The Dictatorship

Tea tariffs that once sparked a revolution are now creating angst

Published

5 months ago

November 24, 2025

Tea tariffs that once sparked a revolution are now creating angst

NEW YORK (AP) — A tax on tea once sparked rebellion. This time, it’s just causing headaches.

Importers of the prized leaves have watched costs climb, orders stall and margins shrink under the weight of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Now, even after Trump has given them a reprievetea traders say it won’t immediately undo the damage.

“It took a while to work its way through the system, these tariffs, and it will take a while for it to work its way out of the system,” says Bruce Richardson, a celebrated tea master, tea historian and purveyor of teas at his shop, Elmwood Inn Fine Teas, in Danville, Kentucky. “That tariffed tea is still working its way out of our warehouses.”

While a handful of bigger firms are behind the biggest supermarket brands, the premium tea market is largely the work of smaller businesses, from family farms to specialty importers to a web of little tea shops, tea rooms and tea cafes across the U.S. Amid an onslaught of tariffsthey have become showcases for the levies’ effects.

On their shelves, selection has narrowed, with some teas now missing because they’re no longer viable products to stock with steep levies on top. In their warehouses, managers are consumed with uncertainty and operational headaches, including calculating what a blend really costs, with ingredients from multiple countries on a roller coaster of tariffs. And in backrooms where the wafting scent of fresh tea permeates, owners have been forced to put off job postings, raises, advertising and other investments so they can have cash available to pay duties when their containers arrive at U.S. ports.

“If I were to add up all the money I’ve spent on tariffs that weren’t there a year ago, it could equal a new employee,” says Hartley Johnson, who owns the Mark T. Wendell Tea Company in Acton, Massachusetts.

Johnson’s prices used to stay static for a year or longer. He ate the tariff costs before being forced to respond. His most popular tea, a smoky Taiwanese one called Hu-Kwa, has steadily risen from $26 to $46 a pound.

He knows some customers are reconsidering.

“Where is that tipping point?” Johnson asks. “I’m kind of finding that tipping point is happening now.”

Though Trump backed off some tariffs on agricultural products last week, many in the tea trade are wary of celebrating too soon and caution tea drinkers shouldn’t either. Much of next year’s supply has already been imported and tariffed and the full impact of those duties may not have fully spilled downhill.

Meantime, other tariff-driven price hikes persist. All sorts of other products tea businesses import, from teapots to infusers, remain subject to levies, and costs for some American-made items, like tins for packaging, have spiked because they rely on foreign materials.

“The canisters, the bamboo boxes, the matcha whisks, everything that we import, everything that we sell has been affected by tariffs,” says Gilbert Tsang, owner of MEM Tea Imports in Wakefield, Massachusetts.

Though globally, tea reigns supreme, imbibed more than anything but water, it has long been overshadowed by coffee in the U.S. Still, tea is entwined in American history from the very beginning, even before colonists angry with tariffs dumped tons of it in Boston Harbor.

Boston may run on Dunkin’ today, but it was born on tea.

The 1773 revolt that became known as the Boston Tea Party rose out of the British Parliament’s implementation of tea tariffs on colonists, who rejected taxation without representation in government. After an independent United States was born, one of the new government’s first major acts, the Tariff Act of 1789, ironically set in law import taxes on a range of products including tea. In time, though, trade policy came to include carve-outs for many products Americans rely on but don’t produce.

For more than 150 years, most tea has passed through U.S. ports with little to no duties.

That began to change in Trump’s first term with his hardline approach to China. But nothing compared to what came with his return to the White House.

In July, the most recent month for which the U.S. International Trade Commission has tallied tariff numbers, tea was taxed at an average rate of over 12%, a huge increase from a year earlier when it was just under one-tenth of a percent. In that single month, American businesses and consumers paid more than $6 million in tea import taxes, amassing in just 31 days more tariffs than any previous full year on record.

“All over again, taxation without representation,” says Richardson, an adviser to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. “Our wants and needs and our voices are not being represented because Congress is avoiding the issue by simply allowing the president to act like George III.”

All told, tea importers paid about $19.6 million in tariffs in the first seven months of 2025, nearly seven times as much as the same period last year.

It’s all been confounding to those steeped in the world of tea, on which the U.S. depends on foreign countries for nearly all of the billions of pounds Americans brew each year. Though a number of small tea farms exist in the U.S., they can’t fill Americans’ cups for more than a few hours of the year.

