Im-Politic: The Swalwell Spy Scandal News Blackout Extends Far Beyond the NY Times

Tags

ABC News, Associated Press, Bloomberg.com, CBS News, China, Christine Fang, Eric Swalwell, espionage, Fang Fang, Fox News, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, McClatchy News Service, media bias, Michael Bloomberg, MSM, MSNBC, NBC News, NPR, PBS, Reuters, spying, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USAToday

If you’re a news hound, you know that The New York Times, long – and long justifiably – seen as the most important newspaper in the world, has devoted exactly zero coverage to a bombshell report earlier this month that California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell several years ago was pretty successfully targeted by a spy from China.

And if you don’t know about this Swalwell story, you should. He’s a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which means that he’s been privy to many of the nation’s most important national security secrets. In addition, he has long been a genuine super-spreader of the myth that President Trump is a Russian agent. So although there’s no evidence so far that Swalwell either wittingly or unwittingly passed any classified or otherwise sensitive information to this alleged spy, understandable questions have been raised about his judgement and therefore his suitability for a seat on this important House panel. Further, he hasn’t denied having an affair with this accused operative, who was known as Christine Fang here, and Fang Fang in her native country.

In other words, it’s a pretty darned big story, and The Times decision to ignore it completely (not even posting on its website wire service accounts of developments) is a flagrant mockery of its trademark slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” and clearcut example of media bias – especially since the paper showed no reluctance to report on his abortive presidential campaign this past year or his (always unfounded) attacks on Mr. Trump.

At the same time, if you don’t know about l’affaire Swalwell, you’ve got a pretty compelling excuse. Because The Times has by no means been alone in its lack of interest. Joining it in the zero Swalwell coverage category since the China spy story broke on December 8 have been (based on reviews of their own search engines):

>The Associated Press – possibly the world’s biggest news-gathering organization

>Reuters – another gigantic global news organization

>Bloomberg.com – whose founder and Chairman, Michael Bloomberg, is a leading fan of pre-Trump offshoring-friendly China trade policies

>USAToday

>NBC News

>CBS News

>MSNBC (The FoxNews.com report linked above says this network covered this news once briefly, but noting shows up on its search engine.) 

>National Public Radio (partly funded by the American taxpayer)

>McClatchy (another big news syndicate)

Performing slightly – but only slightly – better have been:

>PBS (one reference on its weekly McLaughlin Group talk show – nothing on its nightly NewsHour)

>ABC News (one news report)

>The Wall Street Journal (one news article, one opinion column)

The Swalwell story isn’t the world’s, or the nation’s, or even Washington’s biggest. But it’s unmistakably a story, and the apparent blackout policy of so many pillars of journalism today, coming on the heels of similar treatment of the various Hunter Biden scandal charges, further strengthens the case that a national institution that’s supposed to play the critical role of watchdog of democracy has gone into a partisan tank.

The only bright spots in this picture? Social media giants Twitter and Facebook haven’t been censoring or arrogantly and selectively fact-checking Swalwell-related material. Yet.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Out of the Mouths of Generals

Tags

alliances, America First, Associated Press, Blob, China, deterrence, globalism, Jim Mattis, Joe Biden, Mark Milley, North Korea, nuclear umbrella, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, South Korea, Soviet Union, tripwires, Trump

Here’s one that genuinely justifies that over-used term, “You can’t make this up.”

Practically ever since President Trump assumed office, his globalist foreign policy critics have been attacking his claims that maintaining the status quo with U.S. security alliances couldn’t be a top priority of American foreign and national security policy. In this vein, they contemptuously derided as “transactional” his belief that rather than viewing these arrangements as vital ends in and of themselves, Washington needed continuously to make sure that they were creating at least as many benefits as problems for the nation.

