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Opinion
As the US Detains and Deports, Venezuela Reunites Families
A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Aug 05, 2025
In July 2025, the U.S. Congress passed a budget that commits at least $131 billion to expanding detention, deportation, and border militarization. It is the largest immigration enforcement package in modern U.S. history and one that most people are funding without knowing.
Public pension funds, university endowments, and municipal budgets are deeply invested in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) machinery. If you pay into a retirement fund, attend a university, or live in a major city, your money might be helping detain someone. Your tax dollars already are.
The plan triples ICE’s funding, revives the failed border wall project, builds new jails for families, and allocates $10 billion in unregulated funds to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At the same time, up to 17 million people risk losing healthcare and millions of children face losing access to school meals.
These priorities are not accidental. They reflect a political strategy that treats migration as a threat to be neutralized rather than a consequence of U.S. policy. This budget doesn’t just expand infrastructure, it expands a racialized system of surveillance, incarceration, and profit, while shrinking legal protection, due process, and public oversight.
Here’s what the new immigration budget includes:
- $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation—a threefold increase;
- $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers, including for children and families;
- $46.6 billion for border wall construction, which is more than triple what U.S. President Donald Trump spent in his first term;
- $10 billion in unregulated DHS funding to “safeguard the border” without oversight;
- A daily detention capacity of 116,000 human beings, enough to fill a stadium with mothers, students, toddlers, and elders or to disappear the entire population of Lansing, Michigan or Athens, Georgia; and
- An 800 person limit on the number of immigration judges, worsening already record-breaking court backlogs and delaying due process for millions.
ICE Is Everywhere
ICE doesn’t operate alone. It dances with Palantir’s algorithms. It swallows data from school and Department of Motor Vehicles records. It whispers to local cops in sanctuary cities. It hides in contracts signed by universities that claim to care about inclusion. It is public and private, visible and invisible, and always expanding.
The border doesn’t stop at the border.
ICE shares tech, tactics, and training with local police across the U.S., especially in Black and Brown communities. The same algorithms used to deport migrants are used to lock up teenagers in Chicago, LA, and New York. The war economy is domestic, too.
Migration Is Not a Crisis; U.S. Policy Is
The people being detained and deported are not a crisis. They are the result of one. U.S. foreign policy, through sanctions, coups, climate extraction, and economic warfare, has destabilized entire regions and then criminalized those who flee.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Venezuela.
Years of U.S. sanctions have severely constrained Venezuela’s economy and pushed millions to migrate. A recent study in The Lancet Global Health found that unilateral economic sanctions lead to an estimated 564,000 deaths every year, mostly among children under five. The researchers concluded that sanctions are a form of economic warfare with deadly consequences, often as destructive as armed conflict. Venezuela is among the countries most severely affected.
A Stark Contrast: Venezuela’s Efforts to Reunite Families
Despite being locked out of international markets, denied access to its own reserves, and targeted by ongoing U.S. sanctions, the Venezuelan government has prioritized reuniting families separated by deportation. Flights have been organized to return Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. and neighboring countries. Deportees are met with medical care, housing support, and assistance. There are no billion-dollar detention centers. No ankle monitors. No private contractors. Just the political decision to bring people home with dignity.
This reflects a deeper difference. The United States continues to expand a war economy, one that profits from incarceration, surveillance, and militarized borders. Corporations like Palantir, CoreCivic, and GEO Group are major beneficiaries of immigration funding, alongside weapons manufacturers and data firms. In contrast, Venezuela’s response, under siege, has been to build on a peace economy rooted in social programs, community organization, and everyday resilience.
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee.
Much of that work is led by women.
In Venezuela, Madres Víctimas del Fascismo have been organizing alongside the government to locate, support, and repatriate their children, many of whom were detained in the U.S. or in Latin American countries. These mothers have worked with consular authorities, spoken in public forums, and demanded state action to bring their families back together. Through their pressure, and the government’s cooperation, some have already seen their children return home.
This is what a peace economy looks like, one built on social programs, community organization, and state-supported reunification.
