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      Elon Musk’s quest for power has a new target: Wisconsin’s supreme court

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      He is slashing US government agencies, building electric vehicles and space rockets and running one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. But Elon Musk has still found time – and money – to meddle in a relatively obscure election in a state of 6 million people.The close ally of Donald Trump is spending millions of dollars in an effort to tip the scales in favor of a Republican candidate running for a seat on the highest court in Wisconsin. Critics regard it as a statement of intent by Musk to expand his political power in America by playing an insidious role in key races across the country.“It’s one of the most significant threats to our democracy in the current moment,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “You’ve got money and power in one person who’s been given access to the upper echelon of the federal government. He’s fused the power of the Oval Office with his almost unlimited amount of money to support Republicans, both at the state level and national level.”Musk has grabbed attention during Trump’s first month in office with his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, a team of mostly young male software engineers who have laid waste to the federal government and dismissed thousands of workers in ways that have been challenged in the courts.Musk’s startling ascent was on vivid display when he spoke to reporters alongside Trump in the Oval Office and wielded a chainsaw before a cheering crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Earlier this week, he held court at a cabinet meeting, where the president dared any of his officials to express discontent about Musk’s scorched-earth approach. No one did.But away from the TV cameras, Musk is also at work in Wisconsin, which holds an election for its state supreme court on 1 April. The vote will decide whether liberals maintain a 4-3 majority with major cases dealing with abortion, union rights, election law and congressional redistricting already under consideration by the court or expected to be argued before it soon.Such campaigns are now non-partisan in name only. Republicans are lining up behind Brad Schimel while Democrats are backing Susan Crawford. It could be the most significant US election since November, an early litmus test after Trump won every swing state, including Wisconsin.Crawford has received $3m from the state Democratic party, including $1m that the party received from the liberal philanthropist George Soros and $500,000 from the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker.Musk’s America political action committee is spending $1m to back Schimel, a former state attorney general who attended Trump’s inauguration last month. Another group Musk has funded, Building America’s Future, is spending $1.6m on TV ads attacking Crawford, a Dane county circuit judge. It reportedly had to withdraw one social media ad after it featured a photo of a different woman named Susan Crawford.Crawford told a recent meeting of the Wisconsin Counties Association: “Elon Musk is trying to buy a seat on our supreme court so Brad Schimel can rubber-stamp his extreme agenda.”Schimel denies that money would affect his independence on the court. He told reporters: “I don’t have any agenda that I’m working alongside anyone. I’m grateful for our supporters, but they’re getting nothing except me following the law.”But Musk has both business and political incentives to back him. Tesla, the electric car company owned by Musk, has a lawsuit pending in Wisconsin challenging the state’s decision blocking it from opening dealerships. The case could ultimately be decided by the Wisconsin supreme court and Schimel has not committed to stepping aside.Furthermore, in the event of a disputed election in the crucial swing state in 2028, the supreme court could be decisive. Musk tweeted last month: “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” And as Doge lays siege to the administrative state, the courts have provided the strongest pushback. Tilting them to the right could neutralise that opposition and work to Musk’s advantage.Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin, said: “He is not the first far-right billionaire to pour money into a Wisconsin supreme court election but he is spending money hand over fist at the same time the whole world is wondering whether courts will ever be a check on the Musk/ Trump/GOP attack on the rule of law.“While he’s firing veterans with disabilities in Wisconsin from the veterans administration, he’s also working to buy a supreme court majority that could eliminate any possibility of accountability to state law.”Musk exploded onto the political stage last year, spending nearly $300m supporting Republican campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission filings. While most of his efforts went toward electing Trump, a super political action committee he founded also spent millions of dollars on House of Representatives races to keep Republicans in control.Musk also dabbled in state politics in Texas, where he had moved several of his businesses. In 2024, he gave $1m to a tort reform group supporting Republicans in state legislative races and $2m to a political action committee that campaigned to elect Republican judges in the state.Wikler believes there is more to come. “There’s been a question about whether Musk would follow Trump in only caring about elections when Trump is on the ballot. The answer is now clearly no. Musk wants control over every level of government at the same time as he takes control of people’s personal tax information and treasury payments that keep childcare centres open in Wisconsin,” he said.He added: “Musk is trying to execute a uniquely and profoundly grotesque perversion of justice by buying the court system while defying the constitution in order to rip off the poor and the middle class to enrich himself.”Not even Republicans are safe from the world’s richest man, whose fortune is estimated at $426bn. Musk threatened to fund primary election challengers to members of Congress who failed to back Trump’s cabinet picks and legislative priorities.Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator based in Wisconsin, said: “Elon Musk’s money is the bullets in the chamber aimed at wavering Republicans: ‘You don’t support us, Elon Musk will come into your state or your district [and] he will spend more money than God has to defeat you in a primary.’”Musk’s control of the X social media platform gives him profound influence over online discourse and the flow of information. His own feed, with 219 million followers, has become like a running commentary on the Trump administration.He has even sought to flex his muscles abroad, backing Germany’s far-right AfD party, calling for Nigel Farage to quit as leader of Britain’s Reform UK party and pushing false claims that white people are persecuted in South Africa.But while he currently appears omnipotent – a Time magazine cover depicted him sitting behind the Resolute desk like a president – there are signs of growing public discontent.In a Washington Post-Ipsos opinion poll, 34% of respondents said they approved of how Musk was handling his job, compared with 49% disapproving and 14% not sure. Protests against the tech oligarch have been held across the country and congressional Republicans have faced the backlash at raucous town halls.Sykes questions how long Musk’s political honeymoon can last: “He’s signalling that, at least for now, he’s going to be Trump’s enforcer and he’s going to be the force multiplier for the right wing. But as he does so, he’s also establishing himself as an independent force. The dilemma for Trump is that Musk is useful until he’s not but he’s not easy to get rid of.“In the end, there can only be one. The dilemma right now is it’s important to keep the focus on what Elon Musk is doing but not forget that the only reason he’s been empowered to do it is because of Donald Trump.” More

