“Washington, D.C., handyman Bora Akcakanat said he believes the trade war is fluctuating the price of lumber and other materials he relies on.
"’I used to quote my customers estimates and stuff — with materials included. I don't do that anymore because I don't know what prices are going to be the next day,’ Akcakanat said.”
If this sounds like a new story to you, your memory is too short to be trusted. In 2019 when Trump had one of his delusional “tariffs are good for the economy” temper tantrums, American car manufacturers and their US suppliers started to close down operations as prices from China became unpredictable. At that time, a friend of mine worked for a Detroit company that provided electronic controls (mostly smart headlights and their controls), body parts (metal and plastic), and other assemblies to everyone from GM and Ford to Mercedes, VW, and Audi. (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese manufacturers, of course, did all of that design and manufacturing work internally.) In late 2019, he was looking for another job, ideally in another industry, because Detroit manufacturing was all but shutdown because the price of Chinese electronics and other parts became unpredictable. He used almost the same words as Akcakanat in the opening quote, when his company’s purchasing department didn’t “know what prices are going to be the next day” and purchase orders were no longer placed with any confidence regarding delivery or price. Not long after that conversation, his company laid off the entire purchasing department and shut down electronics assembly.
Obviously, those short memory, history-challenged MAGAots have forgotten how expensive even low quality pine 2x4’s were during Trump’s last two years in office resulting roughly a 175% FLCP (a lumber price benchmark) price increases between April and September 2020, topping out at triple the 2018 pricing in May of 2021. Currently, a majority (60%) of corporate CEOs expect a recession in the 2nd half of 2025 and another 15% expect it to happen early in 2026. Consumers are even less optimistic, with only 17% believing business conditions are “good.” Personally, I don’t know what world the 17% are living in, but they are clearly living in a propaganda bubble.
One of Hitler’s biggest advantages in overthrowing the German democratic government was that the US had blown up the world economy and some of Germany’s biggest financiers, US banks, were calling in loans which were bankrupting German companies and putting tens of thousands of Germans out of work. Trump, on the other hand, took over the strongest economy in the world and one of the strongest economies in US history. Economic instability is one of fascism’s most useful tools. Even in the best of times, after an extended period of peace, it is almost impossible for any country not to be plagued with “excess males, but in a recession/depression those mostly-useless men are guaranteed to be unemployed and pissed off and looking to blow things up and kill people. All of those January 6th rioters, purposeless militias, and the obviously overwhelming numbers of incels and generally weird men stomping through the country will be even more purposeless when Trump blows up the economy.
Doing that is, of course, a gamble and Republicans have been the “Party of Unintended Consequences” for at least 100 years, but Trump’s entire life has been filled with failed gambles and, so far, he’s managed to escape consequences for any of that. At 78 with his physical and mental faculties in obvious decline, he’s sure to feel he has nothing to lose with one more toss of the dice. And the Trump crowd are just too dumb to know they are the dice he’s tossing. Nothing in our political system is “normal” and, as a friend said last November, “nothing will ever be ‘normal’ again in this country.” This isn’t a right-vs-left thing, it’s a fascism-vs-everyone-else fight and fascism has a pretty good short term fight record. So, we’re in for it over the next decade or so and the outcome is far from guaranteed.
On that useless-males subject, one unintended consequence of the Russia-Ukraine war might be a golden age for Russia when it’s all said-and-done. Putin is tossing the sorry remains of the last 80 years of Russian procreation into the fire as nothing more than cannon fodder. This headline has all sorts of implications, “Russia's recruited so many inmates to fight in Ukraine that it's shuttering some of its prisons.” Of course, many of Russia’s prisoners are political “criminals,” but Russia has had an excess of unemployable men for at least 50 years and, just like the US and much of the rest of the world, the majority of educated citizens in Russia are women and that number is rising. After this war is over, there won’t be a lot of men left to make up for that deficit. Iceland demonstrated, after that country’s arrogant and foolish men blew up their economy gambling in the stock market, that women can make far better leaders than men in a complicated world.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and the human refuse the Republican Party has offered as “women in politics” aside, only a total fool (of which the US has 76M, at least) would argue that Trump has anything intellectually over Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stacey Abrams, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Cori Bush, Rep. Katie Porter, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and a few dozen other political figures Trump would call “radical left” and any rational person would know are simply 21st Century progressives. Our problem is that covid wasn’t a man-made disease and, as usual for nature, wasn’t nearly effective enough at culling the herd. The US is, so far, entirely too dependent on technology for warfare and that isn’t going to do much to solve the excess-male problems here. Maybe it’s time to remove helmets and protective gear from contact sports?
No comments:
Post a Comment