The Violence of the Border Enforcement Is the Violence of the Empire
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee. Venezuela knows this intimately. Its economy has been blocked, its institutions targeted, and its people criminalized the moment they cross a border. And yet it was Venezuela that welcomed deported migrants with food, medicine, and housing; they were greeted with care. A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Who Is Complicit?
This system doesn’t operate in just one region. It’s not limited to Texas or Arizona. It’s embedded across the country, in contracts, databases, and quiet forms of cooperation.
Schools often share data, directly or indirectly, with ICE. Universities collaborate with DHS through software licensing and research grants. Investors, including public pension funds and university endowments, hold shares in GEO Group, Palantir, and other deportation profiteers.
The U.S. has made its priorities clear. It is willing to spend more to detain migrants than to house the hundreds of thousands living unhoused on the streets of its cities. It is expanding detention while limiting legal avenues for relief. It is responding to the consequences of its foreign policy with policing not accountability.
It’s not enough to say “Abolish ICE.” We must hold accountable every institution that feeds its machinery, from schools that share data, to universities that license surveillance tech, to investors profiting from migrant detention.
Migration is not a crime. U.S. sanctions are.
- End institutional cooperation with ICE
- Demand divestment from companies profiting off detention
- Organize against U.S. sanctions and intervention
The war economy is everywhere. So the resistance must be, too.
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The Olympics Is the Last Thing LA Needs as It Deals With Fires and ICE
A new poll from the anti-Olympics coalition NOlympicsLA finds that public support for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics has soured significantly over time.
Aug 05, 2025
When the International Olympic Committee announced in September 2017 that Los Angeles would host the 2028 Summer Olympics, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti predicted, “The Olympics will spur a bold vision for our city.” Eight years later, enthusiasm in the City of Angels has dwindled considerably.
Current Mayor Karen Bass is under increasing pressure from locals who are concerned that LA, which is already experiencing a budget crisis, will be stiffed with a hefty Olympic bill. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is wreaking havoc on the city’s immigrant population, with masked agents in military-style garb snatching Angelenos off the streets—often violently—and cramming them into vans and ultimately into detention facilities with inhumane conditions.
Amid the mayhem, a new poll from the anti-Olympics coalition NOlympicsLA finds that public support for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics has soured significantly over time. A firm majority of respondents—some 54%—asserted a preference for spending public resources on wildfire recovery rather than the Olympics. Less than a quarter of respondents (24%) supported funding the Olympics over those still reeling from the wildfires that swept through LA in January 2025, ravaging places like the historically Black foothill community of Altadena.
The poll also found a notable age gap, with millennials and Gen Z overwhelmingly spurning the LA28 Games. A mere 22% of those polled between the ages of 18 and 29 were supportive of LA28 whereas in the 45-to-60 age bracket 53% supported the Games. The NOlympics LA survey also uncovered a gender gap: Women were more likely than men to oppose or be neutral toward hosting the LA 2028 Games (40% to 23% of men) and keener to prioritize wildfire recovery over Olympic preparations (61% to 49% for men).
The Olympics have a long and ignominious tradition of short-circuiting democracy, but it’s not too late for Los Angeles to make amends.
The Olympics tend to be popular in the abstract, but as the reality of hosting the Olympics draws closer—with overspending, gentrification, displacement, police intensification, greenwashing, and corruption coming into sharper focus—public support tends to shrink.
For instance, a few months ahead of the Paris 2024 summer Olympics, a poll found that 44% of Parisians thought the 2024 Olympics were a “bad idea.” Then, a couple weeks before the Paris 2024 Olympics kicked off, another poll discovered that the French were less than thrilled at the prospect. More than 65% of the population was either indifferent (36%), concerned (24%), or angry (5%) about hosting the Olympics.
At the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games, staged a year later in 2021 amid the coronavirus pandemic, a whopping 83% stated that the games should be either postponed again or scrapped altogether. When the public ramped up pressure on Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to take action, he was forced to admit that the host-city contract handed the power to cancel or postpone solely to the International Olympic Committee. The IOC ignored public opinion and rammed ahead, resulting in a dramatic uptick of Covid-19 rates in Tokyo during and after the games, while more than 800 people tested positive for Covid-19 inside the so-called “Olympic bubble.”
