Im-Politic: A Chinese Link to Black Lives Matter?

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Alicia Garza, Black Futures Lab, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter Too, BLM, China, Chinese Progressive Association, election interference, Heritage Foundation, Im-Politic, race relations, racism, reparations, structural racism, systemic racism, The Federalist, wealth gap, white fragility

Our times are so racially fraught that even I (someone who rarely feels defensive about my views) feel the need to start out this post by specifying that I am not a systemic or structural racist or even an unwitting example of white fragility. Indeed, I’m so woke on the issue of continuing racial discrimination in America that I’ve come out for reparations to remedy what I see as one recent example of open-and-shut racial injustice whose victims would be relatively easy to identify and compensate. And I’ve called attention to the still yawning racial wealth gap. 

I don’t even have significant problems with the phrase “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) – although I like “Black Lives Matter, Too” because it avoids the possibility of either-or interpretations while making clear that there’s a still a racial gap that must be eliminated.

But the various organizations and coalitions invoking this phrase that have sprung up lately? I’m not so sure about many of them, especially since their proclaimed agendas often go far beyond securing racial justice. (See, e.g., here.) And just yesterday I found out about another potential problem with these groups that seems to support a point I made in a recent article about the massive and under-reported scale of Chinese interference in American public life – signs of close connections between a key BLM organization the Chinese government.

As reported in The Federalist, a conservative publication, based on research by the equally conservative Heritage Foundation, an outfit called Black Futures Lab (BFL) is funded mainly by an organization called the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA). The Lab’s own website, moreover, confirms this finding.

It’s true that BFL is only one group in the BLM constellation. But it’s no ordinary group. Its “Principal” is Alicia Garza, who describes herself, and is credited in news reports, as a founder of the BLM movement.

It’s also true that the CPA isn’t officially affiliated with the Chinese government. But Beijing is certainly a fan of what’s been described as its Boston chapter, as this article (cited in the Heritage Foundation report) from its official mouthpiece demonstrates. One charge I could not independently corroborate – the claim that the Chinese flag-raising event the article mentions was “hosted by the Consulate General of China in New York.”

Consulate officials clearly attended the other event – a flag-raiser – and spoke. But unike the aforementioned Boston passport-focused event, I was unable to find evidence that they played any organizing role.

So maybe the cooperation doesn’t go any further than attending (and sometimes organizing) the kinds of celebrations that might simply be ethnic solidarity events. But according to this study (an undergraduate thesis, but one from Stanford University by a student with clearly progressive sympathies), the admiration between CPA and the Chinese government is decidedly mutual:

“The CPA began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China [PRC] organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and ‘serving the people’.

Further, although “Its activities were independent of the Communist Party of China or the US,” it “worked with other pro-PRC groups within the US and San Francisco Bay Area.”

Again, the prospect can’t be ruled out that Beijing is content simply to admire CPA’s efforts to improve social services for Chinese Americans or even help organize Chinese American events with the group. But given the influence I thoroughly documented in the aforementioned magazine article that China has gained over major American institutions; and given the unusual interest displayed by a group like CPA, which is exclusively focused on Chinese Americans (as it makes clear) in an organization that says it’s exclusively focused on African Americans (especially since serious problem of poverty and discrimination still clearly dog Chinese Americans, according to CPA), grounds for further investigation don’t exactly seem to be lacking.

Indeed, as known by anyone with legal or law enforcement experience, or most fans of detective stories, showing that defendants have had “motive, opportunity and means” is a venerable framework for investigating and determining wrongdoing. When it comes to fomenting racial tensions in the United States, the Chinese government surely has all three. So let’s hope that the federal government (both the Exective and Congress), as well as the supposed watchdogs of our democracy, the news media, look into China’s involvement with the Black Lives Matter movement as aggressively as it’s looked into other charges of improper foreign interference in America’s politics.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Trump Tariffs Will Devastate American Businesses? Seriously?

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China, Heritage Foundation, inputs, Investors Business Daily, manufacturing, Obama, productivity, profits, regulations, regulatory reform, tariffs, Tax Cuts and Job Act, Tax Foundation, taxes, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Since the Trump administration’s actual and potential tariffs became an issue,  opponents (including many American businesses) have complained loudly that these moves would ruin their global competitiveness by raising input costs. And in a supposedly devastating irony, they insist that these higher prices would offset much of the impact of the new tax cuts championed by the President.

If only looking broadly at recent changes in business costs justified such concerns. Or even came close. In fact, the big picture shows that domestic U.S. businesses – including steel users and companies that rely on parts and components from China in particular – have received benefits that will dwarf the costs created by tariffs. These higher costs, moreover, should be all the more acceptable given that a tariff-centered approach is the only response to longstanding predatory foreign economic practices like government-subsidized overcapacity and officially enabled intellectual property theft – whose gravity is now (finally) widely recognized – that hasn’t already failed.

To take one typical example, the Tax Foundation, a think tank that’s called the new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “once-in-a-generation pro-growth tax reform,” thinks the following finding decimates the case against the proposed U.S. China tariffs: They’ll “offset more than a quarter of the tax cuts for 2018.” But by definition, for business, some three-quarters of the benefits of generational tax policy improvement will remain in place. (The exact share is unclear because the Tax Foundation includes consumer costs in its figure for overall tariff increase costs, but it’s no doubt roughly comparable.) In return, at least potentially, major threats to the global trading system will be eliminated or at least reduced significantly. This is an unacceptable trade-off?

