Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists are Pushing for Anti-Jihadist Endless Wars in Africa

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Africa, America First, Blob, border security, globalism, Immigration, ISIS, jihadism, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Serenity Prayer, The Washington Post, travel ban

I started off my new article for The National Interest on America’s lost global lead in semiconductor manufacturing with the observation that “One of the leading features, and weakness[es], of globalist U.S. foreign policy has been the tendency to look mainly to foreign policy to solve problems that domestic policy could likely handle better. That’s because all else equal, conditions at home are much easier to change and control than conditions overseas.”

And one of my examples was “To eradicate, or at least reduce, jihadist terrorism, administrations from both parties mired the nation in costly and protracted foreign wars rather than secure the homeland.”

Little did I expect that the very same day this piece appeared, a front page article in the Washington Post would make clear that although the America First-oriented Trump administration has at least partly learned this lesson, the bipartisan, globalist U.S. foreign policy Blob, (which will return to power if Democratic candidate Joe Biden becomes President, and which contains many Mainstream Media journalists who faithfully serve as its mouthpieces) remains clueless.

The headline alone clinches both these cases: “ISIS attacks surge in Africa even as Trump boasts of a ‘100-percent’ defeated caliphate.”

It’s clear purposes – to spotlight a major broken Trump promise, and to whip up fears that the same kinds of jihadists who have attacked the United States are alive and kicking despite the President’s boasts, and that his ego and blockheaded isolationist foreign policy impulses will only ensure that this threat will keep metastasizing if he remains in office.

After all, “The rise in violence comes as the Trump administration moves to slash U.S. troop deployments and threatens to curtail support for local governments on the front lines of the battle against Islamist militants. The White House is considering steeper cutbacks in U.S. military forces in Africa, despite warnings from some analysts that the reductions could further hamper efforts to check the extremists’ advance.”

Worse, readers are told, the President has been repeating this mistake elsewhere: Despite performing well in killing jihadist leaders, and tightening “the noose on [ISIS] followers in Iraq and Syria, other White House policies undermined the effort to defeat violent Islamist militant ideology globally, according to …counterterrorism experts.”

Specifically, “Trump surprised his own security advisers by twice announcing — and then reversing — a decision to unilaterally withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, signaling an abandonment of U.S.-allied Kurdish fighters who were still battling thousands of Islamic State militants who fled as the caliphate was crumbling.”

And the icing on this cake of failures: Mr. Trump’s “anti-Islam rhetoric and ban on Muslim immigrants handed the militants a propaganda win, reinforcing a ‘fundamental al-Qaeda message, which is that America is against Islam’” as one of these experts contended.

Leaving aside the fact that the immigrants ban wasn’t on Muslims, but on individuals from terror-prone countries, these establishment authorities have it completely backward and the President’s generally America First-y approach is the commonsensical and strategically sound route to follow.

Unless you, like they, think that U.S. advisers or forces or whatever should spend the indefinite future running around failed regions of the world trying to stamp out the extremist factions that keep popping up precisely because of their homelands’ chronically dysfunctional conditions? And that since this strategy has worked so well in the Middle East, it’s now time to reenact it in Africa, where circumstances may be even worse? Because the continent is “already beset by poverty, corruption and the novel coronavirus”?

In fact, as America First-ers recognize, it’s precisely because Africa’s countries are (to quote the Post article) “ill-equipped to fight insurgencies that are well-armed and geographically dispersed” – or to perform as effective governments in just about any way – that Trump travel ban-like and other border security measures represent America’s best hopes by far for ensuring that Africa’s jihadist problems don’t become U.S. jihadist problems. This America First approach, by contrast, can only mire the nation in a new series of futile Endless Wars in one of the world’s least promising theaters.

And to complete this portrait of foreign policy Upside Down World, the biggest mistake in this regard that Mr. Trump has made has been his eager adoption of the globalist goal of defeating ISIS “100 percent” – and presumably eliminating jihadist threats for good with military shock and awe.

Instead, as I’ve written, he should have focused on U.S. borders all along – or at least portrayed continuing anti-terrorist military involvement in the Middle East and elsewhere as a bridge to the time when they become secur enough to keep out jihadists et al however active they are abroad.

