#United States Steel Corporation

[basicpart]

Trump Says Nippon Steel Will Make Major Investment in U.S. Steel

President Trump said on Friday that Nippon Steel was planning to make a major investment in U.S. Steel after the Biden administration moved to block the Japanese company’s $14 billion takeover bid last month on the basis that it was a threat to national security. Such an investment, if it moves forward, could be a breakthrough for a transaction that ran into U.S. political opposition. Former…

[goshyesvintageads]

U.S. Steel, 1946

[comicaurora]

...What happens if I put a full twenty dollars into the urban fantasy vending machine?

it's been on the backburner for over a year, so nothing fresh, but for twenty dollars in the urban fantasy vending machine, here is a short vignette I haven't touched in a year and a half

The room was crisp and bright, all sharp edges and polished monochrome. The sun shone in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, refracting off the sparkling glass and steel spires that carved out the skyline and focusing with almost suspicious precision directly into my eyeballs. I slumped down further in my chair and squinted across at the empty desk. Everything was too damn bright.

“Can I get you anything, detective?”

The voice that rang out from behind me was innocent and musical. The woman it belonged to was not.

I scowled. “Absolutely not.”

“Suit yourself.” I could hear the indulgent smile. “The coffee’s very good, you know. I don’t settle for anything less than the best.”

“I’m sure.”

“And with a nose like yours, I’m sure you already knew.”

Water boiled, and a rich, bitter scent coiled through the air. It was good. Probably that Blue Mountain stuff, or - no. It had to be Turkish. Of course she’d do Turkish.

I squeezed my eyes shut and exhaled harshly. There was no way around it - I was exhausted. I’d hit the 48-hour sleep dep limit back on Saturday and had been burning through raw determination ever since. It was damn stupid of me, frankly. I probably couldn’t even handle arithmetic right now, let alone solve a mystery.

But it’d be real stupid of me to accept a drink from the most notorious poisoner in history, so I was just going to have to deal with it.

I reluctantly opened my eyes and the world blurred back into focus as a tall figure briefly eclipsed the dazzling display of sun-sparkled skyscrapers. A coffee cup settled on the desk with a soft clink. There was a rustle as she settled into the high-backed chair and leaned forward. The sun caught in her golden braided bun and played across the shoulders of her elegant black suit. Pale, slender hands clasped the coffee cup with practiced precision.

“So,” Medea said. “How can I help you today?”

Her eyes were honey-gold. Granddaughter of Helios, the myths had said, and the sun certainly seemed to be in the habit of favoring her. Her corporate empire dealt in energy. Geothermal, hydroelectric, solar, even nuclear - all those shiny, clean alternatives that were slowly outcompeting the old oil-burning models. Her power stations were already keeping the lights on for half of the eastern united states. It was a hell of a niche she’d carved out for herself, and like everything else she’d ever done, she was stunningly good at it. Then again, for a demigod princess and compulsive social climber, the world of corporate politics must’ve felt like a home away from home.

Her gaze was steady and level, like I wasn’t cutting into her busy workday. Like she had all the time in the world.

Well. She did, didn’t she?

I sighed. “There’s a new drug on the streets.”

“Is it Tuesday already?”

“This one’s different.” I rubbed my eyes. “Right now, they just think it’s a hallucinogen.”

“And?”

“It’s not. It shows what’s really there.”

The coffee cup froze halfway to her lips. “How much?”

“Can’t tell for sure. Sounds like they’re seeing fairies, sprites, goblins, standard hidden world stuff… but I’m pretty sure it cuts through glamour. Might even go deeper, start showing shifter’s true forms.” I leaned back. “The secret world won’t stay secret for long if the users and abusers start comparing notes. I was half-tempted to take some of the stuff myself just to find out how much they know, but I’m not exactly a neutral test subject.”

“Yes, between your physiology and your temperament, that would be very unwise.” The clink of her cup cut off my half-hearted retort. “Do you have any mortal friends who might be willing to take the plunge?”

I barked a bitter laugh. “All my mortal friends are wizards or cops.”

“Unfortunate. I see why you came to me.” She leaned back, lacing her fingers together. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

Damn. Damn. Why was I surprised?

“That kind of potion isn’t really my style anyway,” she said. “Illusions and the breaking thereof are rather… outside my typical wheelhouse.”

“I know, I know.” I rubbed my eyes again. “I didn’t think you were making the stuff. I just hoped maybe you knew something. Nobody knows where it’s coming from.”

“The Goblin Market?”

“Obviously some people are dealing it through there, but I don’t have a supplier.”

“Tricky.” She leaned back. “What’s the delivery method?”

“That’s the weird part. It’s topical.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Unusual. No ingestion or injection?”

“No.” I dug into my jacket pocket and pulled out the scuffed stainless steel tin, then dropped it on her desk. “Kid up in Wicker Park saw me, dropped this and ran. Broad daylight. I wasn’t even changed.”

“You do cut an intimidating figure regardless.”

I scowled. “I don’t know what he saw.”

She nodded once, then gestured at the tin. “Do you mind?”

“Be my guest.” I sank deeper into the chair.

She delicately picked up the tin and traced a nail around the lid. “The container is mundane.”

“Yep.”

She turned it in her hands, the battered metal catching the light. Then she cracked the lid.

I braced myself and squeezed my eyes shut. The smell was overwhelming and utterly unidentifiable - syrupy, sickly, wormwood and petrichor and rot. The headache I’d been nursing intensified.

I heard her sniff. Lucky woman. She had to try to smell the stuff.

“Otherworldly ingredients.” There was a click and the smell dissipated. I risked cracking an eye open. She’d replaced the lid and was staring at the container pensively.

“What do you think?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Maybe I should be asking you. If I want to identify the makeup of an unknown mixture, I need a full lab and the favor of Hekate. You just need your nose.”

I groaned. “All I know is it’s weird and I hate it.”

“Weird?”

“Weird! I can’t pin it down. It almost smells like something, but” - I waved my hands vaguely - “it’s all wrong.”

Medea stared for a moment, then set down the tin. “Detective, have you ever been to fairyland?”

“I assume you’re not being euphemistic,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“No. I’m referring to the realm of fairy. Built on the ruins of Tír na nÓg, ruled by the Fairy Queen, land of glamour and illusion, home of the people of the hills. You must be familiar.”

“Of course I am.”

“But you’ve never been there?”

“I don’t do otherworld travel if I can help it.” I sat up. “Why?”

Medea idly traced a finger over the tin. “The bones of the fairy realm are very real, but for the most part, the realm is a beautiful illusion starving for reality. Your senses are entranced by a perfect, glamorous experience, but your body and soul waste away. Surely you’re familiar with the harmful effects of fairy food?”

“On paper.” I glanced at the tin. “You think this is some kind of illusion?”

“Just the opposite.” She tapped the lid sharply. “Fairyland is nothing more than the eternal dream of the Fairy Queen, but Tír na nÓg is as real as you or I. A land of promise and plenty, lost to ruin when its link to this world withered away. Its denizens fading to shades, its fruits and flowers rotting and decaying where they grew.”

I frowned. “This… this isn’t your area. Why do you know so much about this?”

She sighed. “Really, detective. Did you really think, over three thousand years, I stayed entirely in the mediterranean?”

“No, of course not-“

“After my flight from Athens I broadened my horizons significantly. I have visited the realm of Fairy several times.” She wrinkled her nose. “Of course, after the Tír fell to ruin, the quality of ingredients I could acquire plummeted rather dramatically. Gossamer illusions make for poor potions.”

I tried to cut through the fog in my head. Things were coming together. “You… think this was made in fairyland?”

“I think it was, at minimum, made from fairyland.”

“The smell… is odd. Like a floral perfume gone wrong. Rot making everything sweeter.” I scowled. “Not an illusion. Illusions don’t smell that bad.”

“Good,” she said. “Then some industrious denizen appears to have scoured the far edges of Fairyland to acquire ingredients from the ruins of the Tír.”

[misfitwashere]

The American oligarchy is back, and it’s out of control

It’s the third time in the nation’s history that a small group of hyper-wealthy people have gained political power over the rest of us. Here’s what we must do. 

ROBERT REICH

DEC 20

Friends,

Today we don’t know if the United States government will shut down tomorrow because, first, Elon Musk followed by his co-president Donald Trump, persuaded House Republicans to vote against a compromise bill, and then, last night, Republicans couldn’t summon enough votes for a stripped-down continuing resolution because Trump insisted that it contain a measure lifting the debt ceiling. 

This is not governing. Trump and the Republicans are not a governing party.

What’s the back story to all this? It’s the oligarchy that put Trump into the presidency.

A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads, and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the free market. 

But as power and wealth have moved to the top, everyone else — whether on the old right or the old left — has become disempowered and less secure. 

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek words meaning rule (arche) by the few (oligos). It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people or families who control the major institutions of society — and therefore have most power over other peoples’ lives. 

So far, Trump has picked 13 billionaires for his administration. It’s the wealthiest in history, including the richest person in the world. They and Trump are part of the American oligarchy, even though Trump campaigned on being the “voice” of the working class. 

America’s two previous oligarchies

America has experienced oligarchy twice before. Many of the men who founded America were slaveholding white oligarchs. At that time, the new nation did not have much of a middle class. Most white people were farmers, indentured servants, farm hands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the American population was Black, almost all of them enslaved.

A century later a new American oligarchy emerged comprised of men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. It was called the Gilded Age. 

They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output. But they also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.”

World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of the robber barons’ wealth, and much of their power was eliminated with the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. 

