(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Trump Metals Tariffs Coverage has Just (Again) Been Exposed as Largely Fake News

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ABC News, aluminum, Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, durable goods, Financial Times, Jobs, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, Marketwatch.com, metals, metals-using industries, NBC News, PBS, private sector, Reuters, steel, tariffs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

In case you still think that President Trump’s charges of fake news-peddling by the national news media are fake news themselves, consider this: For the second time in two months, if you decided to hold your breath till you found a Mainstream Media item reporting that the America’s metals-using industries have been major job-creation leaders, not laggards, you’d have died.

Such omissions are especially important because since the Trump administration began imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports (in March), the media has been filled not only with predictions of massive employment and production losses in metals-using manufacturing (because the prices of two noteworthy inputs for these industries was bound to rise), but with accounts of actual economic damage that numerous companies in these sectors have already suffered. (See here and here for just two examples.) 

Last month, I noted that, for all these accounts, authoritative government data (through June) showed that the metals-using industries’ performance by both measures had both generally improved, and had indeed both generally improved more than job creation and output in the rest of manufacturing.

Since then, more steel and aluminum tariffs were put in place (mainly because some major U.S. trade partners initially exempted from the tariffs were subjected to the levies). And what did we learn from the newest jobs report, which was released last Friday, and took the story through July (on a preliminary basis)? That the metals-using industries continue to set the national job-creation pace for the entire economy, not simply for manufacturing.

Here are the percentage gains for employment in some major sectors of the economy from April (the first month during which any metals tariffs effects would have been felt) through July except for the industries noted:

entire private sector: +0.53 percent

overall manufacturing: +0.73 percent

durable goods: +0.96 percent

fabricated metals products: +1.10 percent

non-electrical machinery: +1.43 percent

automotive vehicles & parts: +1.06 percent

household appliances (thru June): -0.63 percent

aerospace products & parts (thru June): +1.05 percent

Unfortunately, it was not possible to learn any of this from America’s leading news organizations. For these figures were completely ignored.

To their credit, some leading media mentioned that Trump tariffs and trade war fears in general seemed to be having no effect on manufacturing job creation overall despite industry’s exposure in principle to the fall-out. These included the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Financial Times, CNN, ABC News, and NBC News. Yet the metals-using sectors were never mentioned.

As for The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and CBS News, they made no connection of the tariff/trade war-manufacturing job connection whatever.

And several news organizations actually tried to rationalize the unexpected results. Reuters, for example, claimed that “With manufacturing payrolls increasing by the most in seven months, the moderation in hiring reported by the Labor Department on Friday likely does not reflect the rising trade tensions between the United States and other nations including China.”

According to PBS, “Economists say it is too early to tell whether the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum are having a significant effect on manufacturing jobs.”

Bloomberg and Marketwatch.com weren’t as disingenuous, but still felt compelled to contend that rising trade tensions continued to cast a long shadow on the job markets’ future – without reporting that, if anything, new U.S. policies and statements were so far having exactly the opposite effect on parts of the economy most exposed to existing metals tariffs.

But no account of press coverage of these Trump trade policies would be complete without observing an equally weird development: Neither the President nor anyone else in his administration has pointed to the outperformance of the metals-using industries, either.

In a little over a week, the nation will get its next major opportunity to gauge the impact of metals and other tariffs, and future possibilities thereof – when the Federal Reserve releases the July industrial production data, which includes detailed statistics on inflation-adjusted manufacturing output. Will the Mainstream Media finally zero in on the sectors where the tariff rubber hits the road? At this rate, Americans should be grateful if they simply ended the string of job loss and other Chicken Little metals tariff impact stories.

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: So the Economy Can’t Grow When the Trade Balance Improves?

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Associated Press, growth, inflation-adjusted growth, Paul Wiseman, real trade deficit, Trade, Trade Deficits, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Yesterday’s release of the December and full-year 2017 U.S. trade figures means that there will be lots of detailed data to mine for the next week or two. But the new numbers, and the press coverage, also create a great opportunity to dispel one of the leading myths surrounding the impact of trade – and especially trade deficits – on the U.S. economy.

The myth was nicely stated in the Associated Press coverage of the new trade report – which matters a lot because the AP is one of the leading sources of news for both the nation and the world. According to reporter Paul Wiseman,

“[W]hen it comes to trade, there’s a flip-side to good times [touted by President Trump and others]: ‘A stronger economy will draw in more imports’ as confident consumers seek out foreign products, says Bernard Baumohl, chief economist at the Economic Outlook Group.