And tax cuts are hardly the only major helping hand business has received from the Trump administration. According to one major supporter, the editorial page staff of Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), the regulatory cuts and changes accomplished so far by the President amount to a “Yuuuge” promise kept. Citing a (sympatico) Heritage Foundation study, the publication specified that the net gains for business far exceeded the alleged dollar amount of relief anticipated from the first phase of the new regulatory reform program – $645 million.

For the Trump accession to the White House meant that American companies would no longer be contending with an Obama administration that imposed $120 billion in regulatory costs on the nation’s economy each year, and wouldn’t need to worry about a Democratic successor presumably likely to continue down this road. That’s quite a turnaround.

And the true scale of the reversal is far greater still, for according to Heritage, “the impacts [of the Obama policies] have not been fully quantified for a significant number of rules, and…many of the worst effects — the loss of freedom and opportunity — are incalculable.” In sum, according to another analyst quoted by IBD, the Trump administration’s approach is “one of the most significant developments in regulatory policy in decades.”

Finally, it’s not as if U.S.-based businesses have been hurting financially lately. Corporate profits are near all-time highs as a share of the total economy. So are manufacturers’ profits.

And revealingly, American manufacturing’s productivity growth has been lousy lately, signaling that these firms have enormous potential to absorb the higher input costs generated by tariffs by achieving greater efficiencies.

Not that there may not be numerous convincing arguments against the Trump administration’s imposed and potential tariffs. But can American business, and its enablers in the nation’s chattering classes, at least stop pretending that devastating cost hits to their operations represent one of them?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Against Government and Off the Deep End

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basic research, drug discovery, FBN, Fox Business Network, government, Heritage Foundation, libertarians, National Institutes of Health, NIH, pharmaceuticals, Stephen Moore, Stuart Varney, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I really hate the growing tendency across the political spectrum to label ideological opponents as “stupid,” or something similar, but all too often, the shoe really does fit – as the Fox Business Network helpfully reminded us yesterday.

Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney decided to get worked up over a statement by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren arguing that “Drug companies make great contributions but so do taxpayers….In other words, we built those medical innovations together.” His objection? Warren’s position shows that she’s “a collectivist. She’s saying there’s no such thing as individual liberty and the pursuit of ideas on an individual basis. No, we’re collectivists.” And ostensibly for confirmation, he interviewed Heritage Foundation Chief Economist Stephen Moore. You decide who came off worse.

Was it Varney, who seemed totally incapable of processing Warren’s acknowledgment that “Drug companies make great contributions” to medical innovation? I’m not sure how else to explain his accusation that her position revealed that “Senator Warren is a collectivist. She’s saying there’s no such thing as individual liberty and the pursuit of ideas on an individual basis. No, we’re collectivists.”

Or did Moore give his mindless libertarianism more than a good run for its money? He responded that “It tells you a lot about the modern day Democratic Party that a nutcase like Elizabeth Warren is in first or second place in the early polling for these Democratic primaries. I mean, Elizabeth Warren is a member of the Sandinista wing of the Democratic party, right? She doesn’t believe in the free enterprise system.”

But since Varney is simply a journalist and, according to recent decades’ standards, doesn’t need to know what he’s talking about, I give the ignorance award here to Moore. The Heritage maven actually acknowledged that “the NIH [National Institute of Health] does participate in” the drug discovery process. But, he explained, “they do the basic research. The real blockbusters are developed by private pharmaceutical companies and bio-engineering companies that do incredible work.”

Moore’s clear implication: The basic research performed by NIH is not “incredible work.” Or at least not nearly so incredible. Apparently he has managed to climb the conservative think tank career ladder – and the Wall Street Journal editorial page ladder before – without learning that without enough basic research, the blockbuster flow, and those similar breakthroughs in other fields, dries up.

At one point, though, Moore suggested a less laughable argument. As he put it, “It costs sometimes a half a billion dollars in investment capital – private investment capital, Stewart – to develop these drugs. And for then Elizabeth Warren to come along and say oh, by the way, you know, if you hit a winner, we’re going to take the profits away from you – I think that’s not just bad economics. This is even more important, Stewart. It’s terrible for our our health, because if you delay or disrupt the development of these new drugs, you’re basically, you know, a death sentence for people who have Alzheimers or cancer or heart disease or others.”

Moore continued: “…If you tax something, you get less of it. It’s a very simple economic message. And by the way, the research that goes into these drugs – when I mention it costs half a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, you know only one out of ten of these even succeeds. So the amount of risk capital that goes into these is gigantic. If you don’t give those investors a return, we’re not going to get any more medical progress in this country.”

In other words, Moore’s great fear is that the Warren (and presumably many other) Democrats so hate the private sector and so idolize government that they want to tax the vitality out of the American pharmaceutical industry to finance the (marginally important) NIH. Stripped of unconscionable exaggeration, it seems as if Moore is at least advancing a reasonable proposition here – that the U.S. political system hasn’t yet found the right tax policy balance between adequately fostering private sector medical innovation and adequately funding the kind of basic medical-related research that’s almost never undertaken by free enterprise.

If that’s the case, though, why didn’t Moore say so openly? Because he’s totally desperate to get TV time from a government-hating know-nothing like Stuart Varney?