America demanded fundamental reforms — a progressive income tax, corporate taxes, estate taxes, limits on the political power of large corporations, antitrust laws, laws enabling workers to form unions and requiring that employers negotiate with them, Social Security, the forty-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, civil rights and voting rights, and Medicare. 

For the next half-century, the gains from growth were more widely shared and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans. During these years America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. 

There was still much to do: wider economic opportunities for Black people, Latinos, and women, protection of the environment. Yet by almost every measure the nation was making progress.

America’s current oligarchy

Starting around 1980, a third American oligarchy emerged. 

Since then, the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has stagnated. The share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent, according to an analysis by my Berkeley colleagues Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. 

The richest 1 percent of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia, another oligarchy. 

All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else. 

While the Biden administration sought to realign America with its ideals, it did not and could not accomplish nearly enough. Trump’s lies and demagoguery exploited the anger and frustration of much of America — creating the false impression he was a tribune of the working class and an anti-establishment hero — thereby allowing the oligarchy to triumph. 

In 2022, Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter and turn it into his own personal political megaphone. Then, in 2024, he spent $277 million to get Trump elected, also using Twitter (now X) to amplify pro-Trump, anti-Harris messages. 

These were good investments for Musk. Since Election Day, Musk’s fortune has increased by $170 billion. That’s because investors in Tesla and SpaceX have pushed their value into the stratosphere. 

Trump has put Musk (and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy) in charge of gutting government services in the name of “efficiency.” Musk’s investors assume that Musk will eliminate the health, safety, labor, and environmental regulations that have limited the profits of Musk-owned corporations, and that Trump will put more government money into SpaceX and xAI (Musk’s artificial intelligence company). 

Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else.

The power shift across America is related to a tsunami of big money into politics. Corporate lobbying has soared. The voices of average people have been drowned out. 

The American oligarchy is back, with a vengeance. 

Not all wealthy people are culpable, of course. The abuse is occurring at the nexus of wealth and power, where those with great wealth use it to gain power and then utilize that power to accumulate more wealth. Today’s robber barons include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Charles Koch, Jeff Yass, Ken Griffin, and Rupert Murdoch. 

What the new oligarchy wants

This is how oligarchy destroys democracy. As oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates and deploy platoons of lobbyists and public relations flaks, they buy off democracy. Oligarchs know that politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them. 

As long as they control the purse strings, there will be no meaningful response to the failure of most people’s paychecks to rise, nor to climate change, nor racism, nor the soaring costs of health insurance, pharmaceuticals, college, and housing, because those are not the main concerns of the oligarchy.

The oligarchs want lower taxes, which is what Trump, Musk, and other oligarchs are planning — an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cut, with an estimated price tag of at least $5 trillion. 

They want no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of their giant corporations. Instead, their corporations will grow larger, able to charge consumers even more. Trump is replacing Lina Khan, the trustbusting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, with a Trump crony. 

There will be no meaningful constraint on Wall Street’s dangerous gambling addiction. The gambling will only increase. 

Wall Street is already celebrating Trump’s victory. The stock market has reached new heights. But the stock market is inconsequential for most people, because the richest 1 percent own over half of all shares of stock owned by Americans while the richest 10 percent own over 90 percent. 

There will be no limits to CEO pay. Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will also rake in billions more. Government will dole out even more corporate subsidies, bailouts, and loan guarantees while eliminating protections for consumers, workers, and the environment. 

It will become a government for, of, and by the oligarchy.

The biggest divide in America today is not between “right” and “left,” or between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between democracy and oligarchy. The old labels — “right” and “left” — prevent most people from noticing they’re being shafted.

The propagandists and demagogues who protect the oligarchy stoke racial and ethnic resentments — describing human beings as illegal aliens, fueling hatred of immigrants, and spreading fears of communists and socialists. 

This strategy gives the oligarchy freer rein: It distracts Americans from how the oligarchy is looting the nation, buying off politicians, and silencing critics. It causes Americans to hate each other so we don’t look upward and see where the wealth and power have really gone. 

The necessary agenda

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and win America back, as we did in response to the oligarchy that dominated America’s last Gilded Age. 

This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor, and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy and against concentrated power and privilege. 

It will require that the Democratic Party, or a new third party, tell the truth to the American people: that the major reason most peoples’ wages have gone nowhere and their jobs are less secure, why most families have to live paycheck to paycheck, why CEO pay has soared to 300 times the pay of the typical worker, and why billionaires are about to run our government, is because the market has been rigged against average working people by the oligarchy. 

The agenda ahead is simply stated but it will not be easy to implement: We must get big money out of our politics. End corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Bust up monopolies. Stop voter suppression. 

We must strengthen labor unions, give workers a stronger voice in their workplaces, create more employee-owned corporations, encourage worker cooperatives, fund and grow more state and local public banks, and develop other institutions of economic democracy.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.

It may seem an odd time in our history to suggest such reforms, but this is the best time. Trump and his oligarchy will inevitably overreach. The lesson from the last Gilded Age is that when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, the majority will rise up and demand real, systemic change.

It’s only a matter of time. A government shutdown that hurts average people, engineered by the richest person in the world, might just hasten it. 

[probablyasocialecologist]

The world’s corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for it, according to a study by economists of nearly 15,000 public companies. The “corporate carbon damages” from those publicly owned companies analyzed — a fraction of all the corporations — probably runs in the trillions of dollars globally and in the hundreds of billions for American firms, one of the study authors estimated in figures that were not part of the published research. That’s based on the cost of carbon dioxide pollution that the United States government has proposed. Nearly 90% of that calculated damage comes from four industries: energy, utilities, transportation and manufacturing of materials such as steel. The study in Thursday’s journal Science by a team of economists and finance professors looks at what new government efforts to get companies to report their emissions of heat-trapping gases would mean, both to the firm’s bottom lines and the world’s ecological health.

[...]

The calculations are for only a fraction of the world’s corporations, with many public companies not included and private firms not listed at all, Leuz said. The economists didn’t identify or tease out single companies but instead grouped firms by industry and by country. And they only used direct emissions, not what happens downstream. So the gas in a person’s car does not count toward an oil company’s emissions or corporate carbon damages.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Reich:

Friends, Today we don’t know if the United States government will shut down tomorrow because, first, Elon Musk followed by his co-president Donald Trump, persuaded House Republicans to vote against a compromise bill, and then, last night, Republicans couldn’t summon enough votes for a stripped-down continuing resolution because Trump insisted that it contain a measure lifting the debt ceiling. This is not governing. Trump and the Republicans are not a governing party.

What’s the back story to all this? It’s the oligarchy that put Trump into the presidency.

A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads, and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the free market. But as power and wealth have moved to the top, everyone else — whether on the old right or the old left — has become disempowered and less secure.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek words meaning rule (arche) by the few (oligos). It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people or families who control the major institutions of society — and therefore have most power over other peoples’ lives. So far, Trump has picked 13 billionaires for his administration. It’s the wealthiest in history, including the richest person in the world. They and Trump are part of the American oligarchy, even though Trump campaigned on being the “voice” of the working class.

America’s two previous oligarchies

America has experienced oligarchy twice before. Many of the men who founded America were slaveholding white oligarchs. At that time, the new nation did not have much of a middle class. Most white people were farmers, indentured servants, farm hands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the American population was Black, almost all of them enslaved. A century later a new American oligarchy emerged comprised of men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. It was called the Gilded Age. They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output. But they also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.” World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of the robber barons’ wealth, and much of their power was eliminated with the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. America demanded fundamental reforms — a progressive income tax, corporate taxes, estate taxes, limits on the political power of large corporations, antitrust laws, laws enabling workers to form unions and requiring that employers negotiate with them, Social Security, the forty-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, civil rights and voting rights, and Medicare. For the next half-century, the gains from growth were more widely shared and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans. During these years America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen.

Robert Reich wrote a solid piece that the American oligarchy is back in full force.

[guitarhappyman]

What the Trump Nominees Have Not Done—And Will Not Do

5 Comments / December 5, 2024

Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

Deflated by the resounding November defeat, the left now believes it can magically rebound by destroying Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.

Many of Trump’s picks are well outside the usual Washington, DC/New York political, media, and corporate nexus.

But that is precisely the point—to insert reformers into a bloated, incompetent, and weaponized government who are not part of it.

Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already drawing severe criticism.

His furious enemies cannot go after his resume, since he has spent a lifetime in private, congressional, and executive billets, both in investigations and intelligence.

Instead, they claim he is too vindictive and does not reflect the ethos of the FBI.

But what will Patel not do as the new director?

He will not serially lie under oath to federal investigators as did interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a current Patel critic.

He will not forge an FBI court affidavit, as did convicted felon and agency lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

He will not claim amnesia 245 times under congressional oath to evade embarrassing admissions as did former Director James Comey.

He will not partner with a foreign national to collect dirt and subvert a presidential campaign as the FBI did with Christopher Steele in 2016

He will not use the FBI to draft social media to suppress news unfavorable to a presidential candidate on the eve of an election.

He would not have suppressed FBI knowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine—to allow the lie to spread that it was “Russian disinformation” on the eve of the 2020 election.

He will not raid the home of an ex-president with SWAT teams, surveil Catholics, monitor parents at school board meetings, or go after pro-life peaceful protestors.

Decorated combat veteran Pete Hegseth is another controversial nominee for secretary of defense.

What will Hegseth likely not do?

Go AWOL without notifying the president of a serious medical procedure as did current Secretary Lloyd Austin?

Install race and gender criteria for promotion and mandate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training?

Insinuate falsely that cabals of white supremacists had infiltrated the military—only to alienate that entire demographic and thus ensure the Pentagon came up 40,000 recruits short?