“Recent history shows that the trade deficit tends to grow when times are good and shrink when they turn bad. The trade gap hit a record $762 billion in 2006 toward the end of a six-year economic expansion. It dropped to $384 billion in 2009, in the depths of the Great Recession as American consumers hunkered down and bought fewer imports.

“‘If the goal is to reduce the trade deficit, we know how to do that — just send our economy crashing and we won’t be able to afford to import as much’ says Bryan Riley, director of the conservative National Taxpayers Union’s Free Trade Initiative.”

This relationship holds more often than not. But the notion unmistakably conveyed by Wiseman and especially by the supposed authorities he cites – that it always holds – just doesn’t bear scrutiny.

The U.S. Census Bureau, which tracks the trade deficit, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (like Census, another division of the Commerce Department), which tracks economic growth, both conveniently provide the historical statistics anyone needs should he or she show some actual curiosity about such claims. And what these figures show is that, for two and half decades – from 1961 till the early 1990s – the U.S. economy regularly managed to grow (and often quite nicely) in years when the trade balance improved. This includes years when a surplus increased, a deficit shrunk, or when a deficit turned into a surplus.

All told, such trade balance improvement took place thirteen times during this period: 1961, 1963, 1964, 1970, 1973, 1975, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991

And of these 13 years, the economy grew in nine on an inflation-adjusted basis (the most widely looked at measure): 1961, 1963, 1964, 1970, 1973, 1979, 1981, 1988, and 1990.

Moreover, even though improving trade balances (specifically, falling deficits) have been rarer since, they haven’t been unknown. This development took place in 1995, 2007, 2009, and 2012. And of these years, the economy grew in real terms in all except 2009.

What’s been seen more seldom – though not “never” – is a year-to-year speed-up in growth while the trade balance improves. But this combination has been seen five times since 1960: in 1964, 1973, 1981, 1988, and 2012. For good measure, the trade surplus expanded in 1961, and after-inflation growth remained at its previous-year level of 2.6 percent.

Nor does the picture change much when you look at the annual changes in the inflation-adjusted trade balance. From 1961 through the early 1990s, this trade balance improved in 13 years – the same number as that for the current-dollar trade balances, though the specific list is slightly different. These years were: 1963, 1964, 1970, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1979, 1980, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991

In ten of those years, the economy grew: 1961, 1963, 1964, 1970, 1973, 1979, 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1990

Since the early 1990s, the real trade balance has improved six times: 1995, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013. And it remained roughly the same in 2011. In all of those years – except for 2008 and 2009 – the real economy expanded.

Re the accelerating growth criterion, through the early 1990s, it was met in three of the ten years during which the economy expanded and the trade balance improved. In two other years, the trade balance improved and economic growth held steady (1962 and 1987).

More recently, since the early 1990s, the economic grew in price-adjusted terms in four years when the trade balance improved. In addition, the trade balance barely budged (for the worse) in another growth year: 2011.

A bigger difference comes in terms of accelerating growth – an improving real trade balance has coincided with a growth speed-up only once during this period: 2012.

Now a skeptic could (correctly) observe that during the 1960s and 1970s, trade was considerably less important to the economy. At the same time, this observation also means that American economic policymakers have failed to meet the crucial challenge of helping the economy sustain healthy growth as it’s steadily – and sometimes rapidly – internationalized.

But the paramount point is that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there’s no inherent reason why the economy’s trade position should worsen when it grows. And you can indeed look it up.

Making News: On National (Laura Ingraham) Radio This Morning – & More!

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Asia, Associated Press, Chris Rugaber, Facebook, Jerome Powell, Laura Ingraham, Lifezette.com, Making News, North Korea, Princeton University, The Laura Ingraham Show, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that I am scheduled to appear this morning on Laura Ingraham’s nationally syndicated radio show to talk about President Trump’s trip to Asia.  Listen live at 10:35 AM EST at this link. And of course if you can’t tune in, I’ll post the podcast as soon as it’s available.

The segment will deal with many of the issues raised in my new column for Laura’s Lifezette.com news site. Click here to read this call for a thorough (and Trump-ian) overhaul of America’s strategy toward the Asia-Pacific region in general and the North Korea crisis in particular.

