Following Up: More Data on America’s Dependence on Foreign Healthcare Goods

Tags

Barack Obama, Department of Health and Human Services, facemasks, Following Up, George W. Bush, health security, healthcare goods, imports, Lena H. Sun, manufacturing, masks, Mike Bowen, Prestige Ameritech, Rachel Siegel, supply chain, The American Conservative, Trump, Washington Post

Since news organizations can be so unreliable, I always do whatever I can to use information from primary sources instead of items in the media. I’m making an exception this morning, however, because I’ve failed to find a government document mentioned in several news articles, and reportedly it contains such important data that it deserves mention. Specifically, this document seems to add vital detail to my recent description in The American Conservative of how extensively the United States relies on foreign sources for crucial health care goods, and how long this gaping hole in the nation’s healthcare security has existed.

The document I can’t find has been described in this Washington Post piece as “a 2014 briefing released by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.” Among its findings, according to Post correspondents Lena J. Sun and Rachel Siegel:

“Up to 95 percent of surgical masks are made outside the continental United States, in places like China and Mexico….”

The 2014 date, of course, is revealing in that it was two years before Donald Trump was elected President. Also revealing: The authors interviewed a domestic mask manufacturer who showed them letters he’s written to American Presidents warning that mask availability could be disrupted during a pandemic outbreak.

The first was written to Barack Obama in 2010. And apparently little or nothing was done. But the manufacturer, Mike Bowen of Texas-based Prestige Ameritech, says he reached out to George W. Bush’s administration as well – with the same results.

But just in case you think this is an establishment-bashing exercise, it’s important to note also that Bowen says he sent the same warning in 2017 – when Mr. Trump did occupy the Oval Office.

Contrary to much (self-serving) conventional wisdom, I’m not at all opposed to finger-pointing and blame-casting, even during a crisis. In fact, I view it as critical to ensuring that mistakes aren’t repeated. But I am opposed to cherry-picking finger-pointing. Because by now it should be abundantly clear that when it comes to U.S. national leaders and American health security, both Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives and even populists have let the country down.

And the faster all partisans get off their high horses and focus on identifying lessons that need to be learned regardless of political effect, the faster Americans will overcome this crisis and the lower the chances of a rerun.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: When Industries Disappear

Tags

apparel, big government, Breitbart.com, conservatves, embroidery, Frances Martel, Immigration, labor unions, manufacturing, New Jersey, skills, textiles, Union City, unions, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Until I read Frances Martel’s “Hanging by a Thread,” I used to think of Union City as little more than one of those bleak-looking smallish northern New Jersey municipalities the Amtrak trains pass through on their way between New York City and points south.  How wrong I was!  And for such wide-ranging policy and political reasons!  

Not that you can’t simply enjoy her long feature for Breitbart.com for the fascinating descriptions of what makes her hometown special geologically (e.g., it sits on lots of Manhattan bedrock-like granite, good for supporting factories with heavy machines and multistory housing) and demographically (because it developed fairly late in the 19^th century, its population was always dominated by immigrants).

Clearly important as well is Martel’s main theme – how manufacturing built solid prosperity for Union City from the get-go, and how its demise, due to developments like (but not restricted to) offshoring-obsessed U.S. trade policies helped bring punishingly hard times. (Full disclosure: Martel interviewed me for the article, and quoted me quite generously.)

But if you’re thinking this is only an article for trade and/or manufacturing mavens, or for New Jersey history aficionadoes, you’re sorely mistaken. For along the way, “Hanging by a Thread” offers important insights into how these closely related subjects profoundly affect many of the nation’s other major issues and challenges.

For example, Martel offers a novel twist on the notion that the United States welcomed so many immigrants so consistently (though not always) from the mid-19^th century onwards in particular because of its urgent need for unskilled labor. No doubt most of the newcomers were poorly educated. But as “Hanging” makes clear, industry during this period used lots of complicated machinery, including the embroidery sector that became concentrated in Union City.

