Following Up: Another Confederate Statue Mess

Tags

Albert Pike, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Clarence Williams, Confederacy, Confederate monuments, D.C., D.C. Police, District of Columbia, Following Up, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, history wars, National Park Service, peaceful protests, Perry Stein, Peter Hermann, protests, Trump, U.S. Park Police, vandalism, Washington Post

There is so much shameful behavior by various government and law enforcement authorities reported in this morning’s Washington Post account of the illegal takedown of a statue of a Confederate general (Albert Pike) in the District of Columbia (D.C.) that it’s hard to know where to begin.

But let’s begin on a positive note: There was nothing shameful in the Post‘s own account. Quite the contrary:  reporters Perry Stein, Clarence Williams, and Peter Hermann – and their editors – provided an unusual amount of useful information. Hopefully we’ll see much more journalism like that going forward.

In fact, the Post article taught me something that shows I made a significant mistake in a tweet yesterday. When I learned of the statue’s removal by a mob, I tweeted, “Let me get this straight: The #DC government is so #racist that #peacefulprotest-ers had no choice but to take the law into their own hands & tear down the #AlbertPike statue. Plus, DC cops stand by and watch. Totally disgraceful #vandalism & vandalism coddling. #murielbowser.” (Bowser is D.C.’s Mayor.)

The mistake has to do with jurisdiction. As the Post reported, the D.C. police noted that “The statue in question sits in a federal park and therefore is within the jurisdiction of National Park Service and the United States Park Police.” So the District’s government didn’t, as I implied, have the authority to remove the statue.

Yet although I apologize for the D.C. government reference, I still stand behind mob point (about the need always to follow lawful procedures for removing such monuments) and the D.C. police point. Unless everyone should applaud officers who stand by and do absolutely nothing when flagrant lawbreaking is not only within plain sight, but scarcely a block away? What if the D.C. police saw a murder being threatened in a federal park? (By the way, as a longtime District resident, I can tell you that the parks in which these monuments stand are mostly vestpocket-size parks, and aren’t watched or patrolled regularly by anyone at any time of day.)

Moreover, there’s evidence that the D.C. police were aware that something was wrong – and weren’t even positive that they lacked the authority to act. The Post  quoted a National Park Service spokesman as claiming that “D.C. police had called U.S. Park Police dispatch to ask about jurisdiction. He said in an email that when Park Police officers arrived, ‘the statue was already down and on fire.’ The toppling of the statue is under investigation, he said. Litterst [the spokesman] did not address whether the Park Service thinks D.C. police should have intervened.”

Finally, if you believe, as I do, that monuments to traitors like Confederate generals have no place on public grounds, it’s clear that the federal government has been brain-dead on this issue (to put it kindly). But the Post account also reveals that this disgraceful neglect long predates the presidency of Donald Trump (who continues to oppose any changes in these statues’ placement or even renaming U.S. military bases named after such treasonous figures).

Specifically, “District officials have been trying to get the statue removed for several years. The D.C. Council petitioned the federal government to remove the statue in 1992.”

From then until Mr. Trump’s inauguration, four Presidents have served – including recent liberal and Mainstream Media darlings George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Why didn’t they remove the statue? Why haven’t they even commented on the matter? And why haven’t they been called on the carpet for their records on this matter, and for their silence?

But let’s close on a positive note, too. One question raised by this statue controversy – what to do with it – is pretty easily answered. Either stick it in a museum (with a full description provided of this minor Confederate figure) or throw it in the city or some federal dump.

Im-Politic: Flynn-Flamm

Tags

Barack Obama, collusion, election 2016, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Im-Politic, James Comey, Justice Department, Logan Act, Michael T. Flynn, Mueller investigation, Russia, Sally B. Yates, Sergey Kislyak, Susan E. Rice, Trump, William P. Barr

So let’s wade right into the (latest) Michael T. Flynn uproar.

Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock for the past few weeks, you know that Flynn is the former Army Lieutenant General and head of the Pentagon’s intelligence chief (during the Obama administration) who served briefly as President Trump’s national security adviser. He resigned in February, 2017 after stating that he misled Vice President Mike Pence about the content of conversations he held during the transition period with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. That December, he was indicted by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump Russia collusion investigators for lying to the FBI during interviews in January with Bureau agents in the course of their investigation into his activities, and also pled guilty to the charges.

More recently, after Flynn sought to withdraw this plea, Attorney General William P. Barr appointed a career federal prosecutor to review the case, and in light of newly released FBI documents indicating serious irregularities in the Bureau’s handling of the case, Barr agreed to the prosecutor’s recommendation that the case be dismissed altogether. A federal judge will make the final decision.

This summary, though, scarcely begins to do justice to all the ins and outs and other complexities of the Flynn case. Dealing with them would require a  post even longer than this one will be! But one dimension of the case with unusual importance concerns former President Obama’s actions, specifically because of the recent declassification of an email written by his own former national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, about a meeting held among Obama, former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden, and the former heads of the FBI and Justice Department.

The Obama angle has of course generated claims that his administration’s handling of Flynn and other aspects of its investigation of the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia amount to a major scandal – which Mr. Trump himself calls “Obamagate” and which others portray as nothing less than an effort to overthrow his presidency. To me, these charges should be looked into, but remain to be proved. (In fact, the Justice Department is probing the entire investigation into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign that took place during the Obama years, and the long-awaited report seems likely to be released before Election Day.)

