Im-Politic: The New York Times’ DeSantis Hatchet Job Flunks Even the Competence Test

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demographics, Florida, Im-Politic, Immigration, journalism, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Mainstream Media, MSM, Regime Media, Ron DeSantis, The New York Times

Memo to New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro, her editors at the paper’s opinion section, and indeed all journalists: If you’re going to do a takedown piece on a major politician, or anyone, try to display at least minimal competence.

Had Garcia-Navarro and her editors followed this advice, they’d have never published a recent hatchet job on Ron DeSantis, the Florida Republican governor and possible 2024 presidential candidate, that’s a monument to factual cherry- picking and outright misinformation trafficking, and a disgrace even to the increasingly debased practice of opinion writing.

Garcia-Navarro concentrates on debunking the claims of DeSantis and his supporters that the governor “has overseen a growing economy” and that. “Florida now has the fastest-growing population in the country.” (I reported on the latter and related developments here.)

Actually, the author claims,

“Florida is not a model for the nation, unless the nation wants to become unaffordable for everyone except rich snowbirds.

“While my home state’s popularity might indeed seem like good news for a governor with presidential ambitions, a closer look shows that Florida is underwater demographically. Most of those flocking there are aging boomers with deep pockets, adding to the demographic imbalance for what is already one of the grayest populations in the nation. This means that Florida won’t have the younger workers needed to care for all those seniors. And while other places understand that immigrants, who often work in the service sector and agriculture, two of Florida’s main industries, are vital to replenishing aging populations, Mr. DeSantis and the state G.O.P. are not exactly immigrant-friendly, enacting legislation to limit the ability of people with uncertain legal status to work in the state.”

One obvious reason for doubting Garcia-Navarro’s arguments is the lack of documentation. That’s likely because had the author decided to present the principal facts, or had her editors insisted upon this, they ‘d have watched this indictment melt away.

A balanced picture of Florida’s demographics would have begun by noting that DeSantis has only occupied the state house in Tallahassee since the beginning of 2019. Anyone familiar with the Sunshine States knows that it’s been a popular retirement destination for decades.

It’s possible that DeSantis has had such a powerful impact on Florida’s demographics that these patterns have changed dramatically in the last four years? Well, yes. But the statistics surely have been distorted – like virtually all U.S. data – by the CCP Virus.

In any event, Florida’s own state government shows that the state’s (higher-than-the-U.S. Average) median age rose 0.71 percent between 2019-2021 (the latest figures available) while that of the nation as a whole increased by 0.52 percent. For comparison’s sake, during the two years before 2019, Florida’s median age advanced by 0.48 percent versus the 1.05 percent for the entire United States.

So these limited samples do show that Florida has been aging at a relatively fast pace under DeSantis, both versus its own pre-DeSantis pace and that of all of America. But the none of gaps or the changes between them is the least bit dramatic.

Between 2017 and 2019, Florida’s median age dipped from 110 percent of its total U.S. counterpart to 109.375 percent. By 2021, it bounced all the way back to …109.585 percent. In other words, big whoop.

As for Garcia-Navarro’s charge that DeSantis’ governorship has benefited only “rich snowbirds” economically, that’s hard to square with what the exit polls told us about his 2022 reelection results. Specifically, fully 41 percent of Floridians who voted last year lived in households that earned $50,000 annually or less. Thirty-eight percent of these voters’ households earned between $50,000 and $99,000 per year. And 21 percent earned more than $100,000 each year. So clearly, lots of DeSantis voters weren’t one percenters or five percenters or ten percenters or even close.

It’s true that DeSantis clobbered his Democratic opponent among voters aged 45 or older – by 63 percent to 36 percent. But that group includes lots of non-geezers. And among the 18-44-year olds, DeSantis trailed by just 50-48 percent. So clearly lots of DeSanti voters weren’t wealthy seniors, either. Either all these non-super-rich and young and midde aged Floridians are too stupid to vote in thei own economic self-interest, or they know something that Garcia-Navarro and her editors don’t.