As Union City’s official historian told Martel, many of its first immigrants came from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and other parts of Europe with major textile industries, and brought with them extensive experience working with such devices that employers clearly found valuable.

Since skills (of different kinds, of course) remain so crucial to economic success today, Union City’s past raises the question of whether – as Open Borders advocates seem to believe – the United States today should indiscriminately welcome immigrants regardless of skill levels and gainful employability.

Two other messages coming through loud and clear from Martel’s research and analysis are especially important for conservatives to heed. The first has to do with unions. Martel’s parents were hard-line anti-communists who fled Castro’s Cuba, and her mother worked in apparel. The author explains that these arrangements were seen as “a critical part of the factory ecosystem.” The following exchange, with her mother speaking first, makes the point vividly:

“‘I have always had a good union. It works, I think. It works to have a union because without a union, in a private place, you’re screwed,’ she told me.

“‘You don’t feel that there is a conflict between that and being a capitalist?’” I asked…..

“‘No. What? Being a capitalist? No,’ she replied, with confusion. ‘No, that has nothing to do with socialism, it’s just so that the worker has someone to defend them. If you don’t have a job, they can fire you whenever. That’s not fair. To throw you out for no reason, it’s unfair ifyou are working well.’”

Martel’s second message for conservatives actually echoes a point I’ve made before (e.g., here): The more enthusiastically traditional free trade policies are pursued by American leaders, the bigger government’s going to get. But as Martel makes clear, these approaches to the global economy are bound to generate needs that far exceed the kinds of welfare state benefits (ranging from income support to heavily subsidized healthcare) used to keep living standards above third world levels (or at least try to do so).

As the Union City example shows, relentless globalization can also turbocharge government’s role in economic development itself. The author explains that, since 2000, Union City Mayor Bob Stack (a big-city machine politician if ever there was one)

“took the reins on the eve of the guillotine falling on embroidery and has taken to meticulously rebuilding the identity of the city. He tore down Roosevelt Stadium, the sports venue at the heart of the city, to build a new Union City High School – with a stadium on the roof. Union City previously boasted two high schools, one for Union Hill and one for West Hoboken, that Stack turned into middle schools. He built parks in honor of the city’s Cuban, Colombian, and Dominican populations, and an ‘International Park.’ Seemingly every other street has a water park open in the summer for children to play in – the biggest, Firefighters’ Memorial Park, boasts an Olympic-sized swimming pool. His administration also refurbished the downtown library into the Musto Cultural Center and built its replacement, the library at José Martí Middle School (which his administration also built), in the shadow of what was once St. Michael’s monastery, an imposing Catholic historic site that now houses a Korean Presbyterian congregation.”

In other words, Union City realistically recognized the choices before it, and rejected “the option much of the Rust Belt took: do nothing, abandon ship, hope the invisible hand swoops in before you hit the concrete.” As a result (and also because of its proximity to New York City), it’s more than avoided the ghost town fates of counterparts like Gary, Indiana, Youngstown, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan.

Im-Politic: Selective CCP Virus Finger-Pointing

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Barack Obama, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Dan Diamond, Daniel Lippman, Defense Production Act, DPA, George W. Bush, health security, healthcare goods, Im-Politic, Jessica Silverman-Greenberg, Mainstream Media, MSM, Nahal Toosi, National Security Council, Nicholas Kulish, pandemic, regulations, Sarah Kliff, The New York Times, Trump, ventilators, Wuhan virus

Mainstream Media accounts of the Trump administration’s CCP Virus response keep appearing emphasizing how lousy and lackadaisical it’s been compared with the federal response to potentially dangerous disease outbreaks during the Obama years – and especially given supposedly prescient pandemic warnings that the Obama-nauts sounded to their successors that allegedly were ignored.

So RealityChek is going to have to keep pointing out major flaws in these accounts that both reporters and their editors should have noted, and questions they should have asked.

Keep in mind, moreover, that today’s pushback comes on top of (1) this blog’s description of a 2011 Commerce Department report on America’s increasingly dangerous vulnerability to foreign cutoffs of vital healthcare goods that was completely ignored; and (2) a similar presentation of federal economic data making clear the nation’s healthcare security – another way to think of this vulnerability – has been weakening for at least two decades.