To say the Olympics has a democracy problem is to make an understatement. Where democratic practice flourishes, the Olympics tend to struggle to gain popular traction. Between 2013 and 2018 alone, more than a dozen cities rejected their Olympic bids, after either losing a public referendum, facing the mere prospect of a public vote, or succumbing to political pressure against the games.
This is precisely why the International Olympic Committee opted in September 2017 for the hail-Mary move of announcing two host cities at once, selecting Paris to stage the 2024 Summer Games and Los Angeles to host in 2028. The two cities were originally bidding for the 2024 Olympics, but after conspicupus bid withdrawals from Boston, Budapest, Hamburg, and Rome, the IOC made the unusual dual declaration. Neither Paris nor Los Angeles carried out a public referendum where voters could weigh in on whether or not to host the complicated and expensive sports mega-event.
The NOlympicsLA poll asked Angelenos their thoughts on the possibility of a democratic referendum on the games. Their results were bracing. They found that “only 54% would vote to support LA28 if there were a referendum tomorrow.”
Turns out, a referendum might be on the horizon. In Los Angeles, Unite Here Local 11, the union that represents hotel and restaurant workers, has filed paperwork to create a ballot measure that would provide LA voters a chance to weigh in on whether to develop or expand “event centers” like sports venues, convention facilities, or hotels. The union not only zeroed in on permanent facilities, but also temporary structures like ones being proposed for the 2028 Olympics. As the Los Angeles Times reported, this “could force at least five Olympic venues to go before voters for approval,” including the LA Convention Center, the John C. Argue Swim Stadium, and the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area, which is slated to host Olympic events like 3-on-3 basketball and skateboarding in the San Fernando Valley.
Jonny Coleman, an organizer with NOlympicsLA, pointed out to Common Dreams that “this polling took place before the budget crisis and before the ICE incursion.” He added, “We believe our message has reached many more Angelenos since this poll was conducted, and we are confident more and more Angelenos will reject LA28 and the World Cup on the basis of the ICE collaboration alone.” He also noted that organizers with LA28 have “not made a single public comment since June 6 about the violence taking place against working class Angelenos and how that will continue to be weaponized.”
The Olympics have a long and ignominious tradition of short-circuiting democracy, but it’s not too late for Los Angeles to make amends. While it’s true that neither the word “democracy” nor “democratic” appear in the host-city contract between the IOC and LA, Angelenos could force a democratic vote on key issues. NOlympicsLA’s new poll shows that there is a fresh interest in asking big questions about the 2028 LA Games.
Comedian John Mulaney recently joked that “making LA host the Olympics… would be like if you had a friend, and she was having a nervous breakdown, and she had no money, and part of her house was on fire. And to cheer her up, you made her host the Olympics.”
Well, the joke may end up being on LA28 Olympic organizers who thought they could press ahead with status-quo thinking in a whipsaw world. A public referendum on the LA Olympics, set against the backdrop of an increasingly authoritarian country, might be just what the democracy doctor ordered.
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It’s Up to We the People to Save a Flailing America From Spiritual Death
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice.
Aug 05, 2025
As a retired U.S. Air Force officer, I firmly believe in civilian control of our military. This country should be a nation of laws—not of special interests, oligarchs, or kings. Before committing our forces to battle, Congress should always declare war in the name of the people. Our military should indeed be a citizen-soldier force, not an isolated caste driven by a warrior ethos. And above all, the United States should be a republic ruled by law and shaped by sound moral values, not a greed-driven empire fueled by militarism.
Yet when I express such views, I feel like I’m clinging to a belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It feels idealistic, naïve, even painful to think that way. Yes, I served this country in uniform for 20 years, and now, in the age of Donald Trump, it has, as far as I can tell, thoroughly lost its way. The unraveling began so long ago—most obviously with the disastrous Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, though in truth this country’s imperial desires predated even the Spanish-American War of 1898, stretching back to the wanton suppression of indigenous peoples as part of its founding and expansion.