The oft-quoted Serenity Prayer begins this way:

“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can; 
and wisdom to know the difference.”

That’s logic that’s hard to argue with – and evidence that whoever wrote it would have been an America First-er today.

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Im-Politic: The Price of Unforced Trump Immigration Policy Errors

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Africa, AP, Associated Press, border security, border wall, Center for Immigration Studies, Im-Politic, Immigration, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mark Stevenson, Middle East, migrants, terrorism, Trump

While piloting the fledgling New York Mets to an historically awful season in 1962, their colorful manager Casey Stengel at one point exasperatedly asked “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Or something like it.

An Associated Press (AP) report yesterday makes clear that the same question needs to keep being asked about the Trump administration’s intertwined immigration and border security policies. The article provided the latest batch of evidence supporting an administration claim about the threat of terrorists entering the United States across the southern border that the President and his aides have repeatedly undercut by incompetently presenting the facts.

The most recent controversy about the terrorism-immigration connection erupted in early January, when, according to press reports, former (and later fired) Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen met with Congressional leaders to lobby for Mr. Trump’s border wall proposal. Her pitch, according to the reports, used the claim that, during the past year, 3,000 terrorists were among those apprehended by border officials as they tried to cross into the nation from Mexico.

The claim was so easily debunked that even supporters of much more restrictive U.S. immigration policies were left shaking their heads. But as explained in this post from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a related terrorism-immigration threat does warrant major concern – including wall-building – even though the Trump administration rarely mentions it and even on those occasions often botches the matter. It’s the demonstrable presence in groups of would-be border crossers of migrants from countries and regions where terrorism is all too common, including the Middle East and North Africa and their large numbers of jihadists; and/or of migrants on federal terrorist watch lists.

The numbers of actual terrorists even in these often overlapping groups apparently aren’t large in absolute terms. But as observed by CIS’ Todd Bensman, a former Texas State counter-terrorism official, “in this threat realm, small numbers portend major consequences. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as she heads for the exit over just a relative few migrants who committed terror attacks in her country after entering among the million migrants she admitted.”

And this is where the new AP story comes in. According to correspondent Mark Stevenson,

“Thousands fleeing conflict or poverty in Nigeria, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Haiti and Cuba have traveled across oceans, through the jungles and mountains of South America, up through Central America, on a route that — so far — ends here: the steamy, crumbling Mexican city of Tapachula, near the Guatemala border.”

Why did they try to enter the United States this way? Stevenson quotes a migrant rights supporter as explaining that stating that their presence owes to the fact that

“word quickly spread through international smuggling networks that Mexico had become more permissive for migrants. Attention drawn to the large caravans meandering north to the U.S. last year, combined with Mexico’s fast-track for thousands of humanitarian visas in January, appeared like welcome mats on the global stage. At the same time, it became more difficult for migrants in Asia or Africa to reach Europe.”

The non-Western Hemisphere migrants interviewed by Stevenson all claimed to be fleeing poverty, violence, and persecution in their home countries, and no doubt many and even most are telling the truth. But how on earth can this be reliably determined? Assuming these individuals have national documentation, do Nigeria, Cameroon, and Bangladesh, for example, really have governments remotely capable of identifying their populations with any precision? Can a reporter verify their stories? Also disturbing: Stevenson’s interviewees were all single men.

On the one hand, the length of the journeys they say they have taken surely complicates the task of bringing along family members, and especially children. At the same time, it’s single men who commit the lion’s share of the terrorist acts and crimes against women that have generated such a backlash in Europe and – to a much lesser extent so far – in the United States.

As noted by Bensman, the former Texas counter-terrorism official, the Trump administration could easily clear up the confusion it has helped create by securing the release of the correct numbers as kept by the FBI and Homeland Security’s National Counterterrorism Center, and by reporting them accurately. But weirdly, the administration has not only declined to take these obvious steps. It’s resisting CIS efforts to force the release of these data through the Freedom of Information Act. In fact, ten days ago, CIS sued the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to make the data public.