And has DeSantis really shut off the flow of desperately needed immigrants into Florida? Despite his efforts to “limit the ability of people with uncertain legal status to work in the state” (love that latest euphemism for illegal aliens!), U.S. Census data show that the answer is emphatically “No.”

For example, from July, 2021 to July, 2022 (the latest official data available), slightly fewer immigrants moved into Florida on a net basis (125,629) than into California (125,715). And that’s even though California’s estimated population last year (39.03 million) was much larger than Florida’s (22.24 million), and even though California is a self-proclaimed sanctuary state. (See the the fourth xls table downloadable from this Census link.) 

These data don’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, but for the purposes of this post, who cares? Indeed, do the (not rocket science) math, and even if you believe that more immigrants (includin those with “uncertain legal status) are essential for adequate senior care, it turns out that Florida is in much better shape because it’s receiving nearly as many of the foreign born as California even though its population includes many fewer (4.69 million) seniors in absolute terms than California (5.93 million).

Moreover, these numbers are little changed in a relative sense from those of the last pre-DeSantis year.  In fact, the data in the fifth xls table available at this Census link show that from July, 2018 to July, 2019, more immigrants came to Florida (88,678) than to California (74,028) even though more seniors (just over six million) lived in the latter than in the former (4.54 million).  (Note:  this last data describes the situation as of April, 2020. These were the closest Census figures that seem to be available.)   

I was able to find all these highly relevant figures without undue difficulty. Why couldn’t Garcia-Navarro? Or her editors? No doubt because their intent was not to englighten but to smear. As a result, I feel better than ever about changing my nomenclature for such established news organizations from “Mainstream Media” to “Regime Media.”  

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Im-Politic: It’s Not Just the Twitter files.

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ABC News, Alejandro Mayorkas, asylum seekers, Biden administration, Biden border crisis, border security, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, Gregg Abbott, Im-Politic, Immigration, Karin Jean-Pierre, Mainstream Media, Martha Raddatz, migrants, Regime Media, This Week, Title 42

Although understandably overshadowed by all the Twitter Files releases, another likely example has appeared lately of how thoroughly the nation’s most important news organizations have collectively turned into a “Regime Media” in service of mainstream Democrats (as represented nowadays mainly by the Biden administration) and their Republican partners in globalism.

I say “likely” because I don’t have a smoking gun. But the following sure would be a startling coincidence.

In late October, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who’s been under fire throughout the Biden years for insisting in the face of overwhelming evidence that the United States’ border with Mexico is secure, tried to turn the tables on his assailants.

In an interview with the Dallas [Texas] Morning News, Mayrokas charged that “the political cry that the border is open is music to the smugglers’ ears, because they take that political rhetoric and they market it” to desperate migrants.

In other words, those calling attention to a problem – as opposed to the reality of the problem itself – deserve the blame for the problem’s continuation and even worsening.

What could be more transparently and self-servingly ludicrous? Well according to Martha Raddatz, ABC News correspondent and sometime anchor of the network’s Sunday morning talk show This Week, plenty. Because in the program’s latest edition, Raddatz chided Texas Republican Governor Gregg Abott, a leading critic of Biden border policy with this claim:

“You talk about the border wall, you talk about open borders, I don’t think I’ve ever heard President Biden say, we have an open border, come on over. But people I have heard say it are you, are former president Trump, Ron DeSantis, that message reverberates in Mexico and beyond. So they do get the message that it’s an open border and smugglers use all those kind of statements.”

Actually, candidate Biden said exactly this during his victorious presidential campaign: “All those people who are seeking asylum, they deserve to be heard. That’s who we are. We’re a nation who says, if you want to flee, and you’re freeing oppression, you should come.”

Indeed, candidate Biden also declared that

“We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million [migrants]. The idea that a country of 330 million cannot afford people, who are in desperate need and who are justifiably weak, and fleeing depression is absolutely bizarre….I would also move to increase the number of immigrants able to come but also to deal with all those migrants.”

