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Making News: On National Radio Tonight on America’s Healthcare Goods Foreign Dependency

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, drugs, health security, Making News, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, PPE, protective gear, The Jim Bohannon Show, Westwood One, Wuhan virus

I’m pleased to announce that I’m slated to appear tonight on “The Jim Bohannon Show” on the nation-wide Westwood One network.  The segment, scheduled to begin at 10 PM EST, will deal with America’s dangerous reliance on imports for vital medicines, medical devices, and protective gear for healthcare workers.

You can listen live on-line at this link to this timely discussion of the nation’s at-risk health security.  And as usual, I’ll post a link to the podcast when it’s available.

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

Im-Politic: The China/Biden Opportunity Sanders Needs to Seize

09 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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Tags

Bernie Sanders, China, China virus, coronavirus, Democrats, drugs, election 2020, health security, Im-Politic, Jobs, Joe Biden, manufacturing, Michigan primary, pharmaceuticals, technology, Trade, World Trade Organization, WTO

Since he emerged as a major rival to Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has been criticized for lacking a killer instinct. Specifically, he’s generally declined to attack his competitors as harshly as many supporters and supposed political pros would like. (The articles here and here nicely frame the history.)  

I don’t feel qualified to weigh in on this debate, but with a crucial primary coming up in Michigan tomorrow, it’s clear to me that the progressive standard-bearer could use more of a killer instinct on a big policy issue: former Vice President Joe Biden’s record on China issues.

Sanders has decided to assail Biden on his overall trade record, which makes sense considering the latter’s support for the kind of trade deals and policy decisions (like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the rush to expand commerce of all kinds with China) that have hammered workers in manufacturing-heavy states like Michigan. 

But his focus is far too narrow, especially considering developments over the last few years and particularly the last few months. For the Democratic Socialist is solely emphasizing the job and wages loss resulting from agreements like the Biden-endorsed deal that supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 – which granted Beijing vital legal protection against unilateral American efforts to fight its protectionism and other forms of economic predation. That mattered greatly because many of these Chinese transgressions persisted post-WTO and by all accounts have worsened under the regime of Xi Jinping.

It’s now clear, however, that the China threat is even worse because it’s far broader; that Biden as long-time Senator from Delaware in particular flunked those non-economic policy tests, too; and that the biggest arguably was the WTO vote. So despite signs from polls that Americans generally (though not necessarily in manufacturing centers) aren’t as opposed to pre-Trump trade policies as in the past, the same surveys make clear that all manner of China-related concerns are mounting, and that therefore hitting Biden for supporting measures that have clearly increased Beijing’s wealth, power, and consequent capacities to threaten key U.S. interests in many fields would succeed roaringly.

Indeed, Biden’s stated justification in 2000 for favoring the crucial WTO decision looks especially and dangerously loopy nearly two decades later, when a Chinese cover-up helped the coronavirus become a serious threat to the United States and the rest of the world at large, when American leaders have finally become aware of how the industrial offshoring accelerated by the WTO move has made the nation shockingly dependent on healthcare products from China, and when the PRC’s official press has just published an article all but threatening to plunge the United States into coronavirus hell by blocking the export of the drugs and their chemical ingredients needed to fight the pandemic.

For in 2000, Biden made clear that he mainly supported China’s entry into the trade body – and ending the policy of granting Beijing tariff breaks only on an annual basis and only if its repressive human rights practices improved – in the belief that this new approach would both promote political and economic freedom in China and help “encourage” its “development as a productive, responsible member of the world community.”

Moreover, Biden not only guzzled the kool-aid of claims that WTO entry would foster greater political as well as economic freedoms in China. He argued that such change was exactly what most of China’s leaders intended. These dictators, he argued,

“have consciously undertaken–for their own reasons, not ours–a fundamental transformation of the communist system that so long condemned their great people to isolation, poverty, and misery. They have been forced to acknowledge the failure of communism, and have conceded the irrefutable superiority of an open market economy.”

Biden was right in noting that economic reforms already by then undertaken had greatly improved living standards for enormous numbers of Chinese. But he was completely wrong in believing that “this growing prosperity” would start bringing more democratic reform and a move toward genuinely open markets. Nor did he foresee that because China’s economic progress depended on amassing ever greater trade surpluses in ever more sophisticated products – and especially with the United States, the world’s biggest, most lucrative market – much of the rise in Chinese living standards would come at the expense of American domestic manufacturing and its workforce.

In fact, Biden explicitly scoffed at fears that WTO entry would bring about “the collapse of the American manufacturing economy, as China, a nation with the impact on the world economy about the size of the Netherlands, suddenly becomes our major economic competitor.”

