AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to President Trump’s growing global trade war. Trump has imposed a sweeping 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports from around the world.

The European Union has responded with retaliatory tariffs. European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen said, quote, “We firmly believe that in a world fraught with geopolitical and economic uncertainties, it is not in our common interest to burden our economies with tariffs.”

Meanwhile, tension over trade remains high between the United States and Canada. On Tuesday, Trump backed off his threat to impose a 50% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum. Trump made that threat after Ontario Premier Doug Ford added a 25% surcharge to electricity exports to three U.S. states. Ford then suspended the electrical surcharge after U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick agreed to renewed trade talks. On Tuesday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford appeared on CNN and accused Trump of creating “absolute chaos.”

PREMIER DOUG FORD: There was an unprovoked attack on Canada, on families, on jobs, on businesses. For what reason? You know, the market’s speaking loud and clear. Consumer confidence is down. The market’s tumbling. You know, there’s going to be plants closed in the U.S. Assembly plants will shut down, because they won’t have the aluminum, or they’ll be paying twice, three times as much. This is — this is absolute chaos, created by one person. And that’s Donald Trump, not the American people. I always say Canadians love Americans. I love Americans. And this has to stop.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s escalating trade war rattled markets again on Tuesday, with stock markets continuing to fall.

To talk more about Trump’s trade policy, what many call Trump’s “trade war with the world,” we’re joined by the award-winning investigative journalist Dave Lindorff. His most recent article is “Why US Automakers Make Vehicles in Canada.” It appears on his Substack page, “This Can’t Be Happening.”

Dave, thanks so much for being with us. Why don’t you start off by just responding to what Trump is doing to Canada and the 25% tariffs on steel around the world?

DAVE LINDORFF: Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me on. I’m in Cambridge, so you found me.

The whole issue that really struck me about this is that the reason that the auto industry, and probably a lot of the steel market, went to Canada and that the auto industry actually set up subsidiaries in Canada to construct the cars that they sell, some of them — all the vans, pretty much, minivans, and, you know, noted Ford and GM pickup — is because Canadian labor costs them much less. And it doesn’t cost them much less because Canadian workers earn less per hour, which they don’t. They have good, strong unions, and they have good hourly pay. But they don’t have to — those subsidiaries don’t have to pay for their employees’ healthcare costs.

In the U.S., in contrast, the union has very good — negotiated very good health plans from the auto industry — you know, Ford, Stellantis and GM — but they have to pay for that themselves, you know, the auto companies, and, you know, a part of it by the employees, because we don’t have public medicine, nationally funded public medicine, for working-age people, only for people on Medicaid after they’re 65. They’re not the ones that are working.

So, the fact that we don’t have national healthcare here, like they have in Canada or Britain or all of Europe, is making American industry noncompetitive. In fact, Rick Wagoner told the Senate back in '85 that GM was being driven almost into bankruptcy because of healthcare costs. And now healthcare costs cost about, I think, $4.9 trillion, you know, 6-something percent of the U.S. economy, so — or, 16%, rather. So, we're really paying double for not having national healthcare. We don’t have — we have to pay for it ourselves partly, and we lose our jobs because our industry is not competitive with the world’s other — you know, other industries.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dave, you make the point in your article that it’s not just Canada. In Germany, in Japan, in South Korea, in France, China, many other countries that manufacture automobiles have some kind of government-paid health insurance. And in places like Germany, the auto workers make much more money than auto workers here in the United States, but those companies — the production of cars there is still competitive.

DAVE LINDORFF: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, the irony, Juan, is that if we had, say, what Bernie Sanders has been pushing for several elections, presidential elections and off-year elections, of Medicare for All, you know, sort of expanded and Medicare for All, so everybody got what old people now get, some form of socialized medicine, not only would workers benefit, because they would have — even the money that they’re getting would go further, because they wouldn’t be having to pay for deductibles and copays and things that don’t even get covered, because it would all be covered by tax-supported national healthcare, but the companies that they work for wouldn’t be laying them off because they can’t sell things. And so, you know, it’s a win-win situation, which I don’t understand how it — except for the corruption of our campaign funding system, why Republicans and the neoliberals who control the Democratic Party would think that it’s a good idea not to do this. But they don’t. They’re blocking it, both of those groups.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dave, could you talk about this whole effort of Trump, who especially raised tariffs on Mexico and Canada, both of which are members of the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Trade Agreement that he negotiated and that he called a great agreement several years ago?

DAVE LINDORFF: That’s right. That’s right. He said it was a great agreement, and now he’s breaking it. I mean, it’s a pretty astonishing thing. But, you know, I think it’s incumbent on the working class at this point to call it with their own senators and representatives, because they’re not voting in the interests of working people if they don’t support the idea of Medicare for All.

AMY GOODMAN: I think this is absolutely key, it can’t be said enough, this whole issue of Medicare for All, Dave Lindorff. When there’s this whole discussion, for example, about cuts to Medicaid, about cuts to healthcare in general, and the Democrats are really focusing on this, which is crucial, what they don’t say, what they don’t talk about is universal healthcare, is Medicare for All. Can you talk more about that, about this being the moment? We see Bernie Sanders in his, you know, oligarchy tour around the country continually hammering home on this, but it hardly hits the corporate media radar screen, perhaps because they have so many health insurance and drug company advertisements.