And although he wasn’t President then, soon after he became President, his chief White House press spokesperson said that “he still believes that he wants our country to be a place that there is asylum processing at the border.” That’s not an invitation?

Indeed, she made this remark in order to explain what the President supposedly really meant when, a week earlier, he told asylum seekers “don’t come over” because he aimed to set up a system enabling them to apply in their home countries – and because the southern border was rapidly crowding, at least partly due to his welcoming campaign rhetoric.

But for the purposes of this post, more important than documenting Raddatz’ (willful?) ignorance is noting how her accusation resembled DHS chief Mayorkas’ nearly verbatim.

Further, almost on cue, the very next day, current White House press spokesperson Karin Jean-Pierre told reporters at the daily briefing that

“The fact is that the removal of Title 42 [the pandemic-period Trump administration directive permitting the United States to bar individuals from entering the United States to protect public health] does not mean the border is open. Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply doing the work of these smugglers who, again, are spreading misinformation, and which are — which is very dangerous.”

In fact, she resorted to this tactic twice.

Later yesterday, moreover, one of her assistants said in another interview:

“To be clear: the lifting of the Title 42 public health order does not mean the border is open. Anyone who suggests otherwise is doing the work of smugglers spreading misinformation to make a quick buck off of vulnerable migrants,”

I don’t know if Biden administration officials have been whispering into Raddatz’ ear or vice versa. But these remarks would definitely have problems facing the “duck test.” They look like collusion an sound like collusion, and unless and until this mutual support system is dismantled and the Mainstream Media stops serving as the Regime Media, I for one will be hard-pressed to be optimistic about American democracy’s future.

Glad I Didn’t Say That: Nothing to See About Border Security and the Fentanyl Epidemic?

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Associated Press, Biden border crisis, border security, drugs, fetanyl, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Immigration, Mainstream Media, Mexico, national security, opioids, public health

”Advocates warn that some of the alarms [about fentanyl] being sounded by politicians and officials are wrong and potentially dangerous. Among those ideas: that tightening control of the U.S.-Mexico border would stop the flow of the drugs….”

– Associated Press, October 28, 2022

 

“A report this year from a bipartisan federal commission found that fentanyl and similar drugs are being made mostly in labs in Mexico from chemicals shipped primarily from China.”

-Associated Press, October 28, 2022

 

(Sources: “As fentanyl drives overdose deaths, mistaken beliefs persist,” by Geoff Mulvihill, Associated Press, October 28, 2022, As fentanyl drives overdose deaths, mistaken beliefs persist | AP News)

Glad I Didn’t Say That! The Latest Mainstream Media Misinformation on Manufacturing

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Catherine Rampell, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Jobs, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, manufacturing production, productivity, Washington Post

“Contrary to myths that we’ve stopped ‘making’ things in the United States, we already manufacture a lot of stuff here. In fact, we manufacture nearly the most ‘stuff’ on record, as measured by the inflation-adjusted value of those products. We just happen to make that stuff with fewer workers than we used to, because technological advances have led to huge productivity gains.”

– Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, September 8, 2022

U.S. manufacturing labor productivity since peak*: +4.00%

U.S. manufacturing employment since then: -7.18%

U.S. after-inflation manufacturing production since then: -3.58%

*December, 2007

(Sources: “The myth of the manufacturing comeback,” by Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, September 8, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/08/biden-manufacturing-made-america/; “Labor productivity (output per hour),” Series Id: PRS 30006093, Major Sector Productivity and Costs, Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject, Data Tools, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet; “All employees, thousands, manufacturing, seasonally adjusted,” Series Id: CES3000000001, Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National), Ibid.; & “Industrial Production, Seasonally Adjusted,” Data for Tables 1, 2, and 10 (to July 2022), Industrial Production: Market, Industry Groups, and Individual Series, Historical Data: Tables 1, 2, and 10, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization – G.17, Data, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/ipdisk/ip_sa.txt)

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Deaf Leading the Blind on U.S. China Policy