Indeed, fetishizing alliances was so deeply embedded in the consciousness of the globalist bipartisan U.S. foreign policy Blob that Jim Mattis, the retired Marine Corps General who served as the first Trump Secretary of Defense, based his resignation largely on the argument that the President did not share his “core belief…that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”

So imagine my surprise upon reading an Associated Press story Thursday reporting that U.S. Army General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff (the nation’s top military office), has recommended that Washington – obviously meaning the probably incoming Biden administration – should reconsider “permanently positioning U.S. forces” overseas in instances where these servicemen and women are not actively engaged in combat.

Now it’s true that Milley, at least reportedly, was never especially tight with Mattis in particular. But in this age of political generals and admirals, he couldn’t have risen through the ranks this high had he dissented significantly from the globalist line. And Milley has spoken of the need for U.S. alliances in pretty urgent terms himself.

But there he was this past week, giving a speech on the future of warfare that not only called for more selectivity in creating and maintaining an American military footprint abroad, but basing this proposal largely on his unhappiness – and this is the real shocker – that the so-called forward deployment of these units has usually been accompanied by the families of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and therefore places them in harm’s way.

His position is a shocker because, as I’ve explained before, stationing spouses and children so vulnerably has been a linchpin of globalist strategy toward alliances. They play a crucial role in turning the units they’re linked with into genuine tripwires – forces whose likelihood of defeat at the hands of much larger and stronger invaders like the Soviets or the North Koreans would give an American President little choice but to use nuclear weapons to avert disaster.

Of course, this approach didn’t stem from itchy nuclear trigger fingers in Washington. Quite the opposite: The working assumption was that the high probability of U.S. nuclear weapons use would deter conventional military aggression to begin with. And the probability that their attacks would wind up killing American non-combatants as well as troops was seen as an even stronger forcing event for nuclear weapons use – a situation that, in strategic parlance, would make this contingency more credible, thereby further inhibiting (or, again using strategy-ese, deterring) enemies from striking.

Skeptical? This is exactly why countries like Poland have been urging recent American Presidents to replace the policy of rotating various U.S. units in and out of their lands with big, permanent deployments. And weirdly and alarmingly, Mr. Trump has taken some steps in this direction.

I’ve concluded that, although the creation of such so-called nuclear umbrellas was defensible during the Cold War, when it was used to protect genuinely vital regions like Western Europe and Japan, and when its use in Asia was aimed at prospective foes that lacked nuclear retaliatory forces, it’s recklessly dangerous today. For the Soviet Union is an increasingly distant memory, many major U.S. allies are amply capable of their own defense, Asian adversaries have become able to strike the American homeland with their own nuclear weapons, and the security of South Korea in particular is no longer crucial for the United States’ own safety and well-being (as opposed to Taiwan, which, as I’ve recently argued, has moved into this category because of its world-class semiconductor manufacturing capability).

Not even the America First-y President Trump has gone remotely this far in actually changing U.S. alliance policy. Yet there was Milley, including in his remarks the statement that if war came with North Korea, “we would have a significant amount of non-combatant U.S. military dependents in harm’s way….I have a problem with that.”

The General didn’t make the needed follow-on case that the presence of these civilians has turned these alliances into “transmission belts of war” that could easily go nuclear and bring on the incineration of entire American cities. But an administration that followed his recommendations would greatly reduce this unnecessary potential danger.

So whether Milley recognizes the full implications of his stance or not, all Americans should hope that he keeps pushing this position as he continues as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs past Inauguration Day, and that even some of the globalist enthusiasts of the Biden administration start listening.

Those Stubborn Facts: A Strange Definition of a Broken Trump Promise

Tags

Associated Press, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, health security, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, masks, medical supplies, PPE, supply chain, textiles, Those Stiubborn Facts, Trump, Wuhan virus

“Shortages of meltblown textiles, key to N95 mask-making, illustrate ‘the failure of this administration to take necessary steps to fulfill’ its promise of restoring critical manufacturing capacity lost to China.”

– Associated Press, September 10, 2020

“Pre-pandemic, five U.S. producers were making about 42 million N95 masks a month. By October, that is projected to have increased to 11 U.S. producers making 168 million a month, which could amount to 2 billion a year….”

