WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Trump regime imposed new tariffs of 10 to 12.5 percent on goods from 60 trading partners on July 24, timed to take effect the moment a temporary 10 percent global tariff expired. The action covers 99.4 percent of all U.S. imports and includes the European Union, China, Canada, Mexico, India, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan among the countries hit.
The new duties were imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the regime’s fallback after the Supreme Court struck down its earlier “reciprocal” tariffs in February, ruling the emergency-powers law it had invoked did not authorize them. Section 301 rests on firmer legal ground than the invalidated IEEPA tariffs, and trade attorneys expect it to prove considerably harder to challenge in court.
The official pretext is forced labor: countries assessed at 10 percent have adopted or pledged bans on forced-labor imports, while those hit with the full 12.5 percent have not. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer claimed the United States is “the only country in the world” to enforce such a ban, a claim trading partners rejected outright; EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters flatly, “You can’t say that for the European Union.”
The hypocrisy is grotesque. The Thirteenth Amendment never abolished slavery; it explicitly preserved it, etching into the Constitution that slavery and involuntary servitude remain legal “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This single clause has been exploited for a century and a half to build a vast carceral machine that works, cages, and profits off the coerced and unpaid labor of nearly 2 million people, overwhelmingly composed of the New Afrikan and oppressed nationalities on whose back the U.S. was built. Incarcerated workers produce at least $11 billion a year in goods and prison-maintenance services for wages as low as 13 cents an hour, while seven states pay nothing at all. A state that constitutionally enshrines its own system of legal slavery, and has never once relinquished it, is now the one invoking forced labor as a human rights standard. The forced-labor framing is a cynical legal pretext for extracting tariff revenue and disciplining rivals, dressed in the language of human rights by a government that never abolished slavery.
Firms dependent on imported goods will pass these costs downward, onto distributors, then onto the masses who ultimately buy the goods. It is importers and the masses who pay tariffs, not exporting governments or foreign capital, a burden already drawing warnings from the industry itself. Most affected governments chose to keep negotiating rather than retaliate, reflecting their dependence on American capital. Financial markets barely reacted, attention fixed instead on the war in West Asia.
Sixty economies now sit under these tariffs. The regime’s enemies, China and Russia, alongside its “allies” Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and “Israel.” No bloc of “allies” stands apart from the pressures of international monopoly capitalism, even the tightest inter-imperialist partnerships are subordinate to American finance capital’s need to control and expand its share of world markets.
The Supreme Court already struck down the regime’s tariffs once this February; each new legal pretext just reimposes the same pressure under a different name. This cycle can only be ended through the revolutionary organization of the working class itself, struggling across borders rather than behind them, in solidarity with the global working and oppressed masses against the world imperialist system with its heart in the United States.
