TARIFFS AND SANCTIONS

Paul Edwards

Both terms describe punitive actions directed at economic rivals.  The degree of harm that can be inflicted by employing them has directly to do with the nature of the rival and its capacities and, more importantly, with the relative power of the initiator.

Tariffs are defined as “an official list of duties or charges on imports or exports”.  Their purpose is to make more expensive certain products originating in a foreign country.

Sanction is defined as “something that gives active support, or binding force, to an action, decree, or law”.  It can be used in a positive or negative way, depending on the intent of the user.

The idea of tariffs originated as a means, by making importation of foreign items more expensive, of giving significant advantage to those produced in the country imposing them.  Their use was recognized as intended to nurture an incipient industry that was unable to develop and thrive due to competition from imports.

Their use was recognized as a device to obstruct and impede the exports of one nation by another, and so, as an act of economic warfare, and was the cause of great friction between nations.  In some cases, their imposition gave an enormous boost to new industries in developing nations, sometimes at the price of war.

Economic sanctions are a newer phenomenon.  They are only effective when one nation has such great financial and diplomatic leverage over another that it can damage it in world markets, deny it access to financial and banking services, make officials persona non grata, and cripple its economic operation.

Effectively applied, they are a form of economic blockade, used to injure and, conceivably, destroy a nation. So much for theoretical effects.  In practice, there are limiting factors and forces that impair their efficiency, as occurred with Russia.

Tariffs arose as a defense of home industry against domination by foreign manufacturers or producers.  There is a precarious relation between their positive effects for fledgling industry, and the resentment they create.  Since they risked igniting war, they were historically used cautiously and sparingly.

The imbecile Trump has launched—orally, as usual—a looney assault on the world economy, because his Simian senses have perceived that this calcified Capitalist country imports everything, and he wants to punish other nations for our boundless greed.  Economically illiterate, he sees tariffs only as a potent weapon, and can’t imagine being their target.  As in all he does, he lives to see himself as the power, most especially when he is not.

His rates are absurd and untenable and would incur equally odious ones imposed on The Empire.  Even if he set far lower rates and there was not broad blowback, the burden of higher priced imports would fall heavily on American consumers.

It couldn’t make them buy American substitutes—there aren’t any.  We have no new industries, and in this rigged casino of a nation, there will be none.  The Big Money Game in benighted America is no fault hijacking of public wealth by fiscal insiders.

Having set out to do, for the wrong reasons, what could not be done for the right ones, his idiocy will go the way of annexing Canada and buying Greenland.  It is painful that our numbnuts nation is fronted by such a grossly stupid, boorish ignoramus, with an adoring plurality of dimwitted rubes behind him.

Sanctions are a related moron’s game.  Over decades—Trump did not originate this folly—the other branch of our putrescent polity decided sanctions were the way to punish Russia as the dreaded enemy our War Machine has to have to stay fully lubed.

Assuming, as our deranged “leaders” did—assumptions are the basis of our national behavior—that our shaky dollar ruled the world, our political parties, united in provincial incapacity, acted to impound Russian money in Western banks, to hamstring their businesses, eliminate their markets, and drive them to ruin.

Having sold themselves the myth of Russia’s weakness, certain of its downfall, they were stunned to find their faith-based effort made it stronger.  Facing our enmity, Russia supercharged its industrial plant, initiated non-dollar transactions to bypass the SWIFT system, and made a mockery of scattergun sanctions.

The Empire’s imports were not critical to Russia, and it found it lacked the muscle to strangle its broad world trade.  Russia is stronger than it has ever been, and because Putin won’t abandon its core security requirements for our schmata Schlockmeister, the putz is threatening more of what failed spectacularly.

America, under first a senile bullshit artist, and now a sleazeball carney hustler, has performed one of the most ridiculous pratfalls ever executed by a floundering, over-the-hill, failing empire.

While funding the wholesale murder of Palestinians by Nazi Israel, along with the monotonous slaughter of Nazi Ukrainians by Russia—the inconsistency would be delicious but for the magnitude of tragedy in each bitter case—Trump continues to act the buffoon with his struts and pronunciamentos, appearing for all the world the very image of a Chaplin burlesque.

Criticism of this dim, flashy troll has no effect, though, and the deranged, hysterical Democratic Party offers no alternative.  The reality is you and I, and the world are, to a frightening degree, subject to the whims of this ugly, inferior, inadequate creature.  A proverb says “where there is no vision, the people perish”.

Q.E.D.