–Associated Press, September 10, 2020

“Also pre-pandemic, 24 U.S. companies were making meltblown, with 79 machine lines in operation….But only a fraction of that was going into medical respirators….By the end of 2021… there will be 28 new lines in the U.S., representing a 35% increase, with almost all of the newly produced textile going into medical supplies.”

–Associated Press, September 10, 2020

(Source: “Scarcity of key material squeezes medical mask manufacturing, by Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman, Thomas Peipert, and Irena Hwang,” Associated Press, September 10, 2020, https://apnews.com/02a0542e8a05176bd5d79757134bc277)

Im-Politic: The Public and the Protests

Tags

African Americans, Associated Press, Democrats, election 2020, George Floyd, Im-Politic, National Opinion Research Center, NORC, police brutality, politics, polling, polls, pollsters, protests, racism, Republicans, Trump, University of Chicago

Here at RealityChek I try to focus on polls only that come up with unusually interesting results,, but even by that lofty standard, this new survey from the Associated Press-NORC [National Opinion Research Center] for Public Affairs Research (the latter affiliated with the University of Chicago) is unusually interesting. And for more than one reason.

First and maybe foremost, is the methodological note that came at the end: “[B]lack adults were sampled at a higher rate than their proportion of the population for reasons of analysis.” You don’t have to know much about polling to ask legitimately “What the heck is that about?”

After all, if you’re looking to find out what Americans (or any group) think about this or that subject, you need to ask a sample of that population that’s representative. In this case, sampling African Americans at a higher-than-justified rate is bound to produce results that permit African-American answers to distort the findings in the direction of African-American opinion. And given African Americans’ overwhelming preference for Democrats and (as far as we know) overwhelming opposition to President Trump, this practice is also bound to produce results that skew markedly pro-Democrat and anti-Trump.

Second, even with this “pro-African-American” bias, the survey shows that although a majority of Americans “approve…of the recent protests against police violence in response to [George] Floyd’s death,” the majority isn’t that big. Overall approval is only 54 percent (and again, this finding is thrown off by the aforementioned methology) and “strong approval” was expressed by only 21 percent.

Black Americans’ backing was much stronger: 81 percent overall, with 71 percent strongly approving.

Third, Americans as a whole aren’t buying the notion that the recent protests have been all or mostly peaceful. Indeed, only 27 percent agree with those characterizations combined. Moreover, a slim majority (51 percent) favored the description “both peaceful and violent” and fully 22 percent regarded tham as all or mostly violent.”

And again, the numbers tilting toward emphasizing the violence seen during the protests have probably been depressed by the pro-African-American and therefore pro-Democratic skew of the sample. Nearly half (49 percent) of Democrats called the protests all or mostly peaceful. At the same time, 42 percent of them viewed the protests as “both peaceful and violent.”

Fourth, no racially broken down results were provided for the violence question, but they were presented for the results judging “law enforcement’s response.” In this case, the U.S. public as a whole chose “appropriate response” over “excessive force” by 55 percent to 44 percent. But 70 percent of black Americans believed the police et al used too much force – which surely propped up the 44 percent figure reported for Americans as a whole.

Finally, don’t conclude from the above results that this survey offers much good news for President Trump and his supporters and the relatively hardline approach they’ve favored for handling the protests. As the Associated Press and NORC put it: “Over half of all Americans say his response made things worse and just 12% say it made things better. While there are racial differences, about half of both white Americans (51%) and black Americans (72%) feel that the president’s response made things worse. ”

And in this case, the bizarre sample used by the Associated Press and NORC can’t come close to explaining these underwater Trump ratings. The most positive pro-Trump spin that makes any sense is that although there’s major overall public support for the President’s positions and the actions that logically follow, he’s getting almost no credit for advocating them.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The AP’s Manufactured Nonsense About Manufacturing

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AP, Associated Press, Calvin Woodward, fake news, innovation, Jobs, manufacturing, productivity, research and development, technology, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Associated Press (AP) is a ginormous global news organization, and its reach is especially widespread here in the United States (although I couldn’t find figures breaking out its American clientele specifically). So it’s a big deal when one of its highest profile writers spreads the kind of utter claptrap about domestic U.S. manufacturing that Calvin Woodward just peddled in his new piece on President Trump’s views on the economy.