Let’s start with the article in today’s New York Times detailing how a George W. Bush administration plan continued under Barack Obama failed to plug what its public health officials viewed as “one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators.” The effort entailed finding businesses willing to try to build ventilators that were cheaper, more portable, and easier to use than were then available, and then awarding the contract to the best proposal.

According to Times reporters Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg (and presumably their editors), the eventual failure mainly highlighted “the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis.”

And although this point wasn’t made, the obvious message that the piece meant to send readers is that the President continues making a big mistake by not unleashing the full power of the Defense Production Act (DPA)– which creates vast government power to order whatever companies it wishes to make whatever products it considers necessary as quickly as possible, and to prioritize sales to Washington, not other customers. Underlying this position, of course, is the (completely ignorant) belief that this 1950 law (amended several times since) enables a Chief Executive to snap his fingers and instantly start assembly lines churning out ventilators and face masks and pharmaceuticals, etc.

But let’s leave aside this DPA fetishism. As I tweeted, the following sentence in the piece isn’t completely uninteresting given the unmistakable importance of quick results: After an initial failure (that shouldn’t be pinned on either of those two administrations), “The federal government started over with another company in 2014, whose ventilator was approved only last year and whose products have not yet been delivered.”

That doesn’t sound like the regulatory process reflected particular urgency – and clearly the problem extended into the Trump administration. But this business-as-usual attitude reigned even though, as the article noted, the ventilator project “came in the wake of a parade of near-miss pandemics: SARS, MERS, bird flu and swine flu.” In other words, evidence abounded that pandemics weren’t a rarity. Recently, they were becoming frequent. And still apparently no thought was given to any regulatory fast-tracking.

Finally in connection with this episode. It’s commendable that these pre-Trump public health officials tried to do something new. Less commendable, and less understandable, is why none of them recognized the foreign vulnerability problem and the offshoring-happy trade policies that fostered them.

Two other recent articles seeking to pin the blame for U.S. CCP Virus unpreparedness on Mr. Trump came out March 16 and March 25 in Politico. The first documented that on January 13, 2017 – seven days before the Trump inauguration – a team of outgoing Obama administration officials held a briefing for a team of incoming Trump-ers “intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis” – the distinct possibility that a major, deadly pandemic would sweep over the United States from abroad.

Further, the briefers specified that the new administration “could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was ‘paramount’….” Unfortunately, continued the article by Nahal Toosi, Daniel Lippman, and Dan Diamond, the Trumpers seemed pretty apathetic. And that’s pretty damning, right?

In principle, yes. But why did the Politico staff bury this observation: “None of the sources argued that one meeting three years ago could have dramatically altered events today”? Because it would take much of the punch out of this supposed bombshell?

Also buried: An observation in the apparently actual briefing document that, when in terms of “U.S. hospital preparedness and response,” “State and local governments lead public health response.” That’s an important piece of the current American response – even though it’s been relentlessly portrayed in the press another example of the administration’s failure. And P.S. – this document said nothing about ensuring adequate national screening capability.

Politico wasn’t finished, however. Nine days later, it ran another piece – by two of the same reporters – charging that the Trump administration’s CCP Virus policies have “failed to follow” a detailed pandemic playbook prepared by the Obama National Security Council that, it seems, would have prevented much of the virus damage inflicted on the nation.

Again, it’s a plausible claim – although, like the first Politico piece, this article left out the development of the Trump administration’s own pandemic strategy by the fall of 2018 (which means that work on it throughout the federal government began months before).

Also, like the first article, it failed to pose these crucial questions: If the Obama pandemic specialists were so utterly convinced that a pandemic would strike sooner rather than later, and that Team Trump was falling down on the preparation job, why didn’t they alert Democrats in Congress, or Never Trumper Republicans? Certainly there’s been no shortage of lawmakers (especially Democrats) looking for any opportunity to slam the administration (especially if this activity could do some good).