A glance at U.S. history reveals major atrocities: the displacement and murder of Native Americans, slavery, and all too many imperial misadventures abroad. I knew of such realities when I joined the military in 1985, near the end of the Cold War. Despite its flaws, I believed then that this country was more committed to freedom than the Soviet Union. We could still claim some moral authority as the leader of what we then referred to as “the free world,” however compromised or imperfect our actions were.
That moral authority, however, is now gone. U.S. leaders fully support and unapologetically serve an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They sell weapons to nearly every regime imaginable, irrespective of human rights violations. They wage war without Congressional approval—the recent 12-day assault on Iran being just the latest example. (The second Trump administration has, in fact, launched almost as many air strikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, in its first five months as the Biden administration did in four years.) Those same leaders have been doing a bang-up job dismantling the America I thought I was serving when I took that oath and put on second lieutenant’s bars four decades ago. That America—assuming it ever existed—may now be gone forever.
FUBAR: A Republic in Ruins
My fellow citizens, America is FUBAR (a term that dates from World War II). We are not faintly who we claim to be. Rather than a functioning republic, we are an ailing, flailing, perhaps even failing empire. We embrace war, glorify warriors, and profit mightily from the global arms trade, no matter the civilian toll, including tens of thousands of dead and wounded children in Gaza, among the latest victims of U.S.-made bombs, bullets, and missiles.
Signs of moral rot are everywhere. Our president, who would like to be known for his budget cuts, nonetheless giddily celebrates a record trillion-dollar war budget. Our secretary of defense gleefully promotes a warrior ethos. Congress almost unanimously supports or acquiesces in the destruction of Gaza. Images from the region resemble bombed-out Stalingrad in 1942 or Berlin in 1945. Meanwhile, for more than two decades now, America’s leaders have claimed to be waging a successful global “war on terror” even as they fuel terror across the globe. What do they think all those U.S. weapons are for—spreading peace?
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control.
My wife and I cope through dark humor. We see news on cuts to Medicaid, the mentally ill in the streets, and crumbling infrastructure, and quip: “But Bibi [Netanyahu] needs bombs. Or Ukraine does. Or the Pentagon needs more nukes.” That’s why Americans can’t have nice things like healthcare. That’s why all too many of us are unhoused, in debt, out of work, and desperate. In 1967—yes, that’s almost 60 years ago!—Martin Luther King warned of exactly this: America’s approaching spiritual death through militarism (aggravated by extreme materialism and racism). That death is visibly here, now.
Washington is not even faintly committed to “peace through strength,” a vapid slogan touted by the Trump administration, and an unintentional echo of George Orwell’s dystopian “war is peace.” It is committed instead to what passes for dominance through colossal military spending and persistent war. And let’s face it, that warpath may well end in the death of the American experiment.
The Mediocrity of Our Generals
In this era of creeping authoritarianism and mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. is lucky that its generals are, by and large, so utterly uninspired. Today’s American military isn’t open to the mercurial and meteoric talents of a Napoleon or a Caesar. Not in its upper ranks, at least.
One struggles to name a truly great American general or admiral since World War II. That war produced household names like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Chester W. Nimitz. In contrast, America’s recent generals—Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell of Desert Storm fame, Tommy Franks in Iraq in 2003, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal of the “fragile” and “reversible” Iraq and Afghan “surges”—have left anything but a legacy of excellence or moral leadership, not to speak of decisive victory. At best, they were narrowly competent; at worst, morally compromised and dangerously deluded.
Mind you, this isn’t a criticism of this country’s rank-and-file troops. The young Americans I served with showed no lack of courage. It wasn’t their fault that the wars they found themselves in were misbegotten and mismanaged. Twenty years have passed since I served alongside those young troops, glowing with pride and purpose in their dedication, their idealism, their commitment to their oath of service. Many paid a high price in limbs, minds, or lives. Too often, they were lions led by donkeys, to borrow a phrase once used to describe the inept and callous British leadership during World War I at bloody battles like the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917).
