SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
big pharma
Trump's Tariffs Are Extremely Dumb, Just Not For The Reasons You Might Think
This is a con on a global scale. Trump is not rejecting the corporate trade model. He’s weaponizing it.
Apr 04, 2025
On April 2, Donald Trump declared a national emergency and announced sweeping tariffs on nearly all imported goods. The headlines were dramatic — tariffs on China, allies like Canada and Mexico, and everything from cars to coffee beans. His administration framed the move as a patriotic stance for “reciprocal trade” and economic sovereignty.
Don’t be fooled. This isn’t the collapse of “free trade.” It’s the continuation of corporate globalization — just with a MAGA bumper sticker slapped on it.
Trump says he’s standing up for American workers. But he’s the same president who signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and called it “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law.” The rebranded North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deal — despite some improvements forced in by congressional Democrats and civil society organizations — contained much of the same structural rot that has enabled outsourcing, empowered monopolies, and tied the hands of governments trying to protect their people and environment.
Trump is not rejecting the corporate trade model. He’s weaponizing it.
For decades, “free trade” deals like NAFTA locked in rules written by and for multinational corporations: rules that made offshoring easier, gutted environmental protections, and prioritized investor rights over worker rights. Stagnant wages, emptied factory towns, and rising income inequality have caused widespread pain and frustration among working Americans — which Trump has weaponized again and again.
Tariffs can be part of the answer to these problems, but Trump’s ham-handed approach is not it. There’s no industrial strategy. No labor plan. No climate protections. Just a unilateral, top-down stunt that does nothing to dismantle the corporate architecture still rigging the global economy.
Pair this “concept of a plan” with the rest of his agenda: gutting investment in vital sectors such as biomedical research, support for basic science and clean and affordable energy technologies and products; slashing all efforts to combat child labor and other egregious labor rights violations around the world, providing tax cuts for billionaires and corporations; stripping away health care, food support and other vital services for the most vulnerable Americans, undermining Social Security, and decertifying and undermining the power of labor unions.
It’s clear working people will not be the winners here.
Who Wrote the Rules? U.S. Corporations, Not Foreign Adversaries
Trump loves to blame other countries, claiming global trade has “looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered” the U.S. economy in his “Liberation Day” speech. He claims that the U.S. has been victimized by other countries and has been “too nice” in response.
Nothing could be further from the truth — the rules of the neoliberal trade system were rigged in favor of large corporate interests in the Global North. While workers in the U.S. and around the world were the losers, Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, and other U.S. corporate giants have always been the winners.
For decades, U.S. corporate lobbyists have used their privileged access to closed-door trade negotiations to rig the rules to maximize their profits, not to serve working people, small businesses, or the environment.
They pushed for extreme intellectual property rules to entrench Big Pharma monopolies that keep the price of medicines sky high, with deadly consequences. They demanded open capital markets and deregulated financial flows for Wall Street while securing rules that let agribusiness giants flood foreign markets with subsidized U.S. commodities, displacing millions of farmers and leading to forced migration.
Trade justice requires more than poorly designed tariffs. It demands systemic reform: binding labor rights, climate protections, resilient supply chains, and democratic accountability. Trump offers none of that.
At the same time, they ensured that governments couldn’t support domestic industries, raise labor standards, or enforce environmental protections without being accused of “trade distortion.” The result was a race to the bottom for workers and communities — here and abroad — with record profits for corporate giants.
It matters a lot that Trump is identifying the wrong perpetrators of the failed global trade system because that sets the table for wrong solutions.
Once we identify multinational corporations as the architects of the current system, we’re directed toward the right solutions – not blanket, high tariffs based on mindless formulas, but a new trade policy and new trade rules that prioritize the interests of workers, consumers, and the environment.
NAFTA to USMCA: Same Corporate Model With Some Improvements (No Thanks to Trump)
Trump spent years railing against NAFTA as the “worst trade deal anybody in history has ever entered into,” tapping into the legitimate grievances of workers and communities harmed by its race to the bottom. He campaigned on a promise to eliminate it and replace it with a better agreement for workers.
However, once elected, he opted to renegotiate and rebrand the deal in the form of the USMCA, which he then insisted was “the best trade deal in history.” Now, in a dizzying reversal, he’s claiming the USMCA has been a disaster that only an aggressive wave of “retaliatory” tariffs on Canada and Mexico will fix.
In reality, while some improvements were forced into the negotiation, the USMCA largely preserved the core logic that made NAFTA so harmful in the first place. It expands corporate rights, limits democratic oversight, and undermines public protections in the name of increased trade.
The new labor provisions — often cited as proof of a “new era” in trade — were not original features of Trump’s deal. They were won through months of intense organizing and negotiation by House Democrats, labor unions, and civil society groups.