And this November 3 Associated Press profile of Jerome Powell, Mr. Trump’s new appointee to chair the Federal Reserve, contains a funny anecdote from the days when “Jay” and I were Princeton University undergraduates.

Just FYI, AP reporter Chris Rugaber figured out the connection (which is pretty casual) through a fine bit of journalistic sleuthing. As soon as he heard about the Powell appointment, he scoured his Facebook page and discovered we had friended each other. So he called me on Halloween afternoon to see if I had any insights to offer.

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

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So You Think Trump is a Dangerous Nut on North Korea?

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Alex Ward, alliances, allies, Ana Fifield, Ankit Panda, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Cold War, Council on Foreign Relations, David J. Rothkopf, David Jackson, deterrence, Diane Feinstein, Ed Markey, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, Kim Jong Un, media, Nicole Gaouette, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Peter Baker, political class, Rick Gladstone, Stewart Patrick, The Atlantic, The Diplomat, The New York Times, Trump, United Nations, USAToday, Vox.com, Washington Post

Weird as it sounds, the North Korea nuclear crisis has created two significant benefits – though unfortunately neither has yet created either establishment or popular pressure to change an increasingly reckless American approach.

Still, it’s promising that dictator Kim Jong Un’s rapid development of nuclear weapons that can reach the U.S. homeland is not only revealing that America’s longstanding approach to defense alliances is now exposing the nation to the risk of nuclear attack even when its own security is not directly at stake. It’s also more recently begun exposing America’s many foreign policy and other elite mainstays either as ignoramuses or (much more likely) shameful hypocrites.

The reason? They profess to be shocked, just shocked (Google “Casablanca” and “Louis Renault”) that President Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea in order “to defend itself or its allies.” As if they’ve never heard of “nuclear deterrence.” And don’t know that such saber-rattling has been U.S. policy for decades.

To review briefly, since fairly early in the Cold War, and especially since the former Soviet Union developed its own impressive nuclear forces, American leaders have overwhelmingly concluded that the only reasonable uses of these weapons was preventing a nuclear attack on the United States itself, or a similar strike or conventional military assault on one of the countries it was treaty-bound to protect. The idea was that even nuclear-armed potential aggressors the Soviets and Chinese (and the North Koreans, once they crossed the threshhold) would think at least twice before moving on targets if they had reason to fear that the United States would launch its own nukes against those countries.

From time to time, some politicians and analysts suggested that the effects of such nuclear weapons use could be restricted to efforts to take out the enemy’s remaining nuclear weapons or otherwise fall short of “totally destroying” that adversary. But for the most part, the idea of limited nuclear war has been rejected in favor of vowing annihilation. And except for disarmament types on the Left and super-hawks on the Right (who supported the aforementioned “counterforce” approach), the political class comprised of office-holders and journalists and think tankers was just fine with the nuclear element of U.S. alliance strategy.

It’s completely bizarre, therefore, that almost none of the press coverage – including “experts'” analyses – of Mr. Trump’s September 19 statement evinces any awareness of any of this history. Instead, it’s portrayed the “totally destroy” threat as appallingly monstrous, unhinged rhetoric from an unprecedentedly erratic chief executive. Just as bad, President Trump is accused of playing right into Kim’s hands and shoring up his support with the North Korean populace.

For instance, here’s how Washington Post reporter Ana Fifield yesterday described the consensus of of North Korea specialists she had just surveyed:

“Kim Jong Un’s regime tells the North Korean people every day that the United States wants to destroy them and their country. Now, they will hear it from another source: the president of the United States himself.

“In his maiden address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” Analysts noted that he did not even differentiate between the Kim regime, as President George W. Bush did with his infamous “axis of evil” speech, and the 25 million people of North Korea.”

Here’s the New York Times‘ take, from chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and foreign policy reporter Rick Gladstone:

“President Trump brought the same confrontational style of leadership he has used at home to the world’s most prominent stage on Tuesday as he vowed to ‘totally destroy North Korea‘ if it threatened the United States….”

Similarly, USAToday‘s David Jackson described the Trump speech as “a stark address to the United Nations that raised the specter of nuclear warfare” and contended that “Trump’s choice of words on North Korea is in keeping with the bellicose rhetoric he’s already used to describe the tensions that have escalated throughout his eight months in office.”

