The Trump Tariffs, the WTO and Globohomo

complete corporate global domination was the plan

I was reminded of this piece (hat tip ArthurinCali), written by Kevin Williamson in the National Review back in 2016, from which this beautiful prose is extracted. As the 90s started rolling talk like this, traditionally relegated to country clubs and the smokey backrooms of the political connected, entered into the open speech of the right. It is why I could not stomach the Republican party for most of my life. I couldn’t stand the Democrats either but their odiousness was of a somewhat different character.

Everything is different now. I’ve been trying to assess the potential affects of the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff regime. There is more to it than tariffs. Treasury Secretary Bessent and Trump’s economic team have a much richer plan behind this. I am not qualified to assess it in its fullness so I have been reviewing what others have to say. Unfortunately the people I’ve been reading so far have such chips on their shoulders they haven’t been particularly useful. My sense tells me that this is a work in progress. Trump’s team is nimble and ready to adjust as circumstances change. This gives me great hope because the only kinds of massive changes that have any chance of working are done in this way.

For too long we’ve had massive legislation — thousands of pages of nonsense — that lock our government into rigid policy positions that cause more harm than good. And that’s assuming the legislation was made in good faith which is never the case these days.

In software design there are two main approaches: waterfall and agile. Waterfall is when a single monolithic project is designed from ground up and implemented as a whole only to find, perhaps years down the line, that requirements were flawed and the design built to implement preclude fixing the code to match the updated requirements.

Agile is the opposite approach where a minimal viable project is quickly built, and put into the field. Feedback is received and adjustments are easy to make because the team hasn’t gone down a years-long road that locked them into a rigid design. The agile, incremental approach can lead to an actual functional project. It’s surprising how many firms start off agile and revert to waterfall out of laziness or inexperience.

Trump’s "Liberation Day” plan is flexible. It’s open to tinkering and ready to adjust as required. That’s how FDR’s New Deal worked and whatever you think of what came after — he did manage to save the capitalist system and build an infrastructure juggernaut. He did this by trying hundreds of different programs, dropping the ones that failed and sticking with those that succeeded. We must give Trump the leeway to make mistakes and adjust. The media will do their best to jump on every mistake but with twitter and substack we can and are pushing back on the wreckers.

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There is a tremendous back and forth (mostly forth) on twitter with drop shipper types bemoaning the devastation of their business model: trapped between the Chinese, with whom they‘ve signed contracts preventing them from manufacturing in the US, and firms like Walmart that control everything on the retail end, these guys are finished.

I don’t like to see anyone lose their livelihood (well mostly anyone), but if this is the great engine of American ingenuity we have to sacrifice to regain our national greatness as the most brilliant manufacturing innovators in history, it’s a price well worth paying. C’est la vie. We’ve all had knocks in life. Ya gotta get back up and keep swinging.

That said, here’s a more humorous take to provide some levity:

One thing I find interesting about the Trump tariffs is there has been no mention of the World Trade Organization. The WTO was the institution used, in part, to hammer all of us who used to criticize globalism. It’s primary role was to mediate trade disputes between corporate firms and nations. It’s clients were multinational conglomerates. The arbitrators and attorneys who oversaw their disputes were drawn from the elite ranks of the corporatocracy. Arbitrators are well aware of who pays their way.

At the time, between 10-30 years ago, we were told to shut up — the WTO has authority over these issues since they are “supranational” questions. In fact the globalism project itself was a supranational attempt to remove sovereignty from nations and put such vital national questions as industrial policy, trade, and even the ability to decide who to trade with, outside the reach of our democratic institutions and into the hands of multinational conglomerates.

One function of the WTO was the creation of int’l arbitration tribunals where corporations who lost or, for whatever reason, didn’t get an expected government contract from a given state could literally sue that nation for lost potential profits. Yes, that’s right. One goal of corporate globalism was to entirely remove risk from the plans and investments of our beloved giant multinationals.

We see a version of this when the Pentagon offers a competitive development project to two shipbuilders with the understanding that the winner will get to build two ships and the loser one. This way they all make a profit while the taxpayer loses. Forget that maintaining two entirely different designs imposes huge costs on the military and taxpayer. Removal of risk, of any losses to military contractors, is one of the primary goals of the procurement process today. We see this across the nation and the globalized world.

WTO tribunals exist now in a limited way and would’ve been placed on steroids with the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — which is why Hillary Clinton and everyone else but Trump was pimping so hard for it. We can thus see the outlines of this web of control and power that has slowly crept across the globe.