In the absence of this report, what interests me right now is the question of why Obama didn’t quash the FBI investigation of Flynn during that January 5 meeting – which took place just over two weeks before his presidency officially ended. And the Rice email makes clear just how fishy his decision was.

According to this communication, which Rice sent to herself on Inauguration Day, the January 5 White House meeting was “a brief follow-on conversation” that took place right after Obama, Biden, Acting Attorney General Sally B. Yates, FBI Director James Comey, and Rice were briefed by the leaders of the intelligence community “on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election.” And Flynn was a major subject of the conversation.

Flynn was highlighted due to the former President’s professed determination to (in Rice’s words) “be sure that as we engage with the incoming [Trump] team [during the transition], we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

Comey responded (in Rice’s words again), “that he does have some concerns that incoming NSA [national security adviser] Flynn is speaking frequently with Russian Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak. Comey said that could be an issue as it relates to sharing sensitive information.”

Now comes something really important. Rice continued:

“President Obama asked if Comey was saying that the NSC [National Security Council] should not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn. Comey replied ‘potentially.’ He added that he has no indication thus far that Flynn has passed classified information to Kislyak, but he noted that ‘the level of communication is unusual.’

“The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.”

This Obama response is what raises so many questions. First, back in late January, 2017, the Washington Post reported that the FBI “in late December reviewed intercepts of communications between the Russian ambassador to the United States and retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn — national security adviser to then-President-elect Trump….”

This report was confirmed in the exhibits accompanying the Justice Department’s May 7, 2020 motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn. So apparently, Comey was privy to the Flynn-Kislyak conversations more than two weeks before the January 5 meeting with Obama. During that time, the Rice email states, he reported finding no evidence, or even any “indication,” that Flynn had passed sensitive information to Russia. All he said he uncovered information that he interpreted “potentially” meant that Flynn was untrustworthy.

At least as important, there’s compelling evidence that Obama himself knew the content of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations.  It comes in the form of testimony given by Yates to the Mueller investigators in September, 2017 and described in a September 7 FBI description contained in Exhibit 4 (page 2) of the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss.  She stated that during the January 5 meeting, Obama revealed he had “learned of the information about Flynn,” including not only about the fact that the conversations took place, but about their key subject.

Yates added that Obama at that point specified that he didn’t want “any additional information on the matter” (the FBI’s phrasing) but wanted enough provided (presumably to his aides) to guide the outgoing administration as to whether Flynn could be trusted. In other words, not only does Yates’ testimony add a crucial detail. It also supports the essentials of Rice’s account.

Of course, if the former President was aware of what Flynn and Kislyak discussed, he also must have known that no classified information had been passed to the Russian. Nor according to Rice did he express any other concerns. 

And this episode doesn’t mark the first time that Obama was surely made aware that an FBI investigation of Flynn had turned up nothing legitimately troubling.  For on August 16, 2016, as documented in Exhibit 2 of the motion to disniss, the Bureau began probing whether Flynn, who it identified as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign,

“is being directed and controlled by and/or coordinating activities with the Russian Federation in a manner which may be a threat to the national security and/or possibly a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act [which requires any Americans working for foreign government, political parties, individuals, or other principals – though not U.S. affiliates of foreign-owned companies – to register with the Justice Department and report the nature of the relationship].”

Sounds pretty serious, right? Except in a January 4, 2017 memo – presented as Exhibit 1 of the motion to dismiss – the Bureau’s Washington field office reported its decision to close this investigation because the probe could identify “no derogatory information.”  Is it remotely conceivable that no one told the former President?

The story of this particular investigation, however, doesn’t stop there.  The memo not only wasn’t approved.  As the motion to dismiss recounts (page 4), ostensibly because the FBI’s top leaders (including Comey) had learned of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations, they kept the Flynn probe alive – even though, presumably, they knew they contained no incriminating or otherwise disturbing material, or certainly never reported such to Obama, including up to and including the January 5 meeting.    

The transcripts, though, suggested another possibility for nailing Flynn – a possible violation of the the Logan Act.  But this course of action was pretty problematic, too.  This law, dating from 1798 aimed at preventing private American citizens or other legal residents from interfering with the conduct of U.S. diplomacy.

That’s an entirely legitimate purpose. But throughout the entirety of American history, only two individals have even been indicted for violating the act (most recently, in 1853) and neither was convicted.

The FBI’s interest in such possible Flynn transgressions seems to have originated in purported Obama administration worries that before Inauguration Day, Flynn was engaged in such interference on two different fronts – an upcoming United Nations vote to condemn Israel, and a December 29 Obama decision to sanction Russia on the grounds of election interference.

Yet Flynn ultimately wasn’t indicted (and convicted) for anything having to do with the Logan Act, or anything having to do with his Russia conversations or with the UN business. His only alleged crime (to which he pled guilty) was making materially false statements and omissions” to the FBI about these subjects.

At this point, an obvious choice must have confronted Obama – who must have known that the transcripts absolved Flynn of the most serious offense he was suspected of committing – handing major official secrets to the Russians. He could have told Comey that further investigation of Flynn was pointless and to drop the matter – either because more than two recent weeks of surveillance had turned up nothing alarming; or because Flynn would begin serving in the new Trump administration only two weeks down the road, and would then have been entitled to view all the U.S government’s classified information; or because Obama realized that the Logan Act concerns were excuses for further surveillance of Flynn. Or he could have told Comey to continue (because he didn’t care why Flynn was pursued as long as the effort succeeded), along with directing Rice and all other U.S. officials to suspend sharing intelligence concerning Russia (or any other subject) with the Trump team (more out of some motive other than because of any genuine security concerns).

