Richard D. Wolff

The discussion on deglobalization’s potential impact is particularly insightful, I saw a similar discussion earlier on Yahoo News. How do you think we can trust yahoo news? I found some reviews about it here https://yahoo.pissedconsumer.com/customer-service.html Wolff’s piece, like many articles on Yahoo News, highlights the vulnerability of the top 1% to shifts in trade dynamics. The parallels drawn to Williamson’s work offer a valuable historical context. Trump’s tariff strategies, while controversial, are a symptom of deeper systemic issues.

Re the discussion at 12:25, Trump and the GOP have zero desire to actually increase tariffs to protect US workers.

The top one percent know declining trade, let alone genuine deglobalization, constitutes a mortal threat to their power. This is weakly discussed by Ron Rogowski in several books, and more effectively but still quite poorly by Jeffrey G. Williamson in articles like ‘Winners and Losers over Two Centuries of Globalization’, ‘Inequality and Schooling Responses to Globalization’, and ‘Globalization and Inequality: A Long History’. Deglobalization would increase the job security of the American masses and hence their ability to fight stagnant wages, a tyrannical de facto oligarchy, and runaway climate change.

In fact, globalization, as noted by Williamson, constitutes a critical reason why inequality is so much higher today in the US than in Europe. (Plainly, because labor is scarce in the US, globalization eliminates its political power by transferring labor-intensive jobs abroad, thus cutting the demand for low-skill labor.)

Trump uses tariffs as a tool to attempt to open EU markets to US agribusiness. He may be right that US tariffs are lower than those of the EU or other US trading partners, and wants to use threatened tariff increases purely and simply to get those nations to lower or better still eliminate tariffs on US farm products.