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Barack Obama, Biden, Blob, China, Donald Trump, Fareed Zakaria, George W. Bush, globalism, Mainstream Media, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, privacy, South China Sea, Taiwan, technology, Washington Post

Is “beyond clueless” or “beyond intellectually dishonest” the best way to describe Fareed Zakaria’s latest column for the Washington Post? It’s tough to tell. And you could ask the same of the editors at the Post‘s opinion pages, who clearly saw nothing wrong with letting this apologia for the United States’ thoroughly discredited (at least for those blessed with working and/or uncorrupted brains) pre-Trump China policies see the light of day.

Zakaria’s missive, from this past Thursday, suffers two glaringly obvious flaws. First, like America’s most influential leaders from both parties for decades before 2017 the author insists on the importance of Washington building and maintaining “a serious working relationship” with a regime that has developed (with oceans of reckless American assistance) into one of the world’s “two most powerful actors.”

And former President Donald Trump’s greatest sin (which Zakaria accuses President Biden of following)? Adopting a policy toward Beijing of “open hostility and criticism” that has caused the “collapse” of “communications channels for managing tensions,” and especially during crises or near crises such as that which appears to be developing over Taiwan.

But nothing could be clearer by now than the delusional nature of these procedure-obsessed and substance-free views (which of course despite Zakaria’s claim have continually been parroted by the Biden administration.) For by now it should go without saying that China’s top priority isn’t avoiding conflict with the United States. In particular, it lacks any interest in the President’s oft-stated  objective of creating clear “guard rails” and other rules of the road that result in a safe and orderly “competition” for goals like “winning the twenty-first century” whose definition seems just as vapid, utopian – and distracting – as his administration’s “liberal global order” references.

Instead, China’s top priority is specific and concrete: increasing its power (in all dimensions) and reducing America’s in every way possible. The reason? Eliminate the greatest obstacle to its plans to ensure its decisive control over every major trend shaping the globe’s future – whether the field is military prowess or technological advance or wealth creation or the evolution of society and culture (especially through privacy-threatening progress in cyber-hacking and facial recognition technology).

Not that the Chinese are eager for conflict or even any kind of frontal challenge or showdown – especially when prevailing is still anything but guaranteed. But the ultimate objective is prevailing, and the means entail building the domestic, regional, and global conditions needed to prevail, either without firing a shot or when clashes do break out.

And not that American leaders shouldn’t make sure to maintain those communication lines with Beijing. With both countries possessing vast nuclear arsenals, lowering the odds of accidental conflict is clearly imperative.

But communication, much less broader engagement, mustn’t become an end in and of itself. History too often has shown that they encourage the (1) U.S. acceptance of empty promises; (2) rationalization of failure to achieve or preserve particular valued objectives in the here and now for the sake of payoffs stemming from a sense of mutual obligation that could be entirely unilateral and imaginary, over a time frame that tends to keep lengthening; and (3) the substitution of wishful thinking about attainable goals for gaining and maintaining the ability to deter or successfully counter specific, dangerous Chinese initiatives.

The second glaringly obvious flaw in Zakaria’s column is its exclusive reliance on former Obama administration officials to support his analysis – which makes as much as sense as citing former Carter administration officials as inflation-fighting experts.

After all, it was under Trump’s immediate predecessor that the Chinese began running wild throughout the South China Sea, pushing aggressive territorial claims and literally building islands with military facilities capable of controlling those commercially vital waters – and according to one senior U.S. admiral at the time, precisely because Beijing concluded that Obama would keep sitting on his hands.

It was also Obama who continued enabling China to pursue the predatory economic policies that badly damaged numerous manufacturing industries vital to American national security, and who turned a blind eye to the massive transfer by U.S. and foreign companies of advanced, defense-related techology to the People’s Republic.

But at least Obama “upgraded” the George W. Bush-era “Senior Dialogue” and “Strategic Economic Dialogue” in order to merge “the economic and security tracks” to “break down the barriers inside both the U.S. and Chinese governments to more effectively tackle cross-cutting issues such as climate change, development, and energy security.” Which accomplished exactly what to advance and defend American interests?

