President Trump’s “senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing” is someone called Peter Navarro, chosen by one of Trump’s relatives (apparently) because he’d written a book called “Death by China...”. So yes, he was an ideal “anti-China” candidate for Mr Donald’s Mickey-Mouse cabinet, both in his first administration in 2017, and now in this one - which, it seems has now decided to declare all-out “Trade War” against the Chinese economy.
As would be expected from anyone close to Trump, this professor of economics (how?) combines racial and anti-foreign prejudice with bizarre theories and believes in fantastical conspiracies. So, he explained in an article printed in the Financial Times on Monday, that the USA is in “a state of national emergency” and all because of a “broken system of international trade... rigged against America”. He portrays the mighty US as a tragic victim - attacked and beaten up by the rest of the world: “cheated, looted, raped, pillaged, and plundered'”!
Never mind that it was the USA which wrote the rules of world trade and which is the dominant force behind the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund - which have certainly plundered and pillaged many poor countries over the past decades.
Neither does Peter Navarro explain how it is that the US has still somehow managed to be the wealthiest country in the world, with dominant industries in tech, finance, and social media: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, etc... And by the way, many of which have large parts of their production located in... China! As, of course, does Elon Musk’s Tesla...
Of course, China is a big country with a big economy, but it is quite clearly no threat to any other. It is more sinned against, than sinner, as the priests and vicars in Trump’s godly world might confirm, under oath...
So yes, China may have the world’s largest economy, but what counts is how this is spread over its 1.4bn people. Compared to the gross national income of the US, which works out at $89,678 per head of its 340m population, each head in China has just $13,873; meaning the “poor” US is six times as wealthy...
They have our backs? Oh sure!
The mayhem on the world’s stock exchanges that followed Trump’s tariffs announcement last week, to the capitalists class’s utter horror, would have been a reason to fall about laughing, were it not for the fact that when $6 (or 11) trillion gets wiped off the markets, workers’ pensions and livelihoods are at risk.
Here in Britain, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves treated the rest of us to a pop-up at the Jaguar Land Rover factory where they made soothing noises about how they “have got our backs”... Yes, as in warfare, not welfare, cutting pensioners’ fuel allowance, and abandoning the NHS and elderly social care to the dogs.
For good measure, another spectacle they treated everyone to this week was the Tories calling for the nationalisation of “British Steel” to save over 5,000 jobs at Scunthorpe, (put at risk, so they say, by the 25% tariff on steel exports to the US) - while Starmer’s Labour opposed them, and insisted it should remain in commercial hands. Only the Tories would see any irony in this, however, since workers know very well who “Labour” represents.
Anyway, since the factory is owned by the Chinese multinational Jingye, anti-Chinese feeling on the Tories’ part no doubt played a part in their desire to Make it British Again...
No, it’s the same, rotten, bloody, world!
There was worse to come from the Oval Office, however. On Tuesday Trump “entertained” Israel’s Netanyahu, who has now gone in for the kill in Gaza, bombing, burning and maiming emergency and medical workers, journalists, men, women, children; everyone is a target; there is no safe place.
Of course Netanyahu and his army would never have been able to continue this one-sided war against the Palestinians without US/British aid, weapons and consent; not in the past and not in present. The Trump-Netanyahu joint plan to “relocate” the population of Gaza is obscene. The US/Israeli bombing of Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and maybe soon, Iran too - these are all an imperialist obscenity which the working class everywhere (and in Israel itself) cannot countenance and will never, ever, forget.
Starmer told workers at JLR that “this is a changing and completely new world“. But no, it isn’t! In fact the blood-soaked Trump and his Israeli puppet Netanyahu, are just the naked expression of the “old world” of degenerate imperial capitalism, led by buffoons like Trump today, who, aided by the likes of Starmer, blight the world - and will continue to do so, as long the working class allows it.
So, while there is no “state of emergency” for the capitalists, there is definitely one for the working class, which has the historical task of throwing them out. Workers everywhere need to “get political” urgently, in order to prepare for this!