Instead, he told Comey to “inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks” – but also permitted Rice to continue intelligence sharing as normal. We know this because a May 19 statement by Rice’s lawyer on her behalf said that the former Obama aide “did not alter the way she briefed Michael Flynn on Russia as a result of Director Comey’s response.” This outcome, it must be noted, also supports the claim that Obama had no important security concerns about Flynn. All the same, Comey’s pursuit of Flynn remained ongoing.  

Unless Rice defied the President’s instructions despite her lawyer’s claim?  If not, and they were followed, then why didn’t Obama at any point between January 5 and the end of his administration halt the Comey investigation? Unless he did and Comey continued anyway? Possibly because the FBI chief wished to follow the former President’s instructions even after Obama had left office?  Whatever Comey’s motives, his pursuit of Flynn didn’t stop, and led to the January 24 FBI interview with the new national security adviser.      

Interestingly, that session also undercuts the idea that the Obama administration’s beef against Flynn had anything to do with national security.  For a partly declassified version of the FBI’s report on the January 24 meeting shows that neither of the agents who spoke with Flynn even brought up the matter of illegally passing classified or any sensitive information to Kislyak. Their exclusive concerns were Logan Act-related issues.

A final (for now) weird item: In its indictment, the Justice Department contended that “FLYNN’s false statements and omissions impeded and otherwise had a material impact on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the Campaign and Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

But of course, Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak took place after the election, not during the campaign. The only way they could have been related to the Trump campaign collusion allegations would be if they were the result of some secret deals concerning Russia policy made by Flynn or anyone else in the campaign with Moscow. Yet the exhaustive Mueller investigation of these matters found insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign with the crime of conspiring “with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 20q6 election.” And Flynn’s activities were included.

As mentioned above, the above analysis by no means exhausts all the questions raised by the Flynn uproar – including about Flynn’s dealings with foreign clients; about whether the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn concluded he was lying, or simply believed that his memory was faulty at time (and whether Comey himself was certain of Flynn’s dishonesty, as per the motion to dismiss, Exhibit 13, pages 3 and 4, and Exhibit 5, page 10, respectively); and about why, if the Obama administration viewed Flynn as a major threat to national security, no one ever told President-elect Trump promptly of their concerns, and instead chose a prosecution route that permitted Flynn to occupy an extremely crucial position for three weeks – and that risked his continuing in that post had he performed more skillfully during his session with the FBI.

Former Obama Acting Attorney General Yates has testified to Congress that she did tell then Trump White House Counsel Donald McGahn that Flynn’s false statements were known by the Russians, and therefore made him vulnerable to blackmail. But this warning wasn’t given until January 26 – six days after Mr. Trump assumed office, and Flynn became national security adviser. 

And then there’s perhaps the biggest Flynn-related mystery of all: whether the next few weeks will see more questions, or more answers.

Im-Politic: Why Biden Can’t Run Even as a Fake China Hawk

Tags

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Asian-Americans, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, China, Code Pink, Democrats, election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Im-Politic, Jeet Heer, Joe Biden, Judy Chu, labor unions, Larry Summers, progressives, racism, Rashida Tlaib, Sherrod Brown, The Nation, Trade, Trump

I know I just wrote about how dreadful Joe Biden’s China policy record has been for decades. But the former Vice President is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President, and he could well be sitting in the Oval Office next January. So it’s eminently newsworthy to report that any hopes that a President Biden would recognize these disastrous mistakes, and generally speaking try to continue President Trump’s policy of reversing them, are now lying in ruins.

Specifically, it’s become clear in recent days that any Biden effort to keep his newly made promise in a political ad to “hold China accountable” for its role in unleashing the CCP Virus on the world is going to prove totally unacceptable to his party’s progressive wing – whose support he’s acting like he needs desperately to win in order to defeat Mr. Trump.

Moreover, it’s been reported that one of the campaign advisers chosen by Biden is Larry Summers, a former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Obama administration chief White House economic aide who has always championed reckless trade and broader economic expansion with the People’s Republic. Worse, during the Obama years, Summers was a major obstacle opposing ideas like sanctioning China for its protectionist currency policies – which would have gone far toward stemming the extraordinary increase in Beijing’s economic and therefore military power that took place while Barack Obama occupied the White House. In other words, the Biden campaign will be powerfully shaped by the Democrats’ centrist wing – and its own long record of enabling China.

If you doubt that Summers still backs coddling China, check out this 2018 post – which shows him turning intellectual backflips trying to excuse Beijing’s massive theft and extortion of American intellectual property, and to claim that the Obama policies succeeded spectacularly in bringing China to heel.

The stances of Democratic progressives are less well appreciated – but at least as important given this faction’s success in pulling Biden and other Democratic centrists to the Left this year on a host of issues. Moreover, don’t forget how if they’re unhappy enough with Biden, many of them will stay at home on election day and, as in 2016, help hand victory to Mr. Trump. At the same time, the progressives’ story it’s a more complicated story than the centrists’.

It’s more complicated because two of the progressives’ favorites – Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont – are definitely supporters of tougher and, more important, smarter U.S. China policies. That’s especially true of Sanders, who has voted against every U.S. effort to integrate the American and Chinese economies more widely and deeply during his long career on Capitol Hill. Nonetheless, it’s also true that neither Senator made China a major issue during their presidential campaigns this year.