Such corporate arbitration tribunals should now disappear along with the WTO — and good riddance. National sovereignty is back and just in time before the overarching framework of corporate world domination was firmly in place. Trump scuttling the TPP in 2017 was a vital blow to this structure.

If you ever wondered why China could, under WTO rules, impose tariffs on US-made goods while the US was not permitted to do the same, this was largely to enforce that part of the plan: China was to be the world (slave) factory and the US the financial, judicial and military enforcer. Of course China was happy to gain these benefits but managed to wriggle free of the constraints of this global system. You can mark the date when they finally broke free since it’s the same moment the US media stopped singing hosanas to the wonders of the Chinese system. I believe it was in the early-mid teens but don’t quote me.

The corporate world domination project required one vital piece: a kinetic enforcement mechanism. They thought it would be the US military but that was never going to be placed outside national control thanks to our pesky Constitution. So the plan was to control the presidential selection panel and thus have free reign to use the US military as the enforcement arm of globohomo. They thought the danger to their plans would come from the Democrats so the Dem primary process was rigged (with superdelegates, etc). They never saw it coming from the right.

There is always a crack where the light gets through.

Perhaps we can better understand some of the deeper dimensions to the unceasing impeachments, brutal accusations and assassination attempts over the past eight long years.

The Corporate Globalist Plan has its postwar roots in institutions like the Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome and the formation of the EU. Other institutions like the WEF (1971) and Bilderberg (1954) performed certain functions for Globohomo as well.

The Trilateral Commission itself was formed by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973. The Club or Rome was founded in 1968 by European industrialists and academics and its first major work, a foreshadow of WEF-style thinking, was a report entitled The Limits to Growth. I won’t go into their histories here but you can find information about them across the web.

The EU’s role was to impose a massive corporate-friendly regulatory framework not just on EU signatory nations but the world. The niggling bureaucratic manner and fussy authoritarian superstructure smothering the EU was planned for the world. This plan, along with the EU itself, is most likely now done. Without the US as the backbone, and with China and Russia on the outside of this system, the EU will not be able to maintain the project on its own.

I would argue the failure of Globohomo in the Ukraine war and ever hastening manifestation of the multipolar world was one of the main body blows for globohomo.

In many ways this half-century long project can be seen as the biggest mafia-style operation in world history — at least with regard to the smaller nations. The IMF gets nations hooked on the dope of debt. Then they put the screws to the country: forcing it to abandon pensions and other ‘non-productive’ obligations and instead plant trade crops or whatever the int’l corporate masters thought they could make the most money from. The WTO existed as the good cop — explaining the lay of this new land and how to stay in the good graces of the machine. If any nation got too many ideas first would come the vulture capitalists and friends in judicial robes to steal the nation’s gold and sovereign wealth; and if that didn’t do the trick well the good old US Navy and the CIA were always there, looming just over the horizon, to make them think again. Or just kill their leaders and place new puppets into position. Whatever.

The hollowing out of the US’s industrial base was just one of the prices that had to be paid for the plan. This was necessary to provide a buyer of last resort for Gobohomo’s Chinese produced shit and to also flood the world with the USD to offshore the inevitable inflation of constant money printing and — of course — maintain world economic domination via USD reserve currency status.

Of course that plan’s victims were never its progenitors or their offspring. Nor was it those who found their way into the rapacious speculative world of finance or entered the big tech space at just the right time. For the vast bulk of the US citizenry the experience was decades of devastation, hopelessness and poverty that we have a long way to dig out of.

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The sheer scope of the plan is impressive: to treat nations like children to be corrected. If you ever wondered why US leaders have seemed so weak and useless these past decades wonder no more. But the plan also suffered from that same grandiosity: one flaw — say a president who isn’t along for the ride and has the boldness to stick to his own vision — and the whole house of cards can tumble down.

That said let’s not count them out yet. The men who built this shitty edifice — they don’t just fold up shop and find a new gig. There will most likely be major disruptions coming. Be prepared to explain to friends and family that there will be temporary hardships — some higher prices and stock market disruptions — but, with any luck, in the medium to long term we will get our nation and our democracy back.

I want to include a twitter post by the New Right’s Lomez that puts a face — the face of a real community — devastated by this obscene and treasonous project. It lays out exactly what all of the above machinations have led to across the nation for the last 30 years since NAFTA. Multiply this by thousands of American towns.

And in closing, this great summation by Josiah Lippincott:

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