On July 24, the ultra-reactionary Trump administration imposed new duties on imports from more than 80 countries, including Canada, Mexico, and members of the European Union.
The new duties, in a show of presidential absolutism, have been levied without congressional approval and after the Supreme Court overturned Trump’s previous round of tariffs.
Trump’s repeated attempts to impose tariffs come amid the crisis and decomposition of US imperialism on the world stage, as its interventionist tools are being more frequently used to secure existing markets and open up new ones for US monopolies. The tariffs are economic bombs used to exercise coercion and force “reforms” and new unilateral deals that benefit US imperialism, to further subjugate oppressed nations and in collusion and contention with rival imperialist powers.
According to the Trump administration, a second set of investigations driving the sanctions focuses on 16 trading partners, including China and the European Union, for what the US government describes as “excess capacity”. The strategy of China’s bureaucratic bourgeoisie has been to invest heavily in export manufacturing, flooding markets with more products than their American competitors, thereby creating this “excess capacity”. This reveals how the tariffs are nakedly about imperialist contention, principally with Chinese social-imperialism.
The Trump administration has also targeted Brazil, using this same trade provision to impose a 25% tariff. This followed meetings with Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of far-right former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Trump hopes to use the tariffs to pressure the Brazilian government of the opportunist Luis Inacio to further surrender their national economy to greater US imperialist exploitation in exchange for relief from the tariffs.
The US government document stated that several sectors will be exempt from this punishment, specifically those considered strategic: rare earth minerals, certain refined metals, oil and gas, aircraft parts, and major agricultural exports. These exemptions show the real purpose of the tariffs, not to “re-industrialize” America, but to secure resources and supply chains for US monopolies.
While these exemptions shield military contractors and technology monopolies, workers and small businesses bear the costs through higher prices and economic uncertainty. Small businesses, denied similar protections, quickly filed suit in federal trade court seeking to overturn the tariffs.
The flimsy justification Trump has provided for enacting the new tariffs, in an attempt to circumvent the legal restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court, is investigations by US trade representatives into concerns about “forced labor.” Today, an estimated 1.1 million people are trapped in forced labor operations within the USA (primarily foreign-born workers). Just last year, Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)” cut millions in funding to the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and canceled 70 programs that targeted child labor and human trafficking. US imperialism gives itself immunity to charges of child labor despite the dependence of US multinational corporations’ supply chains on the exploitation of child workers all around the world.
As previously reported by The Worker, US monopolies are increasingly employing child labor, illegally, as part of the developing economic crisis of imperialism, illustrated with the death of a 17-year-old working in Mississippi, or with legislation in Florida and other states loosening restrictions on child labor.
Image: Donald Trump speaks at an event at Joint Base Andrews, 2019. Credit: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.
The Worker is an entirely volunteer-run revolutionary newspaper free from and radically antagonistic to corporate influence. We rely on the support of our readers to sustain our editorial line in service of the working class and the reconstitution of its party, the Communist Party. Make a one-time or recurring donation to our newspaper today:
Make a one-time donation
Make a monthly donation
Make a yearly donation
Choose an amount
Or enter a custom amount
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
