The tariff and trade war between the U.S., China, and other nations continues, bringing along with it chaos, confusion and escalating tensions. In response to what the White House called a lack of reciprocity between the U.S.
And its trading partners, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14257 and imposed across-the-board tariffs on imports. The president said he made the move as part of his administration’s effort to protect American industries, to increase domestic wages, and to decrease the U.S. trade deficit in a time of growing international conflict.
Billed by President Trump as “Liberation Day,” the April 2 fanfare encircling his tariff agenda, purportedly to increase domestic prosperity, diminished after his announcement triggered a steep drop in global stock prices.
The panic led to an amendment a week later relative to China under Executive Order 14259, and for other countries, including a 90-day pause for their implementation, under Executive Order 14266.
As of Final Call press time, tariffs against various Chinese exports to the U.S. have reached 145% and for most other countries, a baseline of 10% will be added to their products imported after the pause.
Tariffs are defined as taxes on goods and services imported from another country to raise revenues, to influence the exporting country’s decisions, and/or to protect competitive advantages domestically.
However, these taxes are often passed on to consumers, leading to higher prices that may produce an unintended domino effect to no one’s advantage.
In a country where Black and Indigenous populations are often already struggling financially, rising costs on much-needed goods and services will be a hardship on millions of citizens.
Dr. Linwood Tauheed, Ph.D., is an economist and author of “100 Years of African American Economists: Difficulties and Prospects for Black Political Economy in the 21st Century.”
He told The Final Call that imposing tariffs and doing so during a time of growing international conflict is not without precedent and that what is intended to protect domestic economies often has the opposite effect.
“Tariffs have been in play in countries around the world for centuries and tariffs are used by countries to gain an advantage over other countries in trade,” Dr Tauheed said of the ideological agendas often behind a government’s desire to impose them.
“While Western countries declare themselves to be supporters of free trade, they have generally been engaged in tariffed or protectionist trade, and it usually goes in a one-sided way to protect their markets while they want the rest of the world to open their markets to them,” he explained.
“This goes back certainly to the beginning of colonization, so this is the way empires grew, and tariffs were a significant part of that,” Dr. Tauheed continued. He noted that before the federal income tax was established in 1913.
The main source of revenue for the U.S. government was from duties, fees and various other tariffs, but these were later found insufficient to fund the federal government as America’s power and influence grew into the 20th Century.
British tariff’s on imports and exports on the original 13 colonies that would eventually become the United States, was one of the grievances leading to the American Revolutionary War.
For example the Townshend Acts of 1767 imposed duties or tariff’s on imported goods like paper, lead, paint and glass.
These acts were imposed in order to generate money for the British government and for colonial officials. Other tariff’s were imposed that made the colonists pay higher prices for goods.
“They were called ‘import duties’ then, but they were the same thing—taxes on imports. This is what led to more than a decade of growing estrangement between Great Britain and some (though not all) of the North American Colonies, culminating in the Boston Tea Party
And, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence,” noted an April 9 article titled, “How tariffs helped spark the American Revolution,” published on cardinalnews.org.
Today, with America’s current challenges, how will other nations react to increased tariffs, a trade war with China, and the pressures these realities place on supply and demand, international trade and commerce, and America’s dependency on the global supply chain?
The moves the U.S. is enacting have also caused other countries to voice their anger and displeasure at the possible fallout from the Trump administration’s tariffs. America is consistently losing influence on the world stage.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam, warned decades ago that, “The strong-hold of the American Government is falling to pieces.” He wrote those words in his seminal book, “The Fall of America,” in the chapter “Decline of the Dollar.”
“She has lost her prestige among the nations of the earth. One of the greatest powers of America was her dollar. The loss of such power will bring any nation to weakness, for this is the media of exchange between nations,” the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad wrote.
Elements for a perfect storm?
Stating that Russia is not the Soviet Union of 34 years ago, Dr. Tauheed said that regardless of sanctions and other attempts to isolate the former superpower because of its war in Ukraine, Russia’s vast resources, territory,
And highly educated population has enabled them to become self-sufficient and independent from other economies led by the United States, and with increased tariffs levied against China, Western policies are creating increased cooperation between the two dominant powers of the Eurasian continent.
“From Russia being able to become more self-sufficient, it increased its trade with China, and with India, and the fact that BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is there, it creates a significant ability for those countries to respond to any sanctions from the West and the growing BRICS (aligned) countries that are able to become more and more self-sufficient,”
Dr. Tauheed noted. Western economies realize that they are much more dependent on non-Western economies than they would like to admit, he opined.
During an April 10 interview with Channel 4 News UK, the vice-president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, Victor Gao, said that the United States is making a mistake by launching a tariff or trade war with China.
“China is fully prepared to fight to the very end because the world is big enough that the United States is not the totality of the market in the world,” Mr. Gao said during the interview. “So, if the United States wants to go in that direction of completely shutting itself out of the China market, be my guest,” he continued.
“China has been here for 5,000 years,” Mr. Gao said. “Most of the time, there was no United States, and we survived. And if the United States wants to bully China, we will deal with the situation without the United States, and we expect to survive for another 5,000 years,” he said.
Mr. Gao also insisted that a trade war with China will harm the United States more because, for decades, America’s manufacturing base has been exported to foreign countries and because the U.S. makes up only a fraction of China’s export market. “
If China and the United States do not take major measures to direct all these tariff war(s) or trade war(s) launched by the United States, we will have a recession,” Mr. Gao said in part. The “we” Mr. Gao was referring to was the U.S. and possibly also China.