As for the Associated Press, the world’s most important news wire service, it was content to offer readers a stunning dose of moral equivalence: “In a region well used to Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons generating a seemingly never-ending cycle of threats and counter-threats, Mr. Trump’s comments stood out.“

CNN‘s approach? It quoted a “senior UN diplomat” as claiming that “it was the first time in his memory that a world leader has called for the obliteration of another state at the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly], noting even Iran’s most fiery leaders didn’t similarly threaten Israel.”

For good measure, reporter Nicole Gaouette added, “The threat is likely to ratchet up tensions with North Korea while doing little to reassure US allies in Asia, said analysts who added that the President now also runs the risk of appearing weak if he doesn’t follow through.”

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Stewart Patrick, who served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under former President George W. Bush, told the BBC that the Trump threat is implausible, and that “I think the folks in the Pentagon when they look at military options are just aghast at the potential loss of life that could occur with at a minimum hundreds of thousands of South Koreans killed in Seoul.”

For David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and protege of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who went on to edit FOREIGNPOLICY magazine (where I worked many years before), the problem is much simpler: “The president of the United States chose, in a forum dedicated to diplomacy, to threaten to wipe another nation — a much smaller one — off the face of the earth in language that was not so much hard-line rhetoric as it was schoolboy bullying complete with childish name-calling.”

Many members of the U.S. Congress were no better. Said California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein: “Trump’s bombastic threat to destroy North Korea and his refusal to present any positive pathways forward on the many global challenges we face are severe disappointments. He aims to unify the world through tactics of intimidation, but in reality he only further isolates the United States.”

Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey brought up a war powers angle: “The more the president talks about the total destruction of North Korea, the more it’s necessary for the country and the Congress to have a debate over what the authority of a president is to launch nuclear weapons against another country.”

What’s of course especially ironic about Markey’s words is that such a U.S. policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons would effectively destroy the American alliances that liberals like Markey have become enamored with lately, and that President Trump is often charged by these same liberals as attempting to dismantle.

Some other news organizations and websites have behaved even more strangely – lambasting the Trump threat but then acknowledging deep inside their accounts that the President said nothing fundamentally new.

For example, the viscerally anti-Trump Vox.com website predictably led off one of its accounts with, “On September 19, President Donald Trump gave his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly. His harsh rhetoric toward North Korea stood out — mostly because he threatened to obliterate the country of 25.4 million people.”

Six paragraphs later, writer Alex Ward got around to mentioning that “A few [specialists] noted that it was similar to what other presidents, including President Obama, have said before.”

And in an Atlantic post titled, “A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence,” author Ankit Panda of The Diplomat newspaper accused President Trump of using “apocalyptic rhetoric” and threatening “to commit a horrific act expressly forbidden by international humanitarian law….”

But then he immediately turned around and admitted,

“The remarks echoed similar, countless deterrent threats levied against North Korea by past U.S. presidents with more subtlety and innuendo, perhaps allowing for a more calibrated and flexible response. But ultimately vowing to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea if America or its allies come under attack is, in fact, not all that sharp a break from existing U.S. policy.”

If these treatments of the North Korea crisis were simply efforts to demonize President Trump by abusing history, that would be contemptible enough, but what else is new from America’s too often incompetent and scapegoat-addicted elites?

But something much more dangerous is at work here. Individuals who, for good reasons, have not been regarded as kooks are using Never Trump-ism to foster a genuinely kooky idea. They’re suggesting that the alliances so central to America’s foreign policy making for decades should be viewed as little more than kumbaya symbols, and that anyone speaking frankly about their possibly deadly and indeed horrific implications is beyond the pale – even though the proliferation of nuclear weapons has unmistakably rendered these arrangements far more perilous.

In other words, they’re spreading the worst, and most childish, of all canards about foreign policy, or about any dimension of public policy – not that a particular set of choices is sound or not (that’s almost always legitimately debatable), but that hard choices never need to be made at all.

Im-Politic: More Illegal Immigration Coddling from the Washington Post

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Associated Press, crime, Darwin Martinez Torres, detainers, Germantown, hate crimes, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Maryland, Montgomery County, Muslims, Nabra Hassanen, Northern Virginia, Rockville, The Washington Post

Hard as it is to believe, The Washington Post news department’s coddling of illegal immigrants looks to have passed a new milestone. On April, I explained how the paper’s news editors and reporters (not the opinion folks) apparently have decided that drunk driving isn’t a serious crime when the guilty are living in the United States illegally.