Let’s all hope this legal action succeeds, or that the Trump administration stops the obstruction. Keeping the nation safe from terrorism is too important an objective to tolerate big unforced official errors continuing.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: More Globalist Fantasies from The Times’ Friedman

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Africa, China, climate change, Cold War, democracy, Europe, global norms, global order, global warming, globalism, human rights, international institutions, Italy, migrants, migration, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, World War II

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column today shows that the uber-pundit continues to perform a crucial dual public service. He both articulates as clearly as possible the usually unspoken assumptions underlying the globalist foreign policy approach pursued by the establishments of the two major American political parties for decades, and (unwittingly, to be sure) he reveals how childish they are. 

In his discussion of the African migrants crisis faced by Italy and other countries of southern Europe, Friedman once again credits “global cooperation and rule-making” with making “America, Europe and the world as a whole steadily freer, more stable and more prosperous since World War II.”

As I’ve pointed out, these successes owed not to any institutions-based “liberal global order” but to the American power and wealth that underwrote the defense of Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea and the recreation of a functioning international economy (until the Cold War ended, of course, one confined to the bounds of the non-communist world).

But what distinguishes today’s article – and pushes it into the realm of fantasy – is the author’s claim that this order and its institutions and procedures have “managed the key global issues after W.W. II — like trade, migration, environment and human rights….”

How do we know this is fantasy? Because Friedman himself emphasizes here that the migrants crisis remains out of control. Moreover, the world trade system is proving woefully unable to handle the challenge of China’s predatory government-private sector hybrid economy. The management claim, meanwhile, is sure hard to square with Friedman’s own nearly innumerable warnings that climate change is about to destroy the planet unless dramatic steps are taken immediately.

And although the world is unmistakably freer than before World War II, again it’s been American power – not any set of worldwide institutions and rules – that’s been primarily responsible. Further, a major elite commentator meme nowadays of course is that freedom has taken some important hits lately – e.g., because of the rise of allegedly authoritarian populists on both sides of the Atlantic, because Russia’s post-Cold War experiment with genuine democracy proved so short-lived, and because China’s widely anticipated evolution toward greater political (and economic) openness never even got started.

I’m also grateful to Friedman for creating another opportunity for me to explain why dismissing the importance of international institutions and rules does not amount to dismissing the importance of international cooperation in addressing the varied and important worldwide problems that transcend borders.

As I’ve most recently written in my June National Interest article on the superiority of a genuine America First foreign policy, there’s no reasonable question that in order to deal with pollution and disease and climate shifts (whether man-made or not, they can create terrible common problems) countries will need to meet and figure out how to respond jointly.

But since the agreed-on solutions will not affect every country equally, or benefit every country equally, it will be vital for the United States to push for the measures that most effectively promote and preserve its own interests. Further, since Washington will not be able to count on persuasion solely or even largely to accomplish this goal, it will need to make sure that it possesses the only other advantages capable of shaping the outcomes favorably – power and wealth. Accept no substitutes.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Case for a “Made in America” Approach

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Africa, AIDS, border security, climate change, corruption, diseases, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, globalism, HIV, human rights, internationalism, Iran, Iran deal, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Middle East, missile defense, nuclear proliferation, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, population control, Project-Syndicate.org, shale, terrorism, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman

I’m picking on New York Times uber-pundit Thomas Friedman again today – not because of any personal animus, but because, as noted yesterday, he’s such an effective, influential creator of and propagandist for the conventional wisdom on so many public policy fronts. And just to underscore that it’s nothing personal, I’ll also put in my cross-hairs another, though lower profile, thought leader: Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. The reason? Both recently have provided us with quintessential illustrations of how lazy – and indeed juvenile – the justifications for American international activism served up by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment have grown.

The analyses I’m talking about aren’t quite as childishly simplistic as the establishment theme I wrote about last month – the assumption that American involvement in alliances and international organizations and regimes is automatically good, and that withdrawal or avoidance is automatically bad. But because it’s a little more sophisticated, it can be even more harmful. It’s the insistence that whenever the United States faces a problem with an international dimension, the remedy is some form of international engagement.

A recent Friedman column revealed one big weakness with this assumption: It often logically leads to the conclusion that a problem is utterly hopeless, at least for the foreseeable future. Just think about the only sensible implications of this October 31 article, which insists that the apparently metastasizing threat of Islamic terrorism in Africa can’t be adequately dealt with through the military tools on which the Trump administration is relying.