Oversee the scramble from Kabul that saw $50 billion in U.S. military equipment abandoned to Taliban terrorists?

Watch passively as a Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental United States for a week?

Allow the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to promise his Chinese communist counterpart that the People’s Liberation Army would first be informed if the President of the United States was felt to issue a dangerous order?

Rotate into the Pentagon from a defense contractor boardship and then leave office to rotate back there to leverage procurement decisions?

Oversee the Pentagon’s serial flunking of fiscal audits?

Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is certainly a maverick. He may earn the most Democratic hits, given his former liberal credentials.

But what will RFK also not do as HHS secretary?

Oversee his agencies circumventing U.S. law by transferring money to communist China to help it produce lethal gain-of-function viruses of the COVID-19 sort—in the manner of Dr. Fauci?

Organize scientists to go after critics of mandatory masking and defame them?

Give pharmaceutical companies near-lifetime exemptions from legal jeopardy for rushing into production mRNA vaccines not traditionally vetted and tested?

Leave office to monetize his HHS expertise and thus make millions from the pharmaceutical companies?

Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, former congressional representative and military veteran Tulsi Gabbard, will soon be defamed in congressional hearings.

But what has Gabbard not done?

Joined “51 former intelligence authorities” to lie on the eve of the 2020 election that the Hunter Biden laptop “had all the hallmarks” of a Russian information/disinformation operation”—in an effort to swing the election to incumbent Joe Biden?

Lied under congressional oath like former DNI James Clapper, who claimed he only gave the “least untruthful answer” in congressional testimony?

Encourage the FBI to monitor a presidential campaign in efforts to discredit it—in the manner of former CIA Director John Brennan, who lied not once but twice under oath?

Fail to foresee the American meltdown in Kabul, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, or the Houthis takeover of the Red Sea?

We are going to hear some outrageous things in the upcoming congressional confirmation hearings.

But one thing we will not hear about are the crimes, deceptions, and utter incompetence of prior and current government grandees.

The current crew, not their proposed Trump replacements, prompted the sick and tired American people to demand different people.

Voters want novel approaches to reform a government that they not only no longer trust but also now deeply fear.

[scotianostra]

George Lauder was born on November 11th 1837 at Dunfermline, Fife.

Lauder is probably a wee bit more well known in his native Dunfermline, or maybe so Americans, I would think this is due to him being a bit overshadowed by a guy described as his "cousin-brother", Andrew Carnegie.

George Lauder was the son of George Lauder, Sr. and Seaton Morrison. His father, a local shop owner on the high street, Dunfermline. Very well read, Lauder Sr. was instrumental in the upbringing of his only son George, as well as his nephew the aforementioned Carnegie.

Lauder Jr. and Carnegie were two years apart in age and best friends as a result of their shared experiences. They affectionately referred to one another as “Dod” and “Naig”, as young children. After Andrew and his family left for America, George stayed in Scotland where he would go on to graduate from Glasgow University with a degree in mechanical engineering while studying under another famous name Lord Kelvin.

Carnegie wrote to Lauder asking him to join him in America as a partner in the Carnegie Steel Corporation. At the time, the major shareholders were Carnegie himself, Carnegie’s brother and two others.

Lauder brought several new developments to the steel business in America, including the process for washing and coking dross from coal mines, which resulted in a significant increase to the overall value of the business.

Lauder would go on to lead the development of the use of steel in armour and armaments. By the turn of the Twentieth Century, Lauder was a director of Carnegie Steel and its second largest shareholder behind his cousin Andrew. Throughout the course of his career, Lauder created a number of patented scientific advancements useful both in the steel industry and beyond.

The sale of Carnegie Steel to JP Morgan in 1901 created U.S Steel where Lauder sat on the board of directors. This became the first corporation in the world with a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion ($43 billion today).

Lauder’s oldest daughter, Harriet married Dr. James C. Greenway combining the Lauder and Greenway families into what is now known as the Lauder Greenway Family, their influence in American political and economic affairs dates from the 1640s through the contemporary era. Their primary contributions have been in the sciences, government, and intelligence. His son George Lauder III, was a high-profile sailor who set the record in 1900 (held until 1905) for the fastest trans-Atlantic crossing with his yacht, Endymion,

In 1905 Harriet bought, what has become known as The Lauder-Greenway Estate a 50-acre property in Greenwich, Connecticut, where George lived out the last eleven years of his life passing away on August 24th, 1924.

The Estate, for a time, was the most expensive private residence in the United States in 2014 when it sold for an eye watering $120 million.

Pics are of George Lauder, the second is Andrew Carnegie, George Lauder, and Thomas Miller in 1862 taken in Glasgow, it is one of very few pics of Carnegie without a beard, Thomas Miller is said to be the man who started Carnegie in the steel business.

[hawkbutt]

Hi! I have to admit that I know nothing about Fallout but would like to understand your AU so idk could you explain Fallout for beginners please? (and maybe how the AU works specifically) 🧡

I’m going to try and put this in the most straightforward terms I can and maybe steal a few things from Wikipedia if I can’t.

And I hope you don't mind, I'll publish this as well so others can learn.

There are currently 7 Fallout games: Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76. (This is not counting the small things like mobile games or the table top games, or even the freaking pinball game either) PLUS there is also the “Fallout”  TV show on Amazon (It's good, My dad who knows NOTHING of Fallout loved it) ▬ The Show on Amazon is based in Los Angeles.

▬ The setting, back story, lore, just a little history:

The series is set in a fictionalized USA in an “alternate history scenario” that diverges from reality after 1945, following World War II. In this alternative "golden age", where atomic physics serves as the foundation of scientific progress, which leads to a bizarre socio-technological status quo. This means things like advanced robots, nuclear-powered cars, directed-energy weapons, and other futuristic technologies are seen alongside 1950s-era computers and televisions. 

▬ Nuka Cola ad featuring Nuka Girl leaning heavily into the atomic/nuclear aspect

The United States divides itself into 13 commonwealths, and the aesthetics and Cold War paranoia of the 1950s dominated the American lifestyle well into the 21st century.

▬ Map of all of the Fallout Commonwealths

The a whole bunch of history happens, it’s honestly wordy and gives the lead-up to how the bombs dropped on the morning of October 23, 2077, a “global nuclear exchange”, which subsequently created the post-apocalyptic United States, the setting of the Fallout world.

▬ Now, in my AU, I say that Buck is from a Vault.

The U.S. government, having foreseen this outcome just a few decades earlier, began a nationwide project to build fallout shelters known as "Vaults".  The Vault-Tec Corporation designed the Vaults as public shelters, each able to support up to a thousand people. Something round 400K Vaults would have been needed if they actually wanted to help the American people, but only 122 were commissioned and constructed. 

Vault Boy; He is the corporate mascot of the Vault-Tec, His female counterpart is Vault Girl. They appear in virtually every released game and evolved over the years into a symbol of the Fallout franchise in general.

However, the Vault project was not intended as a viable method of repopulating the United States; instead, most Vaults were secret social experiments and were designed to determine the effects of different environmental and psychological conditions on their inhabitants. 

▬Lemme just use Norm Maclean (Fallout Series) here to showcase the sort of view in the vault and the lovely blue and gold jumpsuits ALL vault dwellers basically wear.

Now, only Seventeen control Vaults were made to function as advertised, in contrast with the other Vault experiments. However, they were usually shoddy and unreliable due to most of the funding going towards the experimental ones.  Many Vaults remained sealed as part of their respective experiments even after the radiation had reached safe levels.

EDIT: I forgot to actually talk about the Brotherhood of Steel.

▬ Eddie is a former Brotherhood of Steel Knight.

The Brotherhood of Steel, commonly abbreviated to BoS, is a quasi-religious technocratic military order founded in the immediate aftermath of the Great War  The BOS' core purpose is to preserve advanced technology and regulate its use. They believe humanity cannot be trusted with the means to destroy itself, and they think that acquiring technology would prevent another apocalypse. The Basics of BOS came from the fall of the western Roman Empire when the knights and scribes kept the fire of civilization going after the empire imploded. The BOS is a military order with a strictly enforced hierarchy and chain of command. At the foundation, that mandates obedience to one's superiors and forbids circumventing ranks when giving orders. When it comes to the individual members of the BOS, loyalty to and defense of the organization are the top priorities, - 1st: Loyalty to and defense of the organization - 2nd: Dedication and loyalty to the mission. - 3rd: Dedication and loyalty to one's superior officer. Brotherhood members are expected to follow each of these rules in that order. If one's superior should act against the interests of the organization or mission, the third rule is superseded by the second or first rule.

▬ Brotherhood of Steel Ranking Structure

The Brotherhood has been featured in every game and other entry in the Fallout series in one form or another.

▬ My manip of Eddie in a Brotherhood jumpsuit

Eddie's History with the BOS without spoilers

▬ My manip of Eddie in a Brotherhood jumpsuit

While homosexual relationships are generally tolerated, they are pressured to instead seek relationships that will result in 'repopulation.' This leads Eddie to be arranged with Shannon, which then leads to Chris's birth, though Eddie and Shannon are able to keep Chris' Cerebal Palsy (though in the FO Universe, it would be considered his 'disorder or ailment) secret from the BOS for the first few years. BOS finds out about Chris, and would never tolerate someone like Chris within their ranks. Eddie ultimately decides he can no longer remain a part of them, and following his own moral compass, he chooses to desert the BOS.  The Diazs, on their own, now in this new reality, Eddie is constantly on the lookout, aware that his status as AWOL from the BOS makes him a target.