This past week, the Post has acted conspicuously determined to ignore crucial questions of suspected criminals’ immigration status when they threaten to ruin or even complicate another prized narrative – that Muslim Americans are being victimized by a record surge in hate crimes prompted by irrational fears of Islamic terrorists stoked cynically by politicians like President Trump. Such journalistic selectivity is bound to intensify questions about the legality of any Americans of Hispanic heritage arrested for crimes, both when they’re justified and when they’re not.

There’s an alternative explanation for the paper’s behavior that’s comparably disturbing: In an effort to calm public fears about the public safety risks created by indulgent immigration policies, it’s been trying to sweep such immigration questions under the rug because it did report the status of two Hispanic teenage immigrants just a month before, when they were charged with a rape at a high school in the area. In early May, the charges were dropped, seeming to vindicate allegations that immigration policy critics had been using the case to demagogue their cause.      

The latest crime in question was the abominable killing of an Muslim teenage girl from the Virginia suburbs early last Sunday morning. The story quickly attracted national attention, and the Post‘s early coverage demonstrated the obvious reason: The local police seemed determined to classify the murder as an instance of road rage, while many in the local Islamic community — including the victim’s family — along with others insisted that it amounted to the latest hate crime committed against innocent Muslim Americans.

As the Post pointedly reminded readers in its report on Monday:

“Police said Monday they aren’t investigating the death as a hate crime, but the issue was on the minds of many Muslims on Sunday.

“Last month, two men on a Portland train were stabbed and killed after they intervened to protect two girls who were being harassed with anti-Muslim threats, according to authorities.

“Sunday night, a van struck a crowd of pedestrians, including worshipers leaving a pair of mosques in London. Witnesses said the pedestrians were struck as they departed late-night prayers.

“The ADAMS Center [victim Nabra Hassanen’s mosque] has a paid armed security guard at the Sterling site, according to [Arsalan Iftkhar, an “international human rights lawyer and commentator” who attended services at the mosque]. He said many mosques have increased security since six Muslim worshipers were killed at a mosque in Quebec earlier this year.

“Sunday night, a van struck a crowd of pedestrians, including worshipers leaving a pair of mosques in London. Witnesses said the pedestrians were struck as they departed late-night prayers.

“The ADAMS Center has a paid armed security guard at the Sterling site, according to Iftikhar. He said many mosques have increased security since six Muslim worshipers were killed at a mosque in Quebec earlier this year.”

And this focus on the hate crimes charge continued through the Post‘s last comprehensive coverage of the murder, on Wednesday.

But from the start, one crucial aspect of the murder appeared to be undermining claims that animus against Muslims was the suspect’s motivation – an aspect oddly neglected by the Post. As the paper specified from the outset, he was a young Hispanic-surnamed male – Darwin Martinez Torres. But nothing else about him was reported.

That may not sound suspicious to someone unfamiliar with that part of northern Virginia – or even worth writing about at all. But Sterling and environs have long hosted a large population of illegal immigrants. The offense in question was unmistakably felonious and abhorrent, not some trifle. So there are valid public safety issues involved, with large numbers of Americans understandably wanting to what kinds of individuals their leaders have – knowingly – welcomed into their country and their neighborhoods.

Moreover, a Post update later that day offered evidence suggesting Torres’ illegal status: U.S. immigration authorities had requested that local officials put a “detainer” on him – meaning that they were looking into deportation. Now on the one hand, the federal government can place detainers on and deport legal immigrants as well as illegal. But on the other hand, that decision should have raised a red flag with the Post right away, and the question could have been answered with little effort. But no one on the team of reporters assigned the story by the paper seems to have pursued the matter. The hate crimes issue and related concerns voiced nationally about American Muslims’ safety clearly were their top priorities.

As early as Monday, however, it was clear that Martinez’ immigration status was indeed in doubt with the authorities. The Associated Press reported that day that they determined he is “a citizen of El Salvador and there’s probable cause to believe he lacks permission to be in the U.S.”

But even though this AP report appears on the Post‘s website, it prompted no investigation of Torres’ status by the paper itself, either.