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      Trump can’t fulfil his promise to fix the economy, so he’s blaming workers instead

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      During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to harp on inflation, promising that “on day one” he would “end inflation” and lower the costs of groceries, cars and other common goods.Well, it’s day 40, and inflation saw its largest increase in over a year. Blink and you might have missed that Trump and his fellow Republicans have largely abandoned their concerns about inflation to focus on government “waste”.While Trump hasn’t fulfilled his campaign promise, he is living up to his usual brand of politics: the blame game. And this blame, as usual, is rooted in generating anger against “undeserving” Americans.This time, the undeserving are federal workers and poor people who get nominal benefits from the federal government – like Snap, which administers food stamps, and Medicaid. To fix so-called waste, the president apparently has no choice but to crack down on spending (and enlist help from Elon Musk), an issue that barely registered in the public consciousness in the past 10 years but is somehow now a rampant problem, according to Trump.There are policy frameworks backing Trump and the GOP’s divisiveness, including the well-known Project 2025 and a lesser-known House proposal published in 2024, Fiscal Sanity to Save America, that centers government “waste” instead of corporate greed. And now, with Republicans controlling the House, Senate and presidency, Republicans have the power to act on cuts that will harm millions of Americans.Musk and Trump, of course, have already worked to cut thousands of federal workers’ jobs. And with the Trump-backed budget bill the House passed on Wednesday, including $800bn in likely cuts from Medicaid, Republicans are one step closer to bulldozing America’s already paltry social safety net.This isn’t just at the federal level. Republicans have been floating proposals in state governments that would restrict healthcare, housing and food benefits instead of making it easier to afford things.The party of “freedom” is endorsing government home visits to surveil “fraud” in all US states (according to page 43 of the GOP’s “Fiscal Sanity” plan). The party of “family values” is also turning its attention to school lunch and breakfast programs, which it claims are subject to “widespread” fraud and abuse (page 46). The party that wants to “make America healthy again” is floating restrictions to Medicaid that would make recipients work at least 80 hours a month, a proposal that wastes government time and money to verify work requirements and which would probably just deter people from getting healthcare, as a flailing GOP work requirement experiment in Georgia has shown.And as Trump touts himself as an anti-war president, his proposals belie the fact that much of these spending cuts will now be diverted to defense contracts and other military and border spending, not on improving the economic lives of everyday workers to whom he made sweeping campaign promises.Meanwhile, straightforward proposals to simply give people more money (which does have evidence of working), such as universal basic income, would be outright banned at the federal level under the GOP plan. So as the cost of living is primed to increase, Republicans have ready-made excuses to justify cutting billions of dollars from these programs, an exceptional sort of cruelty.Of course, no one wants to see public money being spent wastefully or fraudulently. But incessant focus on “waste” stems from faulty, selective evidence. According to reports from Musk’s own so-called “department of government efficiency”, nearly 40% of cancelled contracts to cut costs are expected to yield no savings. It also stems from something else that does have proven results: the utility of public outrage.Focusing on extreme examples and “undeserving” government beneficiaries animates America’s existing propensity for divisiveness, giving Trump and his party wide latitude to wreck the lives of millions of people who don’t engage in fraud, waste or abuse. When Reagan wanted tax cuts for the rich, we saw the “welfare queen” trope. When neoliberal Democrats and Republicans wanted to cut public housing at the federal and local level, we saw extreme stories about the criminality of people who lived there. We cannot waste the money of hard-working Americans on these “others”. It’s a narrative – often hinging on racism and sexism – that has great outcomes for America’s capitalist class and the politicians who support them.So instead of protesting against the rising cost of living or making demands for universal healthcare, federal job guarantees, increased labor rights, or Snap benefits for all, or cutting the bloated defense budget and increasing taxes on the super-rich to pay for the nominal social welfare benefits that other industrial countries have normalized, working-class Americans are engaging in petty debates about what kinds of groceries other working-class Americans should buy and deputizing themselves to root out “abuse” among other workers.Republicans redirecting blame towards people who are suffering in this economy under the guise of “waste” is a distraction. As inflation is poised to worsen under Trump, Americans would be wise to focus their anger more on the elected officials and billionaires who profit from their pain than on each other.