“We don’t have an industry and we can’t produce one overnight,” says Angela McDonald, president of the United States League of Tea Growers.

Trump’s suspension of tea tariffs came too late for some businesses, including Los Angeles-based International Tea Importers Inc., for which tariffs created an untenable cash-flow crunch.

“We just became over-leveraged financing not just the inventory, but also the tariffs,” says the company’s CEO, Brendan Shah.

Tariffs weren’t the only thing the 35-year-old business was facing, but without them, Shah says it may have survived.

“Unpredictable tariff policies,” he wrote to customers in announcing the company’s closure, “have created the final, insurmountable barrier.”

___

Matt Sedensky can be reached at [email protected] and https://x.com/sedensky

The Dictatorship

Dispatch from inside Vatican bubble during remarkable exchange between pope and president…

Published

4 hours ago

April 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Dispatch from inside Vatican bubble during remarkable exchange between pope and president…

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) — There is an odd sense of isolation when you are covering Pope Leo XIV from inside the Vatican’s traveling press pool: Escorted from venue to venue with police motorcades that clear even the most congested of traffic jams, it’s a membership that has many privileges.

But during Leo’s epic four-nation trip to Africabeing inside the Vatican “bubble” has been an almost surreal experience, as an unprecedented back-and-forth plays out between U.S. President Donald Trump and history’s first American pope.

Every morning this week, waking up to developments in Washington from the evening before, the questions have abounded: Will Leo bite? How will he address the latest criticism, if at all, while focusing on the Africa program he has planned?

That was certainly the case on Wednesday, as Leo, the Vatican delegation and a pool of around 70 accredited reporters boarded the ITA Airways charter for the second leg of Leo’s 11-day odyssey — the flight from Algiers, Algeria to Yaounde, Cameroon.

Much to the reporters’ delight, Leo had responded head-on to Trump at the start of the trip when he gamely came to the back of the plane and greeted journalists traveling April 13 from Rome to Algiers. He responded to those who asked him about Trump’s Truth Social post a day earlier, in which the U.S. president had accused him of being soft on crime, cozy with the left and owed his papacy to Trump.

Trump was responding to Leo’s calls for peace, in reference to the Iran war, and comments that Trump’s threat to annihilate Iranian civilization were “truly unacceptable.”

Stopping to chat as he made his way from row to row that first day, Leo had told journalists that he was merely preaching the Gospel when he called for peace and criticized war, and that he didn’t fear the Trump administration.

A comment about peace

On Tuesday, on the short flight from Algiers to Annaba, the ancient city of Hippo, Leo stayed in the front of the plane where the Vatican delegation sits, dashing the Vatican pool’s hopes for another Trump vs. Leo news cycle.

On Wednesday, with a five-hour flight ahead of us to Cameroon, excitement grew in economy class when Vatican personnel came to the back of the plane, readied the microphone and did sound checks to make sure the whole cabin could hear.

Emerging from behind the curtain, Leo didn’t take questions from reporters and kept his remarks focused on his just-concluded visit to Algeria, where he honored the legacy of his spiritual inspiration, St. Augustine of Hippo.

In brief remarks standing at the front of the cabin, Leo didn’t refer to war or Trump. But he spoke in terms that could suggest the latest overnight lobs from Washington certainly hadn’t gone unnoticed. Perhaps tellingly, he spoke exclusively in English.

Trump had kept up the criticism on Truth Social, while U.S. Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, said that Leo should “be careful” when speaking about theology.

For starters, Leo noted the sign of “goodness,” “generosity,” and “respect” that the Algerian government showed him in welcoming him on the first-ever papal visit. He said that the Algerian honors had included a full military aerial escort of the papal plane through Algerian airspace.

He also recalled his visit to the Great Mosque in Algiers, which he said was a significant way to show that “although we have different beliefs, we have different ways of worshipping, we have different ways of living, we can live together in peace.”

He said that St. Augustine’s message of searching for God, searching for truth, building bridges and seeking unity and community “is something which the world needs to hear today and that together we can continue to offer in our witness as we continue on this apostolic voyage.”

A papal press pool

Like other heads of state, the pope travels internationally with both his own media team as well as a group of external news organizations that pay, oftentimes handsomely, to have their reporters travel aboard the papal plane and have special access to cover his events. The Associated Press is always on the plane, paying for as many as four journalists per trip.