Today, I fear that America’s lions may, sooner or later, be led into even deeper catastrophe—this time possibly a war with China. Any conflict with China would likely rival, if not surpass, the disasters produced by World War I. The world’s best military, which U.S. presidents have been telling us we have since the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, stands all too close to being committed to just such a war in Asia by donkeys like Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
And for what? The island of Taiwan is often mentioned, but the actual reason would undoubtedly be to preserve imperial hegemony in the service of corporate interests. War, as General Smedley Butler wrote in 1935 after he retired from the military, is indeed a racket, one from which the rich exempt themselves (except when it comes to taking profits from the same).
A disastrous conflict with China, likely ending in a U.S. defeat (or a planetary one), could very well lead to a repeat of some even more extreme version of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, amplified and intensified by humiliation and resentment. From the ashes of that possible defeat, an American Napoleon or Caesar (or at least a wannabe imitator) could very well emerge to administer the coup de grace to what’s left of our democracy and freedom.
Avoiding a Colossal Act of Folly
War with China isn’t, of course, inevitable, but America’s current posture makes it more likely. Trump’s tariffs, his bombastic rhetoric, and this country’s extensive military exercises in the Pacific contribute to rising tensions, not deescalation and rapprochement.
While this country invests in war and more war, China invests in infrastructure and trade, in the process becoming what the U.S. used to be: the world’s indispensable workhorse. As the 10 BRICS countries, including China, expand and global power becomes more multipolar, this country’s addiction to military dominance may drive it to lash out. With ever more invested in a massive military war hammer, impetuous leaders like Trump and Hegseth may see China as just another nail to be driven down. It would, of course, be a colossal act of folly, though anything but a first in history.
And speaking of folly, the U.S. military as it’s configured today is remarkably similar to the force I joined in 1985. The focus remains on ultra-expensive weapons systems, including the dodgy F-35 jet fighter, the unnecessary B-21 Raider bomber, the escalatory Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and Trump’s truly fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system (a ghostly rehash of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, vintage 1983). Other militaries, meanwhile, are improvising, notably in low-cost drone technology (also known as UAS, or uncrewed autonomous systems) as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War, a crucial new arena of war-making where the U.S. has fallen significantly behind China.
Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
The Pentagon’s “solution” here is to continue the massive funding of Cold War-era weapons systems while posing as open to innovation, as an embarrassing video of Hegseth walking with drones suggests. America’s military is, in short, well-prepared to fight a major conventional war against an obliging enemy like Iraq in 1991, but such a scenario is unlikely to lie in our future.
With respect to drones or UAS, I can hear the wheels of the military-industrial complex grinding away. A decentralized, low-cost, flexible cottage industry will likely be transformed into a centralized, high-cost, inflexible cash cow for the merchants of death. When the Pentagon faces a perceived crisis or shortfall, the answer is always to throw more money at it. Ka-ching!
Indeed, the recent profit margins of major military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) have been astounding. Since 9/11, Boeing’s stock has risen more than 400%. RTX shares are up more than 600%. Lockheed Martin, maker of the faltering F-35, has seen its shares soar by nearly 1,000%. And Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-21 Raider bomber and Sentinel ICBM, two legs of America’s “modernized” nuclear triad, has seen its shares increase by more than 1,400%. Who says that war (even the threat of a global nuclear war) doesn’t pay?
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s war budget, soaring to unprecedented levels, has been virtually immune to DOGE cuts. While Elon Musk and his whiz kids searched for a few billion in savings by gutting education or squelching funding for public media like PBS and NPR, the Pentagon emerged with about $160 billion in new spending authority. As former President Joe Biden once reminded us: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
What Is To Be Done
I’ve written against warriors, warfighters, and U.S. militarism since 2007. And yes, it often feels futile, but silence means surrender to warmongering fools like Hegseth, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and the farrago of grifters, clowns, toadies, con men, and zealots who inhabit the Trump administration and much of Congress as well. The fight against them must go on.
All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists and foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.”
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice. Yet even despair is being weaponized. As a retired colonel and friend of mine wrote to me recently: “I don’t even know where to start anymore, Bill. I have no hope for anything ever improving.”
And don’t think of that despair as incidental or accidental. It’s a distinct feature of the present system of government.