And one main reason is surely that none of the progressives’ other leading (and younger) lights seems especially interested in China. Commendably, they have condemned China’s horrific repression of its Muslim Uighur minority. But ask yourself – when’s the last time Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, condemned the People’s Republic for the trade and intellectual property and investment policies that have stripped the United States of much of its manufacturing base and hammered the wages of manufacturing workers? I couldn’t find any such statements.

Ditto for Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib – and she represents a Detroit area district whose economic distress owes significantly on China-related and other trade policy failures. But you won’t even find these words on her website.

But although much of the Democratic Left has had little to say lately about China and trade, signs have abounded that it’s royally ticked off about Biden’s CCP Virus ad – in some cases because of their alleged potential to stoke anti-Chinese bigotry at home, but also because they supposedly blame China for U.S. virus-related losses that they insist are really President Trump’s fault.

Most of this pushback so far has come from Asian-American activists in Democratic ranks who don’t hold political office. But it’s also come from California House Democrat Judy Chu, Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Does anyone believe she’ll face much resistance here from the rest of her party?

And non-Asian American progressives have ripped the Biden ad, too – including influential pundit Jeet Heer (national political correspondent for one of the progressives’ flagship magazines, The Nation); Sanders campaign surrogate Josh Fox; and Code Pink, the women-led progressive grass-roots group.

In theory, the Democrats’ still-powerful labor union base could prod Biden to lay out a credible plan to combat China’s many threats to American interests. But its representatives, at least, have been quiet about the virus and its implications. In fact, judging from this recent op-ed piece, its spokespeople seem at least as determined to blame Trump administration blunders for the country’s CCP Virus woes as they are to blame pre-Trump China-coddling and enabling trade policies. Indeed, one of the labor Democrats’ Congressional leaders, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, seems to adopted a “Biden uber alles” position during this campaign, even on China policy.

Yet although both Democratic centrists and progressives will be strongly pushing Biden to soft-pedal criticisms of China for the rest of this presidential campaign, this approach is likely to flop so badly with the American electorate in general (as shown in a post earlier this week) that it’s a natural for President Trump to exploit. And if a Trump campaign hammering China themes creates even more incentive and/or pressure for the President to maintain his hard and smart line against Beijing, it won’t just be his political career that benefits. It will be the entire nation as well. Maybe even the Democrats will start opening their eyes.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Rare Earths Independence is At Least as Important as Energy Independence

Tags

5G, Australia, Barack Obama, Canada, cesium, China, Ernest Scheyder, Lynsay Birdall, national security, OilPrice.com, rare earths, Reuters, telecommunications, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Amid the high and thankfully still-rising levels of concern about America’s dangerous levels of dependence on medical supplies from China, it’s critical to remember that what I call health security isn’t the only form of national security that’s been seriously compromised by reckless pre-Trump policies toward the People’s Republic. The nation’s technology security has been and remains at risk, too, as two recent reports on critical minerals valuably remind.

The problem centers on a group of 16 elements (some say 17) that are called “rare earths.” And they’re not only rare (at least in terms of amounts large enough and concentrations high enough to extract easily and at reasonable cost). They’re crucial to high tech manufacturing – including for all the hardware needed to capitalize on accelerating breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and robotics, and therefore vital to cutting-edge weapons and related military systems. Worst of all: China controls nearly all their worldwide production.

Even the Obama administration – which was at best brain-dead on China policy and at worst corrupt – recognized the fix America was in due to China’s dominant rare earths position. It’s concerns were roused by a Chinese ban on rare earths exports to Japan during a diplomatic dispute. But the Obama-nauts made no meaningful progress in reducing reliance – in part because of environmental regulations on the operations of the only remaining mine for the substances located in on U.S. territory that were actually tightened by Obama. Eventually, he approved the facility’s purchase by a new company, MP Materials, that’s almost a tenth owned by a Chinese investor – which of course means that it’s at least in part owned by the Chinese government.

The Trump administration seems more determined to create a genuine fix. But according to this Reuters report (which also contains most of the above background), it faces an excruciating dilemma. The fastest way to reduce America’s dependence on supplies from China may be to revive government business with that lone domestic mine (located in California and called Mountain Pass) that MP materials says has been suspended by Trump.

The other leading near-term option, observes author Ernest Scheyder, seems to be Pentagon approval (and funding for) the processing in the United States of rare earths imported from Australia – obviously another offshore source, but at least a longstanding U.S. treaty ally.

Washington is also sponsoring the search for more domestic deposits of rare earths that could substitute for supplies from China, as well as for ways to recycle these materials. But even if both projects succeed, any American efforts to revive a significant U.S. industry will need to overcome China’s cheap labor advantage and Beijing’s willingness to price the competition out of rare earths markets – two main reasons for the U.S.-based industry’s demise in the first place.

Meanwhile, a post yesterday on the OilPrice.com website explains the special importance of efforts to break China’s near-monopoly on worldwide supplies of one of these rare earths – cesium. According to author Lynsay Birdall, cesium is vital for its role and potential in advanced healthcare technologies as well as in next-generation 5G communications technologies – which will be key for so much further and closely related economic, overall technological, and national defense progress. When it comes to 5G (where China holds the global lead in much hardware manufacturing), cesium is needed for the super-accurate time-measurement capabilities central to creating its real-time connectivity capabilities. And these in turn are responsible for the vast potential of 5G-enabled advances in mobile networks, the entire internet, and GPS systems.