Being inside the Vatican bubble has journalistic advantages and disadvantages. You get the best access and are traveling under the Vatican’s security umbrella, meaning there’s little or no hassle from local security organizers. The Vatican facilitates visas and local SIM cards in advance, and arranges hotels and local transportation, allowing reporters to focus on the news rather than logistics.

Journalists in the bubble get the pope’s speeches ahead of time and have occasional access to delegation members, as well as other information in real time from the Vatican spokesman.

But the real reason news organizations choose to spend thousands of dollars per journalist, per trip, to be on the papal plane is to be on hand for the pope’s news conferences. The only time a pope holds such briefings with journalists is at an altitude of 35,000 feet (around 10,000 meters)

Who could forget Pope Francis’ famous line on his maiden trip as pope, in 2013 to Rio de Janeiro, when he uttered the line “Who am I to judge,” when he was asked about a purportedly gay priest.

The downside of being in the Vatican bubble is obvious for many of the same reasons it’s helpful: You are removed from local reality, whether in Algeria or Alaska, and rarely have time to do the type of on-the-ground reporting that makes a news report balanced.

Those news organizations that have the resources have teams on the ground producing such content, or journalists within the bubble break away to do their own reporting, so that the end result is a healthy combination of official Vatican information and local input.

But when the real drama involving the pope is occurring thousands of miles and time zones away, being in the Vatican bubble is a somewhat jarring experience. The news everyone wants to know isn’t necessarily what the pope has on his agenda.

But on this trip, the first by an American pope to Africa, being in the Vatican bubble certainly had its advantages. The next stop is Angola. Who knows what Leo will have to say.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

The Dictatorship

Iran negotiator or private investor? Raskin launches investigation into Jared Kushner.

Published

14 hours ago

April 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Apr. 17, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT

House Judiciary Democrats are launching a new investigation into President Donald Trump’s son-in-law — and Iran ceasefire negotiator — Jared Kushner, citing his “glaring and incurable conflict of interest.”

In a letter obtained first by MS NOW, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., writes that Kushner’s dual roles as Trump administration peace envoy and leader of a private equity firm have “been haunting American foreign policy since President Trump returned to Washington in 2025,” with the Iran war only compounding concerns that Kushner’s financial work could distort his priorities.

“Your client Saudi Arabia,” Raskin writes, “wants to see a continuation and escalation of President Trump’s Iran war, but the American people have an interest in minimizing the loss of American lives and treasure in this conflict.”

“To whom do your professional obligations and fiduciary duties belong?” Raskin asks in the letter, which was sent to Kushner, his firm, and the State Department on Thursday.

Kushner, who is married to Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka, founded the investment firm Affinity Partners in 2021 after serving as a senior adviser during Trump’s first administration.

Affinity’s largest and earliest investor, according to The New York Timesis Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The fund invested roughly $2 billion after the first Trump White House ended. Sovereign wealth funds tied to other Gulf nations, such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have also invested.

Affinity has earned a 25% rate of return since 2021, according to a person familiar with the firm’s internal dynamics.

Since Trump returned to the White House, Kushner has taken on the role of peace envoy, working on negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Hamas and, most recently, the U.S. and Iran. The latter two, critics note, are in the region that is the source of sizable investments in Kushner’s firm.

“You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time,” Raskin writes in the letter. “You cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.”

In a statement shared with MS NOW, Ian Brekke, chief legal officer for Affinity, said Kushner “has complied with all applicable laws and requirements and has always operated in the best interests of the United States.”

“Jared is not raising funds and has not done business in Gaza, Ukraine or Iran and has no intention to do so,” Brekke said.

In response to a March report in The New York Times that Kushner had taken recent steps to raise money for his firm from governments in the Middle East, Brekke wrote, “Affinity had early conversations with its anchor investor and does not intend to take in any additional capital while Jared is volunteering for the government.”

And in a statement to MS NOW, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Kushner had “sacrificed time with his family and livelihood” to work on the Trump administration’s initiatives overseas. She called Raskin “an attention-seeking loser who has saved zero lives and hasn’t accomplished anything.”

As part of the new House Judiciary investigation that Democrats are unilaterally launching, Raskin is asking Kushner to hand over a trove of materials tied to his work for Affinity and with the government.

The documents Raskin wants include: records of his communications with Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, and Israeli officials and their state-linked investment funds dating back to 2022; the financial records detailing all investors in his Affinity investment fund; records of meetings with investors dating back to July2024; and all communications relating to financial investments in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, and other areas where Kushner has played a role as a negotiator.