Additionally, if these pandemic warriors did send their message to these lawmakers, why did the public hear so little about it?

My hunch: For three years, the Never Trumpers of both parties had much higher priorities. Think “Russia” and “impeachment.”

Making News: American Conservative Article Details Scary U.S. Health Security Vulnerability

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, facemasks, health security, imports, Making News, medical devices, pandemics, pharmaceuticals, The American Conservative, Trade, Wuhan virus

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my latest freelance article.  Posted this morning at TheAmericanConservative.com, it presents never-before-seen statistics (gleaned from official U.S. government data) showing alarming U.S. vulnerability to cutoffs of vital medical goods from abroad. P.S.  It makes clear that the problem far transcends China.

And keep checking in at RealityChek for news of media appearances and other developments.

Those Stubborn Facts: A CCP Virus Credibility Gap – for the News Media

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CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Mainstream Media, media, MSM, Those Stubborn Facts, Trump, Wuhan virus

Share of Americans approving President Trump’s CCP Virus response:  60%

Share of Americans disapproving:  38%

Share of Americans approving the news media’s CCP Virus response:  44%

Share of Americans disapproving the news media’s CCP Virus response:  55%

 

(Source: “Coronavirus Response: Hospitals Rated Best, News Media Worst,” by Justin McCarthy, March 25, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/300680/coronavirus-response-hospitals-rated-best-news-media-worst.aspx)

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The (Dangerously) False Choice Between the Virus and a Restart

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Angus Deaton, Ann Case, Big Business, CCP Virus, coronavirus, Deaths of Despair, growth, Jobs, lockdown, public health, shutdown, small business, stress, The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Trump, unemployment, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

And here I thought that Americans were starting to understand that defeating the CCP Virus and thus protecting public health on the one hand, and restarting economic activity as soon as possible on the other, are not sharply conflicting imperatives. They’re mutually reinforcing – including for public health reasons. Silly me.

One sign was this column by The New York Times‘ Thomas L. Friedman – not someone who’s career-defining predictions and analysis (like the always beneficial and inevitable expansion of economic globalization) have stood up real well. All the same, as one expert quoted by Friedman observed:

“Income is one of the stronger predictors of health outcomes — and of how long we live. Lost wages and job layoffs are leaving many workers without health insurance and forcing many families to forego health care and medications to pay for food, housing, and other basic needs. People of color and the poor, who have suffered for generations with higher death rates, will be hurt the most and probably helped the least. They are the housekeepers in the closed hotels and the families without options when public transit closes. Low-income workers who manage to save the money for groceries and reach the store may find empty shelves, left behind by panic shoppers with the resources for hoarding.’’

P.S. – This expert is a noted public health authority, not an economist callously focused on money and output.

If you still doubt how worsening economic fortunes can literally be a large-scale killer, check out the work of the husband-wife team of Angus Deaton and Ann Case. Yes, they’re economists. But since 2015, these Princeton University scholars have been documenting how deteriorating well-being has helped fuel an historic rise in mortality among middle aged, working class whites. This year, they’ve published the results of their research in a book (appropriately) titled Deaths of Despair. Serious health problems with economic roots have been identified among African Americans as well.

Nonetheless, President Trump’s statement yesterday setting a target date of Easter (April 12) for restarting economic activity was greeted by a howl of protests accusing him of ignoring public health experts’ pleas, and placing his reelection hopes (which, the argument goes, depend almost exclusively on his economic policy record) over the lives of [FILL IN YOUR FAVORITE NUMBER] of Americans. Could anything be eviller?

There’s a counter-argument of course, at least in theory: Cash payments to workers could keep their incomes up and address these economy-related health threats even as most of the economy remains closed. The problem, though, is that without support for business (especially smaller companies, which are big employers collectively but often lack big cash cushions or access to affordable credit even in the best of times), massive payments could (which would be needed as long as workers have regular bills to pay) last a lot longer than the current health emergency because many such companies are likely to close for good, and leave their workers in the lurch, if they don’t start regaining customers fast.