Birdall reports that only three mines in the entire world can produce this technological equivalent of the finest diamonds, and the only two still open for business (in Canada and Australia) are controlled by China.

Fortunately, another high-grade cesium deposit has been found. It’s also in Canada, but at least its fully controlled by a Canadian company – Power Metals Corp. Unfortunately, the only U.S. cesium-specific measure reported by Birdall is a 2018 decision to add it to the federal government’s official list of critical materials. The list’s creation was approved under Obama in 2010. But not until a December, 2017 directive by Mr. Trump was Washington directed to develop foreign dependence-reduction strategies.

“The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths,” then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in 1992. The United States has done a terrific job in enhancing its energy independence by reducing the dysfunctional Middle East’s role in its energy supply picture. Achieving rare earth independence should be viewed as at least as crucial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Im-Politic: Selective CCP Virus Finger-Pointing

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: U.S. Productivity Growth Keeps Lagging Historically, but has Bumped Under Trump

Tags

Barack Obama, election 2020, labor productivity, manufacturing, multifactor productivity, non-farm business, productivity, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Sure, they’re lagging indicators, and don’t tell us much, if anything, about whatever coronavirus effect the American economy might face. Still, today’s new U.S. government data on labor productivity both say something about where the economy has been until recently before pandemic fears hit, and provide a noteworthy point of comparison between the record of President Trump and his White House predecessor, Barack Obama. And although the news for the economy isn’t good at all (especially for manufacturing), the findings should cheer Mr. Trump and his supporters.

The figures, from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), cover labor productivity – a gauge of output of a good or service per each hour a worker has been on the job trying to create it. It’s the narrower of the two productivity measures calculated by BLS (the other, multifactor productivity, reports on output as a function of many more inputs, like capital and technology), but it’s released on a timelier basis. And the latest numbers not only bring the story up to the fourth quarter of last year (preliminarily). They also incorporate revisions – some of which go back to 1947!

As a result, it’s now possible to take a new look at the nation’s productivity performance during the last three economic recoveries – the most economically valid, apples-to-apples way of comparing trends over significant time spans.

And here’s where the news isn’t good, as will be made clear from the following two tables. The first shows the cumulative productivity changes during those last three expansions before these latest revisions:

                                                                        Non-farm business    Manufacturing

1990s expansion (2Q 1991-1Q 2001):              +23.74 percent      +45.86 percent

bubble expansion (4Q 2001-4Q 2007):             +16.59 percent      +30.23 percent

current expansion (2Q 09 thru final 3Q 19):     +12.74 percent        +9.42 percent

The second shows the same developments with the revisions.

                                                                         Non-farm business    Manufacturing

1990s expansion (2Q 1991-1Q 2001):              +23.75 percent        +44.68 percent

bubble expansion (4Q 2001-4Q 2007):             +16.58 percent        +30.92 percent

current expansion (2Q 09 thru final 3Q 19):     +12.74 percent          +6.32 percent

current expansion (2Q 09 thru prelim 4Q 19):  +13.44 percent          +6.11 percent

The big takeaway is that although the revisions leave the picture for both non-farm businesses (BLS’ main definition of the American economic universe) and manufacturing unchanged in terms of a long and substantial productivity slowdown, they downgrade manufacturing’s performance during the current recovery substantially. In fact, industry’s labor productivity growth is now reported to be about a third slower than previously thought.

Since it’s a presidential campaign year, I thought a Trump-Obama comparison would be appropriate, and here’s where the good news for Trump World, at the very least, comes in.

                                                                   Non-farm business          Manufacturing

last 12 Obama quarters                                 +3.31 percent                -2.27 percent

first 12 Trump quarters                                 +4.17 percent                -0.05 percent

The time frames used make sense because they represent identical numbers of quarters for each President that are also the closest to each other in the current (expansionary) business/economic cycle. The productivity performance under Mr. Trump hasn’t been gangbusters historically speaking for either sector of the economy. But it’s clearly been better than that registered during the most comparable Obama period.

Since most serious students of the economy agree that there’s lots of room for improvement in measuring productivity growth (especially for the services sectors), it would be quite the stretch for Mr. Trump to claim credit for these favorable numbers. Yet when have such substantive considerations ever stopped politicians from pretending they wield such power – for economic good or ill? So unless the productivity arrows start moving down markedly, Americans might finally hear something from the President about productivity before too long.

Making News: Appearances on IndustryToday.com, in The Epoch Times…& More!

Tags

Barack Obama, Breitbart News Tonight, Breitbart.com, IndustryToday.com, John Carney, Making News, The Epoch Times, Tom Ozimek, Trade, Trump, White House Council of Economic Advisers

I’m pleased to announce some new media appearances over the last week or so.

Just today, IndustryToday.com reprinted this morning’s report on the U.S. economy’s biggest exporters and importers for 2019, and how these results compare with that of 2016, the last year of the Obama administration – which not so coincidentally was also the last year of the U.S. trade policies that President Trump is seeking to overhaul.  Here’s the link.

Yesterday, Tom Ozimek of The Epoch Times quoted my views on the latest annual report of the White House Council of Economic Advisers – and on how the Trump economy has differed so far from the Obama economy.  You can read his piece here.

On February 12, Tom devoted an entire article to my first analysis of the final 2019 full-year U.S. trade figures.  Click on this link to read.

This past Wedensday night, I was interviewed on Breitbart News Tonight on Sirius XM Patriot radio on the impact of the coronavirus on the Chinese, U.S., and global economies.  To listen, click here, and then scroll down till you see my name for a February 19 segment.