Raskin is also requesting Kushner’s communications with the White House and the Trump campaign, including with Trump himself, dating back to July 2024 regarding his role in the new administration.

While Kushner is unlikely to play ball with Democrats — and as long as Republicans don’t side with Democrats, Raskin doesn’t have the unilateral ability to subpoena Kushner — the inquiry is a bit of a preview of the investigations Democrats will launch should their party win control of the House.

As the midterms approach, Democrats are pledging to make rooting out corruption in the Trump administration a central focus. And while Kushner could ignore Raskin now, that would be much more difficult next year if Democrats take back the committee gavels.

For Raskin, this is the latest step in a yearslong effort to review Kushner’s activities.

In 2023, while serving as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, Raskin wrote to Kushner questioning whether his business interests may have influenced his work during the first Trump administration.

In 2024, Raskin and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called on the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel to review possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Kevin Frey is a congressional reporter for MS NOW.

The Dictatorship

House extends surveillance powers until April 30 after late-night revolt sinks GOP plan

Published

14 hours ago

April 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House extends surveillance powers until April 30 after late-night revolt sinks GOP plan

Apr. 17, 2026, 2:38 AM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House early Friday approved a short-term renewal until April 30 of a controversial surveillance programused by U.S. spy agencies in a post-midnight vote after Republicans revolted and refused President Donald Trump’s push for a longer extension.

GOP leaders rushed lawmakers back into session to late Thursday with a series of back-to-back votes that collapsed in dramatic failure, before they quickly pushed ahead the stopgap measure as they race to keep the surveillance program running past Monday’s expiration date.

First they unveiled a new plan that would have extended the program for five years, with revisions. Then they tried to salvage a shorter 18-month renewal that Trump had demanded and Speaker Mike Johnson had previously backed. Some 20 Republicans joined most Democrats in blocking its advance.

Shortly after 2 a.m. they quickly agreed to the 10-day extension, which was agreed to on a voice vote without a formal roll call. It next goes to the Senate, which is gaveling for a rare Friday session, as Congress races to keep the surveillance program running.

“We were very close tonight,” said Johnson after the late-night action.

But Democrats blasted the middle-of-the-night voting as amateur hour. “Are you kidding me? Who the hell is running this place?” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., during a fiery floor debate.

At the center of the standoff that has stretched throughout the week is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,which permits the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI and other agencies to collect and analyze vast amounts of overseas communications without a warrant. In doing so, they can incidentally sweep up communications involving Americans who interact with foreign targets.

U.S. officials say the authority is critical to disrupting terrorist plots, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage.

Surveillance program fight is a debate over privacy and security

Its path to passage has teetered all week in a familiar fight, as lawmakers weigh civil liberties concerns against intelligence officials’ warnings about national security risks.

Opponents of the surveillance tool point to past misuses. FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when searching intelligence related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and racial justice protests in 2020, according to a 2024 court order.

Trump and his allies had lobbied aggressively all week for a clean renewal of the program, without changes.

A group of Republicans traveled to the White House on Tuesday, and on Wednesday CIA Director John Ratcliffe spoke directly with GOP lawmakers. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Thursday there had “been negotiations late into the night with the White House and some of our members.”

“I am asking Republicans to UNIFY, and vote together on the test vote to bring a clean Bill to the floor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this week. “We need to stick together.”

The result of days of negotiations

Thursday’s proceedings came to a standstill as lawmakers retreated behind closed doors and Johnson reached for an agreement to resolve the standoff.

Shortly before midnight GOP leaders announced a new proposal, a five-year extension, with revisions. The changes were designed to win over skeptics of the surveillance program who have demanded greater oversight to protect Americans’ privacy.

Among the changes are new provisions to ensure that only FBI attorneys can authorize queries on U.S. persons, and to require the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to review such cases, said Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., during the debate.

But the final product, a 14-page amendment, did not go far enough for some holdouts in either party.

With Johnson controlling a slim majority, he has little room for dissent. As the Republicans fell short on both efforts before the short extension, a handful of Democrats stepped in to try to help them advance the longer extensions, but most Democrats were opposed.

“We just defeated Johnson’s efforts to sneak through a 5-year FISA authorization tonight,” said Democratic Rep, Ro Khanna of California. “Now, they will have to fight in daylight.”