Moreover, on Tuesday, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson announced that Torres is in the United States illegally. Readers of the The New York Times, FoxNews.com, The Daily Caller, and CNN received this information. But nearly a week later, the Post staff itself still has not mentioned it. Neither, weirdly, has the Associated Press – but it’s not the Washington, D.C. area’s leading news organization.

Sadly, this journalistic inevitably raises the question of whether the Post has decided to cover up the legal status of other Hispanic Americans arrested for crimes. For example, also earlier this month, two Germantown, Maryland high school students were murdered on the eve of their graduation. The trio arrested? Jose Canales-Yanez, Edgar Garcia-Gaona, and his brother Roger Garcia. Any mention of their immigration status in the Post coverage? Nope.

But like Sterling, the Germantown area is home to many illegal immigrants, as well as a center of violence from criminal gangs whose crimes are becoming ever more brutal and that are often extensions of similar organizations in Central America. The police force of surrounding Montgomery County has not ruled out a gang angle, and according to Help Save Maryland, an organization favoring stricter immigration controls and enforcement, a photo of one of the suspects reveals a form of tattoo often sported by Central American gang members.  

It’s true that Montgomery police chief Thomas Manger has stated that “to my knowledge, there were no ICE detainers filed in those cases” resulting from some of the suspects’ previous arrests.” But it’s also true that Montgomery County has declared itself to be a safe haven for immigrants – if not an out-and-out sanctuary city – and that Manger has dutifully declared that it’s not his job to determine anyone’s immigration status.

Curiously, moreover, Post reporters and editors were decidedly more aggressive in March, when two Hispanic teenagers, including a minor, were accused of raping a younger schoolmate at Rockville High School in Rockville, Maryland — also in Montgomery County.  The paper’s first article on the incident prominently mentioned that Henry E. Sanchez “a native of Guatemala who arrived in the United States about seven months ago, has a pending ‘alien removal’ case against him, court officials said Friday. ‘He is a substantial flight risk,’ Montgomery County Assistant States Attorney Rebecca MacVittie said in court Friday.

“[Jose O.] Montano has been in the United States for about eight months, MacVittie said. Details about Sanchez’s removal case, or Montano’s immigration status, couldn’t immediately be learned Friday.”

Moreover, the Post‘s own reporting several days later contend that both suspects “were among tens of thousands of young people who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 2016.” Prosecutors dropped the rape charges against the pair in early May. Was the paper’s much more restrained coverage of immigration issues in the two, more recent, murder cases an attempt to keep anti-immigration sentiment in the public under control?    

It’s vitally important to be clear here. As suggested immediately above, I believe that many municipalities and states are ignoring their responsibilities to help the federal government enforce immigration law. But insisting that the Post inquire about the immigration status of criminal suspects is completely different from insisting that state and local governments, whose immigration law enforcement responsibilities are limited and reactive, proactively publicize the immigration status of criminal suspects.

It’s also completely different from insisting that the federal government, whose immigration law responsibilities are extensive and often proactive, seek out and publicize this information whenever an arrest is made by any level of government, even for serious infractions (although I’m leaning strongly in this direction, given the nation’s enormous and possibly still growing population of illegals).

Instead, insisting that the Post and the rest of the media at least seek this information simply entails insisting that they play their proper role as watchdogs of democracy – pressing for accountability for wielders of public and private power, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Viewed from a different perspective, the government at all levels enjoys certain established authority to keep information from the public for various, highly specific reasons – e.g., to protect national security or safeguard Constitutionally guaranteed privacy rights. In order to help ensure that this authority is not abused, the media’s job is to release whatever information it can procure, with certain exceptions that it generally has complied with voluntarily (e.g., protecting information whose exposure would immediately threaten national security and/or the lives of military and intelligence personnel whose lives literally are on the line, or the privacy of minors). When disputes arise over where these respective lines should be drawn, the judiciary steps in to try to provide the answer.

At least since the era of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, the Post has epitomized a national media that understands these distinctions and acts accordingly. Does it now believe that, for reasons it has yet to explain, that its coverage of illegal immigration is an exception?

 

Im-Politic: Little Thinking in The NY Times on Think Tanks

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Associated Press, Bill Clinton, Brookings Institution, Hillary Clinton, idea laundering, Im-Politic, media, Strobe Talbott, The New York Times, think tanks

Even though news organizations like The New York Times are big outfits where it’s hard to keep the left hand informed about what the right hand is doing, it’s disturbing to see how completely the paper has ignored its own reporting about the sophisticated form of corruption perfected by major American think tanks – and keeps mindlessly citing their work and staff members in articles.

