the market sewn up, and can use predatory pricing, refusal to deal, and other anticompetitive tactics to strangle any competitor in its cradle.

But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That's a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple's 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.

There's no reason that a Canadian app store would have to confine itself to Canadian software authors, either. Canadian app stores could offer 5% commissions on sales to US and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allows device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don't get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.

Canadian companies like Honeybee already make "front-ends" for John Deere tractors – these are the components that turn a tractor into a plow, or a thresher, or another piece of heavy agricultural equipment. Honeybee struggles constantly to get its products to interface with Deere tractors, because Deere uses digital locks to block its products:

https://honeybee.ca/

Canada could produce jailbreaking kits for John Deere tractors, too – not just for Honeybee. Every ag-tech company in the world would benefit from commercially available, professionally supported John Deere jailbreaking kits. So would farmers, because these kits would restore farmers' Right to Repair their own tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Speaking of repair: Canadian companies could jailbreak every make and model of every US automobile, and make independent, constantly updated diagnostic tools that every mechanic in the world could buy for hundreds of dollars, rather than paying the five-figure ransom that car makers charge for their own underpowered, junk versions of these tools.

Jailbreaking cars doesn't stop with repair, either. Cars like the Tesla are basically giant rent-extraction machines. If you want to use all the "features" your Tesla ships with – like access to the full charge on your battery – you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees over the life of the car, and when you sell your car, all that "downloadable content" is clawed back. No one will pay extra to buy your used Tesla just because you spent thousands on manufacturer upgrades, because they're all downgraded when you sign over the pink slip.

But Canadian companies could make jailbreaking kits for Teslas that unlock all the features in the car for a single low price – and again, they could sell these to every Tesla owner in the world.

Elon Musk doesn't invent anything, he just takes credit for other people's ideas, and that's as true of bad ideas as it is for good ones. Musk didn't invent the extractive Tesla rip-off: he stole it from inkjet printer companies like HP, who have used the fact that jailbreaking is illegal to turn printer ink into the most expensive fluid in the world, selling for more than $10,000/gallon.

Canadian companies could sell jailbreaking kits for inkjet printers that disconnect them from "subscription" services and disable the anti-features that check for and reject third party ink. People all over the world would buy these.

What's standing in the way of a Canadian industrial policy that focuses on raiding the sky-high margins of American monopolists with third-party add-ons, mods and jailbreaks?

Only the IP laws that Canada has agreed to in order to get tariff-free access to American markets. You know, the access that Trump has promised to end in less than a week's time?

Canada should tear up these laws – and not impose tariffs on American goods. That way, Canadians can still buy cheap American goods, and then they can save billions of dollars every year on the consumables, parts, software, and service for those goods.

This is hurting American big business where it hurts – in the ongoing rents it extracts from Canadians through IP laws like Bill C-11 (the law that bans jailbreaking). Canada could become a global high-tech export powerhouse, selling "complementary" goods that disenshittify all the worst practices of US tech monopolists, from car parts to insulin pumps.

It's the only kind of trade war that Canadian politicians can win against Americans: the kind where prices for Canadians don't go up because of tariffs; where the price of apps, repair, parts, and upgrades goes way down; and where a new, high-tech manufacturing sector pulls in vast sums from customers all over the world.

Canada can win this kind of war, even against a country as big and powerful as the USA. After all, we did it once before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CK3EDncjGI

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

[gwydionmisha]

How Tariffs Actually Work ft. Liz Dye

[destielmemenews]

"Trump Media's stock price fell sharply in morning trade on Wednesday, sliding $2.79, or 15%, to $15.84 — its lowest level since the shares made their public market debut in March. The stock is down 76% from its closing high of $66.22 on March 27, a day after it listed on the Nasdaq Composite index."

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[buttacake80]

We must organize a general strike. We must hit the oligarchs in their pocket.

Elon Musk cannot buy elections if he's no longer the richest man, and he just recently sent an email to the staff at X, confessing they were barely making ends meet.

We need to take away their money. Stop shopping Amazon, Target and all of them WHILE ALSO not turning up to work.

We must remind them that they need us. Not the other way around. That's why Luigi scared them.

But a lot of you white folk are so individualistic that you will always seek the most convenient. If you think I'm lying, go take a ride through some grocery haul videos on TikTok. Those hauls are loaded with convenient foods.

We are going to deal with food shortages.

Food prices are going to rise. Food stores will be depleted.

Agricultural crops are not being picked because the agricultural workers are afraid of being deported. Food will rot on vines.

These folks do not know how to make their food bills stretch. Like adding lentils to ground beef. I rarely see any of them buying bags of beans or rice, but they will dozens of Ramen noodle packages.

You can feed more people with a simple bag of rice and a bag of beans than you can with an 8 pack of microwavable breakfast sandwiches.

Do you know the reason for the Irish Famine?

It's not like there wasn't fish in lakes or rivers. It's not like there weren't other crops to eat. It was that the English landlords refused to feed them because they made their money exporting the food!

My folk know how to feed each other.

It's y'all that don't know how to exist in community.

[newsfromstolenland]

Faced with Donald Trump's tariff threats against Canada, the latter must go “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” play to its strengths and not put itself in a position of weakness vis-à-vis him, by avoiding responding to every one of his “outlandish” assertions.

At her traditional news conference at the start of the year, FTQ (Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec) president Magali Picard spoke of the fears from her major affiliated unions and their members in the face of the 25 per cent tariff threats issued by the U.S. president-elect.

The United Steelworkers, Unifor and the Teamsters, all major affiliates of the QFL, would be particularly hard hit by these potential U.S. tariffs, since they have a strong presence in mining, metallurgy, timber, forestry and transport.

[...]

The FTQ's position is important because its major affiliates have links with American unions, which could become either allies for jobs or obstacles in this debate.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Jan. 14, 2025.

Full article / Article en français

Tagging: @allthecanadianpolitics

this is only partially related (hence the small text), but I do think it's wild how many times I've heard people from québec use the phrase "eye for an eye"/"œil pour œil" considering that whenever they hear it in the context of the Qur'an, they can't shut up about how it makes Islam regressive

[destiel-news-network]

(Source)

[piglemousse]

I mean, I guess congratulations are in order Donald Trump. You’ve managed to mobilize an entire country. I’ve never seen so many Canadians this determined to buy local.

Have the day you voted for, y’all!

[deadpresidents]

Donald Trump has been President for 13 days and CANADA -- one of the most polite countries in the world -- is booing the American national anthem at sporting events. I didn't expect us to become great again so quickly.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]