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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The FAFO Breakfast Special: coming soon to American diners all over? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-28
We begin today with Luis Melgar and Rachel Lerman of The Washington Post report on specific items that could get more expensive beginning this week if the Trump Administration goes through with its proposed tariffs on Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese imported goods.
Tomatoes, T-shirts, crude oil and cars are among the items that could get more expensive if tariffs pledged by Trump go into effect, according to a Washington Post analysis of international trade data from the Census Bureau. Mexico is the largest source of imports to the United States, followed by China and Canada. Together they account for 43 percent of the $3.1 trillion in goods that are imported. [...] China is the main source of imported consumer goods, sending about $210 billion worth of everyday household items into the United States last year. That means electronics like cellphones, apparel like cotton shirts or shoes and children’s toys could be subject to higher tariffs than they are now. [...] “There’s very little in [the] consumer electronics space that is not imported,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said on the company’s earnings call last week.
Tomatoes. Avocados. Bell peppers. And as breakfast turns into brunch, there’s all of the above plus beans, cucumbers, and bananas. Americans like the hot stuff nowadays, so jalapeño peppers fair game too.
Quico Toro of The Atlantic thinks that at some point, America’s bombastic Latin American foreign policy could very well be a boon to China.
The moment called for careful diplomacy, not a fit of pique. In Brazil, where the mistreatment of deportees on U.S. military flights had already caused controversy, Colombia’s spat narrowed the Brazilian government’s room for maneuver still further. And throughout the region, governments struggling to figure out what to do with large numbers of deportees found themselves staring into the abyss: Most Latin American governments do not like how the U.S. government is behaving but cannot afford a trade war with Uncle Sam. Or can they? Zoom out a bit and one might wonder. The era of uncontested U.S. leadership in the region is fading fast in the rearview mirror. These days, China provides an obvious alternative to the United States in the realms of trade, finance, and technology. In fact, most of South America—including big countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru—now trades more with China than with the United States. If you exclude Mexico, Chinese trade now dwarfs American trade in the region. After Trump was reelected, discussion in the region centered on how to balance growing Chinese influence with existing ties with the United States. Most countries were of a mind to try to stay neutral between the two powers and maintain good relations with both Washington and Beijing. Countless university seminars agonized over what a war in the Taiwan Strait would mean for Latin America: No country in the region would want to take sides, though many recognized that they might not have a choice. All along, the assumption tended to be that a crisis that started outside Latin America would have repercussions within it. What few at the time foresaw was that the region could be delivered to China through Trump’s sheer impetuosity, or his inability to think before posting.
David E. Sanger of The New York Times examines what Colombia’s quick capitulation to Trump could mean to Greenland, Denmark, and Panama.
Start with Denmark, whose prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, had a fraught, aggressive conversation with Mr. Trump just five days before he was inaugurated. Having heard his threat that he might use military or economic coercion to get his way on Greenland and the Panama Canal, she opened with ideas about how the United States could expand its existing military presence in Greenland — there is a Space Force base there — and help exploit its considerable mineral resources. Mr. Trump wasn’t interested in cooperation; he wanted control, perhaps ownership, and seemed happy to encourage a movement in Greenland to seek independence from Denmark to get there. [...] Denmark “would have been eager to negotiate with the Americans on basing rights, resource development, Arctic security coordination and whatever else the Trump Administration wanted,” Ian Bremmer, who heads the Eurasia Group consultancy, wrote on Monday morning. “It’s now more likely that Greenland will vote for independence in an upcoming referendum, creating its own security deal with the Americans, critically undermining U.S. relations with Denmark and, with it, the Nordic Bloc.” And then there is Panama, getting ready to receive Mr. Rubio. Usually a secretary of state’s first visit is all about reaffirming alliances and looking forward to years of cooperation. Mr. Rubio’s arrival will probably include some of that — and a demand that the Panama Canal Treaty be scrapped and the arrangement go back to what Theodore Roosevelt had in mind in 1903: American control.
Paul Krugman writes for his “Krugman wonks out” Substack that the imposition of tariffs will cause the United States to lose international credibility on anything that it says or even does.