Why not? “Because what is destabilizing all of these countries in the Sahel region of Africa and spawning terrorist groups is a cocktail of climate change, desertification — as the Sahara steadily creeps south — population explosions and misgovernance.

“Desertification is the trigger, and climate change and population explosions are the amplifiers. The result is a widening collapse of small-scale farming, the foundation of societies all over Africa.”

I have no doubt that Friedman is right here. And as a result, he has a point to slam the Trump administration “for sending soldiers to fight a problem that is clearly being exacerbated by climate and population trends….” (That’s of course a prime form of American international activism.)

But he veers wildly off course in suggesting that other forms of such activism – “global contraception programs,” “U.S. government climate research” and the like are going to do much good, especially in the foreseeable future. Unless he supposes that, even if American policies turned on a dime five or even ten years ago, Africa would be much less of a mess? The only adult conclusion possible is that nothing any government can do is going to turn the continent into something other than a major spawning ground for extremism and refugees.

And this conclusion looks especially convincing considering the African problem to which Friedman – and so many other supporters of such approaches – gives short shrift: dreadfully corrupt governments. For this is a problem that has afflicted Africa since the countries south of the Sahara began gaining their independence from European colonialists in the late-1950s. (And the colonialists themselves weren’t paragons of good government, either.)

So I’m happy to agree that we shouldn’t pretend that sending American special forces running around Africa helping local dictators will actually keep the terrorists under control (although as I’ve argued in the case of the Middle East, such deployments could helpfully keep them off balance). But let’s not pretend that anything Friedman supports will help, either – at least in the lifetime of anyone reading this.

Nye has held senior government foreign policy posts in Democratic administrations and, in the interests of full disclosure, we have crossed swords in print – mainly about the proper definition of internationalism and about a review of an anthology he edited that he didn’t like (which doesn’t seem to be on-line). But I hope you agree that there’s still a big problem with his November 1 essay for Project-Syndicate.org about the implications of America’s domestic energy production revolution for the nation’s approach to the Middle East.

In Nye’s words: “Skeptics have argued that lower dependence on energy imports will cause the US to disengage from the Middle East. But this misreads the economics of energy. A major disruption such as a war or terrorist attack that stopped the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz would drive prices to very high levels in America and among our allies in Europe and Japan. Besides, the US has many interests other than oil in the region, including nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, protection of Israel, human rights, and counterterrorism.”

Two related aspects of this list of reasons for continued American engagement in the region stand out. First, it’s completely indiscriminate. And second, for this reason, it completely overlooks how some of these unmistakably crucial U.S. interests can be much more effectively promoted or defended not through yet more American intervention in this increasingly dysfunctional region, but through changes in American domestic policies.

For instance, we’re (rightly) worried about nuclear proliferation, especially in Iran? How can today’s engagement policy help? Even if the the current Iran nuclear deal works exactly as intended, what happens when it runs out? Should we simply assume that Tehran will be happy to keep its nuclear genie in a bottle for another fifteen years? Will Iran be persuaded to give up the nuclear option permanently if Washington cultivates even closer ties with its age-old Sunni Muslim enemies, like Saudi Arabia?

Although I’m a missile defense skeptic – especially when it comes to the near-term threat from North Korea – isn’t figuring out a more effective way to repel an Iranian strike more likely to protect the American homeland? It’s certainly a response over which the United States will have much more control – and indeed, any control. In addition, if the United States withdraws militarily from the Persian Gulf region, Iran’s reason for launching such an attack in the first place fades away and, as I’ve argued in the case of North Korea, America’s own vastly superior nuclear forces become a supremely credible deterrent for any other contingencies.

Of course the United States faces a big Middle East-related terrorism problem. But as I’ve argued previously, the keys to America’s defense are serious border security measures. They, too, pass the “control test” with flying colors, and consequently seem much more promising than the status quo approach of trying to shape the region’s future in more constructive ways. But as I’ve also written, it would also make sense to keep in the Middle East small-scale American forces whose mission is continually harassing ISIS and Al Qaeda and whatever other groups of vicious nutballs are certain to appear going forward.