      Malaika Jabali is a 2024 New America fellow, journalist and author of It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On More

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      ‘They’ve lost my trust’: consumers shun companies as bosses kowtow to Trump

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      In late January, Lauren Bedson did what many would likely find unthinkable: she cancelled her Amazon Prime membership. The catalyst was Donald Trump’s inauguration. Many more Americans are planning to make similar decisions this Friday.Bedson made her move after seeing photos of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, sitting with other tech moguls and billionaires, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, just rows behind Trump at his inauguration.“I just couldn’t stand to see them so cowardly,” Bedson, of Camas, Washington, told the Guardian. “I lived in Seattle for over a decade. I was a fan of Amazon for a long time, I think they have a good product. But I’m just so disgusted. I don’t want to give these billionaire oligarchs any more of my money.”It’s a sentiment that many Americans have been feeling since Trump entered the White House. Companies and business leaders who were once passive or vocally critical of Trump are now trying to cozy up to him, leading consumers to question the values of the brands they used to trust. A recent Harris poll found that a quarter of American consumers have stopped shopping at their favorite stores because of shifting political stances.Many are being inspired by calls to boycott coming from social media. One boycott has gone viral over the last few weeks: a “blackout” of companies that dropped some of their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals, including Target, Amazon and Walmart, is planned for 28 February with protesters planning to halt all spending at these corporations for the day.View image in fullscreenBut people are also making the decision to boycott at their kitchen tables, trying to figure out how to resist Trump, and perhaps corporate capitalism at large, within their own communities.The Guardian asked readers how their shopping habits have changed over the last few months, as the political climate started to shift after Trump’s win. Hundreds from across the country said that they have stopped shopping at stores such as Walmart and Target that publicly announced the end of DEI goals. Dozens like Bedson had cancelled long held Prime accounts. Others have shut down their Facebook and Instagram accounts in protest of Meta.“I’m just trying to do little things that make me feel a little bit empowered, to stake my claim against what’s happening and how companies are acting in ways that are opposed to my values,” said Kim Wohlenhaus, of St Louis, Missouri, who cancelled her Prime membership, deleted her Meta accounts and has stopped shopping at Target. “It feels good to be able to do something.”Erica Bradley, of Reno, Nevada, said she stopped shopping at Target because of their changing DEI policies.“I don’t plan on going there ever again, just because I feel like they’ve shown that they’re not really committed to these things,” Bradley said. “They’ve lost my trust.”View image in fullscreenFor many consumers, the shift away from the big companies has revealed how much they have come to rely on them. As of last spring, 75% of American consumers had Amazon Prime memberships, a total of 180m Prime accounts, according to Bloomberg.Bedson said cancelling her account made her aware of a culture of consumerism in American where “in some ways, it feels like we don’t have a choice”.“Amazon is so convenient,” she said. “I think we all have become very complacent or complicit, and it’s hard to make these changes. But on the other hand, what else can we do?”It’s been a year since Bradley cancelled her Prime account, after she saw Amazon’s union busting. She recalls a transition period as she was adjusting to life without Prime, but it ultimately led her to spend less overall.“I just decided I don’t really need a lot of these things. Like I don’t need more clothes, I don’t really need more house decorations, which are things I used to spend a lot of money on,” Bradley said. “It’s not retail therapy anymore.”The Harris poll found that a third of Americans are similarly trying to “opt out” of the economy, cutting down on overall spending as the political stances of corporations have become murky.View image in fullscreen“It’s like a Whac-a-Mole now,” Wohlenhaus said. “You could really look in any direction and find something you dislike about the way corporations are caving to this administration.”Wohlenhaus said she has started to prioritize shopping at local businesses. She kept her Costco membership, since the company affirmed its DEI policies.During Joe Biden’s presidency, many of the boycotts against companies actually came from conservatives who felt corporations were caving to a “woke” mob. But boycotts didn’t amount to any serious consequences – with two exceptions. Bud Light saw a drop in sales after it sponsored a post by a transgender influencer and Target removed some of its Pride merchandise after conservative backlash.It’s unclear what the consequences of the current backlash will be. But Wohlenhaus and others voiced optimism that consumers are thinking critically about the choices they’re making at checkout.“Hopefully if thousands of other families are doing what we’re doing, I think they’ll start to feel it,” she said. “We don’t care about your products as much as we care about those values that we cherish.” More