▬ I have planned in the future that Karen is a former Enclave Scientist.

The Enclave is another military organization dedicated to the execution of an all-inclusive holocaust of non-members, who they dehumanize as "genetic non-compliance offenders." While being the continuation of a pre-war American deep state consisting of high-ranking political, military and corporate figures, its members publicly claim to be the direct continuation of the United States of America and its government after the destruction of the world during the Great War.

▬ Enclave power armor, X-01 power armor 

Without going too in-depth with them, it's obvious I hate them, they're the worst, they Suck, and I'm glad Karen left them (In my AU).

here are things I may mention in my AU (when it comes to finally posting my fic)

Pip Boy: The Pip-Boy (Personal Information Processor-Boy) is a wrist computer given to the player (Vault-Dweller) early in the games and series, which serves various roles in quest, inventory, and battle management, as well as presenting player statistics.

▬ This version of the Pip-Boy is not stated in-series, though the official replica sold by The Wand Company is called the Pip-Boy 3000 Mark V

Power Armor: Power Armor, is a type of powered exoskeleton featured in every game in the Fallout series. It allows for protection from enemy fire and enables the wearer to carry cumbersome weapons and other objects with ease. There are so many types, levels and styles of Power Armor. It is considered an iconic part of the Fallout universe, an effective marketing tool for a faceless protagonist, and a prominent symbol within the game's lore. ▬ “Post-war” the Power Armor is most widely used by the Brotherhood of Steel, a cult-like organization that collects and preserves technology (My husband said the BOS is like Mormons and their obsession with Geneology)

▬T-60 Power Armor

There are INSANE Animals that roam the ‘wasteland’. Some were modified by the Government (ie. Death Claws), but some were also just changed by radiation.

▬ BAD: genetically engineered creatures developed by the United States military to replace humans during missions, but they escaped into the wild in the aftermath of the Great War

▬ GOOD: Brahmin are mutated two-headed cattle; they still provide meat, milk, hide, and manual labor.

Ghouls... Ghouls are humans mutated by radiation, rather than killed by it. The mutation process, referred to as "ghoulification", this typically results in an extended lifespan, if not functional immortality, real-time regeneration of wounds allowing for reattaching limbs, and immunity to direct damage resulting from irradiation. However, it changes their appearance, resembling rotting corpses, burn victims, or walking corpses

▬ Cooper Howard - The Ghoul From the Fallout Amazon series

▬ Feral Ghouls in Fallout 4

Now, with my AU, I’m doing a small mix of The TV show, but throwing in elements of Fallout 4 and New Vegas (Kinda) While I won't delve into the details of every single game and its historical context, I hope this overview will provide you with enough information on the basics of Fallout? If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask!

Much Love, ▬ Kenna

[nemosynth]

USスチール社からの声明

2025年1月3日、合衆国バイデン大統���は、日本製鐵がUSスチール社を買収することには反対であると表明。これを阻止すると宣言した。

それに対するUSスチール社からの声明文が凄いというか、いやぁ、正直ここまで人さまをコテンパンにした公式文書というものは寡聞にして初めて拝見。なのでちょっと自分なりの和訳をしてみた。

そもそもUSスチール社はアメリカ第二位の鉄鋼産業企業であるも、経営難に苦しみ単独での再建を諦め、同盟国である日本の企業に買収されることで経営を立て直そうと考えていた。しかも鉄鋼業は自動車産業はもちろん軍需産業にも直結する。戦車の装甲やキャタピラを誰が作るのか、どんな組成の鉄鋼で作るのか、極めて軍事機密性が高い技術分野でもあり、それゆえ同社は前向きに日本製鐵による買収を進めていたところであった。

以下、例によって文化の文脈を踏まえ、異文化理解のために隠された行間すらをも読み取って可視化するnemo版超訳である。いかなる政治的意図もなく、ただただ原文にみなぎる強い論調・もはや口調といっても良いくらいに充満する火の玉のようなエネルギーに興味を持ったから翻訳してみたくなったまでである。

まずは参考までに原文：

Statement from David B. Burritt, U. S. Steel President and CEO, on Today’s Order by President Biden

January 3, 2025 - President Biden’s action today is shameful and corrupt. He gave a political payback to a union boss out of touch with his members while harming our company’s future, our workers, and our national security. He insulted Japan, a vital economic and national security ally, and put American competitiveness at risk. The Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing are dancing in the streets. And Biden did it all while refusing to even meet with us to learn the facts.

Our employees and communities deserve better. We needed a President who knows how to get the best deal for America and work hard to make it happen. Make no mistake: this investment is what guarantees a great future for U. S. Steel, our employees, our communities, and our country. We intend to fight President Biden’s political corruption.

以下、nemo版超訳

「本日のバイデン大統領からの命令に関し、USスチール社社長兼CEOディヴィッド・B・バリットからの声明文

2025年1月3日 - バイデン大統領がとった本日の行為は、恥であり腐敗です。我が社の組合幹部は組合員を無視しているというのに、そんな幹部に対し大統領は政治的見返りを与えるのみならず、その一方で我が社の将来、我が社の従業員、そして我が国の国家安全保障に対して損害をもたらしたのです。しかも我が国必須の経済安全保障同盟国である日本を侮辱したばかりか、こともあろうにアメリカの競争力すらをも危機にさらしたのです。北京にいる中国共産党指導部は歓喜のあまり街に繰り出して踊り出しているに違いありません。そしてあろうことかバイデン大統領は、私たちが事実を伝えるべく面会を申し込んでも拒否したまま、これらの全てを行ったのです。

我が社の従業員とコミュニティは、もっとまともに扱われて然るべきです。我々に必要だったのは、アメリカにとってベストな取引を引き出せる大統領、そしてそのためには努力を惜しまない大統領だったはずです。誤解しないでいただきたい、今回の買収こそが、USスチール社、我が社の従業員、我が社のコミュニティ、そして我が国に素晴らしい未来を保証する投資なのです。私たちはバイデン大統領の政治的腐敗と戦う所存です。」

いやぁ、あらためて凄い口調ですね。

政治的ポーズもあるとは思うけど、ここまで燃えさかるためのジェット燃料として、同盟国企業による買収がダメならダメで、なんであかんのかという理由がバイデン大統領サイドから明確に示されていないことなど、突けばいろいろ出てきそう。 そしてそれらを昨今のトレンドとしてサルでも分かるくらい分かりやすく示しているのか。

まぁそれゆえだとは思うけども、それにしても超巨大企業のトップが超大国の国家元首に対してここまで直球ストレートに言うというのも、ますますこれからの人類の行く末が案じられる昨今。

日産自動車も経産省が圧力をかけてきてホンダが立ち上がったとかあると聞いたし、これから政府自身がナショナリスティックになっていく、そんな世界はどうなっていくのか混濁していく中で、かくも義憤に満ちた言葉が飛び交う時代になったと言うのにも、正直暗澹とする。言葉は刃。 なら訳すなよって？　そうね、でもこれも時代の記録だと思うのです。無論、あくまで私見であり私の訳でしかないのですけれども、それでもなお。

元の声明文それも原文へのリンク；

⚫︎翌朝追記 日本製鐵も声明文を発表したね： https://www.nipponsteel.com/news/20250103_100.html

抜粋すると； 「この決定は、バイデン大統領の政治的な思惑のためになされたものであり、」 「今回の決定が明らかに政治的な判断であることを示しています。」 「バイデン大統領による今回の買収禁止命令は、自身の政治的な思惑のために、米国鉄鋼労働者の未来を犠牲にすることに他ならないと考えます。」 「審査プロセスが、政治によって著しく適正さを欠いていたことは明白」 「その結論は、実質的な調査に基づかず、バイデン政権の政治的目的を満たすためにあらかじめ決定されたものでした。」 いやぁ、これが全て正しいとしても、そしてUSスチールよりは冷静に見えても、やっぱ思い切ったこと言うなぁと僕は思いました。まぁ、もはやそういう時代なのかなぁ。思い切った分かりやすさ。

以下、全文：

「米国政府による不適法なUSスチール買収禁止命令に反対する共同声明　～日本製鉄とUSスチールは法的権利を守るためのあらゆる措置を検討中～ 2025/01/03

日本製鉄株式会社

　日本製鉄株式会社（以下、日本製鉄）とUnited States Steel Corporation（以下、USスチール）は、日本製鉄によるUSスチールの買収（以下、本買収）について、本日2025年1月3日、バイデン大統領が禁止命令を下したことに対して、以下のステイトメン��を公表いたします。

　日本製鉄とUSスチールは、バイデン大統領が、本買収に対して禁止命令を決定したことに失望しています。この決定は、バイデン大統領の政治的な思惑のためになされたものであり、米国憲法上の適正手続き及び対米外国投資委員会（以下、CFIUS）を規律する法令に明らかに違反しています。大統領の声明と禁止命令は、国家安全保障問題に関する確かな証拠を提示しておらず、今回の決定が明らかに政治的な判断であることを示しています。バイデン大統領の決定を受けて、日本製鉄とUSスチールは、法的権利を守るためにあらゆる措置を追求する所存です。