On Valentine’s Day, Breitbart.com‘s John Carney cited my explanation for some of American manufacturing’s output performance in January.  Here’s the link.

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

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Which Industries Were 2019’s Biggest U.S. Trade Winners & Losers?

Tags

Barack Obama, manufacturing, Trade, Trade Deficits, trade surpluses, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

President Trump has set out to overhaul America’s trade policy, and RealityChek has presented abundant evidence showing that, from the proverbial 30,000-foot level and somewhat below, his years in office have seen impressive progress that’s laying the foundations for a healthier economy.

But what about the makeup of U.S. trade flows? Similar progress has been documented here in the recent leveling off of the still-enormous American trade gap in manufactured goods (despite the safety-related woes of aircraft giant and mega-exporter Boeing) and minimal growth in the Made in Washington trade deficit – the shortfall in those flows most strongly influenced by American trade policy decisions (i.e., which leave out oil and services trade).

At the same time, a detailed industry-by-industry examination of U.S. trade patterns reveals changes that have been more modest, though worth examining, especially when a reasonably obvious comparison is made with their counterparts during the last year of the Obama administration – which the President and his supporters (including me) view as a trade policy failure. Specifically, over these three years, the lists of the American industries that ran the biggest trade surpluses and deficits remained practically the same. By contrast, the lists of sectors that saw their trade balances improve or worsen to the greatest extent had almost nothing in common.

Let’s begin with one of Mr. Trump’s priority objectives – reducing the trade deficit. Despite the different look of aggregate deficits, one key measure of the industries winning and losing out most from trade looks remarkably similar last year to its appearance in the final Obama year, 2016. That’s the sectors of the U.S. economy with the biggest trade surpluses. Below are the Top 20 for 2019, in descending order. The magnitude of the 2019 surplus in value terms comes after the sector’s name, and the right-hand column shows how these industries ranked in 2016. Last year’s trade surplus champions that didn’t make the 2016 list are designated with a hyphen.

The categories come from the federal government’s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which has become Washington’s predominant system for slicing and dicing the domestic economy. They represent NAICS’ most granular level of disaggregation – the sixth level. And they leave out a catchall aerospace category that includes both planes and their parts – as opposed to many other NAICS-6 categories, which present the two separately.

Leading 2019 trade surplus sectors                                  2016 rank

1. petroleum refinery products: $30.71b                               1

2. special classification goods: $26.27b                                3

3. plastics materials & resins: 18.74b                                   4

4. soybeans: $18.46b                                                            2

5. waste and scrap: $13.11b                                                 5

6. non-anthracite coal & petroleum gases: $9.27b            16

7. used or second-hand merchandise: $9.16b:                  10

8. motor vehicle bodies: $9.12b                                         7

9. corn: $7.57b                                                                   6

10. non-poultry meat products: $7.36b                            11

11. cotton: +$6.23b                                                          14

12. semiconductors: +$5.91b                                            –

13. wheat: $5.84b                                                            13

14. tree nuts: +$5.10b                                                      15

15. computer parts: +$4.76b                                             9

16. misc basic inorganic chemicals: $3.88b                     –

17. prepared or preserved poultry: $3.75b                      18

18. in-vitro diagnostic substances: $3.39b                      20

19. surface active agents: $3.23b                                    19

20. paperboard mill products: $3.12b                              –

As the table makes clear, there’s been some reshuffling in this group, but not much. Indeed, 17 of the 2016 Top 20 made the 2019 Top 20, and all of the top five in 2016 were top five in 2019, though three of these industries switched orders. And the only major ranking changes occurred in non-anthracite coal and petroleum gases (which move up six places), and in computer parts (which moved down six).

Also of note: In 2016, eight of the Top 20 trade surplus sectors were manufactures, and this number rose to only nine in 2019. So despite the Trump administration’s focus on strengthening domestic manufacturing, little change is evident from this list of leading net exporters.

Yet very different results emerge from a different measure of trade excellence – the twenty industries that have seen their trade balances improved the most between 2018 and 2019, and between 2015 and that final Obama year 2016. Here, for three reasons, I’ve limited the total number of industries I’ve examined to the hundred biggest trade surplus and trade deficit industries.

First, these sectors represent the vast bulk of U.S. goods trade. Second, they enable a filtering out of the “small numbers effect” (that is, big percentage moves that are generated when sectors with small trade flows experiencing changes that are small in absolute terms but big in relative terms). Third, including the big deficit industries enables the identification of sectors whose trade shortfalls have shrunk the most – which on in trade accounting means just as much as boosting surpluses. (These sectors are the ones marked “DF,” for “deficits fell.”)

Just as with the first table, also presented here is where 2019’s biggest trade balance improvers ranked in 2016. And the big takeaway is that overwhelmingly, they didn’t rank at all. An amazing sixteen out of twenty sectors that improved their trade balances the most last year weren’t even on this Top 20 list just three years ago.