Congressional Democrats working in close alliance with the AFL-CIO drew a hard line. Backed by the relentless organizing of groups like Public Citizen, the Communications Workers of America, United Steelworkers, and a transnational coalition of Mexican and Canadian labor and civil society partners, they made it clear: they would block passage of any deal unless meaningful labor enforcement were included and damaging Big Pharma giveaways were removed.
Trump’s administration favored language that preserved corporate prerogatives and offered only symbolic nods to labor rights. Still, in the end, it acquiesced to congressional Democrats’ demands. It incorporated essential tools like the facility-specific Rapid Response Mechanism for labor enforcement and eliminated some of the most egregious giveaways to Big Pharma.
However, the structural rot from NAFTA remained.
While experts across the ideological spectrum lauded the drastic reduction of controversial investor privileges that allow corporations to sue governments over public interest laws through investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), Trump preserved ISDS for fossil fuel firms operating in Mexico — a carve-out aggressively pushed by Big Oil.
Agribusiness also retained its arsenal. The ongoing U.S. trade challenge to Mexico’s restrictions on genetically modified corn — measures rooted in precautionary health standards and cultural preservation — reveal the deal’s true intent. Rather than respecting national policy space over food safety, trade rules are once again being deployed to dismantle domestic protections at the behest of corporations.
Not only did Trump fail to fix NAFTA, but he made it even worse in at least one crucial way: Big Tech secured its wishlist in the form of a digital trade chapter. These new terms undermine the ability of U.S. states, Congress, and other countries’ governments to hold Big Tech accountable for gender and racial bias in AI, rampant abuse of our privacy, and monopolistic overreach.
Performative “Protectionism” and the Authoritarian Trade Playbook
Far from dismantling the corporate trade regime, Trump’s first term revealed him as a loyal steward of it — so long as he could plaster his name on it. Despite the USMCA rebrand, he left the core NAFTA structure intact and continued to stoke public anger over working people’s struggles — not by confronting the root causes but by scapegoating other nations. And he has been increasingly employing tariff threats as his weapon of choice — not in pursuit of justice but as a blunt instrument of control.
Just weeks ago, Trump threatened new tariffs unless Mexico deployed troops to militarize the border. He pressured Colombia to accept a deportation flight of asylum seekers.
Big Tech companies are awaiting their handouts, as it is widely expected that Trump will lift tariffs on countries that agree to undo tech accountability policies.
And perversely, he is using tariffs as a cudgel to pressure other countries into signing the very liberalizing trade agreements he claims to oppose.
“Liberation Day” was more of the same from this ever-more-authoritarian White House: an emergency decree bypassing Congress, escalating instability, and concentrating power in the executive. Trump hasn’t rejected the anti-democratic nature of the neoliberal trade model — he’s replicating it with a vengeance.
All Madness, No Method
While tariffs can be a useful tool, they must be transparently employed in strategic sectors for a clear purpose following careful analysis and open debate.
Trump’s tariffs, however, are based on misleading data and flawed logic. He uses exaggerated trade deficit calculations and stays silent on how the U.S. dollar’s dominance enables America to import far more than it exports, a luxury most Global South nations — burdened with debt and structural trade deficits — cannot afford.
The methodology behind these tariffs has experts scratching their heads.
Trump claimed that the “reciprocal tariffs” were derived from a detailed assessment of each country’s tariff and non-tariff barriers (more on these in a moment). In fact, the number assigned to each country seems to be based on the difference between the total value of imports the U.S. receives from a country versus the amount we export to it.
Apparently, no regard was given to why there may be a large imbalance. For example, Lesotho, which Trump dismissed as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” was hit with the highest tariff of any country at 50%. Forget the fact that the small, landlocked country’s population of 2 million may not be able to afford Made in America products, leading to a lopsided trade balance.
The crude formula used to determine each country’s “reciprocal” tariff was described by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman as something that appeared to be “thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice,” and “reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit their way through an exam.”
As some commentators have noted, this tariff breakdown is what you get if you ask ChatGPT to come up with a U.S. trade policy. This could very well be the first global economic policy written “of, by, and for” our robot overlords. What could possibly go wrong?
The Corporate Wishlist
Since the Trump administration clearly did not take on the, admittedly Herculean, task of reviewing the thousands of tariffs and trade barriers imposed by hundreds of countries, it simply used trade imbalances as a crude proxy. It’s a stand-in for the cost of that country’s tariffs and, importantly, its non-tariff barriers.
“Non-tariff barrier” is trade-speak for “any policy that’s not a tariff” but might restrict trade — from climate protections to minimum wage laws to consumer protections in the form of toxic food additives. While many non-tariff barriers serve vital public policies, corporations and trade negotiators often treat them as obstacles to profit.
According to the April 2 executive order, Trump can unilaterally decide to lower the tariffs imposed on a country if it takes “significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters.”