On August 8 – just over two weeks ago – the paper ran on its front page an invaluable report on how America’s major think tanks, most of which are headquartered in Washington, D.C., now habitually produce and distribute material that promotes the interests of their corporate or other contributors. As I’ve explained, this Standard Operating Procedure is not only contemptibly deceptive, but dangerous to our democracy.

For think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are used by policy makers and the media as important sources of information and analysis – largely because they’re seen as objective sources of expertise, just like colleges and universities. (Brookings even uses the “.edu” internet domain name.) When the main purpose of these organizations is to help their donors, they’re engaged in what I’ve called “idea laundering” – garbing special interest pleading in the raiment of scholarly integrity and independence. Worst of all, think tanks rarely disclose specific actual or possible conflicts of interest.

So the obvious question is whether The New York Times, for starters, is taking the hint, and at least begun to change its news coverage to portray think tank findings and views accurately? Sadly, the answer is, “Not yet” – at least judging from The Times‘ mentions, since the article appeared, of Brookings, whose academic pretenses it spent so much space exposing.

According to The Times‘ search engine, the paper has presented the views of Brookings staff seven times since August 8. And it’s as if the reporters and editors don’t read their own paper.

The most recent was The Times publication today of the big Associated Press story detailing the large number of Clinton Foundation donors who managed to finagle meetings or telephone conversations with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton when she served as Secretary of State. The Brookings “fellow” quoted was identified as someone who might have a bias – since Secretary Clinton was once his boss at State. But credit here should go to the Associated Press, not The Times.

Yesterday, a Times piece on the fighting in Iraq quoted a Brookings analyst once with the CIA. No special interest motive is apparent here, although the source, Kenneth Pollack, was a big backer of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These views weren’t mentioned in the story – but maybe they were a little bit germane?

On August 18 came a Times article purporting to show that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is losing support among white men – widely thought to be one of his core constituencies. Many polls and political specialists were cited, which is all to the good. But one of them was “Brookings demographer William H. Frey” – who has “conducted several simulations that tried to determine how much the turnout among white men without college educations would have to increase for Mr. Trump to win.” His results were bad news for Trump.

That’s in principle fine, too. But here it’s surely relevant that almost none of Brookings’ legion of corporate donors is likely to look favorably on Trump, a loud opponent of the trade and immigration policies these businesses support. Also relevant – Brookings President Strobe Talbott is really chummy with both Secretary Clinton and her husband, the former president. Indeed, he was Deputy Secretary of State in the former’s administration, on top of several other appointive positions.

That same day, some research by Brookings economist Gary Burtless was featured in a Times post on the surprisingly large numbers of men who have been dropping out of the American workforce. Nothing objectionable here, especially since Burtless wasn’t asked to explain his findings.

More problematic was the August 17 Associated Press’ summary of the tax policy plans being touted by the Clinton and Trump campaigns this year. Because the piece, which appeared in The Times, relied in part on the work of Brookings’ Tax Policy Center, and because the issue so politically charged, it seems to me that the Talbott-Clinton connection should have at least been mentioned. Here, the fault lies mainly with the AP – although as a customer of the news service, The Times has wide latitude to edit its material.

Much less partisan was the Reuters article published by The Times August 16 on racial tensions in Milwaukee. The piece, written in the wake of a recent police shooting, offered some Brookings data on the city’s segregated housing patterns that don’t seem to be motivated by any particular agenda.

The final report in The Times, however, was another that missed Brookings’ corporate and Clinton links. The article, again from the AP, summarized and analyzed the two leading presidential candidates’ overall economic plans. The AP in particular should have noted that the Brookings staffer it quoted here, “senior fellow” William Galston, is a “former policy advisor to President Clinton.” Is it any wonder he’s so enthusiastic about amnesty for illegal immigrants!

Since think tanks do house a lot of worthy knowledge and wisdom, and since their donors have every right to participate in policy debates, the solution is obvious: adequate transparency. That way, we could all benefit from this expertise, but also have some sense of who’s been sponsoring it, why – and what it might be downplaying, slanting, or ignoring. And since The Times has done such excellent reporting on what shady institutional characters think tanks can be, is it so unreasonable to expect that the paper starts leading the way?

