Outro Track of the Day
Ok so the Trump tariffs are unleashed and somehow – despite the Donald saying this was the plan not just during the campaign but for decades, despite him and his crew saying over and over that they finally settled on when America was great and it was the gilded age of the 1890s – people didn’t quite believe he’d do it.
People on CNBC were howling and then grabbed audio from the earnings call of Restoration Hardware, which relies on East Asian factories producing antique-y looking items at an affordable price as their whole business model. Even their CEO, in real time, broke when someone showed him the graph of his share price cratering 25% yesterday.
Yet people were surprised. Many are still in shock. And some seem determined to stick to “Trump is an idiot” takes – which is partly how we got here – and/or trying to decode the economic logic.
So I’m delaying getting out other things because I agree with Chris Murphy, US senator from Connecticut, who was out early as economists and pundits spun elaborate theories about what the economic goal was here and people busied themselves figuring out what fake math suggested by an AI had come up with the “formula” or posting postapocalyptic memes from The Road.
As Murphy wrote on BlueSky:
…those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive.
No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.
This week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense.
That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.
Murphy is nearly there. But there’s a much simpler way to understand what Trump is doing. Yes, these are not about economics but political coercion – domestically and internationally. With yes some yummy grift and bribes thrown in, which Murphy and the FT’s Ed Luce or the Bulwark’s
have been writing for months.There’s also a great Gillian Tett FT piece trying to make sense of blowing up a global trading system designed by and for the benefit of the united states by raising the ghost of long-forgotten economist Albert Hirschman, author of a book published in 1945, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade. No I hadn’t heard of him either. But pretty compelling that insofar as there is method to the madness it’s probably this purely imperialistic semi-autarkic vision.
And it’s going to be particularly bad for climate action and climate tech. Here’s James Temple in MIT Technology Review:
Trump’s tariffs will deliver a big blow to climate tech
Broader economic anxieties and uncertainty over clean-energy subsidies are compounding industry fears.
Carbon Brief, getting ahead of the pack, assembled a bewildering array of experts a few days ago to predict the impacts – and this was BEFORE the numbers actually came out.
It’s a Mafia Shakedown
There’s a simpler way to understand what’s going on. Donald Trump is a mob boss and he has decided extortion as imperialism is the way to unchecked power at home and around the globe. Nice economy you got there – shame if something happened to it, while holding a Molotov cocktail and a lighter.
This resonated with some people online when I said it. But then I thought, damn. If that’s right, what do you actually do about that. Growing up in New York you can imagine when we watched Godfather and Goodfellas in the 80s and 90s and saw John Gotti become a folk hero, sure these were tragedies but the guys certainly looked cool for a bit.
When you’re older than like 14 and hear real-world stories of people whose lives were blown apart because they dared not to pay extortion, you sober up pretty quick. My great-uncle, Tom Wallace, back in the 1930s, had a sawdust business. He took nearly worthless sawdust from lumber mills and resold it to butcher shops, pubs, bars, theatres. Sawdust soaks up blood or beer or whatever and you just sweep it away.
Kind of a hard business to get conventional fire insurance.
And when the local mob soldier turned up suggesting Uncle Tom pay them to look out for his stuff, he being a young and headstrong and principled guy told them to fuck off. That weekend his warehouse burned down and that was the end of his career as the Sawdust King of the Bronx.
So standing up to extortion can feel a bit risky. I wondered if there were examples of people who did that, and whether there are anything we could learn from their example that might be useful as boardrooms and national capitals and climate tech entrepreneurs and others scramble to respond to this just straight up shakedown of basically everyone on earth not named Trump.
There are two modes for the sort of “enough is enough” resistance. One is Addiopizzo. If my Uncle was Italian he might have used the word “pizzo” to describe what the mob guy wanted. It wasn’t just money. It could be favours, or to hire a mafiosi who wouldn’t turn up for work, or to use a specific mobbed-up supplier. Ultimately it’s about control. And giving obedience to the local strongman, who tells you the law will be no protection and hey all your competitors are already on board so get in line.
In Sicily, in some ways the home of what Hollywood thinks of when they say mafia, 80% of all business in Sicily 20-25 years ago was paying ‘pizzo’ because quiet life
real people who wanted to do business without paying the pizzo decided to fight back.. Some of them got killed. But enough people joined together to start insisting that by sticking together they could push back. More than 20 years later, this “goodbye pizzo” or Addiopizzo is still going.
So I asked the grassroots group’s representative, Linda Vetrano, to tell their story to see if there was anything relevant that people planning a fight back against this nonsense could pick up and learn from.
Because Sicilian history does offer an alternative. Way back in 1282, a bunch of people from Anjou in France had taken over Sicily some 20 years earlier. They were sucking the place dry with taxes, forcing people into unpaid labour, and thought they could extract whatever they wanted because they were in charge. Stop me if the parallel isn’t obvious yet. On Easter Monday, during evening prayers, a more or less spontaneous revolt broke out that led to basically most of the French who were running the place like mafia bosses being strung up, stabbed, burned, and driven out. Google “Sicilian Vespers” if you want to know more. But it didn’t work out so well for Sicily. A long war followed as other people fought to control the place. The violence, while it must have felt good at the time, didn’t actually get people what they wanted.
The patient and sometimes less exciting work of building solidarity and community and holding each other up? That’s what Addiopizzo did. So, for what it’s worth, see if you find anything worth learning from with Linda Vetrano, speaking for their group.
And if you’re planning a trip to Sicily, we recommend Addiopizzo Travel, where you can actually be sure to stay, tour, shop, eat, etc in places that aren’t funding the OG Sicilian version of Donald Trump.
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