Leading trade balance improvers 2018-19                                       2016 rank

(including percentage changes)

1. semiconductors: +196.2 percent                                                         –

2. perfumes, makeup & other toiletries: +147.4 percent                        –

3. dental laboratories products: +120.0 percent                                     –

4. non-small arms ammunition: +79.8 percent                                      6

5. dried peas & beans: +60.4 percent                                                    7

6. carbon & graphite products: +55.9 percent                                      –

7. oil & gas field machinery & equip: +49.3 percent                           –

8. animal fats, oils & byproducts: +48.9 percent                                 –

9. petrochemicals: +44.9 percent                                                         1

10. computer storage devices: +42.7 percent                                    19

11. ships: +40.2 percent                                                                      –

12. misc chemicals: +35.1 percent                                                     –

13. cheese: +34.0 percent                                                                   –

14. potatoes: +33.6 percent                                                                 –

15. jewelry & silverware: +32.1 percent (DF)                                    –

16. search, navigation, detection instruments: +31.1 percent (DF)    –

17. printed circuit assemblies: +31.6 percent (DF)                            –

18. missile & space vehicle engines & parts: +30.0 percent             –

19. motor homes: +28.0 percent                                                        –

20. specialty canned foods: +27.6 percent                                         –

But also interesting – despite the extensive turnover, for both years, 13 of the twenty top trade balance improvers were manufacturing industries.

Maybe, however, the story is significantly different on the deficit side of the trade ledger? Not meaningfully. Below is a list of the twenty American sectors with the biggest trade shortfalls in absolute terms, in descending order. The actual deficits are included, too. In the right-hand column is their ranking on a similar 2016 table. And as with the surplus table above, that catchall aerospace category is excluded.

Leading 2019 trade deficit sectors                                                 2016 rank

1. autos & light trucks: $126.60b                                                        1

2. goods returned: $91.06b                                                                 4

3. broadcast & wireless communs equip: $73.74b                             3

4. pharmaceutical preparations: $62.36b                                            5

5. computers: $59.62b                                                                        6

6. female cut & sew apparel: $42.13b                                               7

7. male cut & sew apparel: $30.97b                                                   8

8. aircraft engines & engine parts: $25.68b                                     12

9. footwear: $25.62b                                                                        10

10. misc motor vehicle parts: $23.69b                                             11

11. audio & video equip: $21.71b                                                     9

12. dolls, toys & games: $17.37b                                                    13

13. iron & steel & ferroalloy products: $17.03b                             16

14. non-diagnostic biological products: $16.97b                             –

15. printed circuit assemblies: $16.75b 1                                         4

16. motor vehicle electrical & electronic equip: $14.63b              15

17. aircraft parts & auxiliary equip: $14.02b                                 18

18. light truck & utility vehicles: $13.19                                        –

19. misc plastics products: $13.03b                                                –

20. curtains & linens: $12.18b                                                       17

In this case, 17 of the 2019 Top 20 were in the 2016 Top 20. And the order hasn’t changed much, either – except arguably in the case of aircraft engines and engine parts, iron and steel and ferroalloy products, and curtains and linens. One major change does need to be noted, though: You may have observed that the second biggest trade deficit industry in 2016 didn’t make the 2019 list at all. That sector? Crude oil and natural gas, thanks to the U.S. energy production revolution of recent years.

All the same, the 2016 and 2019 lists of biggest trade deficit industries are pretty much…all the same. They’re also both manufacturing dominated, with that super-category accounting for 19 of the Top 20 deficit sectors in 2019 and 18 in 2016.

Turn to the industries whose trade balances have worsened the most (including sectors whose surpluses have declined), and you see a substantially different 2016-2019 comparison – but one strongly resembling that between the sectors whose trade balances have improved the most in 2016 and 2019: showing big-time turnover. (As with the biggest trade balance improvers’ list, the following are drawn from the hundred biggest trade surplus and trade deficit industries.) Those sectors whose surpluses fell are designated with (SF):

Leading trade balance “worseners”                                                      2016 rank

(including percentage changes)

1. non-aluminum, non-ferrous metal refining/extruding: +74.0 percent     1

2. semiconductor machinery: +70.8 percent (SF)                                       –

3. military armored vehicles & parts: +53.9 percent (SF)                          –

4. tobacco: +51.4 percent (SF)                                                                   –

5. electricity measuring & testing instruments: +50.8 percent (SF)          –

6. construction machinery: +47.4 percent                                                10

7. misc non-ferrous secondary smelting/refining: +47.3 percent (SF)     –

8, iron ores: +45.4 percent (SF)                                                                –

9. corn: +39.2 percent (SF)                                                                       –

10. non-reinforced plastic plate & sheet: +35.3 percent (SF)                   –

11. margarine & edible fats & oils: +34.6 percent (SF)                           –

12. timber & logs: +33.4 percent (SF)                                                     –

13. mobile homes & trailers: +30.5 percent (SF)                                    –

14. missiles, space vehicles & parts: +29.8 percent (SF)                        –

15. misc electrical equip & components: +27.4 percent                         –

16. non-diagnostic biological products: +23.1 percent                           –

17. aircraft engines & engine parts: +19.8 percent                                 –

18. light trucks & utility vehicles: +19.7 percent                                   –

19. chocolate & confectionary products: +18.4 percent                         –

20. fabricated structural metals: +17.2 percent                                     12

No fewer than 18 of the 20 sectors on the 2019 list don’t appear on the 2016 list. As for the two that did, construction machinery worsened its relative performance (moving up from the tenth worst sector in this respect to the sixth worst) and fabricated structural metals improved its relative performance (moving from the twelfth worst to the twentieth worst industry).

Of modest significance, though, for manufacturing: It accounted for only 15 of these Top 20 biggest trade losers in 2019, down from 18 in 2016.