　日本製鉄とUSスチールは、本買収により、ペンシルバニア州やインディアナ州をはじめとする米国鉄鋼業がある地域が再び活性化し、米国の鉄鋼労働者の雇用確保、米国の鉄鋼サプライチェーンの強靭化、米国鉄鋼業の中国に対する競争力の強化、及び米国の国家安全保障の強化につながるものと確信しています。日本製鉄は、USスチールが事業を行う地域コミュニティ及び米国鉄鋼業界全体に利益をもたらすため、米国の象徴的な企業としてのUSスチールを支え、成長させるために必要な投資を行うことができる唯一のパートナーです。日本製鉄は、既にコミットしている27億ドルの投資の一環として、ペンシルバニア州モンバレー製鉄所に少なくとも10億ドル、インディアナ州ゲイリー製鉄所に約3億ドルの投資を行うことを決定しています。本買収を禁止することは、USスチールの設備を長期間にわたり稼働させるために必要な27億ドルの投資が実行されないことを意味し、良好な処遇条件で家族を養う何千もの労働組合員の仕事が危機に晒されることになります。バイデン大統領による今回の買収禁止命令は、自身の政治的な思惑のために、米国鉄鋼労働者の未来を犠牲にすることに他ならないと考えます。また、USスチールの株主に対して、買収完了時に1株当たり55ドルを支払うとの約束を果たすべく、日本製鉄とUSスチールは、法的権利を守るためのあらゆる措置を講じてまいります。

　日本製鉄とUSスチールは、CFIUSの審査において、当初から、誠実かつ透明性をもって真摯に協議に応じてきました。CFIUSに提出された記録を見れば、日本製鉄によるコミットメントを伴う本買収は、米国の国家安全保障を弱体化させるのではなく、強化するものであることが明らかです。CFIUSの審査プロセスが、政治によって著しく適正さを欠いていたことは明白であり、その結論は、実質的な調査に基づかず、バイデン政権の政治的目的を満たすためにあらかじめ決定されたものでした。米国政府が、米国の利益につながる競争を活性化する本買収を拒否し、同盟国である日本国をこのように扱うことは衝撃的であり、非常に憂慮すべきことです。残念ながら、米国へ大規模な投資を検討しようとしている米国の同盟国を拠点とする全ての企業に対して、投資を控えさせる強いメッセージを送るものです。

　日本製鉄は、CFIUSの示した懸念に対応すべく、本買収完了後のUSスチールの取締役の過半数は米国籍とし、そのうち3名の独立取締役はCIFUSが承認すること、CEOやCFO等の重要職位は米国籍とすること、USスチールが提起する通商措置に日本製鉄は一切関与しないこと、生産や雇用を米国外へ移転しないこと、ペンシルベニア州、アーカンソー州、アラバマ州、インディアナ州、テキサス州にあるUSスチールの拠点の生産能力をCFIUSの承認なく10年間削減しないこと、国家安全保障協定（National Security Agreement）の遵守状況等をCFIUSに定期的に報告すること、CFIUSは取締役会にオブザーバーを派遣する権利を有すること等を含む、米国政府にとって完全に強制執行が可能な様々な問題解消措置を自主的に約束しました。しかしながら、CFIUS は、日本製鉄とUS スチールが100 日間にも亘って、自主的に提示した4 つの確固たる国家安全保障協定案に対して、書面によるフィードバックを全く行わなかったことから明らかであるように、両社が提案した問題解消措置のいずれについても適切に検討することはありませんでした。本日、バイデン大統領が決定を下したことに、日本製鉄とUSスチールは、深く失望しています。

　日本製鉄とUSスチールは、本買収に際し、USスチールの従業員、地域コミュニティ、政府関係者、政治家、経済界をはじめ、米国および日本の様々なステークホルダーの皆様に多大なる協力と熱烈な賛同を頂いたことに感謝申し上げます。我々は、米国のステークホルダーの利益のために、米国で事業を遂行することを決して諦めません。日本製鉄とUSスチールのパートナーシップが、USスチール、特に全米鉄鋼労働組合との基本労働協約対象拠点をはじめとして、USスチールが将来にわたって競争力を保ち、発展し続けるための最善の方法であると確信しています。それらの未来を確かなものとするために、日本製鉄とUSスチールは、日米政府関係者を含むステークホルダーの皆様と引き続き緊密に連携し、法的権利を守るためのあらゆる措置を追求してまいります。

※本買収に関する詳細は2023 年12 月18 日公表の資料を参照ください。（2023年12月19日、2024年4月15日、同年5月3日、同年5月30日、同年12月26日に経過開示） https://www.nipponsteel.com/common/secure/ir/library/pdf/20231218_100.pdf」

[yourreddancer]

Daniel Thomas - from a FB comment on the meme:

- [ ] The crowd was ostensibly angry but it was a somewhat joyful tone that split the morning air as the convicted and Removed President, wearing an appropriate red felon jumpsuit, with a black silken hood over his head, was led 40 feet up the stairs to the impressive stainless steel guillotine erected in Times Square this brisk fall morning. We are receiving reports from those near to where the Correctional Officers from Ryker’s Island and Federal Marshalls guide The dethroned president who would have been King through the stoic but bitter gathering of watchers saying they hear a childlike whimpering emanating from underneath the black hood.

- [ ] We watch the unprecedented procession unfold before our Nation as a definitive Day of Retribution for the nation, after this man had ransacked our very name throughout the world, destroyed our alliances, and flushed billions of dollars down the toilet while paying, or having his actually wealthy backers pay, complicit news organizations to cast him in a favorable light to their unsuspecting followers.

- [ ] On an informative note, let us also share that the Farmers of America, auto workers and NYPD have helped in a united effort to have this massive but oddly beautiful Stainless Steel Guillotine designed and built with state of the art failsafes to insure that the ex-President’s neck will be severed instantly and completely. A co-operative project between the engineers from Boeing and Lockheed, with some ancillary from the Disney Corporation, this 87 foot tall Madame Guillotine shall, after serving its intended purpose, be relocated to a picturesque spot near the New White House, which has been in recent years called the House of White Power due to the the thankfully short lived rise of The Nationalist Movement in the US. It will embody a significance comparable to the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument for our true citizens, and a palpable warning to Nationalist thinking in this country, which has now been so palpably ostracized by the vast majority as to be simply ridiculed, yes, even In some places like Alabama! Some experts have intimated that, in fact, this criminal to mankind will very probably have a moment or perhaps most of a minute or two to perceive the crowd and perhaps his own headless body if his head lands in the basket at the proper angle, and if his own blood doesn’t obscure his view.

- [x] The crowd is getting louder now, we can hear. As there will be a few minutes before the climactic moment, we break briefly for commercial. The commercials for this spectacular event are clearly surpassing in sheer ostentatiousness the Super Bowl ads of fame, and some are quite provocative, ladies and gentlemen, given the reestablishment of our democracy and the hope we all share of finally undoing and obliterating all the self-serving acts this ex-president has engendered.

- [ ] So we cut now to Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream!!

and a FB answer to some MAGAs crying tears about the meme above:

It’s a WARNING!

When rights are taken away, you never get them back easily. Trying to make people understand where fascism leads, such as beheading your “enemies”. (Not always literally.)

This country, founded on the IDEA that people should be able to make their own rules, design their own laws, appoint their own leaders and everyone is equal under the law.

For years right wing politicians have been determined to change America into a country RULED by ELITES. All these years later while telling you the “elites” are celebrities, TV newscasters, athletes, or authors, we find out the true elites are real estate investors, tech entrepreneurs, and corrupt SC Justices.

They aren’t fiercely determined to fix our crumbling infrastructure, they aren’t concerned about lack of healthcare for Americans, they have NO PLANS to make life better in any way in our country.

They intend to OWN, PROFIT FROM, TAKE, SELL OFF, BARGAIN WITH, LIE ABOUT, DECEIVE, WHATEVER IS NEEDED TO TAKE EVERY DIME THEY CAN FROM AND GIVE ZERO BACK TO you!

You could have researched them and found they have left a long line of lied to, defrauded, embezzled, broke people in their wake.

They are concerned with POWER, MONEY, POWER

But they have you complaining about a singer, a movie star, or a meme.

Keeping you busy while they steal food right out of your mouth.

STEP 1 Cut Social Security and Medicare to have money to give billionaires another tax cut.

STEP 2 deport ENOUGH immigrants to make it LOOK GOOD. Keeping their “personal” illegals hidden away from sight. Arrangements CAN be made for swaths of illegals to work for chicken plants, vegetable farms and such, FOR A PRICE. That’s what this whole, “they’re criminals, drug dealers, murderers, they’ll slit your throat for nothing.” Business is all about.

FIGURING OUT HOW TO MAKE A BUCK FROM ILLEGALS BY BEING IN CHARGE OF DISTRIBUTING THEM!

They’re gonna make sure you have plenty to worry about, while they SELL our military to others, bargain with our nuclear capabilities for highest payment, use our tax money to build another tower, rocket, or AI project, and you won’t even notice you have become a third world society, living in the richest nation in the world, with NO ALLIES, NO ABILITY TO RAISE YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING, and NO JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TO PROTECT YOUR RIGHTS.

Maybe some country out there will someday allow YOU an immigrant from America to seek ASYLUM!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

 The real choice isn’t “pragmatism” or “idealism.” It’s either allowing these trends to worsen – destroying what’s left of our democracy and turning our economy into even more of a playground for big corporations, Wall Street, and billionaires – or reversing them. And the only pragmatic way of reversing them is through a “political revolution” that mobilizes millions of Americans. 

Robert Reich (via azspot)

+

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 2, 2024

On February 25, 1901, financier J. P. Morgan’s men filed the paperwork to incorporate a new iron and steel trust, and over the weekend, businessmen waited to see what was coming. Five days later, on March 2, the announcement came: J. P. Morgan was overseeing the combination of companies that produced two thirds of the nation’s steel into the United States Steel Corporation. It was capitalized at $1.4 billion, which at the time was almost three times more than the federal government’s annual budget.  