DAVE LINDORFF: Yeah, it’s really true. You know, I wrote a book about this, like back in 1992, about the for-profit medicine and what was wrong with it. And it hasn’t changed. It’s gotten worse. The idea that you have none of the administrative costs that are built in at like — as much as 30% of all the trillions of dollars spent on healthcare in the United States goes to administrative costs. It doesn’t do a thing. The insurance company is sucking up the profits for no purpose. They’re just sort of vultures or parasites sucking up the money in between the treatment and the payment. So, it makes no sense at all.

AMY GOODMAN: This is UAW President Shawn Fain speaking on ABC’s This Week.

SHAWN FAIN: Look, we’re in a crisis mode in this country. You know, there is no single issue in this country that has affected our economy and working-class people and their jobs than NAFTA, the USMCA and our trade laws, our broken trade system. And we’re in a crisis mode. And, you know, we are triaging right now. So, I hear this debate about, you know, blanket tariffs and all this stuff, but, look, we’re in a triage situation. Tariffs are an attempt to stop the bleeding from the hemorrhaging of jobs in America for the last 33 years.

So, you know, and as we speak right now, I mean, decisions are still being made. Warren Truck plant right here in Michigan, there’s over 2,000 people laid off. And a simple decision: Stellantis is shifting truck production to Mexico; they could change overnight and move those trucks right back here to Warren, Michigan, and put people back to work. You know, we have Deere workers in Racine, Wisconsin, we have Mack Truck workers in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where the companies are saying they’re going to move their jobs to Mexico. So, tariffs aren’t the end solution, but they are a huge factor in creating and fixing this problem.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the UAW President Shawn Fain. Dave Lindorff, if you can respond to that? And also — 

DAVE LINDORFF: He’s —

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

DAVE LINDORFF: Yeah, he’s not addressing the issue, because he knows that the reason that the industry moved construction into Canada is because of healthcare costs. I mean, that was stated by their executives. And the unions are not good on this, because they actually — you know, the leadership of the unions actually like having — especially when they’re strong, like to be able to point to the healthcare benefits that they’ve negotiated. But those are coming off of the pay of the workers, because even if it’s partly paid by the company, the company could be paying wages instead of insurance premiums to private insurance companies. So, it’s really, you know, a compromised situation for the leadership in unions. They should be supporting state-funded healthcare, so that they can focus on working conditions and better incomes, and not on this other stuff.

So, you know, a tariff — the worst thing about the tariffs — and he also should know this — is it’s the most regressive form of taxes, because it hits the people who have to buy stuff that’s got tariffs on it, from, like, imported food, medicines, all of that. And second of all, it’s a way of keeping the bad American practices and, you know, investing, for example, in productive improvements — productivity improvements in your company, when if you can get a tariff slapped on the competition abroad, you don’t have to make those investments. So, it’s really a way of keeping the management of companies doing whatever they’re doing now instead of fixing things.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: [inaudible] follow up on that. The emphasis that Trump has, how different governments or countries are ripping off the United States when it comes to trade, when, in fact, I think the estimates are that as much as two-thirds of all trade in the world is between multinational companies trading with their own subsidiaries. There’s this internal system of the division of labor among the big multinationals. It’s the companies, the American companies, that go to China, that go to Vietnam, that go to Bangladesh to produce their products. It’s not the nations themselves that are responsible. It’s the way that international multinational corporations work.

DAVE LINDORFF: Yeah, you’re right, Juan. They do that also because they get enormous tax breaks by manipulating the internal pricing of their subsidiary supply parts coming into the U.S. So, you can make the profits show up in the country that has the lowest corporate tax on profits, and you do it by just artificially increasing the cost of the product that you’re buying from yourself from a low-tax place — from a high-tax place to a low-tax place. And it’s very hard to detect that.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dave Lindorff, I want to ask you about the Tesla ad that President Trump performed in yesterday at the White House. It was quite astounding. You have — what’s the article I’m reading right now? — the president throwing Elon Musk a lifeline with an event, live-streamed on X, where he touted the cars and said he would buy one. You have Trump going into a red Tesla as Elon Musk was there with his little son X, talking about how important it was to support Tesla. Can you talk about not only the stock massive drop in Tesla, but the billionaires who stood at the inauguration in front of the Cabinet members losing a tremendous amount of money at this point since the inauguration?

DAVE LINDORFF: Yeah, I mean, what he’s doing is he’s helping him because his market is collapsing around the world. People don’t want to buy Teslas from, you know, this lunatic, fascist drug user. And he’s angering the MAGA people. He’s angering foreign buyers who would buy this. And the Teslas are being attacked. So, if you buy a Tesla, you’re liable to get key scratches on your car when you park it, and, you know, worse. So, I think he’s lost like — the last time I looked, it was $129 billion since the election, his Tesla companies and his other companies. So, yeah, I mean, so Trump is giving him — trying to give him a boost. It’s pretty obscene. He should put him in a red Tesla and launch him to Mars.

AMY GOODMAN: But you would have to be very careful that the rocket doesn’t explode. And what I’m referring to, of course, is the second explosion of one of Elon Musk’s rockets, this one over the Caribbean. Dave Lindorff, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning investigative journalist, author of the recent book Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World. Dave Lindorff’s most recent article on Substack, “Why US Automakers Make Vehicles in Canada.”

Coming up, attorney John Bonifaz of the Impeach Trump Again campaign, and then we’ll look at what’s happened to the former Philippine President Duterte, flown to The Hague. He’s been arrested. Stay with us.