Your Eyewitness has stocked up on popcorn as the reaction to Pres Trump’s “Liberation Day” on tariffs kicked in – and some countries at the receiving end kicked back!!! Ooooh! This is gonna be fun!! Now, some may ask, “How about that 38% tariff on our exports to the States??” But hey…since petroleum, gold and bauxite are exempted, the US ain’t really doing this to collect revenue – like we do on all the taxes we slap on cars, or to slap us into line (Mad Maduro has already done that!!), or to preserve a local industry. So, our Government should straighten things pretty quickly!! We already have a paid lobbyist, don’t we??
But, as your Eyewitness has already announced, he doesn’t mind that 38% being slapped on “whiskered fish” – Gillbacker – and “crustaceans” – shrimp. Right now, with most of the better catch going to Stateside, your Eyewitness pretty much has to hock his heirlooms to eat those treats!! Let’s see how those Guyanese in foreign gonna deal with Gillbacker at US$25 per pound!! So, all in all, we’re small potatoes, and we’ll work it out.
Your Eyewitness is more interested in how not only China – enemy #1 to the US – but friends like UK, Germany, Canada, Mexico and EU gonna be reacting!! On the latter, Trump’s hitting them in their pocketbooks – which is where it hurts the most!! And not only that…they must now find money to defend themselves against the Big, Bad Russian Bear, whom they’re convinced is champing at the bit now that Ukraine’s almost in its pockets!! Trump clearly thinks they’re paranoid – but that doesn’t give them much comfort, seeing that THEY think Trump and Putin have a smokin’ bromance going on!!
The other bone of contention, of course, is that while the Europeans see Trump playing fast and loose with their “security” vis-a- vis Ukraine, they haven’t digested that a friend would want to expropriate such a big piece of real estate like the entire Greenland – from Denmark!! Yes, Denmark – where a founding figure of the western gestalt – Hamlet – pondered the existential question: “To be or not to be”!!
To Europeans, “Something isn’t right in the state of the USA”!!
So, on to what the Chinese response is gonna be – apart from the 34% reciprocal tariff they slapped on Trump’s reciprocal tariff!! It’s a supreme irony that, twenty-five years after the US and China had signed a landmark agreement on China’s accession to the WTO, the latter has gone to that body to lay charges against the former for violating the rules of the game!! But then it was the same US that built up China to be the superpower it now is, innit?? Ouch!!
…infiltration??
We had three hundred years of colonisation by the West – never mind Gabriel Marquez’s “One hundred years of solitude”!! We were never cut off from the tentacles of Western power through the myriad forms assumed – art, culture, language, politics, economics, and so on. But, in all those years, we in the south were never “settler colonies”. The bottom line is that the British, for example, would dally here for a while and crack their whips – but in the end return to Old Blighty to end their days.
Even when the Americans took over from the Brits – after installing Burnham in power – they never descended on us like the proverbial swarm of locusts. They even built our first airport – where CJIA now stands – and stationed troops during WWII, but they got out before Sparrow could sing ‘Jean and Dina’!! Well, there’s a new coloniser in town – the Chinese. Unlike the West, they send in their citizens to actually settle here. Supermarkets at every corner!!
How’d we deal with settler colonialism??
…with subventions
Government just announced an increase in subventions to NDCs amounting to $30 million. With the VP also just pointing out how these councillors have become overbearing little Caesars, shouldn’t there be some stronger oversight mechanisms implemented??