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      China promises ‘countermeasures’ after Trump threatens additional 10% tariff

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      Donald Trump has threatened China with an additional 10% tariff on its exports to the US, prompting a promise of “countermeasures” from Beijing and setting the stage for another significant escalation in the two governments’ trade war.The US president also claimed he planned to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting next Tuesday, having delayed their imposition last month after talks with his counterparts.Posting on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said illicit drugs such as fentanyl were being smuggled into the US at “unacceptable levels” and that import taxes would force other countries to crack down on the trafficking.“We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA, and therefore, until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled,” the Republican president wrote. “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”If Trump makes good on this latest threat, the move would further strain relations between the US and its largest trading partners.In response, China’s commerce and foreign ministries on Friday vowed to retaliate if Chinese companies were affected by the tariffs, accusing the US of using fentanyl as a “pretext” to threaten China.“Such behaviour is purely ‘shifting blame and shirking responsibility,’ which is not conducive to solving its own problems,” a commerce ministry spokesperson said. “If the US insists on proceeding with this course of action, China will take all necessary countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”Canada and Mexico have promised to retaliate if the US imposes tariffs on their exports. China hit back swiftly when Trump imposed a 10% tariff on its exports earlier this month.The Trump administration has repeatedly raised the threat of tariffs, vowing to rebalance the global economic order in the US’s favor. A string of announced measures have yet to be introduced, however, as economists and businesses urge officials to reconsider.The duties on imports from Canada and Mexico have been repeatedly delayed; modified levies on steel and aluminum will not be enforced until next month, and a wave of “reciprocal” tariffs, trailed earlier this month, will not kick in before April.This week, the US president vowed to slap 25% tariffs on the EU, claiming the bloc was “formed to screw the United States”, although details remain sparse. Duties will be applied “generally”, Trump said, “on cars and all other things”.The prospect of escalating tariffs has already thrown the global economy into turmoil – with consumers expressing fears about inflation worsening and the auto sector possibly suffering if the US’s two largest trading partners in Canada and Mexico are slapped with taxes.The prospect of higher prices and slower growth could create political blowback for Trump.Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Do Trump and co want a world reclaimed by straight white men? It’s not certain they’ll get it | Andy Beckett