Following Up: Trump Hit .500 on Trade at the Debate – Which Isn’t Nearly Good Enough

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Asia-Pacific, Associated Press, China, Donald Trump, Fox Business Debate, Japan, Mainstream Media, minimum wage, multinational companies, Obama, punditocracy, rules of origin, sourcing, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you think a .500 batting average represents as good a performance in presidential debates as in baseball, then you’re going to be pretty pleased with Republican candidate Donald Trump’s performance on trade-related issues in the GOP Milwaukee main event last night. If you’re wondering how the Republican front-runner (co-front-runner?) could have gotten one answer so mind-bogglingly wrong, and one just as completely on target, chances are you’re more downbeat.

Of course, it also needs to be noted that apparently no one in the Mainstream Media knows enough about trade, and specifically about President Obama’s Pacific Rim trade deal, to have recognized the accuracy of Trump’s answer about China’s relation to the agreement. But in defense of the scribblers, they’re not competing for the authority to press policy buttons.

Trump’s wrong answer was his first (here’s a debate transcript), and although it came on a question concerning the minimum wage, not trade, it bears directly on America’s approach to the global economy. Explaining why he opposed government-mandated hikes in pay floors, Trump told the audience that with U.S. “taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we can not do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.”

What was completely weird about this response was that, as with other critics, a main reason for Trump’s opposition to current U.S. trade policies is that they benefit offshoring interests at the expense of American workers by forcing the latter into a no-win competition with much more poorly paid foreign counterparts. Indeed, although Trump never mentioned “wages” explicitly in his new China trade paper, he did charge that the status quo approach exclusively serves the interests of “Wall Street insiders that want to move U.S. manufacturing and investment offshore.” And he asked how “American manufacturers, who must meet very high standards, [can] possibly compete with Chinese companies that care nothing about their workers or the environment?”

So Trump’s position that the minimum wage can’t be raised because of this (presumably unacceptable) low-wage foreign competition amounts to a version of blaming the victim.

And it would have been so easy for Trump to have had his policy cake and eaten it, too, on this front. He could have expressed sympathy with the idea of raising minimum wages – especially because of penny-wage foreign competition. And he could have gone on to insist that a better way to raise living standards was to fix the trade policies largely responsible. Trump did suggest that his tax policy reforms would get the job done by super-charging America’s growth and job-creation. But if so, why put so much emphasis on the need to overhaul trade policy?

By contrast, Trump’s critique of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) revealed genuine mastery of typical and major U.S. trade policy failings. As he contended (inter alia), “The TPP is horrible deal. It is a deal that is going to lead to nothing but trouble. It’s a deal that was designed for China to come in, as they always do, through the back door and totally take advantage of everyone.”

The commentariat seemed to agree that Trump had displayed his ignorance by claiming that China is one of the TPP signatories. That’s what one of Trump’s rivals, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, claimed. So did the Associated Press.

But of course, that’s not what the candidate said. He said it was designed for China to participate covertly, not that China is one of the members. And anyone who’s read the TPP’s rule of origin provisions (here, here, and here) knows that this is exactly the case. The deal would extend duty-free treatment within the new integrated market to a long list of products that could be made largely outside the TPP zone. Indeed, many goods with levels of content from TPP signatories well under 50 percent would be so favored.

Nor did these TPP features appear in the deal by accident. They reflect the clear desire of U.S., Japanese, and other multinational companies from TPP signatory countries to enjoy maximum flexibility in sourcing their production, in order to secure the lowest cost levels. Not only does such sourcing leeway greatly water down the TPP’s potential benefits for the domestic economies of the signatory countries. But it flies completely in the face of promises by Mr. Obama and other backers of the deal that it would both contain the rise of Chinese economic power and influence globally and in the Asia-Pacific region specifically, and that it would create powerful incentives for China to clean up its economic act and become eligible for membership.

Trump remains the only Republican candidate to mount a serious and sustained challenge to today’s American trade policies. And as his China paper made clear, his diagnoses and prescriptions are every bit as substantive as those embodied in numerous bills introduced to overhaul Washington’s longstanding approach. But Trump’s crusade faces obstacles aplenty already – including the establishment-coddling media’s determination to keep branding him an ignoramus even when this accusation is wildly off base. He can’t afford to give them any real ammunition.