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control. Yet power ultimately resides in the people (if we remember our duties as citizens). Isn’t it high time that we Americans recover our ideals, as well as our guts?
After all, the few can do little without the consent of the many. It’s up to the many (that’s us!) to reclaim and restore America.
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Can We Do Better Than Trumpian or Neoliberal Trade Policy? Yes.
Trump’s program and the neoliberal policies that came before him have substantial differences, but both preserve and even worsen the great economic inequalities and uneven power arrangements that dominate our society. We can do better.
Aug 05, 2025
U. S. President Donald Trump has remade the international trading system by ending the so-called “free trade” era and bringing back protectionism. In doing so, he has created massive uncertainty in the U.S. and global economies and has thrown into disarray the traditional left-right divide on international trade. However, as left-wing economist Arthur MacEwan argues in the interview that follows, neoliberal regimes and Trumpian tariffs are not the only options for organizing international trade. As an alternative, he makes the case for a progressive U.S. world trade policy. MacEwan is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Among his many publications are 25 years of columns in the progressive magazine Dollars & Sense. His most recent book is Ask Dr. Dollar: Essays on Economic Power, Inequality, and Climate Change.
C. J. Polychroniou: Trump has made trade tariffs a key component of his foreign policy strategy. In doing so, he is trying to rewire the global economy in a manner that will be serving U.S. interests. Indeed, the plan behind Trump’s protectionist policies seems to be the improvement of U.S. economic competitiveness, bringing manufacturing back to the United States, and paying off the deficit. Is the bet paying off or is this a strategic blunder since tariffs are putting the squeeze on businesses and consumers and causing significant uncertainty?
Arthur MacEwan: Tariffs are unlikely to regenerate manufacturing in the United States, and especially important, tariffs are not likely to lead to a substantial increase of jobs in manufacturing.
The changes in U.S. manufacturing have not resulted simply because of competition from production in China and other countries. Production in manufacturing between 2000 and 2024 was relatively stagnant, rising by only 2.4% in this period while overall GDP (adjusted for inflation) rose by 65%. The manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP dropped from 15% to 10%. A significant portion of this was, indeed, the replacement of domestically produced goods by imports.
However, another significant part of the decline was due to the fall of the U.S. share of manufactured exports to global markets, as China replaced the U.S. as the leading supplier of manufactured goods to the rest of the world. In 2000 the U.S. exported $648 billion of manufactured goods, almost three times as much as China’s $220 billion. But in 2024, China’s export of manufactured goods had risen to $3.26 trillion, while the U.S. amount had risen to only $1.24 trillion. U.S. tariffs on imports from China (or elsewhere) are not going to do anything to restore the global market for U.S. manufactured exports.
And then there are the jobs. A primary rationale offered for the Trump tariffs is to restore jobs in manufacturing. Yet, that 2.4% increase of manufacturing output was accompanied by a 26% decline of workers in manufacturing—from 17.2 million in 2000 to 12.8 million in 2024. Automation, which increased output per worker by almost 40%, accounted for a large amount of the employment decline. U.S. tariffs will not replace the jobs—the many, many jobs—lost to automation.
Furthermore, and somewhat ironically, while tariffs might seem to favor U.S. production over imports for the domestic market, those tariffs will also undercut U.S. production by raising the prices of inputs. U.S. manufacturing, now and in a potential future, is highly dependent on imports of raw materials and parts. Tariffs will raise the price of these inputs, reducing any overall shift to domestic production.
There is no way of getting around the price problem, and it is much larger than the difficulties caused by the rising prices of inputs to manufacturing production. The whole purpose of tariffs is to raise the price of imported goods so that domestic production will be able to compete with the imports! If, for example, no tariffs were imposed on China-produced electric cars, they would make large inroads in the U.S. market for electric cars, replacing the more expensive U.S.-produced models. But with the tariffs, the China-produced cars become more expensive in the U.S. and the U.S.-produced cars might be able to compete.
In other words, U.S. buyers—the population in general—pay higher prices to generate more domestic production of goods now imported. Theoretically, this could be worth it, as I will take up shortly, but it is unlikely to be popular.
