in World News Tariffs Aren’t Bad For The Economy, Just For Financial Pencil-Pushers
Kevin Capolino
The American economy is worth saving. So are the people who built it. And for the first time in a generation, someone is finally fighting to do just that.
The howls from Wall Street echo like the cries of a spoiled aristocracy waking up to find their servants gone. A modest dip in the stock market, and suddenly the talking heads on CNBC and Bloomberg start shrieking about doom, devastation, and economic collapse. These are the same people who insisted that market plunges during the Biden administration were just statistical noise.
Now, with President Trump reasserting trade policies that prioritize American labor over foreign profit margins, the very people who cheered offshoring act as though he’s detonated the foundation of the economy itself.
Let’s call this what it is: populism manifest. President Trump is delivering on a promise: a long-overdue correction to an economic system that has gleefully sold out the American working class. For decades, jobs were outsourced, factories were shuttered, and the keys to our industrial future were handed to our geopolitical rivals.
All the while, they told us not to worry. “The market is strong.” “GDP is growing.” And the heartland burned.
Years ago, noted leftist Noam Chomsky warned that the financialization of the economy, where profits are generated not by production but by MBAs moving numbers in endless circles, would lead to a dangerous concentration of wealth and power. We now live in the very nightmare his cohorts spent six decades bemoaning, only to fall silent when someone finally challenges its architects.
Where is the “Occupy Wall Street” ensemble in the face of the first real confrontation with the financial elite in living memory? Silent. Turns out they never wanted solutions, just slogans and soggy cardboard signs. Maybe preserving their illusion of ideological purity matters more than actually lifting the working class they so loudly claim to defend.
We financialized everything, and in the process, we turned the American economy into a spreadsheet with no soul. The American economy has become a husk, propped up by torching our children’s inheritance and trading the dignity of work for short-term shareholder gains. We stopped making things. We started shuffling numbers. We turned labor into leverage and productivity into PowerPoint. We didn’t build wealth; we rearranged it. And we called it progress because the line graph kept creeping up, no matter what lay beneath it.