The April 5 weather made for a remarkable and inspiring demonstration against the policies of our current president. The head count is always difficult to determine, but I heard people guess anywhere from 500 to 700 people took part. The range of creative signs was astonishing. I’ve been to many demonstrations over the years, but I don’t remember any as funny, clever, angry, or adamant as the ones that were carried last weekend. Everybody had one: some written on an old cardboard box opened up, some on fancy poster board, some scribbled on a single piece of paper.

Most demonstrations are upbeat affairs if you find yourself in a crowd of people who, more or less, speak your language. You take note of who’s there and who isn’t. Sometimes if there’s a counter demo, things can get dicey; but nothing like that happened last Saturday. The sun was out, the crowd was glad to be together, the mood was enthusiastic. Except for one small aside: as I was walking back to my car after the couple mile circuit from the end of Boulevard down Long Beach main street and back, I heard one fellow in the parking lot of Scoopers say as I walked by, “I should have worn my Trump hat.” I said, “You like what’s going on now? Do you have a 401k account?”’

 

Liberation Day

Liberation day, as Trump labeled it, seems to be the day when many of us were liberated from large chunks of money in our retirement accounts. And unfortunately for those of us on the latter end of a lifetime, taking such a huge hit at this late stage doesn’t leave much time for the stock market to bounce back and catch up to itself. I apologize profusely for folks who don’t have retirement accounts to worry about. But in case you’re feeling left out, don’t — you’ll soon enough feel the crunch in other ways.

So let’s talk for just a moment about tariffs. (One note: I’m not going to try to explain the discounted methodology this administration used for calculating these “liberating tariffs” or their notion about balancing trade deficits. That really gets us in the weeds.) I worked in the banking sector for 12 years — first at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (headquarters for our ninth district on the West Coast), then at the Fed’s Los Angeles Branch; and finally in the marketing department of Citibank in Oakland. I’m far from an economics expert, but I know enough to read and follow financial news. Innumerable experts have been writing recent editorials about tariffs and their negative effects on financial markets. (For a good comprehensive analysis listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhabG-dyQu.)

Here’s a thumbnail view. Globalization, something that has been developing, more or less, since the end of WWII, works this way. Countries make or produce and trade with other countries either raw materials or products. Based on their labor rates, natural resources, intellectual expertise and technologies, manufacturing and marketing capabilities, countries with the lowest prices for their goods — whether components or final products — sell them to other countries who can’t make them as cheaply.

 

Our global supply chain

Global cooperation, promoted and nurtured by the U.S. and other westernized countries, first as one facet of creating a more peaceful world, and, second, as a response to efficient use of capital, has meant that there are many component parts in most products. Very few items are made solely in one country. So dismantling our global supply chain is fraught with problems. We do have manufacturing in our country — though, it’s true, less of it than in the 50s — but it’s manufacturing that gathers up globally-sourced component parts in order to put final products together.

Let’s just take one example — a computer. It all starts from raw materials like copper and gold, then moves on to technical design, then etching procedures for chips, soldering and reflow methods for mounting chips, on to testing, to plastic molding and extrusion processes, to power supply units (transformers, capacitors), to sheet metal for cases, to packaging, distribution, and sales. These component parts are completed, shipped around the globe, and put together all up and down a computer supply chain based on which countries have the needed next piece of the puzzle at the right time at the cheapest cost. (Here’s a listing of what’s needed to manufacture a computer: tinyurl.com/yzcpfbj5) It takes a world to produce the laptop that ends up on my lap. Look at any appliance or complex consumer item: dishwasher, car, tractor, fridge, solar panel, apartment building, and you’ll see the same pattern.

Applying tariffs on countries that produce component parts means that those products will be more expensive or not available at all. Some things we simply can’t provide in the U.S.: avocados, bananas — thank you, Mexico. And some things are being made more cheaply elsewhere — we’re looking at you, China.

America is at the top of that global “supply food chain.” Ideally, we want the jobs at the apex of that chain — providing services or high-tech products — jobs that require the most knowledge and sophisticated assembly equipment; and not those less-skilled menial jobs at the bottom of the chain. How many of us want to be sitting at a sewing machine making clothes like workers in Vietnam? Or mining copper in Chile?

When Trump says he wants to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., does he understand how this really works, or is he just trying to pull the wool over our eyes? Economists point out that reviving a manufacturing economy in the US will take massive capital support (some from the government) for buildings and equipment, re-training of our labor force, and retooling of this now-broken supply chain. A successful economy also requires financial stability — something in short supply at the moment. Business people don’t throw capital around willy-nilly; they want to be able to understand what the future might look like. Further, if some kind of manufacturing resurgence does take place in the United States, it will certainly not happen in time to goose my 401-K before I leave Planet Earth. Nor, in the short term, is breaking our relationships with suppliers and allies going to help me with the prices of groceries, or as Trump calls them, “a bag with different things in it.”

 

At the crossroads

As David Brooks writes in a recent New York Times article, “Great nations throughout the history of Western civilization have been crossroad nations. Places where people from all over meet, exchange ideas and come up with new ones together.” Or as Peter Hall writes in “Cities in Civilization,” successful nations are places where “People talk, people listen to each other’s music, and each other’s words, dance each other’s dances, take in each other’s thoughts.” America used to be one of these junction points: we were a country that took in people from other places, immigrants who wanted the freedom to be creative and live authentic and rich lives. We used to be less class-bound, less formal, less hierarchical. We used to be at the center of diverse networks of energy. Donald Trump and his minions want walls; they want to separate us from our allies, from other countries, and from each other. By starting this global trade war, Trump has made it clear that his values are not my values.

As a resident and journalist in a small rural town, a town of rich diversity and natural resources, I’m confused about where I stand. I want to be able to continue to speak about the aspects of our community that we all love; at the same time I can’t be silent about what I see happening in our government. I’m trying to keep my balance at a time when it seems our leaders want to keep us off balance and at each other’s throats. I should have stopped that guy in the Scoopers parking lot so we could have had a real conversation. But I’m confused and angry and not sure I have the patience for that. And, given what’s happening to our nation right in front of our eyes, I’m not sure we have the time for that.