Moreover, these small business vulnerabilities don’t exist in isolation because so many make much of their money selling to big businesses. So when the latter run into trouble because of a weak economy, the little guys – and their workers – inevitably will suffer, too.

So unless you’re a diehard Never Trump-er, and/or know absolutely nothing about the economy or Americans’ health and are unwilling to learn, you’ll recognize that the supposed choice between reopening the economy before too long (if not necessarily by Easter) and saving American lives is a false one. American policy, in other words, will have to learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. The good news is that, as The Times‘ Friedman and others have noted, any number of approaches are available to achieve the best of both worlds that the nation urgently needs.

Making News: Cited on Marketwatch.com and in The Epoch Times

Tags

CCP Virus, Chris Matthews, coronavirus, COVID 19, Defense Production Act, health security, healthcare products, Making News, manufacturing, Marketwatch.com, The Epoch Times, Trade, Trump, Wuhan virus

I’m pleased to report two new national media appearances.

This past Saturday, the 21st, Chris Matthews of Marketwatch.com quoted my views on the tremendous possibilities for reviving domestic U.S. manufacturing – including of  healthcare-related goods needed to fight the CCP Virus – that would be created for President Trump through full use of the Defense Production Act.  Here’s the link.

Click here, meanwhile, for a March 19 article from The Epoch Times in which I note the strong start in restoring healthcare security in manufacturing created by Mr. Trump’s America First trade policies.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Thank Goodness Free Trade Zealots Didn’t Completely Destroy the U.S. Textiles Industry

Tags

apparel, Apple, health security, healthcare products, manufacturing, NAFTA, National Council of Textile Organizations, NCTO, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, textile, The Race to the Bottom, Trade, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The news media have been filled lately with encouraging stories like this one from the Financial Times – reporting that “US factories that usually mass produce hoodies and T-shirts are being retooled to make face masks as chief executives in the clothing industry try to alleviate shortages of equipment to combat coronavirus. A group of nine American apparel companies began producing the masks on Monday….”

Moreover, according to their main industry organization, companies like these and their domestic manufacturing plants “make a broad range of inputs and finished products used in an array of personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical nonwoven/textile supplies, including surgical gowns, face masks, antibacterial wipes, lab coats, blood pressure cuffs, cotton swabs and hazmat suits. These items are vital to the government’s effort to ramp up emergency production of these critical supplies.”

These actions are not only commendable and critically important nowadays. They’re also a major reminder that it’s fortunate in the extreme that there are still domestic textile and apparel industries with production in the United States – and that this sector has survived despite every effort made by pre-Trump Presidents and Congresses either to put them out of business and send them offshore.

Washington’s motivation? Nothing personal or political – just blind adherence to the bedrock economic principle of comparative advantage, which simply put holds that if other countries make certain products more efficiently than the United States (with or without subsidies, by the way), U.S. policy should simply permit the those stateside industries to wither and die, in full confidence that Americans will always be able to import whatever they need whenever they need it.

Geopolitics was at work, too.  Garment-making in particular is the kind of “starter” sector needed by developing countries to start down the road toward industrialization and therefore the broader economic progress they understandably covet. As a result, foreign policy makers viewed chunks of the U.S. industry as an ideal offering for winning and keeping allies in the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.    

A labor-intensive sector like apparel was consigned to this fate decades ago. But a sector like textiles was treated similarly – even though it’s the kind of capital- and technology-intensive industry in which high-income, advanced economies like America’s are supposed to excel. Moreover, as countless textile executives with whom I’ve spoken over the years have emphasized, even though they (who make the fabrics and similar materials) differ significantly from the clothing makers (who essentially cut and sew the stuff together), their fates have been closely connected. For the apparel companies are prime customers for the textile producers (though far from the only ones, as you’ll realize if you’ve ever owned, e.g., a carpet), and foreign governments could be counted on to give their own textile sectors a leg up in sales by throwing up all manner of obstacles to U.S.-owned firms supplying overseas garment makers.