Nye’s point about the integration of global energy markets is a valid one. But in the same article, he acknowledges how the U.S. domestic energy revolution’s “combination of entrepreneurship, property rights, and capital markets” has changed the game for America. Why does he suppose that its effects won’t spread significantly beyond our borders?

As for Nye’s other two reasons for continued U.S. Middle East engagement, the notion that Washington can do anything meaningful to promote the cause of human rights simply isn’t serious, and Israel has amply demonstrated that, with enough American military aid, it can take care of itself.

Moreover, as you may recognize, the arguments for mainly focusing on border security to handle the Middle East terrorist threat applies to the African menace that’s preoccupying Friedman.

The main takeaway here isn’t that U.S. international engagement will never be needed to protect national security, safeguard the nation’s independence, or enhance its prosperity. It’s that Made in America approaches will turn out to be vastly superior in many cases – and certainly in many more cases than the bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment recognizes. How long will it take for President Trump to get fully on board?

By the way, I first began exploring the idea of Made in America solutions to foreign policy problems and international threats when I read this article by current Atlantic Monthly Editor Jeffrey Goldberg. He argued in 1999 that the nation was making a big mistake ignoring Africa in its diplomacy because the continent was likely to become a source of deadly diseases sure to cross oceans and eventually afflict Americans and others; that “H.I.V., of course, is a particularly vicious warning shot”; and that it was high time for Washington to deal with “poverty, poor sanitation and political instability” as well as put “a global system of public health and disease surveillance in place.”

Not that Goldberg presented a stark either-or choice, but my reaction was “If we do need to figure out whether to place more AIDS-fighting emphasis on promoting African economic development, or on finding a cure through medical research, isn’t the latter much likelier to deliver major results much sooner?”

As is clear from the Friedman article, Africa’s array of problems continues unabated. And according to no less than the (devoutly globalist) Obama administration, as of last year, the United States was “on the right track to reach most of its “National HIV/AIDS Strategy” goals for 2020 – which seek an America that’s “a place where new HIV infections are rare” and where “high quality, life-extending care” is available.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Obama-nomics Looks Like Importing the Workers and Exporting the Jobs

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2016 elections, Africa, apparel, California, Congress, Democrats, garments, Immigration, imports, income inequality, Los Angeles, manufacturing, minimum wage, Obama, offshoring, Republicans, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Vietnam, Wall Street Journal, {What's Left of) Our Economy

This one is so easy that it feels like piling on to write it. But if you need any further evidence that President Obama’s approach to economic policy has dissolved into complete incoherence, look no further than the Wall Street Journal‘s new article on Los Angeles’ garment industry. And it offers some vital lessons for many of his fellow Democrats, too.

As the Journal has reported, Los Angeles will be raising its minimum wage to $15 per hour in phases over five years. In response, the city’s still considerable garment manufacturing industry, which employs huge numbers of the working poor, including many legal and illegal immigrants, is threatening to leave.

It’s certainly reasonable to counter that business owners will always squawk about any cost increases, and that Los Angeles’ proximity to a fashion market that requires lots of very quick order filling will remain a big competitive advantage for a sector that needs to keep up with rapidly changing fads. It’s also reasonable to challenge Los Angeles garment makers to preserve their profitability by increasing productivity – though if they achieve this goal with more automation, employment levels could suffer at least in the short run.

But let’s look at how Obama-nomics is affecting the situation. The president has been a leading champion for those minimum wage hikes. (Most other Democrats agree.) At the same time, he’s seeking a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement that will open the American apparel market even wider to exports from Vietnam in particular, where average hourly wages in the industry as of 2013 reportedly were 53 cents per hour, and where employers – including the government – don’t have to worry about workers’ rights. Mr. Obama also favors trade deals that will boost apparel imports from other very low-wage, regulation-free regions like sub-Saharan Africa. And even though most Congressional Democrats oppose the TPP, they’ve strongly supported the Africa deal.

From the broader standpoint of Los Angeles’ entire economy and its prospects, virtually the entire Democratic party favors enormously increased immigration (and eventual citizenship for most of the current illegal population). So the city faces the prospect of a big new influx of new low-wage, low-skill foreign arrivals on top of the influx it’s already experienced, and a big exodus of the best kinds of jobs such newcomers can reasonably hope to hold.  Further, given the president’s support for this import-the-workers-export-the-jobs combination, plus the strong possibility that Democrats will retain the White House in 2016, the same fate appears in store for much of the rest of the country, too.   