And this is where Zakaria’s editors at the Post come in. Evidently none of them thought to say something like, “Hey, Fareed. Maybe quote someone on China policy whose advice isn’t widely seen as a proven failure?”

Maybe they’re just supposed to look for stray commas and dangling participles?  I suspect that the real reason is that they’re part of the same group-thinking, self-perpetuating globalist Blob that keeps working overtime to ensure that the American public is never exposed to any genuinely fresh ideas about promoting the United States’ security, prosperity, and optimal place in the world – and whose  decades-long record of squandering the nation’s blood and treasure on behalf of one grandiose goal after another is its only claim to success.

Im-Politic: Objectivity in American Journalism Going, Going….

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Gallup, Im-Politic, journalism, liberals, Mainstream Media, media bias, news media, objectivity, Pew Research Center

No one who’s been paying attention should be surprised by a recent Gallup survey showing that the American public’s trust in journalism is near rock bottom. As the polling company (again) makes clear, it’s been falling steadily for half a century.

What even I was surprised at were the results of another sounding that explains much of the reason why: A wide gulf has opened between the news media and its readers and viewers on the definition of journalism’s fundamental mission. Specifically, according to the Pew Research Center, although by landslide proportions, a majority of Americans believe that “Journalists should always strive to give every side equal coverage” in news reports, a smaller majority of journalists themselves – but still a sizable majority – doesn’t.

Also interesting and important (and seemingly consistent with the above finding), the same July 13 Pew findings make clear that the public gives journalists low marks on what the news media in recent years has often and loudly proclaimed to be its paramount purpose and contribution to American democracy: “Serving as a watchdog for elected leaders.”

First, the “evenhandedness” results. According to Pew, by a 76 percent to 22 percent margin, U.S. adults regard it as a hallmark of good journalism. But by 55 percent to 44 percent, journalists believe that “Every side does not deserve equal coverage.”

There’s a partisan gap in public opinion here, but it’s not enormous. Eighty seven percent of Republicans and Republican leaners value evenhandedness versus 68 percent of their Democratic counterparts.

More troubling, at least to me, the evidence points to a partisan gap that’s wider among news people themselves. The Pew researchers asked journalists who believe their audience “leans right” the evenhandedness question they endorsed this objective by 57 percent to 42 percent. But the journalists who believed their audience “leans left” rejected it by 69 percent to 30 percent. (News people who believe that their audience is “mixed” politically are split on this question.)

In addition, by 32 percent to 20 percent, journalists describe their news organization as leaning left versus leaning right, which strengthens the case for another important finding of partiality – most of it favors left-of-center views. For good measure, these data dovetail nicely with numerous surveys over many years (see, e.g., here) documenting a pronounced liberal tilt in their ranks.

In principle, this imbalance needn’t prevent journalists from effectively and evenhandedly holding the powerful to account. But the Pew results at least show that the public isn’t convinced that journalists perform well in “Serving as a watchdog over elected leaders.” Only five percent graded them “Very good” and just 24 percent “Somewhat good” at this task. The “Very bad” and “Somewhat bad” results were 24 percent and 21 percent, respectively. (Twenty six percent rated journalism as “Neither good nor bad.”)

I’ll acknowledge that the evenhandedness issue isn’t as clearcut as these Pew questions might suggest. For example, when it comes to reporting verifiable facts, every depiction clearly doesn’t deserve equal coverage. At the same time, aside from genuinely settled scientific or mathematical questions, the number of incontrovertible facts isn’t nearly as great as has often been supposed. Think of the Trump-Russia collusion claims, the mainstream media’s treatment of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the CCP Virus lab leak controversy, and the whipping Haitian migrants charges. And before the Trump era, these news organizations overwhelmingly cheerled for the second Iraq War, the reckless expansion of trade with China, and Open Borders-friendly immigration policies.