In an article posted today, Woodward portrayed Mr. Trump’s emphasis on industry (and other elements of his worldview) as nothing more than a pathetic and downright dangerous exercise in nostalgia for the “grunt work of old” that ignores how “Industry, technology and much of the culture are finding new ways of doing and living” and how “U.S. prosperity has been driven for decades by services, technology and new things….”

Some confidence in Woodward’s conclusions might be justified if he relied on manufacturing specialists or even economists to support them. But the authorities he cites are a “professor of communications” and a psychologist who “studies nostalgia from Britain’s University of Southampton.”

Not that economists have been killing it in recent decades in properly evaluating the importance of manufacturing. But if Woodward had bothered to consult one,  the odds would have been higher that he’d have encountered the idea that industry is kind of important for any country seeking to build or maintain a world-class military. Or” that it’s historically been the U.S. economy’s leader in productivity growth (although as RealityChek regulars know, it’s recently been losing its mojo on that score). Or that it boasts one of the nation’s biggest employment multipliers – meaning that the creation of each American manufacturing job generates an outsized number of jobs elsewhere in the economy compared with employment increases in most other sectors. Or that manufacturing accounts for the lion’s share of American business research and development spending. 

That last fact is especially important for Woodward and others of his ilk to know. For it makes clear that if the United States is to keep generating the “technology and new things” that of course are central to its hopes for continued (much less greater) prosperity, it has better keep its manufacturing base world class.

I’ll leave it to you to judge whether Woodward’s article qualifies as Fake News.  But there can’t be any legitimate doubt that it’s manufactured nonsense.   

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.

Im-Politic: ‘Tis the Season – for Immigration Double Standards

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Associated Press, Chuck Schumer, CNN, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media. Nancy Pelosi, migrants, Open Borders, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

All reasonable participants in the often angry national debate about American immigration policy surely agree that the deaths of migrant children in U.S. custody and the killing of a police officer at the hands of an illegal alien are comparably tragic. Why, then, have the Open Borders supporters treated them like night and day, focusing intently on the former and literally ignoring the latter? And why has President Trump so needlessly fed his own critics’ charges of cruelty, racism, and xenophobia on immigration policy with some double standards-setting of his own on these matters?

The discrepancy on the part of Open Borders advocates has been especially dramatic when it comes to Congress’ leading Democrats – who will assume control of the House of Representatives in January. House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, and other major figures in the party (including its likely presidential candidates) have uniformly expressed outrage at the deaths this month of two Guatemalan children held by the U.S. immigration authorities after being brought to the border by parents on long, arduous trips from their home country.  (See, e.g., here and here.)

But the early morning December 26 killing of a Newman, California police officer (and an immigrant himself) by a suspect identified as an illegal alien by local law enforcement officials has elicited no response at all – even from Pelosi, who represents a California district.

The same pattern marks the coverage of these incidents by the Mainstream Media, which has made its Open Borders sympathies abundantly clear in recent years. For example, the Washington Post this morning was still highlighting on its front page the controversy over the children’s deaths. But the police officer’s death didn’t even make the print edition. The killing was mentioned on the paper’s website three times yesterday and today. But all three items were taken from the wire services, meaning that the Post hasn’t as of now assigned one of its own reporters to investigate.  (See, e.g., here.)

The New York Times did cover the policeman’s killing with one of its own correspondents – and ran the story on page 15 of the news section today. But an article on the children’s deaths, which are no longer breaking news, received front page coverage.

Visit the website of the Associated Press, the world’s largest bona fide news agency, and you’ll see an article on the most recent Guatemalan child’s death right near the top of the home page. But you need to scroll way down to find a piece on the police officer’s killing.

CNN also featured a follow up on the most recent child death prominently on its home page. But its coverage of the police killing doesn’t appear anywhere. You need to look for it with the search engine.