And here’s the icing on this cake – as Democrats seek to focus America’s attention on wide and rising income inequality, Los Angeles already stands as one of the most unequal cities in the country, and California as the most unequal state (indicating that it’s more than a Los Angeles issue).

Not that Republicans are significantly better on trade and immigration issues – especially their Washington and Congressional leaders. But at least they’re not also peddling the false hope of big minimum wage hikes on top of their offshoring-and cheap labor-friendly immigration stances.  BTW, back in the late-1990s, I put out a short item on this very problem emerging in California (but can’t find it anywhere on line).  Plus ca change, as they say. 

 

 

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Washington’s Africa Sloppiness Shows Dangers of Fast Tracking Trade

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Africa, African Growth and Opportunity Act, AGOA, Congress, economic development, fast track, garments, manufacturing, MFA, Multifibre Arrangement, TPA, TPP, Trade, Trade Promotion Authority, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Uruguay Round, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Renewal of America’s trade agreement with sub-Saharan Africa isn’t the single biggest determinant of the fate of fast track authority in Congress this week, but it’s certainly in the mix. And the enormous popularity it’s enjoyed even among lawmakers generally opposed to current trade policies speaks volumes about how sloppily Washington as a whole develops trade agreements, and how the results can fail even intended foreign beneficiaries.

The Africa trade deal – created by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) – is intended to promote economic progress on the continent by opening the U.S. market wide to its exports. Even though African countries aren’t required to reciprocate, the measure seems worthwhile, as the continent’s own purchasing power is meager at best, and its non-oil sales to the United States are miniscule as well.

But since AGOA went into effect in 2001, even supporters in academe, like Harvard University economist Robert Z. Lawrence have called its growth-inducing effects in Africa “quite disappointing.” And the reasons stem from two major and related U.S. trade policy mistakes that could be easily corrected, but that remain in effect mainly because Washington has cared much more about pretending to help the continent rather than seriously addressing its problems.

The first fatal flaw has to do with AGOA’s “rule of origin” provisions, which principally affect the African apparel production and shipments. Developing strong apparel industries is crucial to the development hopes of the AGOA countries, because as a labor-intensive manufacturing sector, clothing historically has served as a “starter” industry for developing nations seeking both higher growth and higher incomes. And the hope clearly was that, once competitive local garment manufacturing had been established, sub-Saharan Africa would be able to attract the kind of investment needed to move to from relatively simple assembly to the next stage up the industrialization ladder – fabric and other input production.

Indeed, the current lack of meaningful fabric or yarn manufacturing in most of the AGOA countries to begin with led Washington to permit them to export on a duty-free basis to the United States garments made largely of foreign-produced fabric – both from the United States and from third countries. In its first few years, AGOA did stimulate strongly growing African apparel shipments to the United States. But progress came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the last decade, The quality failed to improve – in particular, AGOA fostered almost no fabric production – because most of the non-U.S. providers of fabric for African-assembled garments showed almost no interest in its encouragement. So AGOA apparel sales to Americans still largely consist of fabric produced outside Africa, generally in Asia – including China. Consequently, Africans have remained stuck in knitting and sewing work, which adds relatively little value to their economies.

But even the growth of shipments from Africa to the United States has slowed, and that owes to Washington’s second major trade policy mistake – its insistence that a global system of quotas for third world apparel exports be abolished as part of the Uruguay Round world trade liberalization agreement. As I wrote in this 2013 article, this Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) was widely criticized as selfish protectionism on the part of the high income countries that used it to regulate foreign market access for textiles and clothing. But it also gave invaluable opportunities to the world’s least developed countries to establish niches – and indeed growing niches – in this business, mainly by limiting imports from more advanced developing countries, like Taiwan, Korea, China, and even India.

And since AGOA’s provisions remain largely unchanged, most of its economic development benefits will continue flowing to countries that need them much less. And in a final, especially cruel, irony, avowed friends of Africa who vote for President Obama’s proposed Pacific Rim trade deal will only wind up putting added pressure on the continent. For one of the biggest expected results of this Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will be to supercharge U.S. apparel imports from hyper-competitive – and super low-wage and anti-union – Vietnam.