But in light of China’s growing international belligerence particularly under Xi Jinping, it’s disturbing that the then-Senator – supposedly a foreign policy expert – was equally blind to the likelihood that a WTO-fostered “emergence of a prosperous, independent, China on the world stage” would enable China to flout “international norms in the areas of trade, security, and human rights” whenever it chose, rather than strengthen China’s loyalty to that “liberal global order.” 

Sanders and other critics of the WTO decision rightly derided all of these declared convictions. But I’ve yet to hear him spotlight the dangers to America’s global technology leadership and therefore national security (including health security) generated and continually worsened by the richer, stronger China made possible by the policies supported by Biden and the rest of the bipartisan globalist establishment that ran Washington, D.C. – and U.S. China policy – before Donald Trump’s election as President. P.S. A China that achieved its strategic goals could decimate American living standards still further.

This presidential campaign has already featured so many ups and downs, and so many front-runners who have risen and fallen, that Michigan probably won’t be  Sanders’ last chance to mount a broad-brush attack on Biden’s atrocious China record. (Just FYI, as of this afternoon, the polls show Sanders getting thumped.) The continuing coronavirus fallout could create further opportunities for him as well.

What is clear, however, and to large, growing numbers of Americans, is that enabling the rise of China ranks as one of the most potentially calamitous mistakes in American history.  And the sooner Sanders starts exploiting Biden’s role in enabling it (which continued during the do-nothing Obama administration), the better.     

Stunning Opioid Addiction Findings in Maryland

27 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Uncategorized

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addiction, American Society of Addiction Medicine, drugs, heroin, Maryland, opioids, prescription pain-killers, University of Maryland, Washington Post

Did you ever read something in the news that just knocked your socks off? Especially since it made clear that a problem that was easy to dismiss as happening somewhere far from home is actually happening painfully close to home? I just did – and it was strangely buried in a Washington Post article today.

According to the piece, no less than 34 percent of residents of my adopted state of Maryland say that they “have…family or close friends who are or have been addicted to prescription pain pills or heroin….” That’s about one in three!

To be sure, that doesn’t mean that 34 percent of Marylanders are addicted themselves. But it means that addiction has affected the lives of more than one in three in major ways.

Some of the various demographic breakdowns in the Washington Post-University of Maryland survey that produced these results were almost as stunning. To be sure, one result mirrored what has been increasingly reported on a national level: More whites (38 percent) than non-whites (30 percent) or African-Americans specifically (32 percent) reported relatives or close friends who are addicts. In addition, the wealthier (especially with annual incomes over $100,000) were a good deal less likely than those earning less than $50,000 to be so impacted by addiction (by 41 to 29 percent).

But the difference between the share of those closely affected who held college degrees (31 percent) and those that lacked such degrees (36 percent) sure didn’t strike me as all that wide. And despite the above racial results, the region in Maryland with the highest share of residents affected was heavily African-American Baltimore (42 percent) and those parts of the state outside the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area (41 percent) – which can be pretty white. Yet addiction had a much smaller impact on also heavily African-American Prince George’s County in the D.C. area (where I live) – 22 percent.

I tried to find some information on how these Maryland results compare with those of other states. One study that looks pretty authoritative – this one from the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). As of 2015, it found that just under 2.6 million Americans suffered from the kinds of opioid abuse problems studied in the Post-University of Maryland poll. Given that the total U.S. population is currently estimated at nearly 325 million, that makes the Maryland figures seem astronomical (even keeping in mind the difference between the ASAM figures, which presented the numbers of addicts, and the Post-University of Maryland survey, which gauged how many individuals knew an addict well).

But even if the latter poll is off by 100 percent, and the problem is only half as wide-ranging as it judges, that still strikes me pointing to a shockingly high level of actual addiction. All the more reason to be thankful that this scourge is finally attracting serious national attention, and to hope that this growing spotlight leads to effective and lasting solutions.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Post’s Tradition of Immigration Inanity Continues

26 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by Alan Tonelson in (What's Left of) Our Economy

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Border Crisis, Central America, drugs, immigrant children, Immigration, immigration reform, violence, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s now at the point where I cringe each morning when I open the Washington Post, dreading what transparently tendentious pro-Open Borders/amnesty immigration inanity will greet me not only on the editorial pages, but on the news pages. This morning’s edition certainly didn’t disappoint.

Just below the fold, on page one, appeared a report from correspondent Pamela Constable titled “Deportation policies may have fueled rise of gangs.” The implication couldn’t be more obvious: Many, at least, of the Central American children streaming toward the United States have been fleeing violence increasingly threatening them from drug criminals. So the longstanding U.S. practice of deporting immigrant drug gang members responsible for further immiserating many American inner cities was portrayed by Constable as a possible policy blunder, or at least a classic example of unintended consequences deserving the spotlight.