“President Trump needs to realize that Rome is not built overnight,” Gao continued. “To talk about millions of manufacturing jobs going back to the United States, relying on tariff(s) is a futile attempt,”
He said of the time it will take the United States to retool its factories, reeducate its workforce, and rebuild a diminished manufacturing base to standards needed to compete with China in the global market.
Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad is the manager for the Nation of Islam’s farm in Georgia and an agricultural economist. He agreed that a trade war resulting from tariffs will hurt American goods exported to China.
But he also stated they will have a significant impact on domestic food prices while undermining America’s exports of farm products to a market of more than one billion Chinese consumers.
“Now that they’re setting up this trade war, it’s going to affect the general public because the only thing a company is going to do is increase their prices to the consumer,” Dr. Ridgely Muhammad told The Final Call.
“They’re not going to lose, so if tariffs go up 100%, they’ll just double their prices and either you buy it or you don’t. China and all the big corporations don’t just depend on America, they’re worldwide,” he said, noting that nations of the Global South, or the global majority, will buy from China if the U.S. refuses to import Chinese goods.
“The super elite don’t need Black people anymore in America, and they don’t need White folks who are demanding a piece of the pie that they helped the elite to steal,” Dr. Ridgely Muhammad said. “So, in this tariff move, they don’t care anything about the American working class, the middle class, they won’t need them,” he said.
Political scientist, host of Connecting the Dots podcast and author of “Politics: Another Perspective,” Dr. Wilmer Leon, told The Final Call that the tariffs called for by the president appears to have more to do with Republicans supporting Mr. Trump than with traditional conservatives advocating for the positions of Reagan Republicans on free trade and open markets.
He said there is seemingly a blind loyalty to the current administration by political allies, but at the expense of the American economy.
Dr. Leon cited parallels between President Trump’s Executive Orders and the motivations behind the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 at the onset of the Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929.
“President Hoover didn’t listen to his advisors in the same way Trump isn’t listening to those who should be advising him today, that’s the greatest parallel that I see,” Dr. Leon stated plainly.
“Economists and a number of very prominent businesspeople and financial minds they told Hoover this is not a good idea and Hoover ignored them.
Before the Great Depression, American industrialization was growing and things were going fairly well, but one of the problems today is there is not a lot of American industry to protect because we’ve outsourced everything,” he said.
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his National Representative, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, have taught and demonstrated the need for Black people to “do-for-self” and not depend solely on the American government to do what they can do for themselves.
Minister Farrakhan noted in a message, “Justice is the Joy of Freedom,” delivered on November 20, 2010, at the Coronado Performing Arts Theatre in Rockford, Illinois, that “Government shouldn’t have to do everything for the citizens, but government should create the atmosphere that the citizen can do for themselves.”
During his message, Minister Farrakhan spoke on conditions impacting Rockford and other cities that were once great hubs of manufacturing and industry. Smaller family-owned companies were acquired by larger companies, which then relocated products to lower-wage markets or sent them overseas to be manufactured, he explained.
“So what happens to the people of Rockford who are blue-collar workers? What happens to the people of Chicago or the people of the urban centers of America who looked to factories to give them a decent wage that they could feed their families?
Now that the factories have closed or have been relocated, the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are left in the lurch. And Blacks being the most unlearned, the most unskilled, the most dependent, unfortunately, are the worst off,” Minister Farrakhan said.
Many economists on various sides of the political spectrum have expressed doubt that the Trump administration’s tariff action will revitalize the economy, bring back America’s manufacturing and industry, or create millions of jobs for its people.
Divine guidance and a divine solution
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught and demonstrated what Black people must do to address their economic situation. In his book, “Message to the Blackman in America,” he explains on page 195 that, “It is very hard for an economist to plan a wise program and see his plans carried out, because the so-called American Negroes’ economics are controlled by the White man.
The White man owns the country and the industry. Now, it is difficult to plan an economic program for a dependent people who, for all their lives, have tried to live like the White man.”
Nation of Islam Southwest Regional Student Minister Dr. Abdul Haleem Muhammad of Houston’s Mosque No. 45, who has a background in urban planning and environmental policy, told The Final Call that predictions of tariff-driven price increases, unemployment.
Budget cuts and austerity measures that have laid off or fired thousands of federal employees, may prove to be just the beginning of sorrows for both the American people in general and for Black people in particular.
“We have to go back and examine the cost of rejecting what God gave to the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. It’s all written in his book, ‘Message to the Blackman in America,’” he said.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said: “Our economic position remains at the bottom of the ladder because of this ineffective leadership and because so many of our people ignore the basic rules of a healthy economic life. We fail to develop self-leadership in economics.”
Student Minister Dr. Abdul Haleem Muhammad quoted from page 194 of “Message to the Blackman in America” and encourages people to read and implement the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s guidance as outlined between pages 194 through 203. In those pages, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad lays a base for how to make an economic program successful.
“Black people have to undergo a total and complete paradigm shift in our thinking to mitigate the fallout of what has begun and what is continuing to come as the days ahead become darker and darker,”
Student Min. Dr. Abdul Haleem Muhammad said. “What is happening with the tariffs, what is happening with the government, and what is happening with Affirmative Action, and so-called DEI?” he asked.
“All of this is for us to hit the reset button so we may know that Pharaoh has let us go and that now is the time for us to let Pharaoh go,” Student Minister Dr. Haleem Muhammad said. “We must get up and ‘do-something-for-self’ as the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan have taught us to do.”
April 28, 2025