So if Congress – and the Obama administration – really wanted to help sub-Saharan Africa, they would push the World Trade Organization to restore the MFA or at least reestablish a quota system of its own, and they would rethink the TPP. That neither proposal is on the table in Washington strongly indicates that, when it comes to using U.S. trade policy to aiding developing countries, American leaders are much more interested in feeling good than in doing good. And can the same president and legislators who have so thoroughly neglected crucial AGOA-related details really be reasonably expected to produce a TPP that benefits America?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Senate’s Messy but Historic Anti-Fast Track Vote

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2016 elections, Africa, AGOA, currency manipulation, fast track, Harry Reid, Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell, Obama, Orrin Hatch, Ron Wyden, Senate, TAA, TPA, TPP, Trade, Trade Adjustment Assistance, Trade Promotion Authority, Trans-Pacific Partnership, {What's Left of) Our Economy

So far, the Senate’s vote this afternoon to block debate on granting fast track trade negotiating authority to President Obama stands out mainly for two somewhat contradictory but equally valid reasons.

First, just one look at the actual roll call is enough to remind that even lawmakers’ decisions on the highest profile, emotionally charged issues can be an incredibly nuanced mix of substantive and procedural considerations. For example, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has helped lead the charge to grant the president a virtual blank check for concluding new trade agreements, voted against proceeding, even though the triumph of the Nays puts fast track’s future in major jeopardy. The reasons reportedly were tactical, related to Senate procedures. Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, one of the few Republicans on Capitol Hill understanding the need for fundamentally new approaches to both trade and immigration policy, is recorded as voting for the measure. Unless that’s a typo, I’m dying to find out why.

Then there’s Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and ranking minority member of the Finance Committee – which takes the lead on trade issues in the Senate. Wyden brokered a fast track compromise with Republican Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah that resulted in a bill strongly opposed by most Democrats in both Houses of Congress. Yet Wyden cast a ballot against starting a fast track debate on the Senate floor – avowedly because McConnell and other Republican leaders refused to guarantee strongly enough that related trade measures would be voted on as well. So did several other Senate Democrats who normally support standard trade deals.

Even stranger, these related bills are at best a mixed bag when it comes to affecting trade policy, trade flows and, most important, the U.S. economy’s growth and hiring performance – which could certainly use a helping hand. For example, one is a measure that would fund so-called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) for workers who lose their jobs because of import competition or trade-related offshoring. These retraining and reeducation programs are widely viewed as chronic failures by those who have studied their results. Their continued popularity in Washington reflects their ability to enable trade deal supporters to claim genuine concern for Americans whose livelihoods they repeatedly vote to devastate. In other words, TAA support historically has provided a measure political cover for trade liberalization votes. But this year so far it’s throwing a major major monkey wrench into the president’s trade agenda.

Another trade-related demand made by fast track opponents is legislative movement on extending a free trade deal with sub-Saharan Africa. Although this arrangement’s impacts on the U.S. economy are modest, it’s involved a sacrifice of American jobs, mainly in the apparel industry, for African jobs. Even those believing that this tradeoff makes sense for U.S. interests should be troubled by how the African deal has become a back door for shipping Chinese-made garments, and clothing made from Chinese, not U.S.-manufactured fabric, into the American market.

At the same time, despite the byzantine array of motives on display, this Senate vote was a genuine milestone. For whatever their narrower and even cynical concerns, Senators who opposed launching the fast track debate had to know that any delay could well doom the measure, and with it any hopes for new trade agreements for the foreseeable future. The reason? The longer these decisions take, the deeper they get pushed into the already unfolding 2016 presidential cycle, when few politicians relish running as champions of current U.S. trade strategies.

Indeed, for all the White House efforts to dismiss today’s events as an “procedural snafu,” this anti-fast track vote represents the first time in decades that the Senate has rejected a major trade policy measure that didn’t require approval in the House as well. (In 2011, the Senate passed a stringent anti-currency manipulation bill, but many of the Yes voters no doubt knew that the measure was going nowhere in the House.)