Predictably, Constable had no trouble finding supposed experts critical of what they viewed as the shortsightedness – at best – of the deportations. Since this view is widespread among the influential supporters of immigration reform, that was reasonable enough. What wasn’t reasonable was Constable’s neglect of the screamingly obvious rejoinder: Just what were U.S. officials supposed to do? Keep the gang members in the United States where they either would add to prison overcrowding even if they were convicted, or would quickly return to the streets after wrist-slapping plea bargain deals?

Of course, the policy critics quoted by Constable believe they have the answer: More U.S. foreign aid that can turn Central American countries into the kinds of places where drug trafficking and gangs won’t breed in the first place. But such initiatives – also requested by the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran presidents at their meeting with President Obama yesterday – have a long record of failure, mainly because Central America was so ruined by centuries of Spanish colonial rule that it’s been stripped of the social and cultural prerequisites of successful economic development.

Therefore, as is so often the case, Washington is faced with an enduring condition that’s mistaken as a problem — which by definition has a feasible solution. It’s bad enough that American leaders can’t keep the distinction clear. Neither can an American chattering class whose only valid raison d’etre is realistically monitoring the government’s performance, but that keeps pretending that the intrinsic limits of human knowledge, wisdom, and good will are “news.”

Equally moronic – but more excusable, given its appearance on the op-ed page – was Colman McCarthy’s effort to compare what he depicts as the despicably un-American cruelty of today’s immigration restrictionists (the “send’-‘em-all-back crowd and the build-bigger-walls cabal”) with the vastly more welcoming attitude that he implies prevailed in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Singled out for special praise today and back in the day are “justice-seeking” immigration lawyers – like his late father.

McCarthy’s article was of special interest to me because his family lived on the north shore of Long Island, close to where I grew up. And I’m sure his father was a fine man. But what McCarthy somehow forgot to emphasize is that the newcomers for whom his father did so much pro bono or largely free work, both in the courtroom and in terms of job placement, came to the United States legally. McCarthy did mention that his father “met and befriended them at Ellis Island” – meaning that they were admitted only after passing through that official inspection station. Yet the author apparently regards immigrants who ignored the law and jumped the line as meriting the exact same status as immigrants who played by the rules.

Something else of supreme relevance overlooked by McCarthy – last year, the United States allowed more than 990,000 immigrants to become permanent, legal U.S. residents. Maybe in his next column, he’ll explain the apparent paradox of today’s allegedly inhumane restrictionists overwhelmingly supporting this influx.

A final note: McCarthy quite accurately describes how the immigrants to the Long Island of his childhood often found decent-paying jobs from the Gatsby-esque one percenters who were building palatial estates all along what would become known as the Gold Coast. Nowadays, as I documented in a recent Fortune Magazine column, America’s wealthiest employ more than their fair share of the current generation of immigrants, especially illegals. But the wages paid are generally so low that these newcomers still need plenty of social services – which are paid disproportionately by taxes from the lower 99 percent.

McCarthy has long been a pillar of the social justice community. To be genuinely true to his avowed principles, he should wholeheartedly back my proposal to boost taxes on the rich to pay most of the costs of the greater immigrant presence that he – and they – so strongly favor.

Blogs I Follow

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(What’s Left Of) Our Economy

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy

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Im-Politic

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Signs of the Apocalypse

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Those Stubborn Facts

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  • Those Stubborn Facts
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The Snide World of Sports

  • (What's Left of) Our Economy
  • Following Up
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  • Golden Oldies
  • Guest Posts
  • Housekeeping
  • Housekeeping
  • Im-Politic
  • In the News
  • Making News
  • Our So-Called Foreign Policy
  • The Snide World of Sports
  • Those Stubborn Facts
  • Uncategorized

Guest Posts

  • (What's Left of) Our Economy
  • Following Up
  • Glad I Didn't Say That!
  • Golden Oldies
  • Guest Posts
  • Housekeeping
  • Housekeeping
  • Im-Politic
  • In the News
  • Making News
  • Our So-Called Foreign Policy
  • The Snide World of Sports
  • Those Stubborn Facts
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Current Thoughts on Trade

Terence P. Stewart

Protecting U.S. Workers

Marc to Market

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Alastair Winter

Chief Economist at Daniel Stewart & Co - Trying to make sense of Global Markets, Macroeconomics & Politics

Smaulgld

Real Estate + Economics + Gold + Silver

Reclaim the American Dream

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Mickey Kaus

Kausfiles

David Stockman's Contra Corner

Washington Decoded

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Upon Closer inspection

Keep America At Work

Sober Look

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Credit Writedowns

Finance, Economics and Markets

GubbmintCheese

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

VoxEU.org: Recent Articles

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Michael Pettis' CHINA FINANCIAL MARKETS

New Economic Populist

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

George Magnus

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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