While the stock market was abuzz with news of the nation’s first billion-dollar corporation, Vice President–elect Theodore Roosevelt was on his way from New York to Washington, D.C., where he and his family arrived at 5:00 in the evening. The train was an hour behind schedule because the crowds coming to see the upcoming inauguration, scheduled for Monday, March 4, 1901, had slowed travel into Washington. 

Two days later, President William McKinley took the oath of office for the second time, and Roosevelt became vice president.

McKinley was a champion of big business and believed the role of government was to support industry, dismissing growing demands from workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs for the government to level the economic playing field that had tilted so extraordinarily toward a few industry leaders. McKinley had won the hard-fought election of 1896 handily, but by 1900, Republicans were so concerned about the growing demand for reform that party leaders put Roosevelt, who had won a reputation for standing up to business interests, on the ticket, at least in part because they hoped to silence him there.

Roosevelt hoped he could promote reform from the vice presidency, but he quickly discovered that he couldn’t accomplish much of anything. His only official duty was to preside over the Senate, which would not convene until December. He was so bored he asked the chief justice of the Supreme Court if it would be unseemly for him to enroll in law school to finish his degree. (Horrified, the justice offered to supervise Roosevelt’s studies himself.)

But then, in September, an unemployed steelworker assassinated McKinley, and Roosevelt became president. “I told McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia,” one of McKinley’s aides said. “I told him what would happen if he should die. Now look. That damned cowboy is president of the United States.” 

Two months later, on November 13, J. P. Morgan and railroad magnates brought together the nation’s main railroad interests, which had been warring with each other, into a new conglomerate called the Northern Securities Company. Even the staunchly big business Chicago Tribune was taken aback: “Never have interests so enormous been brought under one management,” its editor wrote. 

Midwestern governors, whose constituents depended on the railroads to get their crops to market, suggested that their legislatures would find a way to prohibit such a powerful combination. Northern Securities Company officials retorted that they would simply keep all business transactions and operations secret. When Roosevelt gave his first message to Congress in December, industrialists watched to see what the “damned cowboy” would say about their power over the government. 

They were relieved. Roosevelt said the government should start cleaning up factories and limiting the working hours of women and children, and that it should reserve natural resources for everyone rather than allow them to be exploited by greedy businessmen. 

But Roosevelt did not oppose the new huge combinations. He simply wanted the government to supervise and control corporate combinations, preventing criminality in the business world as it did in the streets. He asked businessmen only for transparency. Once the government actually knew what businesses were up to, he said, it could consider regulation or taxation to protect the public interest. 

Senators and businessmen who had worried that the cowboy president would slash at the trusts breathed a sigh of relief that all he wanted was “transparency.” According to the Chicago Tribune, the “grave and reverend and somewhat plutocratic Senators immediately admitted in the most delighted fashion that the young and supposedly impetuous President had discussed the trust question with rare discrimination.” 

But they were wrong to think Roosevelt did not intend to reduce the power of big business. In early January 1902, Minnesota sued to stop the Northern Securities Company from organizing on the grounds that such a combination violated Minnesota law. While the Supreme Court dithered over whether or not it could rule on the case, the Roosevelt administration put the federal government out in front of the issue. In February, Roosevelt’s attorney general told newspapers that the administration believed the formation of the Northern Securities Company violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and that he would be filing a suit to keep it from organizing.

Businessmen were aghast, not only because Roosevelt was going after a business combination but also because he had acted without consulting Wall Street. When J. P. Morgan complained that he had not been informed, Roosevelt coolly told him that that was the whole point. “If we have done anything wrong,” said the astonished Morgan, “send your man [the attorney general] to my man [one of his lawyers] and they can fix it up.” The president declined. “We don’t want to fix it up,” explained the attorney general. “We want to stop it.” 

“Criticism of President Roosevelt’s action was heard on every side,” reported the Boston Globe. “Some of the principal financiers said he had dealt a serious blow to the financial securities of the country.” For his part, Roosevelt was unconcerned by the criticism. “If the law has not been violated,” he announced, “no harm can come from the proposed legal action.”  

In late February, the Supreme Court decided it would not hear the Minnesota case; on March 10, the United States sued to stop the organization of the Northern Securities Company.

In August 1902, Roosevelt toured New England and the Midwest to rally support for his attack on the Northern Securities Company. He told audiences that he was not trying to destroy corporations but rather wanted to make them act in the public interest. He demanded a “square deal” for everyone. As the Boston Globe put it: “‘Justice for all alike—a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor,’ is the Roosevelt ideal to be attained by the framing and the administration of the law. And he would tell you that that means Mr Morgan and Mr Rockefeller [sic] as well as the poor fellow who cannot pay his rent.” 

In 1904 the Supreme Court ruled that the Northern Securities Company was an illegal monopoly and that it must be dissolved, and by 1912, Roosevelt had come to believe that a strong federal government was the only way for citizens to maintain control over corporations, which he saw as the inevitable outcome of the industrial economy. He had no patience for those who hoped to stop such combinations by passing laws against them. Instead, he believed the American people must create a strong federal government that could exert public control over corporations.

In a famous speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1912, he called for a “new nationalism.”

“The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being,” he said. He warned that “[t]here can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains…. We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know…whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public.”

Roosevelt had come to believe that a strong government must regulate business. “The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” he said. 

After all, he said, “[t]he object of government is the welfare of the people.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[dark-rx]

‘Trump Recruited as Moscow Asset,’ Says Ex-KGB Spy Chief

Alnur Mussayev, former head of Kazakhstan’s security service, who rose up the ranks of the Soviet KGB, claims Moscow groomed Trump under pseudonym “Krasnov” in 1987.

US President Donald Trump was groomed 37 years ago as a potential Soviet asset, according to Alnur Mussayev, the former head of Kazakhstan’s security services, who had been a KGB officer in Moscow at the time.

In a Facebook post, Mussayev tried to shed light on Trump’s often baffling willingness to mollify Putin: “In 1987, I served in the 6th Directorate of the USSR KGB in Moscow,” Mussayev wrote on Feb. 20, explaining how “the most important direction of the work of the 6th Administration was the recruitment of businessmen from capitalist countries.”

He added: “It was that year that our administration recruited a 40-year-old businessman from the United States, Donald Trump under the pseudonym ‘Krasnov.’”

Since his first term as president, Trump has been suspected of being, if not a Russian asset outright, then at least inordinately sympathetic to Vladimir Putin and Russia.

In 2017, just as Trump was taking office after defeating Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, a report put together by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele came to light. The document, initially commissioned by Trump’s Republican adversaries and subsequently taken over by the Democratic opposition, contained salacious accusations from purported Russian intelligence operatives claiming that Moscow had kompromat (compromising material) on Trump dating back to his various visits to Russia – including the infamous and never-corroborated “golden shower” videotape with Trump and a prostitute in a Moscow hotel.

Although the credibility of the “Steele dossier” has been vehemently contested by Trump supporters, especially for its use of anonymous sources, Mussayev confirms the existence of kompromat on Trump. In a Facebook post from Feb. 18, 2018, the former Kazakh spy chief who now resides in Vienna, Austria, wrote:

“Donald Trump is on the FSB’s hook and is swallowing the bait deeper and deeper. This is evidenced by numerous indirect facts published in the media. There is such a thing as the recruitability of an object. Based on my experience of operational work in the KGB-KNB [the Kazakh successor to the KGB], I can say for sure that Trump belongs to the category of ideally recruitable people. I have no doubt that Russia has kompromat on the US President, that over the course of many years the Kremlin has been promoting Trump to the post of President of the main world power.”

Already seven years ago, Mussayev said that the ruling elite in the US understood well that their president was deeply dependent on the Kremlin, but wouldn’t openly admit it, so as to not jeopardize the US’s status as sole superpower. He predicted the various attempts to remove Trump from power.

Well-worn accusations

Mussayev’s claims are by no means the only ones from former KGB officers.

In “American Kompromat,” a 2021 book by Craig Unger, former KGB officer Yuri Shvets claims that Trump had been recruited by Moscow in the 1980s.

“Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset… and proved so willing to parrot anti-Western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow,” Shvets told the Guardian in 2021.

Shvets was a KGB major during the 1980s with cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Soviet news agency TASS. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He worked as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006, according to the Guardian.

In the book, which relies heavily on Shvets’ recollections, Unger describes how Trump first came to the Russians’ attention in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. In 1979, once she married Donald Trump, already a notable American real estate mogul, the Czech Secret Service spied on Ivana at home and abroad, and reportedly questioned her father about the couple after his trips the United States. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later, Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue, nearby.

Shvets told the Guardian that Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denied that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said Trump was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

A 2017 Politico article by Luke Harding sustains that “according to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan.”

Harding adds that the agents who undertook this task were code-named Al Jarza and Lubos. “They opened letters sent home by Ivana to her father, Milos, an engineer. Milos was never an agent or asset. But he had a functional relationship with the Czech secret police, who would ask him how his daughter was doing abroad and in return permit her visits home. There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited Milos in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or ‘cover.’”

Unger, however, has been quick to point out that the Trump recruitment process was almost fortuitous. “He was an asset,” Shvets said of Trump. “It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started… the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

Shvets noted that Trump was the perfect target: “His vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election,” he said, referring to the 2016 election.

Unexpected observer at Riyadh peace talks

Images from the Feb. 18  Riyadh meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his American counterparts showed Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev as a member of the Kremlin delegation and present at the talks, watching away from the main table. Rybolovlev is the Russian oligarch responsible for helping Trump out of a debt crunch by purchasing a Trump Palm Beach property valued at $40 million for $95 million in 2008.