What constitutes a “significant step” isn’t defined, but it certainly looks like an open invitation for governments to slash their tariffs and reverse policies to appease Trump and his billionaire buddies.
For what exactly those policies may be, just look to the report Trump waved around at the beginning of his so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcement speech in the Rose Garden.
That document is a 400-page list of the policies that other countries have enacted — or are even considering enacting — that U.S. corporations don’t like. It’s the National Trade Estimates Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, an annual government report that has long been criticized as an inappropriate overreach to name and shame other countries’ legitimate public interest policies. It’s also a glimpse of the policies that Trump may seek to have destroyed in exchange for tariff relief.
The policies targeted in this year’s report include climate protections, including Canada’s Clean Fuel Standard, the European Union’s Deforestation-Free Supply Chain Regulation, and Japan’s renewable energy incentives — all of which are aligned with global climate commitments.
Public health regulations aimed at protecting consumers, preserving biodiversity, and preventing long-term health risks were also attacked. Employed by dozens of countries, these include bans, testing requirements, or even labeling policies on pesticides like Roundup’s glyphosate, genetically engineered food, ractopamine in beef and pork, and heavy metals in cosmetics.
Regulations that promote competition in the digital ecosystem, laws that impose digital services taxes on Big Tech firms, place conditions for cross-border data transfers, promote fairness in the digital economy, and laws that regulate emerging technologies such as AI.
Benefits for Trump’s Buddies
Countries are not the only ones who will be supplicating to avoid the full weight of Trump’s tariffs. Despite Trump’s claims that other countries foot the bill on tariffs, it is U.S. importers who must pay this fee … unless they can convince Trump to grant them a special exemption.
It is well-documented that the opaque and chaotic tariff exclusion process created in Trump’s first term quickly overwhelmed government agencies and enabled a quid pro quo spoils system that rewarded the rich and well-connected. A revolving door of lobbyists, including former and future Trump administration officials, were able to secure lucrative tariff exceptions for their CEO clients through political pressure, informal meetings, and campaign contributions.
Trump’s latest stunt had nothing to do with “liberation.” You can’t fix a rigged trade system while keeping its rules and attacking people at every turn.
Through this system, Trump wielded tariffs and tariff exceptions to reward his friends and punish his enemies. CEOs that donated to Republicans had a 1 in 5 chance of having their exemption request granted versus 1 in 10 for CEOs that supported Democrats, according to a January 2025 study.
If Trump’s recent attacks on law firms, universities, and the press are any indication, he’s prepared to double down on using his second term to punish enemies and enrich himself and his friends. And his dismantling of watchdog agencies and boosting of big business ties set the stage for tariff exemptions to be even more corrupt and harmful to workers, consumers, and the U.S. and global economy.
What other displays of political loyalty might companies offer to Trump for a tariff exclusion this time around? Public endorsement of his policies? Promises to monitor employees for DEI ideologies or views critical of the administration?
We Deserve Better
Trade justice requires more than poorly designed tariffs. It demands systemic reform: binding labor rights, climate protections, resilient supply chains, and democratic accountability. Trump offers none of that.
There’s no industrial plan. No support for unions. No climate-resilience vision. Just a chaotic, performative tariff regime, which in practice will surely be wielded to reward loyalty and punish dissent.
Trump’s latest stunt had nothing to do with “liberation.” You can’t fix a rigged trade system while keeping its rules and attacking people at every turn. Trump talks a big game but serves the same corporate interests that gutted labor rights in the first place. Working people deserve a system with them at the center, not one that favors corporations.
This isn’t trade justice. It’s a con.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Warren Urges Medicare Nominee Oz to 'Divest From Financial Conflicts of Interest'
"By making these commitments, you would increase Americans' trust in your ability to serve the public interest during your time at CMS—rather than the special interests of companies in your network."
Mar 12, 2025
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday called on Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump's nominee to head the federal agency in charge of Medicare, to divest all financial ties to Big Pharma and healthcare companies in order to avoid conflicts of interest and gain the public's trust.
"Congratulations on your nomination to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)," Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter to the celebrity heart surgeon and erstwhile purveyor of phony weight loss cures. "If confirmed, you will be expected to steward CMS' $1.5 trillion budget in the best interest of the over 140 million Americans on Medicare and Medicaid. Entering this role with financial conflicts of interest would undermine your effectiveness and the effectiveness of the programs you are slated to administer."
"To avoid this, I request that you agree to: divest any remaining financial interests in health-related companies or patents that you will have the power to influence, recuse from matters involving your former employers and clients, and, for at least four years after you leave office, not lobby CMS or join the industries that depend on CMS' work," the senator said.
"Entering this role with financial conflicts of interest would undermine your effectiveness and the effectiveness of the programs you are slated to administer."
"By making these commitments, you would increase Americans' trust in your ability to serve the public interest during your time at CMS—rather than the special interests of companies in your network," she added.