The implications seem strikingly clear – though one is much more surprising than the other. The not-so-surprising conclusion: Because the supertanker of U.S. trade flows is so big, changing it dramatically is a long-haul affair. So industries that are the biggest trade losers and winners in 2016 can be expected to hold the same positions in 2019.

But on a more dynamic basis (improving and worsening trade balances) substantial change is possible in a three-year period – both for better and for worse.

Tomorrow we’ll turn from industries’ trade balances to how well these generalizations hold for the sectors with the most and the fastest-growing exports and imports.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Newest Numbers Show Trump’s Real Wages Problem Continues

Tags

Barack Obama, election 2020, inflation adjusted wages, manufacturing, private sector, real wages, Trump, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The big economic message sent by today’s official U.S. data on inflation-adjusted wages is highly concentrated in the so-called benchmark revisions – which adjust the results going back to 2015. And the big political message sent by these revisions is that President Trump’s economic record still suffers from a serious real wage problem – especially in the manufacturing sector, and especially compared with his predecessor, Barack Obama, whose supposed economic failures Mr. Trump has made a major campaign issue.

To be sure, the newest (and unrevised) January statistics weren’t great news for Trump-World, either. Total private sector pay in real terms inched up only 0.09 percent month-to-month, and the annual increase was a mere 0.64 percent. Between the previous Januarys, constant dollar private sector wages improved by a much faster 1.77 percent. (The Labor Department doesn’t track public sector wages, because their levels and growth are determined overwhelmingly by government decisions, and therefore supposedly say little about the state of the labor market or of the entire economy.)

The story for blue-collar workers (called “production and nonsupervisory workers” by the Labor Department and abbreviated here “N/S”) was only a little better. Their real wages flat-lined on month in January, but year-on-year they were up 0.75 percent – more strongly than overall private sector wages, and thereby in synch with numerous observations that pay at the lower end of the scale is rising faster than it is at the upper end.

In manufacturing, however, that picture is more mixed. Overall after-inflation manufacturing wages dipped by -0.09 percent sequentially in January, though they advanced by 0.74 percent year-on-year. That rise was better not only than that of total private sector workers, but than of its own performance the previous year – which saw zero increase in these wages.

Price-adjusted wages for manufacturing’s blue collar workforce, however, fared only negligibly better than for all manufacturing employees – flat-lining versus a small decline. And year-on-year they increased by less than a third the rate of pay for all manufacturing workers (0.23 percent) and much more slowly than the year before (1.37 percent).

The good news for Mr. Trump – the revisions put more of a shine on his job creation record over the last two years, as shown in the tables below. (Keep in mind that they only take the story through December, 2019 – because today’s January figures haven’t been revised yet.)

                                                                     Unrevised

                                     Total private     N/S private     Total mfg      N/S mfg

Year-on-year, 2019:         +0.64%           +0.75%          +0.74%        +0.45%

Year-on-year, 2018:         +0.56%          +1.63%                0%          +1.14%

                                                                      Revised

                                    Total private      N/S private     Total mfg      N/S mfg

Year-on-year, 2019:        +0.73%           +0.85%           +0.74%        +0.45%

Year-on-year, 2018:        +1.40%          +1.74%                 0%          +1.03%

Interestingly, though, the biggest changes came for all private sector workers. And the updates make the picture for blue-collar manufacturing workers slightly gloomier.

But the revisions still left the Obama years’ real wages performance looking better than those of the Trump years – a comparison that might be raised frequently during this election year. The 34-month periods have been chosen because that’s the amount of time Mr. Trump has been in office since his first full month in the White House (February, 2017. Further, the two time periods are right next to each other in the current business cycle.

The bottom line? The gap between the two administrations closed for all private sector workers and blue collar private sector workers. But it widened in the manufacturing sector.

                                                                Unrevised

                                  Total private      N/S private      Total mfg    N/S mfg

1^st 34 Trump months:    +2.53%           +2.72%          +0.65%       +2.77%

last 34 Obama months: +3.50%           +3.97%          +3.05%       +2.97%

                                                                  Revised

                                  Total private      N/S private      Total mfg    N/S mfg

1^st 34 Trump months:    +2.71%            +3.05%          +0.65%      +2.65%

last 34 Obama months: +3.49%            +3.97%          +3.44%      +3.34%

And finally, the impact of the revisions on real wages trends during the current economic recovery, and on the previous two expansions:

                                                                                 Unrevised

                                                             Private    N/S private    Mfg      N/S mfg

1990s expansion (2Q 91-1Q 01):           n/a          +6.37%        n/a       +2.18%

bubble expansion (4Q 01-4Q 07)         : n/a          +0.35%        n/a       -2.77%

current expansion (2Q 09 – present): +6.30%      +6.79%    +1.59%   +3.01%

                                                                                 Revised                      

                                                              Private   N/S private    Mfg      N/S mfg

1990s expansion (2Q 91-1Q 01):            n/a          +6.51%       n/a        +1.81%

bubble expansion (4Q 01-4Q 07):           n/a         +0.35%        n/a        -2.77%

current expansion (2Q 09 – present):  +6.70%     +7.01% +   1.59%    +2.77%

The big takeaways, as I see them: The real wage performance of the current recovery looks somewhat better than previous thought – except for blue-collar manufacturing paychecks. And the widely admired 1990s expansion looks better for blue-collar private sector workers in toto but worse for their manufacturing counterparts.

Several recent polls show Americans to be unusually happy about the state of the economy and their own personal situations. (For the latest, see here.) These real wage figures indicate that it’s not yet entirely clear why.