Now, as Trump continually makes moves – particularly with regard to Russia and its brutal war against Ukraine – that would seem to benefit only Moscow, former KGB recruiters such as Mussayev are convinced that the US president is “deeper and deeper” on the hook.

[dailyanarchistposts]

F.6.2 What are the social consequences of such a system?

The “anarcho” capitalist imagines that there will be police agencies, “defence associations,” courts, and appeals courts all organised on a free-market basis and available for hire. As David Wieck points out, however, the major problem with such a system would not be the corruption of “private” courts and police forces (although, as suggested above, this could indeed be a problem):

“There is something more serious than the ‘Mafia danger’, and this other problem concerns the role of such ‘defence’ institutions in a given social and economic context. ”[The] context … is one of a free-market economy with no restraints upon accumulation of property. Now, we had an American experience, roughly from the end of the Civil War to the 1930’s, in what were in effect private courts, private police, indeed private governments. We had the experience of the (private) Pinkerton police which, by its spies, by its agents provocateurs, and by methods that included violence and kidnapping, was one of the most powerful tools of large corporations and an instrument of oppression of working people. We had the experience as well of the police forces established to the same end, within corporations, by numerous companies … (The automobile companies drew upon additional covert instruments of a private nature, usually termed vigilante, such as the Black Legion). These were, in effect, private armies, and were sometimes described as such. The territories owned by coal companies, which frequently included entire towns and their environs, the stores the miners were obliged by economic coercion to patronise, the houses they lived in, were commonly policed by the private police of the United States Steel Corporation or whatever company owned the properties. The chief practical function of these police was, of course, to prevent labour organisation and preserve a certain balance of ‘bargaining.’ … These complexes were a law unto themselves, powerful enough to ignore, when they did not purchase, the governments of various jurisdictions of the American federal system. This industrial system was, at the time, often characterised as feudalism.” [Anarchist Justice, pp. 223–224]

For a description of the weaponry and activities of these private armies, the Marxist economic historian Maurice Dobb presents an excellent summary in Studies in Capitalist Development. [pp. 353–357] According to a report on “Private Police Systems” quoted by Dobb, in a town dominated by Republican Steel the “civil liberties and the rights of labour were suppressed by company police. Union organisers were driven out of town.” Company towns had their own (company-run) money, stores, houses and jails and many corporations had machine-guns and tear-gas along with the usual shot-guns, rifles and revolvers. The “usurpation of police powers by privately paid ‘guards and ‘deputies’, often hired from detective agencies, many with criminal records” was “a general practice in many parts of the country.”

The local (state-run) law enforcement agencies turned a blind-eye to what was going on (after all, the workers had broken their contracts and so were “criminal aggressors” against the companies) even when union members and strikers were beaten and killed. The workers own defence organisations (unions) were the only ones willing to help them, and if the workers seemed to be winning then troops were called in to “restore the peace” (as happened in the Ludlow strike, when strikers originally cheered the troops as they thought they would defend them; needless to say, they were wrong).

Here we have a society which is claimed by many “anarcho”-capitalists as one of the closest examples to their “ideal,” with limited state intervention, free reign for property owners, etc. What happened? The rich reduced the working class to a serf-like existence, capitalist production undermined independent producers (much to the annoyance of individualist anarchists at the time), and the result was the emergence of the corporate America that “anarcho”-capitalists (sometimes) say they oppose.

Are we to expect that “anarcho”-capitalism will be different? That, unlike before, “defence” firms will intervene on behalf of strikers? Given that the “general libertarian law code” will be enforcing capitalist property rights, workers will be in exactly the same situation as they were then. Support of strikers violating property rights would be a violation of the law and be costly for profit making firms to do (if not dangerous as they could be “outlawed” by the rest). This suggests that “anarcho”-capitalism will extend extensive rights and powers to bosses, but few if any rights to rebellious workers. And this difference in power is enshrined within the fundamental institutions of the system. This can easily be seen from Rothbard’s numerous anti-union tirades and his obvious hatred of them, strikes and pickets (which he habitually labelled as violent). As such it is not surprising to discover that Rothbard complained in the 1960s that, because of the Wagner Act, the American police “commonly remain ‘neutral’ when strike-breakers are molested or else blame the strike-breakers for ‘provoking’ the attacks on them … When unions are permitted to resort to violence, the state or other enforcing agency has implicitly delegated this power to the unions. The unions, then, have become ‘private states.’” [The Logic of Action II, p. 41] The role of the police was to back the property owner against their rebel workers, in other words, and the state was failing to provide the appropriate service (of course, that bosses exercising power over workers provoked the strike is irrelevant, while private police attacking picket lines is purely a form of “defensive” violence and is, likewise, of no concern).

In evaluating “anarcho”-capitalism’s claim to be a form of anarchism, Peter Marshall notes that “private protection agencies would merely serve the interests of their paymasters.” [Demanding the Impossible, p. 653] With the increase of private “defence associations” under “really existing capitalism” today (associations that many “anarcho”-capitalists point to as examples of their ideas), we see a vindication of Marshall’s claim. There have been many documented experiences of protesters being badly beaten by private security guards. As far as market theory goes, the companies are only supplying what the buyer is demanding. The rights of others are not a factor (yet more “externalities,” obviously). Even if the victims successfully sue the company, the message is clear — social activism can seriously damage your health. With a reversion to “a general libertarian law code” enforced by private companies, this form of “defence” of “absolute” property rights can only increase, perhaps to the levels previously attained in the heyday of US capitalism, as described above by Wieck.

[mariacallous]

U.S. President Donald Trump’s second-term trade war officially began on Tuesday with fresh tariffs on China and retaliation from Beijing, but that’s only a small sample of what lies ahead.

In his first term, the self-declared “tariff man” levied tariffs on a scale unseen since the 1930s, though he had fairly narrow goals: protect some favored industries like steel; focus on China, the U.S.’s biggest rival; and pressure allies to line up with U.S. political goals. His first sallies this time followed part of that playbook when he threatened tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China over what he said were their lax policies on immigration and drug traffic.

But he has a bigger goal in mind for his second term with plans he is still cooking up. Trump seeks to remake global trade based on what he calls “reciprocity”—treating other countries, supposedly, in the same fashion as they treat the United States. China is not the target this time—or at least not the only one. He has his sights set on any country with which the U.S. has a large, persistent trade deficit, which in his mind means it is treating the U.S. “terribly.” Success would mean sharply reducing the trade deficit, no matter which country he hits or what other geopolitical goals it impedes.

Former President Joe Biden, for instance, talked about defending Taiwan against China, a traditional aim of Republican China hawks such as new Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump, in contrast, is threatening to wreck Taiwan’s economy with up to 100 percent tariffs on its semiconductors and also require it to pay the U.S. for defense. Although Trump has packed his administration with China hawks, he has long sought accommodation with Chinese President Xi Jinping on trade and other issues.

“Trump at this point is absolutely not focused on China, both in terms of what’s been seen in public and what’s happening behind the scenes,” said Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute who has long focused on Trump’s trade plans.

Since the 1990s, exporting to the U.S. has been like driving on an open road. In Trump’s plan, that road will become a toll bridge, with a 10 percent or 20 percent passage fee—his planned “universal tariff”—unless he decides to waive it, whether for countries or individual companies. “If you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff,” he told global corporate leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, last month via videoconference.

Underlying Trump’s plans is the seemingly simple concept of reciprocity. Major U.S. trading partners have tariff levels higher than the United States does, so the U.S. should hike its tariffs to those heights or beyond for trade to be fair. “Eye for an eye,” Trump said in a 2023 campaign video explaining his plan to pass what he called the “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act.”

A White House official said the president and his trade team haven’t finalized their plans and are still exploring options. “Reciprocity is a big focus of the president,” the official said. “There’s also question about  general restrictions, and he has talked about reviving manufacturing and industry.”

Reciprocity as a trade concept dates back at least to Thomas Jefferson, said Dartmouth College economic historian Douglas Irwin. “Where a Nation imposes high Duties on our productions, or prohibits them altogether, it may be proper for us to do the same by theirs,” the then-secretary of state wrote in 1793.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the concept differently in the 1930s as he sought to wean the world off the protectionism engendered by the Smoot-Hawley tariff wars. He negotiated a series of reciprocal trade agreements where the United States and a trading partner agreed to lower tariffs for some goods, and then the U.S. applied those reduced tariffs to other countries with which it had a reciprocal deal.

After World War II, individual deals gave way to multilateral rounds of tariff reductions, with the U.S. taking the lead. Again, reciprocity was the guiding principle—the United States would only cut tariffs if other countries did, too. But the tariff reductions weren’t equal. Looking to lead the way and woo allies during the Cold War, the U.S. cut tariffs more deeply.

It was a good deal. Consumers benefited from cheaper and more varied goods, and domestic producers were forced to up their game to outcompete foreign firms. Trade expansion has boosted U.S. GDP by $2.6 trillion since 1950, according to the free-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics.

But the downsides of liberalized trade became clear over the years, too, as foreign competition from first Japan and then China hollowed out U.S. factory towns in the Midwest and Southeast, such as Olney, Ill., and Hickory, N.C. It was one thing to push for minimal tariffs when China was poor and struggling and quite another as it grew to be the world’s largest exporter.

Chinese average tariffs of as high as 10 percent compared to U.S. tariffs of 3.4 percent seemed grossly unfair, let alone Indian average tariffs as much as 50.8 percent or Indonesia’s 37.1 percent. Those countries also use regulations and subsidies far more than the U.S. to protect domestic industries.