As a result, Mr. Obama’s trade agenda, including his proposed Pacific Rim trade deal, is by no means dead. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, till now a bulwark of opposition to fast track and that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement reportedly is already trying to figure out how to save the president from complete humiliation. But given the Senate’s usually friendly disposition to standard trade liberalization policies, and given how its reservations may further stiffen the spine of the traditionally balkier House, there can be no doubt that U.S. trade policy history was made today. And given the current strategy’s record of slowing both economic growth and job creation, it’s history that even the most ambivalent, even Machiavellian fast track opponents can be proud to have made.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: More Evidence that U.S. Trade Deals are Really Offshoring Deals

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Africa, Asia, Asian Development Bank, exports, incomes, offshoring, poverty, poverty line, third world, Trade, trade agreements, World Bank, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The U.S. trade policy front – thankfully – has been quiet lately. That means dim-looking short-term prospects that Congress will pass new fast track presidential trade negotiating authority, and new trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that are proven job- and growth-killers.

Nonetheless, these globalization measures still represent a rare point of agreement between President Obama and Congress’ Republican leaders, and the lobbying might behind such deals is still potentially overpowering. Therefore, it’s worth noting the recent appearance of more evidence refuting a prime argument made by supporters of new trade deals: that since 95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside the United States, Washington urgently needs to enable American businesses and workers access all that purchasing power to give the current recovery some real oomph.

Last March, I skewered that claim by pointing out that most of those foreign consumers, concentrated in very low-income third world countries, earn next to nothing, and therefore can’t possibly become strong consumers of U.S.-origin goods and services. This month, comparable findings from three respected sources should help bury the “95 percent illusion” for good.

The first throws buckets of cold water even on the idea that fast-growing Asia presents massive growth opportunities for the U.S. domestic economy. According to an August 20 Financial Times article, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and India’s new government are seriously rethinking current official poverty lines. The former specifically has concluded that its existing $1.25 per day poverty line “was not enough to maintain minimum welfare in many parts of the region.”

Of particular interest to American trade officials, and their supporters and critics, the ADB calculated that raising the poverty threshold to a mere $1.50 per day would boost Asia’s poverty rate from 12.7 percent of its population to 41.2 percent. In other words, even without this statistical manipulation, more than one billion Asians considered to be above the poverty line, and potential customers for U.S. exports, were making only between $1.25 and $1.50 per day.

Moreover, as the Financial Times emphasized, many Asians’ incomes remain not only abysmally low, but highly precarious. Its analysis of World Bank data showed that nearly one billion people in the developing world overall were at risk of falling out of what is charitably called “the middle class.”

And as pointed out by my March article, even the meager income levels revealed in this data are present a thoroughly misleading picture of third world purchasing power. The reason: They’re measured according to a methodology known as Purchasing Power Parity – which adjusts the costs of goods and services down to the rock-bottom levels inevitably found in low-income countries. When these incomes are measured by their ability to buy products and services created at U.S. price levels, they turn out to be much lower.

The day before, the FT also (unintentionally) refuted a sub-myth of the 95 percent illusion – the belief that sub-Saharan Africa could well be the world’s most exciting future growth market. In an August 19 article, the paper reported findings by Standard Bank that the region would by 2030 see “ a burgeoning consumer market for items such as vehicles, insurance policies, property and health products” because of a tripling of its middle class households.

This does indeed sound pretty exciting, until it becomes clear that this tripling would bring the number of sub-Saharan Africa’s middle class households to only 22 million. That’s only slightly larger than the population of greater New York City today. And even the wealthiest of these African households would be earning a mere $42,000 annually. The poorest would be making only one-fifth that much.

Finally, the Gallup polling organization last week released a survey showing that fully 29 percent of the world’s working population is self-employed – and that far from representing “a positive sign of proactive entrepreneurial energy, high rates of self-employment can often signal poor economic performance.” Even more important: “The self-employed are three times as likely as those who are employed full time for an employer to be living on less than $2 per day.” And self-employment rates are by far the loftiest in highly populous developing countries.

These statistics reinforce what should have been clear to American leaders, the media, and the public for decades. The push for trade agreements fueled so prominently by multinational companies has almost nothing to do with finding new foreign consumers for American exports, and nearly everything to do with finding penny wage workers and other super-cheap factors of production for offshoring-happy corporations.