DL Open Thread: Wednesday, April 9, 2025

It’s On!  Trump’s Tariffs Kick Off Global Trade War:

President Trump’s global trade war intensified on Wednesday as China announced additional levies on American goods, hitting back at the United States hours after Mr. Trump’s punishing new tariffs took effect. Stocks and bonds slumped again on the moves, which heightened fears of a global recession as the European Union prepared its own retaliation for U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs.

Mr. Trump’s latest tariffs hit nearly all U.S. trading partners with new levies and raised import taxes on Chinese goods to 104 percent. Beijing then announced additional tariffs on imports from the United States, for a total levy of 84 percent, to go into effect within hours…China also announced that it was putting export controls on 12 more American companies and had added six more American companies to its list of “unreliable entities” that are mostly barred from doing business in China or with Chinese companies.

Mr. Trump spooked India’s pharmaceutical industry, the country’s most successful exporters, when he said Tuesday that he would soon announce “a major tariff” on drugmakers. The companies had been exempted in the first round of levies, but Mr. Trump has argued that in the long term more medications should be made in the United States.

Is This All About Male Fragility?  Philip Bump makes a strong case–including charts:

Not that they pine for tariffs, specifically, but instead for some idealized version of the United States, one in which men went to real jobs making real things and women stayed home to take care of the kids in picket-fenced homes flying the American flag. Some of his supporters were alive during the post-World War II period in which this was supposedly (but not really) the norm. Others, the younger ones, feel a nostalgia for what they perceive that they missed. Young men in particular seem to have an acute sense that the world was once at the mercy of people like them — but that, for them, it very much is not.

This is at times offered quite explicitly. On the Fox News show “The Five” on Monday, co-host Jesse Watters (too young to have experienced that era) celebrated the idea that jobs centered on manufacturing were a central element of masculinity.

“When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman,” he insisted, deploying his familiar pretending-to-be-joking style. “Studies have shown this.” His colleagues laughed. “Studies have shown this! And if you’re out working, building robots … you are around other guys; you’re not around H.R. ladies and lawyers. That gives you estrogen.”

It’s worth pointing out that, even without Trump’s tariffs, the passage of 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure bill was already leading to a surge in spending on new manufacturing construction. In other words, there are ways to boost domestic production without the damage and volatility of heavily taxing imports.

What that bill lacked, though, was the emotional appeal of restructuring the economy to assuage male fragility. It was legislation that aimed, directly, to make America great again by repairing broken roads and bridges and by ensuring that the economy could weather the evolution in energy production that’s underway. But it didn’t include a budding autocrat’s pledge to douse U.S. paychecks in testosterone, so I guess it doesn’t really count.

A Pulitzer-worthy column, especially when you consider that everything, everything Trump has done has been aimed at allaying the grievances of bitter young white guys.  Read the whole thing.

Yet Another Bullshit Trump Executive Order.  From The Guardian:

Donald Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that aims to block the enforcement of state laws passed to reduce the use of fossil fuels and combat the climate crisis.

The move is the latest in a string of efforts by Trump’s administration to pump up domestic energy output and push back against largely Democratic-led policies to curb carbon emissions. It came just hours after Trump, a Republican, issued orders to increase coal production.

The order directed the US attorney general to identify state laws that address climate change, ESG initiatives, environmental justice and carbon emissions, and to take action to block them.

“Many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security,” the order said.

Trump specifically cited laws in New York and Vermont that fine fossil fuel companies for their contribution to climate change, California’s cap-and-trade policy, and lawsuits by states that have sought to hold energy companies accountable for their role in global heating.

Here’s how corporations spent those corporate tax cuts that Trump gifted them:

Eleven top US consumer goods corporations spent more than three times more on share buybacks than they did on taxes, using their savings from the 2017 Donald Trump tax cuts to supercharge purchases that enriched investors instead of lowering prices on goods essential to daily life, according to a new report.

PepsiCo, Comcast, United Healthcare, personal care giant Kimberly Clark and the other companies have collectively recorded nearly $500bn in profits since the last cuts. They enacted $463bn in buybacks and paid just $140bn in federal taxes.

The figures are “startling”, said Liz Pancotti, a study co-author and director of policy with the Groundwork Collaborative, and highlight how the cuts incentivize buybacks.

“The companies are now throwing massive amounts of money at investors who are largely already wealthy people,” Pancotti added. “This is how you get the staggering wealth inequality in this country.”

Buybacks are a company’s purchase of its outstanding stock shares, which reduces the number of shares available on the market. That juices the stock’s value and investors’ wealth. By one estimate, publicly traded companies now collectively spend as much as 90% of their earnings on buybacks instead of reinvesting to keep prices down, or raising workers’ wages. (Something those resentful white male idiots can’t understand.)

Yes, Trump’s doing it again:

Undeterred, Trump is now proposing lowering the corporate rate to 17%, which could generate a $50bn annual windfall to the 100 largest US corporations.

‘Kill Your Lawn’.  My youngest daughter has a Masters  in sustainable landscape design.  She couldn’t agree more with this U of D professor:

If you’re a human living on this planet, you should get to know Doug Tallamy, the entomologist and University of Delaware professor whose groundbreaking 2006 book, “Bringing Nature Home,” supercharged the native plants movement.

Tallamy made a case that our native birds and insects evolved with native plants, so they recognize them as food. The loss of these native plants and habitats to development poses an existential threat not just to wildlife, but to us.

Since then, Tallamy co-founded Homegrown National Park, a grassroots movement whose mission is to “urgently inspire everyone to address the biodiversity crisis by adding native plants and removing invasive ones where we live, work, learn, pray, and play.”

Here’s what he suggests:

First, reduce the lawn. Every property has to support pollinators, every property has to manage the watershed in which it lies and every property has to sequester carbon (plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere). That’ll help combat climate change. And every property has to support the viable food webs of the animals associated with the property.

Lawn does none of those things.

If you have a lot of lawn, you get a lot of runoff, and you’re polluting your watershed with the fertilizers and the pesticides you put on the lawn. When you have a well-planted property, it keeps the water on site, cleans it, helps it soak into the ground and recharges your water table.

Choose plants that are going to support that food web, the ones that will share the most energy with other living things. That’s the problem with plants from other continents; our insects can’t eat them. So, there are no insects for the birds, and the food web stops.

In 84% of the counties where they occur, oaks are the No. 1 plant for passing along that energy. If you’re going to plant a tree, that is the best plant to choose.

Amen.

Should Wilmington City Council Be Allowed To Caucus?  Good question:

Late last week, the city council unanimously passed a resolution requesting that the Delaware General Assembly create an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act for meetings attended by council members of the same political party – referred to in the proposal as any  “caucus of the City Council.”

Every member of the city council is a Democrat, except for one.

City officials say the exemption would give council members the ability to freely discuss ideas and key issues related to business or proposed legislation. But opponents say the public should be able to access those communications.

If the resolution is approved by the General Assembly, regular council and committee meetings will continue to be held publicly, as they are now. However, council members would also be permitted to meet privately among themselves to discuss various city-related affairs.

I report (well, actually a reporter does). You decide.  What do you think?

What do you want to talk about?