In fact, pre-Trump administrations continued to dismiss the textile industry long after its potential became clear for creating all sorts of high tech fabrics with breakthrough qualities like temperature and odor control and bio-monitoring capabilities.

It’s true that the companies could always follow what you might call the “Apple model” – after the electronics giant’s strategy of researching, engineering, and designing its products domestically, and sending the manufacturing overseas. But as I documented nearly two decades ago in my globalization book, The Race to the Bottom, once industries offshore production, many of these so-called white collar activities tend to follow – since there’s nothing like physical proximity to generate the kind of intensive, interactive collaboration between labs and shop floors often needed to spark innovation.

Moreover, as Americans are learning today, you can be the world’s innovation leader by leaps and bounds, but if you lack the domestic production facilities when emergencies arise, you may be standing at the end of the line for supplies of vital products.  In fact, as of late last week, no fewer than 38 countries had limited exports of healthcare-related goods.

So it’s pretty appalling to see how successful pre-Trump U.S. leaders were in stripping the nation of these capabilities. Federal Reserve statistics tell us that inflation-adjusted production of textiles in the United States has sunk by just over half since January, 1994 – when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect and officially ushered in a long offshoring-happy phase of U.S. trade policy. And if you think that’s terrible (which it is), it’s a performance that positively shines when compared to apparel (and leather goods) production. That’s down more than 86 percent during this period.

Interestingly, just two years before NAFTA’s advent, a pair of vocalists, Fontella Bass and Bobby McLure, released a song titled “You’ll Miss Me (When I’m Gone).” What a near-tragedy that shortsighted American trade policymakers didn’t realize how thoroughly this message can apply to major industries. What a blessing that the nation’s remaining textile and apparel makers chose to hang on. And thank goodness that the nation has a President today who clearly recognizes the imperative of Making it in America not only in textiles and apparel, but across the manufacturing spectrum. 

P.S. Full disclosure: For nearly two decades, funders of my work at the U.S. Business and Industry Council included a major domestic textile company. At the same time, the firm suddenly and unceremoniously dumped the organization in 2009 (and not for lack of resources). So my warm and fuzzy feelings toward the sector are limited.

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists Remain as Clueless as Ever on the CCP Virus

Tags

America First, Catch 22, CCP Virus, Clinton administration, coronavirus, COVID 19, globalism, health security, healthcare products, Joseph Heller, Madeleine Albright, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pandemics, TIME, Wuhan virus

The current CCP (for Chinese Communist Party) Virus outbreak has intensified a broad debate about America’s grand strategy in world affairs.

Specifically, supporters of an America First-type strategy (including, to some extent, President Trump) believe that the key to current and future anti-pandemic success, and overall national success, is building up national capabilities – like restoring lost production capacity in healthcare goods like pharmaceuticals and medical devices (think “ventilators”).

Pushing back is a school of thought now called “globalism” – a handy shorthand for backers of pre-Trump U.S. foreign policies who have long insisted that the nation’s best bet for adequate levels of security and freedom and prosperity is strengthening mechanisms of international cooperation. Not that the globalists completely neglected the need for national self-sufficiency, especially in terms of purely military products, or national sovereignty. But they clearly sought to “bend the curve” of American national security and foreign economic policy toward buttressing global capacities instead of national capacities. My evidence? The very healthcare goods shortages America is facing today.

As RealityChek regulars know, I’m squarely in the America First camp. And my confidence in this strategy has just been immeasurably bolstered by having read Madeleine Albright’s new essay in TIME defending the focus on cooperation.

I’m this confident not simply because Albright has long been one of the dimmest bulbs in the globalists’ ranks – despite having served as Secretary of State (during the Clinton administration). As I’ve previously noted, she never seemed to have learned the definition of “deterrence.” Instead, I’m mainly confident because her own new post (unwittingly) explains why it’s globalism that – in her words – reflects “childish” beliefs.

