In late September 2001, I wrote an article about a trade dispute between the US and Canada. The US had slapped a protectionist tariff on Canadian soft lumber and justified this breach of free trade etiquette with a transparent excuse about counteracting Canadian lumber subsidies (subsidies that three international trade courts agreed did not exist). So basically, the US violated the rules of free trade, which it regularly champions.

Fast-forward to March 2002. If I took my September article and replaced the words "lumber" with "steel" and "Canada" with "the whole world," I could probably reprint the rest of it without changing another word.

In early March, Bush imposed tariffs between 8-30% on a number of steel imports (a little shy of the 40% tariffs demanded by the steel industry). This time Bush doesn't even have a flimsy excuse to justify his violation of free trade standards. In his own words, he is "provid[ing] temporary relief so that the industry could restructure itself." Or he's just trying to gain steelworker votes for the Republican party, depending on how you look at it.

But either way, it is undeniable that the American steel industry is in trouble. And of course, other nations are filing lawsuits against these tariffs at the World Trade Organization, and many are also imposing retaliatory tariffs against US products.

I will conclude simply by reprinting my previous article's conclusion, because there really is only one.

"The US does not care about free trade. Never has. The only thing the US has cared about is winning. And under the US defined version of free trade, it usually does win. And when the US finds that it (or corporations within its borders) may lose out, they simply ignore the rules."

I'm not writing this to say the US should stop the hypocrisy and follow its own rules. I'm writing this to say that the US does not have rules. This nation sees rules as sets of restrictions that we can sometimes trick other countries into following. Nothing more, nothing less. All of the talk of free trade and globalization are just schemes, attempts to trick other nations into following rules that will deluge the coffers of US corporations with money.