So it looks quite likely that Trump will indeed impose high tariffs on our neighbors a few days from now. I don’t know that this will happen, and even if he does he may find some reason to reverse the tariffs a few days later. But I don’t think people fully realize how damaging even temporary tariffs on Canada and Mexico would be. For one thing, the North American Free Trade Agreement — which Trump renamed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement after some mostly cosmetic changes — is, in effect, a contract that everyone assumed was binding. NAFTA wasn’t a declaration of principles or intentions; it was a formal pact permanently eliminating most tariffs and other barriers to trade across our northern and southern borders. Now a U.S. president is threatening to ignore this pact and unilaterally slap on high tariffs. In which case you have to ask, what’s the point of negotiating with the United States? What’s an agreement worth if a U.S. president can decide to ignore the agreement whenever he feels like it? Of course, the loss of U.S. credibility extends to areas far beyond economics. In the future, what country in its right mind will trust U.S. guarantees that it will protect that nation’s security?
x Google said Monday it will change the name of Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” after the government updates its “official government sources.” The company also said it will start using Mount McKinley, which is currently called Denali.
[image or embed] — CNBC (@cnbc.com) January 27, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Aidan Quigley of Roll Call looks at Trump’s freeze on federal loans and grants and the programs that could suffer in the interim
At face value, the memo represents a major halt to the flow of funds from programs that could equal around 20 percent of all federal spending, not including interest on the debt. The memo said total spending on programs meeting the definition of “federal financial assistance” that could be impacted reached $3 trillion in fiscal 2024, though exemptions are likely to reduce that figure. Still, as written the pause could affect a big swath of programs that aid lower-income households, including: Medicaid; school breakfast and lunch programs; Section 8 rental assistance; Title I education grants; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; state grants for child care; Head Start; and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. [...] The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant Program and EPA grants to states and localities for clean water infrastructure — both of which fund a large chunk of congressional earmarks each year — could also be impacted. Foreign aid grants are likely to be put on hold as well as clean energy projects, as those are specifically named in earlier executive orders.
I guess that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis thought that Trump’s retribution didn’t apply to fellow Republicans at all, lol.
Lawrence Mower, Ana Cebellos, and Alexandra Gloroso/Miami Herald
Instead of supporting DeSantis on his signature issue in recent years, lawmakers are holding their own special session this week to support President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda by passing a bill that they’re calling the “Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy (TRUMP) Act.” And they are considering stripping DeSantis of his immigration enforcement powers, which the governor used to fly migrants to Martha’s Vineyard three years ago. House Speaker Daniel Perez, R-Miami, and Senate President, R-Wauchula, all but accused DeSantis of calling lawmakers back to Tallahassee to boost his own political profile. [...] Over the last six years, he’s run roughshod over his GOP colleagues, frequently vetoing their priorities while calling them back to Tallahassee to pass legislation that he touted during splashy news conferences and on the campaign trail. Republican leaders are now proposing to kneecap DeSantis on immigration. They could strip DeSantis of his authority to enforce immigration in the state and give that power to Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, a Republican who has a frosty relationship with DeSantis. Simpson, a former Senate president, was elected to lead the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in 2022.
Finally today, Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review doesn't seem to have much confidence that legacy media can keep up with the dizzying pace of news events.
I noted in 2020 that the “basic rhythms” of the news business aren’t designed to cope with deluges of huge stories: whatever the day’s news, it must be stretched or shrunk to fill roughly the same number of newspaper column inches or cable news hours; the internet, of course, theoretically offers near-infinite space for news coverage to expand, but many digital formats—from homepages to newsletters—themselves have spatial limits, and that’s before we get into strained newsroom resources and apparently diminished audience buy-in, as Stelter pointed out last week. These constraints make it hard for the news media, as a collective apparatus, to communicate proportion. We have tools for organizing stories by importance—back in 2020, I noted that the New York Times had run thirty-three banner front-page print headlines in less than six months, smashing even its election-year average—but the constant blare of headlines, as I noted, can have a “flattening effect, making it harder, over a long period of time, to distinguish actual news from attention hustling.” The problem of proportionality is recurring now. A story previewing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s potentially radical plans to “target vaccines” should he be confirmed as health and human services secretary appeared about halfway down a major Politico newsletter on Friday; yesterday, the CIA lab-leak story made the front page of the Times, but only in brief form at the very bottom. Needless to say that in the summer of 2020, both these stories would have been earth-shaking.
Yes, too much is happening too fast.
I’m out.
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