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      For people who believe that the world should be run by straight white men, these are heady times. Probably the most powerful social conservative on the planet occupies the White House again, and seems determined to drive “immoral” and “discriminatory” diversity policies out of American life.Two years ago, the US supreme court banned the use of affirmative action in university admissions. A growing list of American and British companies, from Ford to BT to Goldman Sachs, appear to be reducing their commitment to the once fashionable corporate principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Meanwhile, Reform UK promises to “scrap DEI rules that have lowered standards and reduced economic productivity”. In politics, commerce and education, a huge, potentially lasting counterrevolution seems to be under way.“The death of DEI is finally here,” wrote the columnist Michael Deacon in the Telegraph last year, “and it’s a joy to behold … A radical progressive ideology that, in recent years, has held countless western institutions in its miserable grip … is finally loosening.”For many companies, promoting diversity has only been a priority for a few years, since the surge of anti-racist activism set off around the world by Black Lives Matter in 2020. And in some ways the inclusive values of DEI and the winner-takes-all ethos of capitalism have always been an awkward fit. For all but the most ethical businesses, hiring and employing people in a more egalitarian way is less fundamental than maximising profits.In many supposedly diverse companies, progress towards a truly representative workforce, especially in senior positions, has been slow and far from complete. From rightwing and leftwing perspectives, it can be argued that diversity policies have just been a cynical experiment: yet another attempt to polish corporate capitalism’s increasingly tarnished public image. Now that the political climate has changed, the experiment is being unceremoniously abandoned.But is the situation really that clearcut? One of the key features of current rightwing populism is a desire to escape complicated social realities, and so it is with the revolt against diversity. Thanks to globalisation, immigration and trends in birthrates, Britain and the US, like most other rich countries, are much more multicultural than they were in the 1980s – the last time there was a big conservative pushback against diversity policies. Between 1980 and 2019, the minority ethnic proportion of the US population doubled to 40%. In England and Wales, the proportion of people who didn’t describe themselves as white British doubled between 2001 and 2021 alone: from one in eight to one in four. During these decades of flux, there were also profound shifts in how millions of Britons and Americans thought about feminism, gender, sexuality and disability.None of these socially embedded trends is likely to be completely reversed, however much rightwing populists rail against them. In a speech last week, Kemi Badenoch described diversity policies as “poison”, but the Conservatives have their own equal opportunities policy, with her face on the document’s first page. It commits the party to being “a supportive and inclusive environment where … the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances will be positively valued … [and] where the party will also continue to work towards its dedicated goal of encouraging and promoting equality and diversity”. It’s easy to see these commitments as insincere or hypocritical, but they are also a sign of how far DEI ideas have spread.Back in the 1980s, the last transatlantic campaign against diversity policies was led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Her government caricatured Labour councils that helped minorities as “loony left”, and then took many of their powers away. Meanwhile, in the US, Ronald Reagan aimed to abolish the federal government’s affirmative action programme, which he saw as “bureaucratic” social engineering. He also reduced funding for the agency that enforced equal opportunities employment law, drastically reducing the number of cases it brought against companies.But his counterrevolution got no further. Strong opposition – hard to imagine now – came from relatively liberal senior figures in the Republican party. More relevant to today, further support for diversity policies came from big business. “When Reagan sought to tear down affirmative action,” wrote the American sociologist Frank Dobbin in his 2009 book, Inventing Equal Opportunity, “corporate America stood together to oppose the [president’s] idea.”Businesses argued that diverse workforces made the best use of the country’s range of talent and were more creative and productive, and more able to understand a broad spectrum of customers at home and abroad. Shrewdly, businesses also rebranded affirmative action in more neutral, less political language, as “human resources management”. Reagan’s attempt to abolish affirmative action was quietly abandoned.Might today’s war on diversity fail in a similar way? The forces of white male supremacy have a more relentless rightwing media on their side than in Reagan and Thatcher’s day. Donald Trump and other reactionary populists also seem less likely to compromise in culture wars than their more pragmatic conservative predecessors.Yet with multiculturalism now deeply entrenched, rooting out diversity policies will be harder than Trump’s confident executive orders suggest. Legal opposition is building, and there are already signs that business is hiding its diversity programmes behind euphemisms again. On Tuesday, Apple shareholders voted against ending the company’s diversity programme. “DEI is being rebranded – not disbanded,” complained the rightwing New York Post recently. It pointed out that some companies widely thought to have dropped DEI continued to promote it on their websites in slightly modified language. If diversity policies increase profits – and according to the president of the British Chambers of Commerce, Martha Lane Fox, “Businesses that embed diversity have 25% higher financial results” – then even the most determined anti-DEI campaign is unlikely to totally prevail.Moreover, what the reactionaries want is less clear and coherent than it first seems. Do they want to restore a society utterly dominated by straight white men, which is almost certainly impossible? Or do they accept the existence of a diverse society, as long as it isn’t actually shaped by diversity policies? On these questions, conservatives are divided.Even Trump sometimes acknowledges American diversity’s permanence and importance. In his inauguration speech, he boasted of his “increases in support from … young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans …” Social conservatives around the world may be feeling triumphant now, but their revolt against diversity has probably come too late.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Apple shareholders vote against ending DEI program amid Trump crackdown