In my view, President Trump has dropped the ball here as well. It’s true that his administration has expressed regret over both migrant children’s deaths, is investigating these events, and seeking ways to handle the new flood of migrants more effectively. It’s also true that the administration has blamed the children’s parents in part for putting them in dangerous situations to begin with – and I agree. I also fully support the administration’s insistence that the U.S. government’s responsibilities to its own citizens are qualititatively different – meaning greater – than to citizens of other countries.

But although Mr. Trump has tweeted about the shooting (without condolences for his family or his colleagues) he’s made no comment at all about the children’s deaths. And just as the Open Borders folks exhibited a major blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special shame surrounding the death of a public official who risked his life every day on behalf of others by an individual who commonsense immigration policies likely would have kept out of this country, the President has exhibited a blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special sorrow surrounding the death of a minor who bore no responsibility for his circumstances. And he could so easily have done expressed such sentiments without conceding a single inch of ground in his campaign for the most stringent border security regime.

Following Up: No, Trump’s Guards vs Guns Idea Isn’t Crazy

Tags

anti-semitism, armed guards, Associated Press, Following Up, guns, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, political violence, TIME, Trump, Twitter, Washington Post

President Trump’s claim after the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings that the presence of armed guards would have reduced the fatalities had all the earmarkings of one of those face-palming (for various reasons) comments he too often makes. I mean, everyone knows this belief is bonkers, right? Twitter has apparently “melted down” over them. Late-night TV comics were in full snark mode. More seriously, public officials in Pittsburgh threw cold water on the suggestion.

Apparently, all these critics missed these highly conspicuous exceptions: many prominent Jews themselves. Their views of course aren’t dispositive. But given all the dismissive and/or indignant harrumphing generated by the idea that any houses of worship need such security, or should need such security, the points they’ve made certainly deserve more attention than they’ve gotten so far – and they’re worth presenting in some detail.

In particular, according to this Associated Press report:

“[B]efore those incidents, many synagogues and Jewish organizations in the U.S. had been ramping up security measures.

“Fifteen years ago, the Anti-Defamation League issued a 132-page guidebook titled, ‘Protecting Your Jewish Institution: Security Strategies for Today’s Dangerous World.’

“It includes detailed advice on controlling access to the premises, and also urged leaders of institutions to think carefully about whether or not they wanted to hire armed guards.”

In addition:

“A rabbi-emeritus at the Tree of Life Synagogue that was the site of the Pittsburgh attack, Alvin Berkun, “said guards — while used during the major Jewish holy days — were not on duty Saturday.”

And it’s not just Pittsburgh:

“In Kansas City’s synagogues, armed security has been a presence for years — particularly on major holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Some synagogues hire guards every Friday night and Saturday morning for Shabbat (sabbath) services. At others, armed security protects children as they come and go for preschool.”

One big reason? As RealityChek regulars know, Kansas City’s Jewish community was attacked by a neo-Nazi gunman in 2014.

In fact:

“Many U.S. synagogues do employ armed guards; others have taken alternative measures to tighten security.

“‘I doubt there’s a synagogue in the US that doesn’t think seriously about security,’ said [Heidi] Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center [from the AP story linked above].”

Further, in the wake of the latest shootings, the Washington Post has reported that:

“[P]olitical and Jewish leaders across the country are grappling with whether [Mr. Trump’s] suggestion makes sense.”

And in Pittsburgh itself, at least one Jewish congregation has settled on an answer: “Pittsburgh Synagogue Hires Armed Guards to Open for Sunday School After Shooting.”

At this pthatoint, I’m far from sold on armed guards as the idea way to prevent shootings at synagogues and other religious institutions – or any other public places. And I hate the fatalism implied. But we don’t live in an ideal world. And we certainly don’t live in a world that permits us to safely dump all over a recommendation just because we don’t happen to care for the source. At least that’s the message being sent by those who need to take on this challenge in the here and now, as opposed to posturing from afar.

 

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

Tags

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.

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

Tags

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.