The United States Has Become the World's Wild Card
'Being America's enemy is bad, being its friend is worse.'
Approximately 2.9 million people reside in the landlocked country of Lesotho, which is considered one of the poorest countries in the world. Officials in Lesotho, as well as the country’s citizens, were happy when American companies began to send orders for text tiles. Levi’s and other companies, as well as Trump golf shirts, sourced materials from the country for clothing Americans regularly buy.
Trump looked at this “shit-hole” country trying to become less of a “shit-hole” and trying to lift itself through hard work and economic success and decided that the country needed to be crushed once and for all. A 50 percent tariff was levied on the denim and other materials the country exported to the U.S. If Levi’s continues to use denim made in Lesotho, the price of a pair of jeans will increase by at least $10, if not more. If the tariffs remain, as seems likely, then Lesotho will be severely affected.
For the most part, manufactured exports from Africa to the United States are minuscule. But to countries like Lesotho, the impact of tariffs is enormous. Exports of denim and diamonds make up more than a tenth of the country’s gross domestic product.
This will “devastate the economy,” said Jacques Nel, head of Africa Macro at Oxford Economics, a research firm. Lesotho is already a poor country. It has a population of two million and its entire national output is about $2 billion a year, with an annual per capita income of $975 (Huge Tariffs Hit Small African Economies).
The United States has demonstrated to the world that it is no longer a reliable partner. The political system is broken, and the guardrails created formelry by tradition of checks and balances have been removed. The nation and the world look on in utter shock, unsure what will happen next.
Uninformed Americans, products of our educational system, won’t understand why wrecking the economy for a country like Lesotho is a bad thing. Right-wingers, libertarians, and many others supporting Trump, or not as passionately opposed to him like many of us here, are incapable of understanding the effects of the opportunity cost of losing a country like Lesotho. By punishing Lesotho, we potentially give an opening to our enemies, drive more of those citizens to migration, and also create the conditions for more disease and pandemics.
Until the rise of Reagan, Republicans still maintained a basic understanding of economics. Gerald Ford was the last of the old-style Republican presidents, who, while focused more on business and less on Main Street, also recognized that a swing of the pendulum too far in one direction would harm the nation’s overall foundation. Along came Reagan, who vilified the government so that he could swing the pendulum as far as possible toward Big Business, lacking any concern or understanding of how that would harm Main Street.
To justify such pro-business policies, Republicans ended the era when decisions were made on sound economic theory and entered the era of “political economics.” Decisions were made not with the concern that 2+2=4 but that 2+2=12. “And what better, four or 12?” The myth was that “if we do it this way, then everyone will be rich and happy. Just watch!” The idea that magical policies, such as the Laffer Curve, would lift the boat for all Americans was trumpeted and sold to Americans in much the same way as participation in a Pick-6 lottery.
While the United States more forcefully thrust its consume-or-die ethos on a world in which it was the sole superpower, Americans came to accept that the truest patriotic act was to consume. Everything about our society revolves around consumption, and the more we consume, the better off the country is.
Reagan and the Republicans made a social contract of sorts with Americans. You close your eyes to the unbridled theft of the super-rich, and we will guarantee you that goods will always be cheap. When it became too difficult to manufacture goods locally at a competitive price, jobs were offshored to China and other Asian countries. In return, Americans got th cheap shit they craved, amassed massive amounts of debt, and the only new jobs were in the service industry which rarely offered full-time status.
Fast-forward four decades, and we now have the proof in the pudding: Ronald Reagan’s economic “revolution” was a historic failure. Reagan’s failure led us to Trump and, today, to the destruction of 80 years of relatively free trade. The greed that drove our American society into wars, into support for dictators, and left millions of Americans homeless, hopeless, under-employed, and addicted has come home to roost.
And instead of looking in the mirror and asking, “How did we f*** up so badly?” We are blaming the rest of the world for our ignorance, fascism, and crippling lack of curiosity.
Trump’s policies, now the policies of our country, will cast tens of millions into even more abject poverty. Innocent people in the U.S. and around the world will suffer and die because of these policies, because of our greed.
We have the potential to be amazing, but we have become shitty, unreliable, dangerous, and most tragically, unpredictable. The world will not forgive us for this hubris.