“U.S. exporters face formal barriers nearly three times higher than those the United States imposes on importers, and nontariff barriers imposed on U.S. exporters are 36 percent higher than those faced by importers to the United States,” Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers wrote in 2018.

Now Trump wants to flip FDR’s concept of reciprocity on its head and lead the world back to an era of protectionism. He wants to boost U.S. tariffs at least to the level of U.S. trading partners. Realizing the difficulty of negotiating individual deals, he’s promised a 10 percent or 20 percent across-the-board universal tariff to start.

Forget Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat; Trump’s world is rutted and strewn with boulders and sinkholes. “Let’s just say this: We’re going to make great deals, and we have all the cards,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago press conference in December.

Trump says the deals would restore fairness to the trading system, protect U.S. jobs, and force companies to reshore operations to the United States. But the effort has huge downsides, including trade wars with allies and higher prices via tariffs and retaliation. It also takes the focus off China, because so many other countries are in Trump’s crosshairs that it’s tough to focus on any one country.

When Trump threatened tariffs this past weekend over immigration and drugs, he proposed a 25 percent levy on Mexico and Canada, though he delayed them for a month after talking to the leaders of both countries and claiming they had made concessions. Especially striking was his willingness essentially to tear up the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a free trade  pact he negotiated his first term.

He carried out his threat of 10 percent tariffs against China and said the levies could go higher, prompting Beijing to retaliate with tariffs and other measures. But he plans to talk to Xi in a few days, where the two might work out a deal, too.

“The U.S. can’t handle China on its own,” said former U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, who negotiated the U.S. World Trade Organization (WTO) deal with China. “It needs allies and partners who view China in the same way as the U.S. For the U.S. to reinforce those relationships, the last thing you want to do is pick fights with our friends. It’s counterproductive.”

Peter Navarro, Trump’s White House senior trade advisor, has provided the clearest roadmap of Trump’s reciprocal approach in an essay in Project 2025, the 887-page compilation of recommendations for Trump 2.0. Navarro ranks trade targets according to the size of their bilateral trade deficit with the United States and the difference in average tariff levels.

He comes up with a hit list of eight targets: India and China are at the top of the list, followed by the European Union, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and then Malaysia and Japan. All but China are U.S. allies or countries the U.S. would like as allies. Strikingly, the list doesn’t include Mexico, Canada, or Colombia—Trump’s first targets.

Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, also would divide the world into different camps when it comes to tariffs. “I think we should make it very clear that there is a green, a yellow, and a red bucket, and we let everyone know where they are [and] here’s what we ask of you,” he said at a conference at the conservative Manhattan Institute last June.

Even a successful campaign against all the trade miscreants to equalize tariffs, though, would have a small impact on the overall trade deficit. Whether the U.S. raises its tariffs to reach the levels of other countries or they lower their tariffs to U.S. levels, Navarro estimates the overall trade deficit would fall by about 10 percent—not much of a gain for a series of trade battles that would shake markets and threaten global growth and inflation.

Trump talked about a reciprocal trade offensive in his first administration. In 2019, he proposed the United States Reciprocal Trade Act, which would have given him authority to raise tariffs to competitors’ levels and used his State of the Union to promote the bill. Navarro led the administration’s lobbying effort, but the bill never made it out of committee in the House or Senate, as the White House focused on battling China instead.

This time, Trump has made reciprocity a priority and used one of his first executive orders to launch a series of studies this year that would provide the grounding for his effort. His picks for top trade positions are echoing his priority.

“We are treated horribly by the global trading environment,” Trump’s Commerce secretary-designate, Howard Lutnick, said in his confirmation hearing. “We need to be treated with respect, and we can use tariffs to create reciprocity, fairness, and respect.”

There are plenty of issues to be resolved first, including whether to try to push again for legislation or use trade law or emergency powers to create an across-the-board tariff. Also, what criteria would the administration use to eliminate the tariffs if a trading partner makes concessions? Trump also must decide whether to follow up his initial move with a heavy tariff—a kind of big bang approach—or move gradually.

Bessent, for instance, has talked of phasing in tariffs. Last year, he advocated for a gradual increase of tariffs specifically on China that could eventually reach 60 percent. The Financial Times recently reported he is pushing for the same approach when it comes to the universal tariff of 10 percent or 20 percent on all trading partners.

How much to focus on China, too, will surely be a matter of controversy inside the administration. Navarro, who has been the main advocate for a broad reciprocal approach, is also probably the economic team’s most fervent China warrior.

Before he joined the administration, he released a promotional video for one of his books that featured a dagger, labeled “Made in China,” stabbing the heart of America. He hasn’t mellowed since then and has a more powerful role in an administration full of political appointees who lack his knowledge of trade policy and long relationship with Trump.

Jamieson Greer, Trump’s pick for trade representative, has called for “selective decoupling” from China and ending that country’s trade preferences, known as permanent normal trade relations, which now generally provides China the same tariff rates the U.S. provides other WTO members. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top adviser, would focus on forcing China to accept a much tougher trade deal than the Phase One accord of Trump’s first term. Bannon is still close to Trump White House officials.

But Trump has a history of limiting trade coercion of China, at least at first, in hopes of getting its help on other issues. During the first administration, he delayed trade action on China for a year while he sought Xi’s help in restraining North Korea, to the consternation of his national security staff. Now he says he wants China’s help in pressuring Russia to settle the war in Ukraine.

Beijing is also preparing an offer to buy more U.S. goods, as Trump has long sought, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei. China had pledged to buy an additional $200 billion worth of goods over two years as part of the Phase One deal it signed during the first Trump administration but fell 40 percent short of that commitment because of the pandemic and other factors.

Trump never singles out China, his former aides say. He feels that gives Xi plenty of room to make concessions without seeming weak. A small devaluation of the Chinese yuan would eliminate most of the impact of the 10 percent tariff just imposed, for instance.

Market reaction is another reason Trump may be wary of pressuring China too hard from the start. The first year of the Trump trade war against China was a lousy year for stocks and acted as a constraint on Trump’s trade threats. The S&P 500 dropped more than 6 percent in 2018, its worst performance in a decade.

“Market volatility also spiked, meaning good days were really good and bad days were really bad,” noted financial journalist Jon Hilsenrath. “During one three-month stretch late in the year, the market was down 20 percent.”

On Monday, for instance, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 650 points, reacting to the news of tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China before bouncing back and finishing at 122.75 points, or 0.3 percent, after Trump said he was delaying the Mexico levies

“Trump is the X factor on trade in his administration,” said Peter Harrell, a former Biden National Security Council official now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Capitals around the world are plotting their response as Trump shapes his plans for what he calls reciprocal trade.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Biden Administration blocks sale of US Steel by Nippon Steel

Jeff Stein and David J. Lynch at Washington Post:

President Joe Biden’s decision to block Nippon Steel’s proposed purchase of U.S. Steel was a political act made in “clear violation of due process and the law,” the two companies said Friday, signaling that a courtroom fight is imminent. The government’s review of the deal “was deeply corrupted by politics and the outcome was predetermined, without an investigation on the merits, but to satisfy the political objectives of the Biden White House,” the two companies said in a joint statement.

The companies said they were “left with no choice but to take all appropriate action to protect our legal rights,” reiterating earlier warnings that they would go to court to challenge a presidential rejection. Biden’s rejection of the dealcame in a presidential order posted on the White House website, declaring Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid for the U.S. steelmaker “prohibited.” In a statement accompanying the order, the president said the nation would be “less strong and less secure” without a U.S.-owned steel industry. “This acquisition would place one of America’s largest steel producers under foreign control and create risk for our national security and our critical supply chains,” Biden said. Biden opted to kill the deal despite intense efforts in recent days by some of his senior advisers, who warned that rejecting a sizable investment from a top Japanese corporation could damage U.S. relations with Japan.

Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel had previously vowed to pursue legal action against the government, claiming it failed to follow proper procedures during its consideration of the acquisition. The president’s action comes after a Dec. 23 report by the interagency committee responsible for reviewing foreign investments in the United States for potential national security concerns. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) said it was unable to reach a consensus on the risks of the Nippon Steel deal, leaving the final verdict with the White House. In its final evaluation of the transaction, the committee warned that after buying U.S. Steel, Nippon Steel could reduce domestic steel output and pose “risks to the national security of the United States.” Among the industries hit hardest in that case would be the transportation and energy sectors, said the panel, chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen.

[...] Biden had planned in September to block the deal. But after Democratic officials in Pennsylvania raised alarms about potential economic and political costs in that critical swing state, he agreed to postpone the decision until the presidential election was finished.

[...] The collapse of Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition represents a victory for United Steelworkers union president David McCall. A fourth-generation steelworker who rose to lead the union following the 2023 death of his predecessor, McCall objected to the deal from the moment it was announced in December 2023. At the time, Nippon Steel said it wanted to buy U.S. Steel to benefit from the industrial revival spurred by Biden’s economic policies. The president’s signature legislative achievements — the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, semiconductor industry subsidies and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy projects — were driving steel demand higher. And U.S. tariffs made it more profitable to produce industrial metals here rather than import them from Japan.

[...] U.S. Steel’s next step is not clear. The Pittsburgh-based steelmaker could resume its search for a buyer. Previous bidders include Cleveland Cliffs, the second-largest domestic steel producer, which offered $7.3 billion to acquire the company in 2023. U.S. Steel also could opt to proceed as a stand-alone company. But CEO David Burritt already has warned that it lacks the financial resources needed to reinvigorate some of its aging blast furnaces in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley and in Gary, Indiana.

Smart move by President Joe Biden (D) to block the purchase of US Steel by Nippon Steel.