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      Apple shareholders voted down an attempt to pressure the technology company into yielding to Donald Trump’s push to scrub corporate programs designed to diversify its workforce.A proposal drafted by the National Center for Public Policy Research – a self-described conservative thinktank – urged Apple to follow a litany of high-profile companies that have retreated from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives currently in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.After a brief presentation about the anti-DEI proposal, Apple announced shareholders had rejected it without disclosing the vote tally. The preliminary results will be outlined in a regulatory filing later on Tuesday.The outcome vindicated Apple management’s decision to stand behind its diversity commitment even though Trump asked the US Department of Justice to look into whether these types of programs have discriminated against employees whose race or gender are not aligned with the initiatives’ goals.But Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has maintained a cordial relationship with Trump since his first term in office, an alliance that so far has helped the company skirt tariffs on its iPhones made in China. After Cook and Trump met last week, Apple on Monday announced it would invest $500bn in the US and create 20,000 more jobs during the next five years – a commitment applauded by the president.Tuesday’s shareholder vote came a month after the same group presented a similar proposal during Costco’s annual meeting, only to have it overwhelmingly rejected.That snub did not discourage the National Center for Public Policy Research from confronting Apple about its DEI program in a pre-recorded presentation by Stefan Padfield, executive director of the thinktank’s Free Enterprise Project, who asserted “forced diversity is bad for business”.In the presentation, Padfield attacked Apple’s diversity commitments for being out of line with recent court rulings and said the programs expose the Cupertino, California, company to an onslaught of potential lawsuits for alleged discrimination. He cited the Trump administration as one of Apple’s potential legal adversaries.“The vibe shift is clear: DEI is out and merit is in,” Padfield said in the presentation.The specter of potential legal trouble was magnified last week when the Florida attorney general, James Uthmeier, filed a federal lawsuit against Target for allegedly failing to properly disclose the financial risks of its DEI programs to stakeholders.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Cook conceded Apple may have to make some adjustments to its diversity program “as the legal landscape changes” while still striving to maintain a culture that has helped elevate the company to its current market value of $3.7tn – greater than any other business in the world.“We will continue to create a culture of belonging,” Cook told shareholders during the meeting.In its last diversity and inclusion report issued in 2022, Apple disclosed that nearly three-fourths of its global workforce consisted of white and Asian employees. Nearly two-thirds of its employees were men.Other major technology companies for years have reported employing mostly white and Asian men, especially in high-paid engineering jobs – a tendency that spurred the industry to pursue largely unsuccessful efforts to diversify. More

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      Trump is using tariffs as a blunt-force tool. It won’t work | Mike Williams