All in all, the extent to which the new tariffs will succeed in generating more domestic manufacturing is questionable. However much new manufacturing takes place, the creating of new manufacturing jobs will be much less. And, in our role as consumers, none of us will be pleased by the higher prices.
Worse still, the tax—and the tariff is a tax—will fall disproportionally on low-income people. In effect, the tariff/tax is a sales tax, raising the cost of purchases. Low-income people spend a higher proportion of their incomes on purchases, while high-income people spend a smaller proportion of their income on purchases. Thus, the tariff/tax is what we call a “regressive” tax.
Certainly, this appears to be an economic and political blunder. But Trump and his minions, crying “American First” and stressing the nationalism and xenophobia of a tariff-based economy, might get away with it.
C. J. Polychroniou: Free trade agreements have been a hallmark of neoliberalism while left-wing parties have stood for the most part in support of protectionist policies. Does this mean that Trump’s obsession with tariffs has put an end to the traditional left-right divide on trade policy?Arthur MacEwan: It is correct that many people on the left have responded to neoliberalism by calling for the protection of U.S. production from foreign imports. Yet, there are important elements of neoliberalism that cannot be characterized by “free trade” but, instead, are protectionist. The U.S. has used international trade agreements to extend the U.S. system of patents and copyrights. This amounts to protecting the monopolistic position of, especially, large pharmaceutical and large high-tech companies. Moreover, “free trade” agreements tend to include dispute resolution procedures that are highly favorable to business interests. For example, if new environmental regulations are established to reduce imports of Canadian tar-sands oil (which is especially bad for the environment), the trade agreement gives the Canadian oil-producing companies the right to sue because their profits have been lost.
Nonetheless, “free trade” has come to mean opening domestic markets to imports without restriction. It is understandable why workers and people on the left oppose such openings. Workers understandably fear that they will lose their jobs and not be able to obtain reasonably equivalent new jobs. Workers’ power and the power of their unions is undermined by the “free trade” of neoliberalism. At the same time, by giving businesses more options—e.g., the option of importing goods instead of producing at home—the power of business is enhanced.
So, I think it best to see the left-right divide on international trade as a divide over power. If international commerce would be organized in a way that would maintain or even increase the power of workers, it would have the support of the left—but the right would not be so happy.
C. J. Polychroniou: Are there other ways to organize U.S. international trade besides neoliberal free trade agreements and Trumpian tariffs?Arthur MacEwan: Disputes over how to organize international commerce are usually structured by a simplistic dichotomy between “free trade” and Trumpian tariffs (or other forms of restricting trade). Yet, there are alternatives. In particular, it is possible to set out a progressive form of U.S. policy on international commerce.
One element in the foundation of a progressive trade policy would be recognition that there are real gains that can be obtained, and should be preserved, from international commerce. Some of these gains are economic—there are goods and services that can be produced more effectively in some places than in others due to differences, for example, in natural resources and in the historically developed skills and specializations in different places. There are also great cultural, culinary, and scientific gains that can be obtained by international connectedness.
Also, a progressive trade policy would be based on protecting workers and their power, not on protecting jobs. However, many workers and progressives see the trade problem in terms of jobs being destroyed. For example, when more cars and car parts are imported from other countries, jobs are lost in the U.S. auto industry. But this does not mean that a progressive trade policy should throw up tariffs to protect those jobs. There is nothing intrinsically more valuable about those jobs than many other jobs. It is workers, not their jobs, that need protecting. Just like workers who lose their jobs because of automation or because their bosses made stupid mistakes, workers who lose their jobs to foreign competition—which is not the workers’ fault—should be protected. And protecting workers means protecting their power.
Because it is workers, not jobs, that should be protected, it becomes clear that a progressive trade policy depends on a progressive domestic policy. For example, a national single-payer health care program (such as Medicare for All), would ensure than workers who lost their jobs for whatever reason would not lose their health care. Similarly, higher education and skills training should be free, so that, if workers lost their jobs, their children would not lose their educational opportunities and the workers themselves could be readily trained for other jobs.
