One passing train can hide another. The same is true of man-made disasters like Tr*mps tariffs. We need to be wary of what they hide.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
BEWARE!
As you stand at a level crossing be warned, one passing train can hide another. The world in shock has its eyes riveted on Tr*mp’s tariffs which are not only devastating but arbitrary, illogical and counterproductive (1). In fact, the dictates of the American president in multiple areas amount to one shock after another. These could be misconstrued as the antics of an attention grabbing, power hungry individual or the cynical strategy of flooding the zone to keep everyone disorientated. But what if they had a more sinister purpose.
Look sharp
Despite our natural inclination to ward off disaster, we need to keep an eye on what other damage Tr*mp is wreaking while we are distracted. Such a ploy is exactly what Naomi Klein describes in her book Shock Doctrine, although none of the examples she cites are so brazenly worldwide. What’s shock capitalism, as she calls it? A deliberate strategy of political actors to exploit the chaos of natural or deliberately fabricated disasters to push through unpopular policies favouring corporate interests and those of the very rich while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens and, in this case, governments worldwide who are too overwhelmed to respond or resist effectively. That said, we also need to be attentive how leaders elsewhere take advantage of the crisis to ram through their own undesirable agendas.
(1) Quoting the economist Dr Justin Wolters of Michigan University, Nikki McCann Ramirez on a Guardian podcast said about Trump’s tariffs that they are “…monstrously destructive, incoherent, ill-informed tariffs based on fabrications, imagined wrongs, discredited theories and ignorance of decades of evidence and the real tragedy is that they will hurt working Americans more than anyone else.”