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      Last week, Donald Trump revived a trade war from his first term, implementing a 25% tariff on all imported steel. In doing so, he’s using tariffs as a blunt-force tool under the assumption that they’ll be sufficient to jump-start the American steel industry.But that’s not the case.Tariffs are important, but they’re far from enough. Thanks to decades of disinvestment and terrible trade policies, the steel industry has grappled with decline and stagnation for years. It now faces grave threats as China continues to flood the global market with artificially cheap steel, manipulating prices in its favor. Meanwhile, the global market has begun a shift towards “clean” steel produced with electricity and hydrogen, a process the United States has only just started to support.To survive, the steel industry must modernize. To support that effort, the federal government should be implementing targeted tariffs alongside investments and incentives that help the industry grow and transition.Strategic tariffs can help protect steel manufacturing from excessive overcapacity and unfair price manipulation by foreign competitors. They can also be used to account for other effects, such as the impact of high-emissions steel production on health and the environment. For example, a tariff that considers carbon emissions in the production of a given unit of steel would help protect the domestic steel industry from foreign competitors’ cheap, high-emissions steel. The European Union is already implementing this kind of tariff, called a carbon-border adjustment mechanism. Revenue from this tariff – and others – could help our steel industry transition to clean technologies and accelerate the industry’s modernization.When tariffs are used for negotiation without being combined with other government tools, they can backfire. Already, Canada and the EU are preparing reciprocal tariffs on American steel and aluminum, which will make American steel even less desirable in those markets. Steel is a critical material in countless supply chains, from cars and planes to housing and infrastructure, and across-the-board increases in steel prices carry widespread economic risks. Trump’s 2018 tariffs on steel provide a roadmap for what we can expect: while production temporarily ticked up, exports declined almost 25% between 2018 and 2020, and after retaliation from China and Mexico, economists downgraded growth estimates, and business investment slowed.Tariffs are necessary for correcting distortions in global trade but are a poor tool for catalyzing the kind of investment needed for the long-term viability of the American steel industry, which needs to transition to clean technology to remain competitive globally. While tariffs can protect existing production capacity from being undercut, they won’t necessarily yield large infrastructure and modernization investments from domestic steel companies already operating at slim margins.But just as it has started to do for our domestic semiconductor industry, the federal government can combine fortified trade policies with structural support for the steel industry’s transformation. This could include investment tax credits for revamping steel-production facilities to use clean technologies and production tax credits for making domestic clean steel, spurring private investment across the steel industry.The federal government could leverage existing policies as well. For example, expanding the Biden administration’s “Buy America” requirements for federally funded projects, such as highway and bridge construction, to include domestically produced, 100% clean steel would strengthen demand for US-produced steel. Reviving “Buy Clean” standards for steel used in federal projects could also accelerate the industry’s modernization. These structural supports could be funded by the revenue from targeted, well-designed tariffs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has claimed his tariffs will create a “manufacturing boom”, turn America into a manufacturing “powerhouse” and “make America rich again”. But going all in on tariffs alone is an unsteady foundation for industrial policy. Unless Trump expands his strategy to include incentives and investment for the steel industry, his approach will be like a game of Jenga: eventually, it will all come crashing down.

      Mike Williams is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former deputy director of the BlueGreen Alliance More

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      Trump threatens 25% tariffs on foreign cars and semiconductor chips

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      Donald Trump stood firm against warnings that his threatened trade war risks derailing the US economy, claiming his administration could hit foreign cars with tariffs of around 25% within weeks.Semiconductor chips and drugs are set to face higher duties, Trump told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.The White House has repeatedly raised the threat of tariffs since Trump returned to office last month, pledging to rebalance the global economic order in America’s favor.A string of announced tariffs have yet to be introduced, however, as economists and business urge the Trump administration to reconsider.Duties on imports from Canada and Mexico have been repeatedly delayed; modified levies on steel and aluminum, announced last week, will not be enforced until next month; and a wave of so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, also trailed last week, will not kick in before April.Tariffs are taxes on foreign goods. They are paid by the importer of the product – in this case, companies and consumers based inside the US – rather than the exporter, elsewhere in the world.Asked on Tuesday if he had decided the rate of a threatened tariff on cars from overseas, Trump said he would “probably” announce that on 2 April, “but it’ll be in the neighborhood of 25%”.Upon being asked the same question about threatened tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, Trump replied: “It’ll be 25% and higher, and it’ll go very substantially higher over the course of a year.”The ramp-up, he explained, was designed to lure manufacturers to the US. “When they come into the United States, and they have their plant or factory here, there is no tariff.”Executives have cautioned that the administration’s plan for tariffs risks harming the US economy. A 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada “will blow a hole in the US industry that we have never seen”, Jim Farley, the Ford CEO, told an investor conference in New York last week. More