To oversimplify a little, the America First strategy doesn’t softpedal cooperative efforts because it’s selfish or mean or any of those human character traits that so commonly (yet so misleadingly) are used to characterize approaches to world affairs and the motives underlying them. Instead, its emphases stem from the assumption that American leaders can’t count anytime soon on the rest of the world adopting the kind of cooperative ethos needed to transition to globalism safely, and that as a result self-reliance is the only realistic choice available.

It’s also important to note that support for the America First strategy doesn’t require believing that all of most or even any other countries can rely on their own devices as well. Rather, it requires understanding how distinctively capable of self-reliance the United States has always been – and how much more self-reliant it can become.

Albright regurgitates the standard globalist points about how the main foreign dangers to the United States, including pandemics

“do not respect boundaries. They include rogue governments, terrorists, cyber warriors, the uncontrolled spread of advanced weapons, multinational criminal networks and environmental catastrophe. These perils cannot be defeated by any country acting alone, and any country would be foolish to try.”

Yet here’s what she also observes about the current state of world affairs:

>”[T]he largest and most powerful national governments are not prioritizing the improvement of our capacity for international cooperation.”

>”Hyper-nationalist leaders across the globe seem determined to ignore the awareness of interdependence that was—in the last century—drummed into our minds at a nearly unbearable cost.”

>”In the past two decades, jingoism has returned and spread in the manner of a contagious disease. Instead of highlighting the need for global teamwork, the doctrine of “every nation for itself” has taken hold on matters involving oil prices, trade, refugees, climate change, the regulation of communications technology and more.”

>“Look around: where are the leaders who will remind us of our mutual obligations and shared fate? In Moscow? Beijing? London? Rome? Paris? New Delhi? Ankara?”

>”[A] huge gap has opened between what the international community needs and the patchy, underfunded, under-energized reality now in place. The size of this gap represents a failure on the part of leaders on every continent….”

It’s true that Albright seeks to pin the blame on “a vacuum at the top that only the United States can fill.” But is claim is not only loony, but clueless. For this kind of leadership obviously requires the kind of superior material power and wealth that, in a world lacking common rules because common values are missing, have always been essential to influence behavior abroad. And relative American power in all fields except actual weapons and military equipment (though not in the materials, parts, and components needed to build them) has always been dismissed by the globalists as a pipe dream.

In one of the dark comedy classic novel Catch 22‘s numerous stunningly insightful exchanges, Yossarian, the main character who’s trying to have himself declared crazy and therefore unfit for combat or any kind of military service, tells one of his superior officers, “From now on I’m thinking only of me.” As author Joseph Heller continues:

“Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: ‘But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.’ 

“‘Then,” said Yossarian, ‘I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?’”

That’s obviously disastrous advice for Americans today – and inexcusably so, since the nation unmistakably has built up a network of shared values that marks it as a genuine community, and consequently a political unit that makes cooperation both necessary and possible to begin with. When it comes to the (undeniably anarchic) “international community” – not nearly so much.

Which is why until Madeleine Albright and other globalists acknowledge this situation, and the policy imperatives flowing logically therefrom, you’d need to be a damned fool to take them seriously as well.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! What Could Have Gone Wrong with Offshoring?

Tags

Clinton administration, coronarivus #CCP Virus, COVID 19, Glad I Didn't Say That!, globalization, health security, Larry Summers, manufacturing, Obama administration, offshoring, supply chain, Trade, Wuhan virus

“Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?”

–Former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary and Obama administration top White House economic adviser Larry Summers, March 21, 2020

“There are those today who would resist the process of international integration; that is a prescription for a more contentious and less prosperous world. We should not oppose offshoring or outsourcing.”

–Former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary and Obama administration top White House economic adviser Larry Summers, June, 2011

(Sources: Summers Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1241329121768230912 and “At World BPO/ITO Forum 2011, iRise CEO Stresses Need for Transformational Thinking Among CIOs,” Business Wire, August 25, 2011, https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110825006115/en/World-BPOITO-Forum-2011-iRise-CEO-Stresses. Specia acknowledgements: John Greener and Mike Cernovich)