Further, those other jobs need to have reasonable wages, which requires a progressive domestic policy of generating higher wages and reducing inequality. Good places to start would be with pushing the minimum wage up and up and reinforcing the opportunities for workers to form powerful unions. Also, workers need to eat while they are getting retrained, which means a progressive trade policy would provide income during the retaining period.
Still, there are times in the U.S. and elsewhere when tariffs or other forms of protection could be justified, even if they force people in general to pay higher prices for goods than they would if imports could freely enter the country. Historically, in the United States and in the United Kingdom, trade restrictions were important in allowing certain manufacturing industries to get started, and these industries generated the development of many connected activities. The long-run results seem to have been favorable for economic growth and, ultimately, wide benefits. This argument of protecting “infant industries” could apply in many developing countries, but it is of dubious validity in one of the world’s most advanced economies.
In today’s United States, there could be issues of markets being flooded with products produced abroad with very, very low wage labor. Those conditions might justify restrictions on imports, even though there would be real costs. The extreme cases would be when products are produced by prisoners, slaves, or children. Then there are situations where workers do not have the right to organize to form independent unions. Similarly, when goods are produced abroad in environmentally destructive ways, restrictions on importing those goods could be reasonable.
But, again, the issue of domestic policy arises: How can we defend, through trade barriers, the rights of workers elsewhere when many workers in this country have their rights to organize greatly restricted? Or when child labor is on the rise here? How can we demand that other countries follow good environmental policies when our own are so insufficient?
Support for a progressive trade policy will, of course, be attacked by the traditional arguments for “free trade.” Yet, these arguments lose their force when it is recognized that there is really no such thing as “free trade,” if by that term we mean the absence of actions by government that affect international commerce. Yet, innumerable actions of government have impacts on a country’s international commerce. Education policies that affect the structure of the labor force, for example, play a role in determining the kinds of goods that are produced in the country and their position in global trade. Or consider agricultural policies that, in the history of the United States, have had the impact of making this country a major exporter of agricultural commodities. Tax policies and other government programs could also provide examples. So, the issue is not whether or not to adopt government policies affecting international trade. The issue is which policies!
C. J. Polychroniou: A recent story in the New York Times pointed out that hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are currently unfulfilled. First, is this evidence that the industrial sector has bounced back, and second, how do we explain the alleged labor shortage in manufacturing jobs?Arthur MacEwan: It is best not to take business complaints about a labor shortage too seriously. What they generally mean is that with the wages, benefits, and working conditions that they offer, they can’t get enough workers.
Traditional orthodox economics has a simple answer to such complaints: offer higher wages! And, of course, better benefits and improved working conditions. The workers will come.
But, unsurprisingly, this has not been what employers have been doing. In May of 2025, the average hourly wage for production and non-supervisory workers in manufacturing was $28.79, while for all private-sector production and nonsupervisory workers the figure was 7.6% higher, at $30.97. This was a switch from 25 years ago: In May of 2000, the hourly wage for manufacturing workers was 2% higher than the hourly wage for all private-sector workers.
Moreover, in from 2000 to 2023, while the real (i.e., inflation adjusted) median household income rose by about 15%, the wage for production and nonsupervisory workers in manufacturing, adjusted by the consumer price index, rose by only 5%. (Real household income data are not yet available since 2023.)Employers in manufacturing have accomplished this relative decline in workers’ wages by several means—automation, union busting, and shifting (or the threat of shifting) production abroad. In short, they have done just about everything they could to keep wages down. And now they have the audacity to complain about a “labor shortage.”
C. J. Polychroniou: Are there lessons to be drawn for the left from Trump’s approach to international trade?
Arthur MacEwan: There are several lessons for the left. Some of these are implicit in my answers to previous questions—for example, the importance of protecting workers and their power instead of protecting jobs, and the essential complementarity between international and domestic economic policy.
Further, there are different ways that policy can protect the interests of business—that is, the power of capital. Trump’s program and the neoliberal policies that came before him have substantial differences, but both preserve and even worsen the great economic inequalities and uneven power arrangements that dominate our society. In fighting against the depredations of the Trump era, we need to look beyond what came before to determine how to create something new.
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