"You have deep ties to companies that could profit from your decisions at CMS," Warren noted. "You currently serve as a managing member or adviser of multiple healthcare and pharmaceutical firms with a financial stake in CMS policy, including how the agency sets payment rates and coverage determinations for Medicare and Medicaid."
Warren continued:
You also use your public platforms—including your website, TV show, TikTok, and Instagram pages—to promote drugs, such as Ozempic, produced by pharmaceutical companies that are currently seeking expanded CMS coverage approval and that are subject to government drug negotiations—which you would be responsible for conducting. You have been paid to push your show's viewers to enroll in the private alternative to Medicare, Medicare Advantage—a program run by private health insurers that overcharged CMS by at least $83 billion in 2024 alone.
Doctors have critiqued you for allegedly "promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain." Furthermore, much of your financial portfolio (worth at least $98 million) is invested in healthcare and pharmaceutical companies whose value is tied to CMS' regulatory work.
Last December, the watchdog Accountable.US revealed that Oz had invested as much as $56 million in three companies with direct CMS interests. In 2022, Oz's single biggest healthcare holding was up to $26 million in Sharecare, a digital health company Oz co-founded, and which became the exclusive in-home supplemental care program for 1.5 million Medicare Advantage customers.
On Tuesday, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen published a research brief examining the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political lobbying by Medicare Advantage companies ahead of Oz's confirmation hearing, which is scheduled for Friday morning.
Warren and other Democratic lawmakers previously pressed Oz on his advocacy for Medicare privatization, including a 2020 call for enrolling all U.S. seniors in Medicare Advantage plans.
Last month, Oz pledged to divestfrom insurance companies and drugmakers and step down from his advisory positions if his nomination is confirmed.
"I appreciate that you have agreed to divest much of your portfolio and resign from your advisory posts," Warren wrote. "Still, given your close ties to the industry that you would regulate, if you are confirmed, the public would have reason to question your impartiality and commitment to serving the public's interest."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Senators Want to Know Why RFK Jr. Dined With Pharma Execs at Trump's Private Club
"You owe the American public an explanation for why you took part in PhRMA's influence-peddling events with President Trump," wrote Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Bernie Sanders.
Mar 11, 2025
A group of progressive U.S. senators on Monday pushed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, to disclose what he and President Donald Trump discussed with pharmaceutical executives at recent private dinners as the industry pressures the new administration to end Medicare drug price negotiations.
In a letter to Kennedy, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pointed to Wall Street Journalreporting from last month on the millions of dollars that healthcare industry executives spent to dine with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida ahead of his inauguration.
Kennedy, according to the Journal, "attended several of the dinners, but largely stayed quiet as Trump and others talked."
Warren, Wyden, and Sanders wrote to Kennedy that "the dinners may have served as an opportunity for Big Pharma to gain insider access to both you and President Trump" and asked the HHS chief to reveal information about the meetings with industry executives, including how many there have been since the November election and whether Medicare drug price negotiations or other critical matters were discussed.
"Big Pharma stands to profit immensely from a second Trump administration, especially if they can convince you and President Trump to abandon policies like Medicare drug price negotiations and patent reform that would save Americans hundreds of billions of dollars on lifesaving drugs," the senators wrote. "Indeed, the executives that attended these dinners have called on him to 'pause drug negotiations'—negotiations that are expected to save taxpayers $100 billion by 2032."
"You owe the American public an explanation for why you took part in PhRMA's influence-peddling events with President Trump, what happened at these meetings, and whether they will affect your commitment to ensuring that Americans receive the relief they deserve from high drug prices," the senators added.
RFK Jr. said he'd "clean up corruption" as HHS Secretary. So why'd he have dinner with Big Pharma executives at Mar-a-Lago with Trump? The American people deserve to know what kind of deals might have been made at those "million-dollar" dinners.
[image or embed]
— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) March 10, 2025 at 7:29 PM
The Journal reported that the CEO of Pfizer, which pumped $1 million into Trump's inaugural committee, was among the executives who attended the private Mar-a-Lago dinners. Eli Lilly's chief executive also joined at least one of the dinners.
Though Kennedy, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, has vocally criticized Big Pharma and its political influence, the industry did not lobby against his nomination to lead HHS, which oversees the Medicare drug price negotiations that began during the Biden administration.
Last month, the head of the pharmaceutical industry's biggest lobbying group and several pharma CEOs met with Trump as part of a campaign to weaken the price negotiations, which threaten drugmakers' ability to jack up prices at will.
The negotiations have yielded significant results, but Trump's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—an agency within HHS—has signaled it is open to altering the program.
"The Trump administration's statement is far from an embrace of drug price negotiation," Wyden and other senators warned earlier this year, "and appears to be opening the door to changes that could undermine Medicare's ability to get the best price possible on drugs."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular