(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Win for Transparency on Corporate Vulnerability to China

Tags

China, Congress, investment, multinational companies, national security, offshoring, Securities and Exchange Commission, Steve Milloy, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, transparency, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Here’s a development in U.S.-China economic relations that’s potentially game-changing, and that yours truly finds particularly satisfying: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency largely responsible for regulating U.S. financial markets require companies publicly traded in America to open their books wide on their ties with and reliance on China.

It’s potentially game-changing because ever since the early 1990s, Washington stepped on the gas to encourage the expansion of trade and investment with China (including massive factory and manufacturing job offshoring), but permitted the multinational companies that by far benefited most from these practices to control the release of most of the information capable of gauging the impact on the broader economy.

The result: When the American political system set its China economic policy priorities, it was forced to rely on the offshoring companies themselves for crucial information on the employment and production fall-out at home. And naturally, these firms – along with the sympathetic economists and think tank hacks they funded – presented Members of Congress and journalists with only cherry-picked facts and figures suggesting that the domestic winners far outnumbered the losers.

But this playing field may be in for major leveling thanks to the work of Steve Milloy of the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute. Milloy, a former SEC attorney, has persuaded the Commission to approve his proposal for a “Communist China Audit,” that would ask “companies to disclose to shareholders the extent to which their business relies on China.”

Milloy’s rationale, as explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week? A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would thoroughly disrupt the extensive commercial ties many public companies maintain with China (which include crucial supply chain dependencies of all kinds), and threaten their bottom lines – and the portfolios of their shareholders – with massive losses. In turn, the entire national economy would take a staggering hit. He rightly adds, moreover, that China’s hostility now extends nearly across the board of major U.S. interests.  

Multinational and other public companies are already required to tell shareholders about the various risks they run. But everyone who has looked through their quarterly and annual financial statements knows that politics and geopolitics risk disclosures are invariably vague and scanty, and details on their China-related operations almost non-existent.

Indeed, the author reports that the SEC is already pushing public companies to reveal how significantly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is affecting their businesses. Since China’s impact on American companies, their shareholders, and the entire American economy is so much greater, he rightly argues that full transparency on this front is all the more important.

I was thrilled to learn about Milloy’s ideas and successes because for many years, I’ve been advocating something very similar. As I wrote in this 2017 post, Congress should pass and a President should sign what I called a “Truth in Testimony Act.” The measure would require any multinationals representatives appearing before Congress on an international trade or investment or technology-related issue

“to specify their job and production offshoring, the wages of their U.S. and overseas workers, their foreign and domestic procurement, the foreign and domestic content of their products, and similar statistics.”

I also recommended that time series be provided, in order to identify long-term patterns. In addition, I pointed out, comparable information has been required of auto-makers selling in the United States since the 1990s, so major precedent exists. And I urged similar requirements for a full range of businesses and their representatives when testifying before the House and Senate, and called for their think tank and academic spokespersons to come clean on all relevant sources of their funding.

Businesses have long protested that such requirements would deprive them of valuable trade secrets and other prime sources of competitive advantage. I countered that (a) if full disclosure is a must for everyone, then no one wins or loses on net; and (b) companies unconvinced by this argument would remain free to opt out of telling Congress their stories.

Milloy’s proposal, however, matters much more, because it would apply to the entire universe of public companies whether they appear before lawmakers or not.

So I’ll be trying to get in touch with him to see if I can help his China audit campaign in any way, and report back on the results, and on any further progress he’s made. As I wrote five years ago, for far too long, the U.S. government has been flying blind on China and other international economic issues and relying on unreliable, incomplete information. Milloy is right in emphasizing that the China threat in every dimension has metastasized. Nothing less than full corporate China-related transparency can be acceptable.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Will the Tech Competitiveness Bill Shaft American Tech Workers?

Tags

China, competitiveness, Congress, Immigration, labor shortages, Lisa Irving, NumbersUSA, semiconductors, STEM, STEM workers, tariffs, tech workers, technology, Trade, visas, {What's Left of) Our Economy

In case you didn’t already think that the U.S. government has become a dysfunctional mess, the immigration realist group NumbersUSA has just highlighted a recent, thoroughly depressing example. It’s the decision of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to turn its version of a bill to boost American technological competitiveness (especially versus China) into a device to advance its Open Borders-friendly immigration agenda ever further – and at the expense in particular of native-born tech workers and tech worker hopefuls.

Not that the story of this competitiveness effort wasn’t a prime example of dysfunction already. As I’ve previously pointed out, both the House bill and its Senate counterpart were originally introduced in mid-2020, and these efforts still haven’t become law – even though concerns about China catching up to the United States technologically, and threatening both American national security and prosperity even more sharply, remain as strong and widespread as ever.

And not that the Democrats are solely responsible: As I’ve also noted, Senate Republicans have strongly supported provisions in their version of the legislation that would both greatly weaken a president’s authority to impose tariffs (including on China to offset the economic damage to U.S. industry from its predatory trade and broader economic practices), and reduce various existing tradei barriers to many imports (including from China).

But the immigration provisions of the House version could be just as damaging, and deserve at least as much attention. As explained by NumbersUSA analyst Lisa Irving, this legislation “allows for an unlimited number of green cards for citizens of foreign countries seeking permanent U.S. residency who hold a U.S. doctorate degree, or its equivalent from a foreign institution, in STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering,and Math fields].”

Adds Irving, “This provision would result in further limiting the job prospects and resources for highly qualified Americans in tech fields.” 

To add insult to injury, as Irving reminds, the measure is based on phony and thoroughly debunked claims, mainly propagated by the U.S. technology industry, that it’s facing a crippling labor and talent shortage. In fact, the tech sector’s prime objective is curbing wage and other compensation gains by opening the flood gates ever wider to foreign-born technologists willing to accept much lower pay.   

The best outcome for the cause of American competitiveness — and for its potential to benefit the existing American population economically — would be for the Congressional conference committee assigned with devising a final compromise version that President Biden can sign into law to strip the Senate version of its trade sections, and the House version of these immigration sections

But don’t expect any progress any time soon. Reuters reports that the committee will hold its first meeting next week – and will contain more than 100 House and Senate lawmakers. In other words, more than 100 cooks for this broth.

As a result, even though China continues massively subsidizing its own tech sector, and even though other countries have already responded with their own incentives aimed at attracting and maintaining their capabilities in semiconductors and other industries, “Congressional aides said it could still take months before a final agreement is reached.” In the ultimate sad commentary on American political dysfunction, given the glaring flaws of both bills, that could be a good thing. 

Im-Politic: A Rapidly Mounting Case Against Fauci – and His Former Boss

Tags

Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, China, Congress, coronavirus, COVID 19, Francis Collins, gain-of-function research, Im-Politic, lab leak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, natural origin, NIAID, NIH, Wuhan virus

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci must be one of the luckiest people in the world, with Dr. Francis S. Collins not far behind. President Biden’s chief medical advisor and the recently retired head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been leading charmed lives because evidence keeps emerging of their incredibly shady and quite possibly corrupt and illegal behavior in dealing with the China angle of the CCP Virus pandemic, and so far they’re getting off scot free.

As known by RealityChek readers, overwhelming evidence exists that Fauci, longtime head of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) lied to Congress when he denied under oath that his agency funded gain-of-function research at a Chinese virology lab in violation of federal government guidelines at the time. Such deceitful statements are criminal offenses and Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul has rightly asked the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. But how anxious do you think this Biden administration cabinet agency will be to look into someone whom the President himself has repeatedly touted as the world’s greatest expert on handling the pandemic?

This Fauci decision on gain-of-function funding, by the way (as opposed to misleading Congress about it) should be enough to put him in serious legal jeopardy. And ditto for Collins if he knew about Fauci’s action.

In the last month, however, recently released emails suggest two more major reasons for investigating Fauci and Collins.

The first concerns statements by both in their correspondence during 2020 and 2021 that they not only tried to suppress public discussion and consideration of Chinese responsibility for loosing the virus on the world – which has been clear enough from the numerous times they described as “fringe” and “conspiracy” thinking positions arguments made in support of the lab leak theory made by numerous eminent virologists and epidemiologists.

Now, thanks to a new group of emails – released by Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committtee – we know that the agencies for which Fauci and Collins have worked are trying to cover up the reasons that scientists tasked by the former during the pandemic’s early U.S. stages to examine the virus’ origins switched from viewing as solid and even convincing both main versions of the lab leak theory (that a naturally occuring coronavirus escaped due to Chinese carelessness, and that the pathogen that leaked was man-made) to staunch opponents of these ideas.

If such a cover up wasn’t taking place, why were virtually all the contents of the communications that could have shed light on the specific reason for this dramatic change redacted? Like scientific and medical information should suddenly be treated as a state secret?

Second, these emails also speak volumes about the motives of Fauci and Collins. Their sole aims, the wording strongly suggests, weren’t to make sure that pseudo-science didn’t distract and inhibit the nation’s response to the pandemic. Instead, they were also concerned with maintaining “international harmony” (as Collins put it in a February 2, 2020 message) and not doing “unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular” (according to one of the experts involved in the electronic discussions on the same day).

There’s nothing wrong with scientists worrying about the state of science worldwide and about dangers to the international cooperation that drives so much scientific progress. But there’s everything wrong (although it’s probably not a crime) for such scientists, and especially government scientists who have been appointed and not elected to their jobs, trying to stamp out any discussions – both inside and outside the government – involving an entirely possible danger to public health in order to advance the above aims, or for any non-scientific reason. In the American system of government, that call – which involves major and complicated scientific and non-scientific tradeoffs – must be made by elected officials. The appointed technocrats should be providing input reflecting their paticular expertise, and nothing more.

Third, two conservative-leaning news organizations (see here and especially here) have obtained NIH documents showing that some of the scientists who changed their minds and indeed began leading the charge to debunk the lab leak theories got big increases in grant funding from Fauci’s NIAID (and by extension, Collins’ NIH). In other words, these experts could well have done these government scientists’ bidding in exchange for a payoff.

None of this new material is enough to declare anyone guilty of anything. But it’s full of information demanding a far-ranging probe. During the Watergate era, Congress rightly sought to determine whether there was a “cancer on the Presidency.”  Especially as an era of pandemics may well be starting, the possibility of a cancer on the public health establishment should be equally alarming. 

Following Up: Why the Fauci-Lied Charges Look Stronger than Ever

Tags

Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, Congress, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci, Following Up, gain-of-function research, James Comer, Lawrence Tabak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, NIAID, NIH, Obama administration, Rand Paul, science, virology, Wuhan lab

If Anthony S. Fauci hasn’t been lawyering up already to defend himself against charges that he lied to Congress in denying that he U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), for which he’s worked for so long, ever funded dangerous gain-of-function (GOF) research in a Chinese virology lab, he definitely should be now.

For unless he’s gotten a God complex from all the CCP Virus era adulation he’s received, and assumes he’ll never be held accountable for his actions by mere mortals’ systems of government, Fauci – who also serves as President Biden’s chief medical advisor – must recognize that the NIH just made clearer than ever to lawmakers not only that statements of his earlier this year to Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky were false, but that he knew at the time they were false.

As a post of mine on July 22 explained, although Fauci made his denials twice this year in response to questions from Paul, facts that were undoubtedly at Fauci’s disposal stated otherwise. Principally, the public record shows that at least three research grants approved by the NIH branch headed by Fauci (the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – NIAID) sponsored research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that plainly fell under the U.S. government’s official definition of gain-of-function – which is the only definition that Fauci, a federal employee, should care about in connection with his official work.

More important, from a legal standpoint, in an article detailing its findings, one team of recipients explicitly described its work at “GOF.” Similarly, in a February, 2020 email exchange, both Fauci and a senior colleague showed that they were well aware that of this research. The concern stemming from the grant that they discussed was not whether this description was correct or not, but whether or not this research took place when it was still permitted by federal regulations.

That’s obviously important, but as I noted, it has nothing to do with the lying to Congress charge. For that’s not what Paul asked. He asked whether NIH had ever paid for such work in China at any time. And even more important, Fauci was surely aware both of these emails’ contents, and of the original grant. OK – it’s conceivable that he had forgotten all of this when first questioned by Paul. But it’s inconceivable that by the second appearances (at which he was given the chance to walk back his denial), he hadn’t done his homework.

It was against this background of legitimately indisputable facts that the NIH finally issued a statement that seeks to clear the air about its connection with the Wuhan lab. The statement, which came in the form of an October 20 letter from NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak to Kentucky Republican Congressman James Comer, doesn’t explicitly comment on Fauci’s statements. But although it does insinuate that no one at NIH is to blame for any Wuhan-related confusion on the part of Members of Congress, it keeps him in hot water nonetheless.

For not only does it leave those indisputable facts completely undisputed. It makes two relevant claims that quickly dissolve under even casual scrutiny.

The first centers on Tabak’s allegation that the contractor in question, the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance, violated the terms of its grant by failing to notify anyone at NIH that some of the experiments it helped conduct in Wuhan created an engineered version of a bat coronavirus that infected human cells ten times faster than the natually occuring version of that virus. According to Tabak, “EcoHealth failed to report this fining right away, as was required by the terms of the grant.”

That’s on EcoHealth, of course. But if it was concealing information from NIH, then doesn’t that mean that Fauci’s denials to Paul, however inaccurate, simply stemmed from ignorance and not a desire to mislead? Unfortunately for Fauci, no. Because as NIH recently told The New York Times, EcoHealth didn’t simply fail to report these results “right away.” The organization was two years late. And since this revelation came only this past August, Fauci must have known of its tardiness this past May and July, when he expressed his flat denials to Paul. In other words, Fauci knew he lacked all the facts needed to support his statements. But he made them anyway. And the difference between such statements and a deliberate falsehood is what, exactly?

Tabak’s second Fauci-relevant claim is even more easily dispensed with. It raises the question of defining gain-of-function research once again, and emphasizes that EcoHealth’s work “did not fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential” – and therefore wasn’t prohibited under the prevailing regulations governing GOF research – because the bat coronaviruses being used “had not been shown to affect humans.”

Yet this argument still leaves Fauci with several big problems. First, as I wrote above, recipients for one of the NIH grants for Wuhan work stated explicitly that they were engaged in GOF research. Their results were published in November, 2015 – which means that at least part of the research was performed after October, 2014, when the Obama administration ordered a three-year pause in such work.

Plainly this evidence flatly contradicts Fauci’s insistence that NIH-funded GOF research took place in Wuhan. So does a comparison of the grantees’ description of their project and the Obama administration’s definition of the kind of work that was not to be supported:

“[R]esearch projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.”

Moreover, “The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity.”

The pause was lifted at the end of 2017, and replaced with a review process that would allow funding gain-of-function research under certain conditions. As you can see, there are lots of them. Indeed, there are so many that Fauci (who was doubtless involved in the drafting) could be forgiven strictly speaking if he concluded that he’d gotten pretty close to a green light for resuming NIH funding for all manner of GOF work.

But it’s crucial to remember that Paul never asked Fauci whether NIH had ever funded GOF research in China that was legal at the time. He asked him whether NIH had ever funded GOF research in China – period. And nothing in the post-pause GOF funding guidelines changed the 2014 official definition of GOF – the definition that was controlling for Fauci and other federal employees. All the new guidelines did was stipulate when GOF research anywhere could be legally funded.

Nor did Tabak’s letter do anything to help Fauci on this score. Although he’s correct in noting that the new guidelines don’t proscribe research with pathogens with no record of infecting humans, this qualification is contained nowhere in the still-operative official U.S. government definition of GOF – which covers enhanced infectiousness and transmissibility in all mammals.

There’s a third claim made by Tabak that actually doesn’t directly bear on Fauci’s guilt or innocence, but very nicely illustrates why the NIH deserves absolutely zero credibility on CCP Virus origins issues. That’s the claim that EcoHealth didn’t mislead anyone, either, however late it was in keeping the agency informed. That’s because the organization supposedly didn’t expect the results it got.

As Tabak wrote (though, as with the rest of his letter, he oddly he didn’t specifically link this point to th e Fauc-lied controversy), “As sometimes occurs in science, [the much greater infectivity etc of the engineered viruses] was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”

Yet it’s obvious that the researchers – and the NIH itself – expected that they might display some enhanced capability. Why else would the agency have instructed EcoHealth to “report immediately” a ten-fold-or greater increase in its infectiousness – or any increase in its infectivity?

Tabak also apparently left on the table another suggestion that EcoHealth and NIH (and by extension Fauci) should be let off the hook on substantive grounds (in terms of conducting and supporting gain-of-function research) in addition to NIH (and by extension Fauci) should be let off procedurally (because of EcoHealth’s failure to report its results promptly: It’s the suggestion that because the gain-of-function results were unexpected, that the relevant experiments weren’t about gain-of-function in the first place.

What, however, could be more absurd? For example, scientists began trying to develop a polio vaccine in the 1930s. They didn’t succeed until 1953. Can anyone seriously believe that the failed efforts don’t qualify as polio vaccine research? Ditto for the long string of failures to develop an AIDS vaccine. Or a U.S. rocket that could lift a satellite into space. Or the story of practically every scientific discovery or progress in engineering, or for that matter in the social sciences.

It’s true that Fauci could have easily and truthfully answered Paul’s questions with a statement along the lines of the following in speaking about the post-gain-of-function pause experiments: “At the time of this work, government guidelines permitted NIH to support GOF research in China and everywhere else if its review process determined that such work was justified, and that determination was in fact made.”

That’s not, however, what he said – evidently because his top priority wasn’t factual accuracy, but ensuring that neither he nor NIH could be tainted by association with supporting potentially dangerous research in China – which would have further exposed he and NIH to charges of dreadful judgment (considering their lax attitude toward reporting deadlines and the underlying decision to work with a foreign regime with a long history of keeping secrets and spreading information.

More important from the Fauci-lied standpoint, though, is that there’s no way he could have answered the questions about the pre-pause research truthfully without admitting that NIH had indeed funded some GOF work at the Wuhan lab.

And there’s a final point that needs to be mentioned:  Is the Tabak letter the best that NIH can do to exculpate Fauci of the lying charges and all concerned of  allegations of whopping misjudgement? If so, I’m doubly convinced that Fauci specifically should be seeking legal aid. If you’re still a fan, feel free to send your suggestions to:

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci

Director

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

5601 Fishers Lanes, MSC 9806

Bethesda, Maryland 20892-9806

Im-Politic: Yet Another Weird, Dangerous Turn in Identity Politics

Tags

affirmative action, African Americans, colleges, Congress, higher education, Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, Hispanics, historically black colleges and universities, identity politics, Im-Politic, lobbying, minorities, Politico, reconciliation bill, universities

Just what America needs right now – yet another source of identity politics-driven division, right? And one that looks completely bogus. Apparently this is exactly what the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) thinks.

Politico.com reported last week that the organization is competing with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) for funding reserved for “minority-serving institutions” in the big social spending bill (also called the “reconciliation bill”) passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives but still still under consideration in the Senate.

And according to Politico, that’s how the measure has been structured – which depressingly indicates that the scramble for power, influence, and government resources has great potential to pit various racial and ethnic minority groups against one another, as well as continuing to foster competition between these groups collectively against whites. (Another example of intra-minority tensions – the pushback by Asian-American groups against affirmative action programs that they claim unjustly discriminate against them and for other “people of color.”)

But let’s say that, for some whacko reason, Americans decide that these battles among minority groups should be encouraged, or tolerated. Let’s also agree for the sake of argument that throughout American history, Hispanics have suffered from discrimination comparable to that which has victimized African Americans. (It’s a completely specious claim, but that’s not the point.) Shouldn’t the organizations involved at least boast genuine levels of legitimacy? If you agree, then the HACU doesn’t have a leg to stand on, even though according to the group’s website, the federal government for decades has formally recognized “campuses with high Hispanic enrollment as federally designated HSIs and [begun] targeting federal appropriations to those campuses.”

After all, the HBCUs were founded because of decades of unquestionably systemic and predominantly officially sanctioned discrimination in U.S. higher education against black Americans. Those days thankfully are gone, but it’s understandable that many African American students still want to attend those colleges and universities for reasons like demonstrating solidarity with them due to their historic role, or to a greater sense of comfort academically and/or socially on majority black campuses.

But the story of “Hispanic Serving Institutions” (HSIs) is totally different from that of the HBCUs. In fact, it’s so totally different that they don’t seem to have a story as such at all. The first big clue comes from the HACU’s own description of its membership: They’re schools “committed to Hispanic higher education success in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Latin America, Spain and U.S. school districts.” Even overlooking the inclusion of non-U.S. institutions in this definition (and, incredibly weirdly, Spain???), evidently the only hard and fast characteristic distinguishing these schools is their domination of Hispanic college enrollment in the United States (allegedly two-thirds).

But a look at the HACU’s membership list (which includes memberships of all types, in addition to institutions it classifies as HSIs) reveals that this criterion is meaningless on two major grounds. First, a very large percentage of these institutions are located in places like California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, New Mexico, and New York. In other words, they’re located in states with big Hispanic populations – along with Puerto Rico. So of course they enroll outsized shares of Hispanic students – especially since so many of those schools are public colleges, universities, and community colleges. And that’s supposed to demonstrate a defining commitment?

Second, perusing the membership list also quickly reveals that this commitment is often pretty weak, at least numerically speaking. For instance, Ball State University in Indiana is a member. Hispanics represents just 6.26 percent of its undergraduate and graduate enrollment. Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio belongs, too. It’s Hispanic enrollment is just 6.52 percent. For Central Michigan University, it’s a mere 4.89 percent. Duke University, with an overall student body that’s 6.78 percent Hispanic is a member. So is Emory University in Atlanta (8.17 percent), Michigan State University (6.01 percent), Mount Holyoke College (7.61 percent), Northwestern University (8.68 percent), the Univeristy of Alabama-Birmingham (4.42 percent), the University of North Carolina-Charlotte (7.31 pecent), the University of Tennessee (4.75 percent), the University of Chicago (4.54 percent), the University of Michigan (6.51 percent), the University of Pennsylvania (6.74 percent), the University of Pittsburgh (3.70 percent), Villanova University (5.38 percent), Washington University in St. Louis (6.69 percent).

(Note: Many of these figures come from the “Universities” section of the DataUSA.io website founded in part by the international consulting firm Deloitte.  The others come from the websites of these institutions themselves.)

And here’s some vital context: As of the latest available (2016) data from the U.S. Department of Education, the share of Hispanic students at all degree-granting American post-secondary schools was 17 percent. So all the above schools associated with the HACU are serving Hispanic students much less well according to this key measure than the national average. And since figures from the same agency show that the Hispanic share of the American college and university student body has been rising faster than that of any other racial or ethnic group, and since the above enrollment figures are all from well after 2016, arguably their performance has worsened in recent years.

Even more bizarre: The HACU reports that for its own “membership purposes, Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are defined as colleges, universities, or systems/districts where total Hispanic enrollment constitutes a minimum of 25% of the total enrollment.” So by its own standards, none of the above schools should be members – or even close.

Moreover, the federal government itself has no official list of HSIs. But for the purposes of determining eligibility for aid, the 25 percent threshhold also seems crucial (though as you will see, HACU acknowledges that there’s no fixed formula.

If Hispanics want to start their own separate higher education system and then seek as much taxpayer-funded assistance as they can get, that’s their God-given right as citizens of this great country. But it’s obvious that no such system has ever existed, that none exists now, and that the idea that Congress should pay any attention an organization even claiming to speak for a significant number of schools with an unusually strong commitment to higher education for Hispanics is a sham.

Moreover, rather than continue to play grievance politics – and with an artificial interest group – wouldn’t it be much better for the nation as a whole, and even for Hispanics specifically, for these institutions reorient their lobbying toward ensuring college affordability for all American students in need who can truly benefit from higher education. And wouldn’t it be nice if on top of seeking additional access to the government funding trough, and thereby indirectly feathering their own nests even more lavishly, they paid at least as much attention to reducing their long-soaring costs – e.g., by improving their performance and their efficiency?

After all, if American higher education doesn’t start helping students think more logically and coherently; receive an accurate, balanced picture of the society in which they live and the civilization that spawned it;  and function effectively in the economy that it’s created, then any lobbying victories it wins will be hollow for those they say they’re championing.       

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Just Blundered on Taiwan, Too

Tags

ABC News, Afghanistan, alliances, allies, Article Five, Biden, China, Cold War, Congress, credibility, George Stephanopoulos, Japan, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Republic of China, semiconductors, South Korea, Taiwan, treaties, vital interests

Last week I tweeted that I was worried that President Biden would do something stupid and reckless to try to establish or reestablish (depending on our viewpoint) his global chops following the Afghanistan military withdrawal his administration has so disastrously conducted. As known by RealityChek regulars, American Presidents have followed this course before – notably John F. Kennedy.

And sure enough, on Wednesday he at least came uncomfortably close. No, Mr. Biden didn’t invade or threaten another country, or even move U.S. military forces into provocative positions versus, say, China or Russia or Iran or North Korea. But he did say something that should worry all Americans. In his interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, the President suggested that Taiwan now enjoys the same status in American eyes as Japan, South Korea, and the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That is, they’re allies in whose defense against external aggression the United States is treaty-bound to fight.

Specifically, when asked by Stephanopoulos if China could credibly tell the Taiwanese – who they claim run a renegade province that Beijing has vowed to bring back into its fold with force if necessary – “See? You can’t count on the Americans,” Mr. Biden’s response included:

“We have made– kept every [defense] commitment. We made a sacred commitment to Article Five that if in fact anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with– Taiwan. It’s not even comparable to talk about that.”

The President is right about NATO. In fact, that Article Five he mentioned is the keystone of the treaty that established the alliance. In 1949, the signatories agreed

“that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs…will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

The Japan-U.S. Security Treaty of 1951 contains its own Article Five. The key section:

“Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.”

The promise to meet aggression with U.S. military force is a little looser here – and notice that the treaty creates no Japanese obligation to aid the United States with its own military if American territory comes under attack. The reasons are complicated – for example, in 1947, Japan, then under U.S. military cooperation, adopted a constitution containing a proposal from Supreme Allied Commander General Douglas MacArthur that pledged “never” to “maintain” “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential.” The idea, of course, was to prevent Japan from ever reemerging as the type of threat it became in the 1930s. And at that point, it wasn’t even a fully sovereign nation, much less an armed one.

Nonetheless, as the Cold War developed, and Washington’s priorities in East Asia shifted toward using any actual and potential assets available to resist communist aggression, the United States proceeded to push Japan to rearm and add to the regional forces that could fight the Soviets or the Chinese or the North Koreans. But even though Japan continuously balked, the United States’ determination to defend Japan could never be seriously doubted as long as tens of thousands of American servicemen were stationed on Japanese soil, representing a “tripwire” whose presence and possible vulnerability to the superior conventional militaries of potential regional aggressors would guarantee an armed U.S. response – poentially complete with the use of nuclear weapons – against an attack on Japan. 

A similar U.S. commitment – complete with unequal obligaions and tripwire forces – has been made to South Korea.

There’s now clearly a case for adopting the same policy toward Taiwan. From 1954 to 1979, the U.S. security relations with Taiwan were governed by a assymetrical defense treaty, too, complete wiith an Article Five American commitment. But since the United States decided to recognize the People’s Republic of China (yes, the Communists) as China’s sole legitimate government, its approach toward Taiwan’s defense has been informally called “strategic ambiguity” – which is just as fuzzy and plastic as it sounds.

Yet whereas that posture arguably made sense for most of the post-1979 period, since the People’s Republic has grown so much stronger and more important economically than Taiwan (which still calls itself the Republic of China), the island can now legitimately claim to boast an asset vital to America’s own national security and prosperity – world leadership in the manufacture of the world’s most advanced and powerful semiconductors.

At the same time, extending Article Five-type status even to a technological powerhouse like Taiwan isn’t a decision to be made on the spur of the moment. The impact on China – which has significantly closed the military gap with the United States especially in its own backyard (where Taiwan is located) – needs to be carefully considered. And more important, it’s a move that the United States can’t make by presidential fiat. Congress needs to approve.

On Thursday, a “senior Biden administration official” told reporters that American “policy with regard to Taiwan has not changed.” And the usual supposed experts and talking heads said that Mr. Biden had simply added to his long record as a “gaffe machine.” But who the heck is this senior official, anyway? Why should anyone believe him or her if they’re not willing to speak for attribution? And why should the Chinese take this walk-back seriously, or take comfort in (unofficial) assurances that the President was just Biden-ing again – especially since “strategic ambiguity” has become a lot bolder under both him and President Trump?

Moreover, if they’re not aware of it already, the Chinese should know that Presidents have used all sorts of ways short of formal treaties to tie the nation militarily to foreign countries, and even to use military force (Google “Tonkin Gulf Resolution,” or “Authorization for Use of Military Force”), and that timely, effective Congressional resistance is anything but a sure thing. That could go double for a national political establishment that today is united by a sense of humiliation due to the Afghanistan debacle – and possibly spoiling for an opportunity to regain global confidence.

Again, I’m not against a treaty commitment to Taiwan. But it needs to be made with full consideration of all the pluses and minuses, and according to clear Constitutional procedures. And it certainly shouldn’t result from an out-of-the-blue comment by a Chief Executive under heavy political fire, however richly deserved.

Im-Politic: Why It Sure Looks Like Fauci Lied

Tags

Anthony S. Fauci, Biden administration, CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Congress, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, gain-of-function research, Im-Politic, Medium.com, MERS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Nature, NIAID, Nicholas Wade, NIH, perjury, Rand Paul, SARS, Shi Zheng-li, Washington Post, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan virus

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul wants the Justice Department to investigate whether President Biden’s top medical adviser, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, committed the crime of lying to Congress when he claimed that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in which he’s a senior official “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)” in China.

And if I was Fauci, who is also the long-time director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, I would be lawyering up. For if the Biden Justice Department is a truly non-political law enforcement agency, Fauci is going to have a heck of a time proving both that his statement (which he’s made in testimony at least twice) wasn’t a deliberately told falsehood. (See here and here for these instances.)  

Before I explain why, it’s important to specify what Paul’s charge is not about. It’s not about whether the grants given by Fauci’s agency to the WIV funded any research that went into actually creating the CCP Virus specifically. Therefore, contrary to Fauci’s statement (found in the Washington Post report linked above), it’s not about whether he bears any responsibility for causing this pandemic.

Nor is Paul’s charge about whether these U.S. government agencies financed such research in defiance of a three-year pause on such activity mandated by the Obama administration in October, 2014.

Nor – and this is crucial – does Paul’s charge have anything to do with the controversy among virologists about defining gain-of-function research.

As I explained in this post, these kinds of questions are all important, and should be looked into.

But what Paul is claiming is that Fauci lied in contending that NIAD and NIH never funded activity that is defined explicitly by the U.S. government. That matters because as a federal official, Fauci presumably is required to use this definition as his definition. And whereas in the above-linked May 30 post, I wasn’t convinced of Fauci’s guilt, the evidence demonstrating that NIAD and NIH funded work that matches now looks pretty cut and dry to me – especially since Paul last week gave Fauci a chance to climb down from his claim, and since new evidence has emerged.

Let’s start with that definition of gain-of-function: According to the announcement of the gain-of-function pause, new funding would be suspended

“for gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity.”

Now for the two pieces of evidence that should have Fauci awfully worried.

The first consists of an article published in 2015 in the journal Nature by a team of U.S., Swiss, and Chinese scientists (the latter from the WIV), which examined the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations.”

The authors went on to explain that, using reverse genetics, they “generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.” A chimeric virus, according to this definition, is one “made by inserting the genetic material of one virus into the genome of another, safe surrogate, and these introduced sequences are passed on when the virus replicates.”

The article is important because it lists among funders for this project the two NIH branches – one of which is Fauci’s NIAID. Moreover, it specifies that

“Experiments with the full-length and chimeric SHC014 recombinant viruses were initiated and performed before the GOF research funding pause and have since been reviewed and approved for continued study by the NIH.”

Talk about a smoking gun! The authors obviously made this statement to preempt charges that either they or the NIH violated the pause. But just as obviously, they were concerned about it to begin with because they themselves considered the work to be “GOF” (gain-of-function).

And why wouldn’t they? The purpose of using reverse genetics to create a virus that doesn’t exist in nature was to examine “the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations” because such naturally occuring pathogens had demonstrated the ability of “cross-species transmission” that could affect humans.

They created the new virus precisely in order to mimick the kind of natural mutation that could theoretically take place in the original virus to find out whether such a mutated pathogen could infect human respiratory systems. And they discovered that some of them could.

Even more important: so evidently did Fauci. On Saturday, February 1, 2020 – during the very earliest stages of the virus’ spread in the United States, Fauci sent the following email message to aide Hugh Auchincloss:

“It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. I have a conference call at 7:45 AM with [Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex] Azar. It will likely be over at 8:45 AM. Read this paper as well as the email that I will forward to you know. You will have tasks today that must be done.”

The paper was the 2015 Nature article. Auchincloss’ response began:

“The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH.”

He continued, “Not sure what means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework.” And then somewhat oddly, he concluded, “She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”

Emily is Emily Erbelding, who heads much of NIAID’s international research program. The P3 framework is a system created by the Health and Human Services Department to guide “funding decisions on individual proposed research that is reasonably anticipated to create, transfer, or use enhanced PPPs [potential pandemic pathogens].

That last sentence is odd because the Nature article clearly credited NIAID as a funder.

In any event, though, what’s most important is that Auchincloss’ main concern seemed to have been whether any NIAID gain-of-function funding was approved during the pause (which he notes the authors denied). He doesn’t seem to dispute that the experiments qualified as GOF.

Fauci’s main concerns are less clear. Did he understand the broader possibility that NIAD may have helped create the virus? Not strictly according to his phrasing. But his words plainly connote major concern about something. Moreover, there’s no public record here or anywhere else of him denying that the grant financed GOF work until Paul raised it in May.

Yet this Nature article-related evidence doesn’t exhaust the list of concerns Fauci should have. In his excellent May examination on Medium.com of the debate over the virus’ origins, former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade describes in detail NIAID grants in 2018 and 2019 that he contends clearly funded research that falls under the official definition of GOF.

In his words, the grants were intended to enable WIV virologist Shi Zheng-li

“create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes …creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures…and humanized mice….And this information would help predict the likelihood of ‘spillover,’ the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.”

These grants appear to have been compliant with U.S. government policy when they were approved, since the funding pause was lifted at the end of 2017. But again, that isn’t what Paul believes may be a crime on Fauci’s part. The alleged crime has to do with Fauci’s claim that neither NIH nor NIAID ever funded GOF experiments in Wuhan at any time.

The most detailed defense of Fauci has come from the NIH sub-contracter through which its funds were funneled to the WIV – a non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance. But they don’t even come close to letting Fauci off the hook.

For example, Alliance spokesman Robert Kessler told the Washington Post that

”the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples. The NIH grant includes language that some say suggests gain-of-function research; NIH says that is a misinterpretation.”

But of course, collecting the samples was integral to the project. And since NIH is in the dock here, its claim of misinterpretation proves nothing.

Moreover, even Kessler didn’t seem satisfied with this argument, as he went on to contend that “As described in the paper, all but two of the viruses cultured in the lab failed to even replicate.” Not only does this mean that two of them did. His claim recalls notoriously spurious claims on the order of “Sure, I stole the money. But I didn’t steal very much.”

As for Kessler’s insistence that “GoF was never the goal here,” the authors’ own reference to abiding by U.S. government GOF guidelines shows that this was exactly the goal.

Finally, as indicated by my reference to the (legitimate) scientific debate over defining GOF, Kessler may have been right when he told the Post that “gain of function research is the specific process of altering human viruses in order to increase their ability (the titular gain of function) either to spread amongst populations, to infect people, or to cause more severe illness.”

But this position has nothing to do with the charge against Fauci, since the U.S. government definition that should have been controlling his decisions never limited its scope to “altering human viruses.” And in fact, how could it? The origins of the MERS and SARS viruses it mentions still haven’t been pinned down. But according to the NIH itself, research suggests they both “originated in bats.” And of course, the authors of the 2017 Nature paper agree, since they described called their work investigating whether viruses found in non-human mammals could mutate to infect humans.

In the U.S. criminal justice system, you’re innocent until proven guilty.  So legally speaking, Fauci deserves the benefit of the doubt.  Also, evidence might be uncovered absolving him of Paul’s charge.  But the existing evidence looks so compelling, a perjury charge is so serious, and Fauci’s role in CCP Virus-fighting policy remains so important, that Paul’s planned investigation request looks entirely reasonable. 

Moreover, Fauci himself should welcome the probe, for if conducted properly, it could lift this cloud over his head once and for all.  Opposing an investigation, by the same token, can only fuel suspicions that he has something to hide.       

Im-Politic: The U.S. Still Isn’t Even Running in the Global Semiconductor Supremacy Race

Tags

appropriations, authorization, Chuck Schumer, Congress, Defense Department, House of Representatives, Im-Politic, innovation, Intel, microchips, semiconductors, Senate, subsidies, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, technology, TSMC

In a week, the United States will mark an anniversary that no American should want to celebrate: It was last June 10 and 11 that companion bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to increase greatly the U.S. government’s support for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Since I’m a strong backer of such efforts, why am I so downbeat? Because despite the importance of strengthening the American footprint in this sector for both national security and future prosperity, and despite seemingly strong bipartisan support for this effort (at least in principle) nearly a year later, not a single penny has been been spent.

It would actually be reasonable to argue that the federal government took way too long to take even that preliminary step. After all, as I documented in this article last October, America’s global leadership in producing (as opposed to designing) the microchips increasingly crucial to so many defense-related and civilian products and services – and indeed, entire industries – had been waning for decades, and was finally lost in 2017. That’s the year when U.S.-owned Intel became unable to keep up with Taiwan’s Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in turning out semiconductors featuring the world’s smallest circuit sizes – the main indicator of a chip’s capabilities.

So it’s not terribly impressive that American political leaders took two years to begin responding in a serious way. (And P.S. – the executive branch, under President Trump, clearly wasn’t johnny-on-the-spot, either, in using the bully pulpit to sound the alarm and generate support for action.)

Still, the bipartisan nature of the legislative effort – at a time of heated partisanship on virtually every other national issue – seemed cause for encouragement. Even better: Just a month later, the House and Senate passed their respective semiconductor bills.

Since then, however, progress has been sluggish. The Representatives and Senators didn’t manage to get their acts together before that session of Congress ended in order to draft and pass the consensus bill needed to go to the President’s desk for signing. Therefore, the measures died, and work needed to begin all over again this past January, when the new Congress convened.

Semiconductor work was proceeding along another track in late 2020, and resulted in key provisions of the expired bill being incorporated into legislation authorizing the Defense Department’s levels and kinds of spending for this fiscal year. That bill became law this New Year’s Day (over a Trump veto for unrelated reasons), but according to Congress’ procedures, authorizing bills can’t trigger any spending. That requires an appropriations bill – which also must be passed in identical form by both chambers before enactment.

Six months later, there’s still no money flowing. The story is excrutiatingly difficult to follow, but it appears that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York tried to speed up the process in May with an emergency funding measure. Passage seemed likely at month’s end, before the Senate’s scheduled Memorial Day recess, but was stymied at the last minute by a sadly typical array of political shenanigans from both the minority Republicans (whose support was needed because of the Senate’s filibuster provision requiring super-majorities to pass most legislation) and Democrats. (See here and here for good accounts.)

Passage of a similar measure by the House looks to be easier, because of the Democrats’ slightly bigger majority. But there the process is less advanced, since the House Democrats’ own technological competitiveness proposals were only introduced in committee May 25.

It’s not like the U.S. private sector has been standing still. Intel, most significantly, seems determined to reemphasize manufacturing again, and has committed to put lots of money where it’s mouth is. But without a major helping hand from Washington, this campaign is sure to be swamped by the massive amounts of foreign government subsidies for promoting advanced semiconductor manufacturing that have been announced lately. (Here’s a useful summary.)

I’m generally a fan of the cautious approach to policymaking fostered by the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers and checks and balances principles. And I wouldn’t be so fast, like so many Democrats, to junk the Senate’s filibuster rule (which is not found in the Constitution). Yet time is not America’s friend when it comes to regaining lost ground in a fast-moving industry like semiconductors, and if Washington continues its business-as-usual approach on this issue, history will likely conclude that the American political system failed a big test.

Full disclosure:  I own a not-trivial number of shares of TSMC common stock.

Im-Politic: Looking Backward and Forward on Trump and Trumpism

Tags

cancel culture, Capitol Hill, Capitol riots, China, climate change, Congress, Conservative Populism, Constitution, Democrats, election 2016, election 2020, election challenge, Electoral College, establishment Republicans, Hillary Clinton, identity politics, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, incitement, insurrection, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, left-wing authoritarianism, mail-in ballots, nationalism, Populism, Republicans, sedition, separation of powers, tariffs, Ted Cruz, Trade, trade war, Trump, violence

(Please note: This is the linked and lightly edited version of the post put up this morning.)

The fallout from the Capitol Riot will no doubt continue for the foreseeble future – and probably longer – so no one who’s not clairvoyant should be overly confident in assessing the consequences. Even the Trump role in the turbulent transition to a Biden administration may wind up looking considerably different to future generations than at present. Still, some major questions raised by these events are already apparent, and some can even be answered emphatically, starting off with the related topic of how I’m viewing my support for many, and even most, of President Trump’s policies and my vote for him in both of his White House runs.

Specifically, I have no regrets on either ground. As I’ll make clear, I consider Mr. Trump’s words and deeds of the last few weeks to represent major, and completely unnecessary, failures that will rightly at least tarnish his place in history.

All the same, legitimate analyses of many developments and resulting situations need to think about the counterfactual. Here, the counterfactual is a Trump loss to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. And I’m confident that her presidency would have been both disastrous in policy terms (ranging from coddling China to moving steadily toward Open Borders immigration policies to intervening militarily more often and more deeply in numerous foreign conflicts of no importance to the United States) and heatedly divisive in political terms (because of her grifting behavior in fundraising for the various supposedly philanthropic initiatives she started along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton; because of her campaign’s payment for the phony Steele dossier that helped spur the unwarranted and possibly criminal Obama administration investigation of the Trump campaign; and because of intolerant and extremist instincts that would have brought Identity Politics and Cancel Culture to critical mass years earlier than their actual arrivals).

As for the worrisome events of the last several weeks:

>As I’ve written, I don’t regard Mr. Trump’s rhetoric at his rally, or at any point during his election challenges, as incitement to violence in a legal sense. But is it impeachable? That’s a separate question, because Constitutionally speaking, there’s a pretty strong consensus that impeachment doesn’t require a statutory offense. And since, consequently, it’s also a political issue, there’s no objective or definitive answer. It’s literally up to a majority of the House of Representatives. But as I also wrote, I oppose this measure.

>So do I agree that the President should get off scot free? Nope. As I wrote in the aforementioned post, I do regard the Trump record since the election as reckless. I was especially angered by the President’s delay even in calling on the breachers to leave the Capitol Hill building, and indeed the entire Capitol Hill crowd, to “go home.” In fact, until that prompting – which was entirely too feeble for my tastes – came, I was getting ready to call for his resignation.

>Wouldn’t impeachment still achieve the important objective of preventing a dangerously unstable figure from seeking public office again? Leaving aside the “dangerously unstable” allegation, unless the President is guilty (as made clear in an impeachment proceding) of a major statutory crime (including obstruction of justice, or incitement to violence or insurrection), I’d insist on leaving that decision up to the American people. As New York City talk radio host Frank Morano argued earlier this week, the idea that the Congress should have the power to save the nation from itself is as dangerously anti-democratic as it is laughable.

>Of course, this conclusion still leaves the sedition and insurrection charges on the table – mainly because, it’s contended, the President and many of his political supporters (like all the Republican Senators and House members who supported challenging Electoral College votes during the January 6 certification procedure) urged Congress to make an un-Constitutional, illegal decision: overturning an election. Others add that the aforementioned and separate charge not includes endorsing violence but urging the January 6 crowd to disrupt the certification session.

>First, there’s even less evidence that the lawmakers who challenged the Electoral College vote were urging or suggesting the Trump supporters in the streets and on the lawn to break in to the Capitol Building and forcibly end the certification session than there’s evidence that Mr. Trump himself gave or suggested this directive.

>Second, I agree with the argument – made by conservatives such as Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul (often a Trump supporter) – that authorizing a branch of the federal government unilaterally to nullify the results of elections that the Constitution stipulates should be run by the states is a troubling threat to the Constitutional principle of separation of powers. I’m also impressed with a related argument: that sauce for the goose could wind up as sauce for the gander.

In other words, do Trump supporters want to set a precedent that could enable Congress unilaterally to overturn the election of another conservative populist with something like a second wave of Russia collusion charges? Include me out.

>Further, if the Trump supporters who favored the Electoral College challenge are guilty of insurrection or fomenting it, and should be prosecuted or censured or punished in some way, shouldn’t the same go for the Democrats who acted in the exact same ways in other recent elections? (See here and here.) P.S. Some are still Members of Congress.

>Rather than engage in this kind of What About-ism, and help push the country further down the perilous road of criminalizing political behavior and political differences, I’d much rather consider these challenges as (peaceful) efforts – and in some cases sincere efforts – to insert into the public record the case that these elections were marred by serious irregularities.

>How serious were these irregularities? Really serious – and all but inevitable given the decisions (many pre-pandemic) to permit mass mail-in voting. Talk about a system veritably begging to be abused. But serious enough to change the outcome? I don’t know, and possibly we’ll never know. Two things I do know, however:

First, given the thin Election 2020 margins in many states, it’s clear that practices like fraudulent vote-counting, ballot-harvesting, and illegal election law changes by state governments and courts (e.g., Pennsylvania) don’t have to be widespread. Limiting them to a handful of states easily identified as battlegrounds, and a handful of swing or other key districts within those states, would do the job nicely.

Second, even though I believe that at least some judges should have let some of the Trump challenges proceed (if only because the bar for conviction in such civil cases is much lower than for criminal cases), I can understand their hesitancy because despite this low-ish bar, overturning the election results for an entire state, possibly leading to national consequences, is a bridge awfully far. Yes, we’re a nation of laws, and ideally such political considerations should be completely ignored. But when we’re talking about a process so central to the health of American democracy, politics can never be completely ignored, and arguably shouldn’t.

So clearly, I’m pretty conflicted. What I’m most certain about, however, is that mass mail-in ballots should never, ever be permitted again unless the states come up with ways to prevent noteworthy abuse. Florida, scene of an epic election procedures failure in 2000 (and other screwups), seems to have come up with the fixes needed. It’s high time for other states to follow suit.

As for the politics and policy going forward:

>President Trump will remain influential nationally, and especially in conservative ranks – partly because no potentially competitive rivals are in sight yet, and possibly because Americans have such short memories. But how influential? Clearly much of his base remains loyal – and given his riot-related role, disturbingly so. How influential? Tough to tell. Surely the base has shrunk some. And surely many Independents have split off for good, too. (See, e.g., this poll.) Perhaps most important, barring some unexpected major developments (which obviously no one can rule out), this withering of Trump support will probably continue – though the pace is tough to foresee also.

>The Republican Party has taken a major hit, too, and the damage could be lasting. In this vein, it’s important to remember that the GOP was relegated to minority status literally for decades by President Herbert Hoover’s failure to prevent and then contain the Great Depression. Those aforementioned short American memories could limit the damage. But for many years, it’s clear that Democratic political, campaigns, and conservative Never Trumper groups like the Lincoln Project, will fill print, broadcast, and social media outlets with political ads with video of the riot and Mr. Trump’s rally and similar statements, and the effects won’t be trivial.

>What worries me most, though, is that many of the urgently needed policies supported and implemented by the Trump administration will be discredited. Immigration realism could be the first casualty, especially since so many of the establishment Republicans in Congress were such willing flunkies of the corporate Cheap Labor Lobby for so much of the pre-Trump period, and Open Borders- and amnesty-friendly stances are now defining characteristics of the entire Democratic Party.

The Trump China policies may survive longer, because the bipartisan consensus recognizing – at least rhetorically – the futility and dangers of their predecessors seems much stronger. But given Biden’s long record as a China coddler and enabler, the similar pre-Trump views of those establishment Republicans, and their dependence on campaign contributions from Wall Street and offshoring-happy multinational companies, important though quiet backtracking, particularly on trade, could begin much sooner than commonly assumed. One distinct possibility that wouldn’t attract excessive attention: meaningfully increasing the number of exemptions to the Trump China and remaining metals tariffs to companies saying they can’t find affordable, or any, alternatives.

>Much of the political future, however, will depend on the record compiled by the Biden administration. Not only could the new President fail on the economic and virus-fighting fronts, but on the national unity front. Here, despite his reputation as a moderate and a healer, Biden’s charge that Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have used Nazi-like tactics, and race-mongering comments accusing law enforcement of handling the overwhelmingly white Capitol Rioters more gingerly than the racial justice protesters earlier this year represent a lousy start. And as his harsh recent rhetoric suggests, Biden could also overreach greatly on issues like climate change, immigration, and Cancel Culture and Identity Politics. Such Biden failures could even shore up some support for Mr. Trump himself.

>How big is the violence-prone fringe on the American Right? We’ll know much more on Inauguration Day, when law enforcement says it fears “armed protests” both in Washington, D.C. and many state capitals. What does seem alarmingly clear, though – including from this PBS/Marist College poll – is that this faction is much bigger than the relatively small number of Capitol breachers.

>Speaking of the breachers, the nature of the crimes they committed obviously varied among individuals. But even those just milling about were guilty of serious offenses and should be prosecuted harshly. The circumstances surrounding those who crossed barriers on the Capitol grounds is somewhat murkier. Those who knocked down this (flimsy) fencing were just as guilty as the building breachers. But lesser charges – and possibly no charges – might be justifiable for those who simply walked past those barriers because they were no longer visible, especially if they didn’t enter the Capitol itself.

>I’m not security expert, but one question I hope will be asked (among so many that need asking) in the forthcoming investigations of the Capitol Police in particular – why weren’t the Capitol Building doors locked as soon as the approach of the crowd became visible? The number of doors is limited, and they’re anything but flimsy. The likely effectiveness of this move can be seen from an incident in October, 2018 – when barred Supreme Court doors left anti-Brett Kavanaugh protesters futilely pounding from the outside when they attempted to disrupt the new Supreme Court Justice’s swearing in ceremony. Window entry into the Capitol would have remained an option, but the number of breachers who used this tactic seems to have been negligible.

What an extraordinary irony if one of the worst days in American history mightn’t have even happened had one of the simplest and most commonsensical type of precaution not been taken.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: How to Bypass Washington on CCP Virus Relief

Tags

Americans for Tax Fairness, billionaires, CCP Virus, Congress, coronavirus, COVID 19, Covid relief, Institute for Policy Studies, stimulus, super-rich, woke capitalism, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s getting pretty clear that, even if the various anti-CCP Virus vaccines started getting stuck into Americans’ arms right away, many in the United States would be facing major financial hardships for many months because Congress and the administration still can’t get their act together to pass a meaningful relief bill.

My own hunch is that pretty full normality will return for most of the country by the end of next year. Through then, however, and afterwards, the personal service-oriented businesses big and small in particular that employ so many Americans in relatively low paying jobs will struggle to return to business- and employment-as usual. Moreover, continued budget crises in many states and localities could result in both significant, lasting layoffs of government workers, and big and equally lasting cuts in the social services needed by the needy.

Luckily, thanks to the work of the progressive organizations Americans for Tax Fairness (AFT) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) a very promising bandaid has come into view: stimulus checks written voluntarily by America’s billionaires.

These two groups want the funds to be generated by an “emergency wealth tax on billionaire profiteers,” but there’s no reason to believe that such a measure would pass the Senate, assuming it turned Democratic. And even the House might balk, given that the Democrats’ majority will be so narrow.

There’s nothing, however, stopping the billionaires – who AFT and IPS say number 651 – getting together and furnishing such assistance on their own. Distribution could be handled just as official Washington handled the previous $1,200 checks.  Or the billionaires could set up their own system. (Maybe through Amazon and Fedex and other delivery companies?)

These funds won’t cure everything that will keep ailing Americans and their economy for the foreseeable future. But the effects would be considerable.

Specifically, if the 651 came up with the $3,000 per check recommended by the two organizations for every inhabitant of the country, the total 330 million U.S. population would receive a total of just under $1 trillion. That sum would represent a big fraction of the $3.5 trillion in federal budget resources and tax relief signed into law this year so far. And it’s somewhat bigger than the $908 billion framework for a compromise package put forward by a bipartisan group of Senators earlier this month.

Moreover, the uber-rich themselves could clearly afford this spending. AFT and IPS estimate that the billionaire class has increased its net worth by $1 trillion since the pandemic reached the United States. And its members would still be left with $3 trillion in assets.

In addition, unlike a big emergency wealth tax increase – a cash cow that government would be reluctant to repeal, at least in full, once normality returns – the billionaires’ check-writing would be a one-off measure, intended to help Americans keep their heads above water while the economy remains in extreme distress.

At the same time, if the pandemic emergency lasts longer than expected (e.g., because vaccine immunity doesn’t last as long as widely assumed), nothing would prevent the billionaires from coming to the (partial) rescue again, at whatever scale they chose. Even better – the 651 could also reach out to the somewhat less super-rich and urge them to lend a hand as well. It’s not like they’re without influence, and are unfamiliar with peer pressure – or outright arm-twisting.

Further, not only would the general politics of tax increases be avoided by privatizing virus relief. All the other conflicting priorities and legislative shenanigans that have held up progress on this particular package would be bypassed altogether, too – like CCP Virus liability insurance for business and bailouts for allegedly spendthrift state and local governments. And of course, no deficit hawks (phony or genuine) inside or outside government could object, since no public funds would be spent.

The one important objection I can think of is that billionaire action on this scale could convince politicians that they’re off the virus-relief hook for good. But it’s also possible that a privately financed aid package could shame collective Washington into subsequent needed action. In fact, this would be a great lobbying cause for the billionaires – along with threats to withhold campaign contributions from lawmakers or Presidents they’ve identified as obstacles.

The American super-rich haven’t blown off their fellow compatriots entirely during the pandemic. And of course, they’re major contributors to many non-CCP Virus-related good causes as well. But from what’s publicly known, their pandemic-related donations has been astonishingly meager, and their records seem Scrooge-ier still given how they’ve greatly they’ve become enriched collectively during the crisis.

Given the rise of “woke capitalism” in recent years, and the corporate world’s embrace – at least rhetorically – of social responsibility, it’s obvious that America’s super-rich fear they have a serious image problem. It’s hard to think of a better way to improve their standing than by springing to their compatriots’ rescue at a time of such dire need.