Maybe most depressing: The Pew poll strongly suggests that the news media will keep covering stories in a one-sided manner. Specifically, it found that journalism’s strongest opponents of evenhanded journalism are the youngest journalists – who reject this aim by 63 percent to 37 percent if they’re between 18 and 29 years of age, and by 63 percent to 49 percent if they’re in the 30-49-year old cohort.

Im-Politic: Will the Pandemic’s Real Lessons Ever Be Learned?

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CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, facemasks, Great Barrington Declaration, Im-Politic, lockdowns, Mainstream Media, mandates, natural immunity, The New York Times, vaccines

Give The New York Times some credit here. On the one hand, its big, graphics-rich feature marking the grim news that about a million Americans have been killed by the CCP Virus has pinpointed a highly specific group of culprits for this towering toll, and an equally specific group of measures that could have held it way down (although it’s never indicated by how much).

Among the worst: “elected officials who played down the threat posed by the coronavirus and resisted safety measures” and “lower vaccination and booster rates than other rich countries, partly the result of widespread mistrust and resistance fanned by right-wing media and politicians.”

So clearly, the authors insist, mask-wearing and lockdowns and social distancing should have been imposed much faster and more widely (without stating for how long), and more vaccinations required.

On the other hand, the reader is presented with abundant evidence that the benefits of such measures might have been limited – which is especially striking since not even a hint is provided that such steps might have inflicted considerable damage in their own right – including from other threats to public health that have been neglected.

Most strikingly, consistent with its observation that “The virus did not claim lives evenly, or randomly.” the piece reminds that in fact, the worst damage was remarkably concentrated in a single group. Specifically, “Three quarters of those who have died of Covid have been 65 or older.” Moreover, of that cohort, a third were 85 and over.

And then there was the related nursing homes disaster. According to the Times piece, a fifth of the roughly million CCP Virus-induced deaths in America occurred among residents and staff of these facilities.

Why longer and more sweeping lockdowns and the like would have reduced the virus’ damage to the nation as a whole, considering all the economic, educational, and health harm they produced for the vast majority of Americans who were far less vulnerable, is never explained.

The article’s case for vaccine mandates is similarly muddled. It repeats the widespread claims that most of those who died from the virus after vaccines became widely available were unvaxxed, and that “vaccinated people have had a much lower death rate — unvaccinated people have been at least nine times as likely to die since April 2021 [when the eligibility for the doses became universally available].”

At the same time, readers learn that:

>“at least 50,000 vaccinated people, many of them older or without booster shots, were among the deaths reported since late April 2021….”; and that

>”People 80 and older who had gotten shots were almost twice as likely to die at the height of the Omicron wave as those in their 50s or early 60s who had not, according to C.D.C. [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data.”

Further, the article makes clear that, even forgetting about the decisive role played by age, claims about vaccine effectiveness are substantially exaggerated. Despite presenting the common contention that “unvaccinated people have been at least nine times as likely to die since April 2021,” the chart presented to support this point shows that this ratio has held for only part of the period duing which vaccines have become widely available. The chart also that the gap has almost disappeared today.

In addition, the piece reports that “The C.D.C. has received data on deaths by vaccination status from only about half of the states….” As the authors explain, this data shortage makes it “impossible to know exactly how many vaccinated people are among the million who have died.”

Conversely, this data shortage – along with thoroughgoing ignorance about how many Americans have enjoyed natural immunity from the virus and therefore passed up the jabs, and how many who caught Covid asymptomatically and made similar decisions – also prevents figuring out what share of unvaccinated Americans died of the virus.

But because both numbers are doubtless both enormous, this percentage is doubtless much smaller than commonly supposed.  The Times authors (and their editors, who it should always be remembered greenlight every article’s journalistic methodology) might have adjusted their judgements, and recognized that alternative pandemic mitigation approaches — including those that took into account the difficult tradeoffs that needed to be made — have long been recommended, had they bothered to consult any of the impressively credentialed specialists who have been making these points. 

Yet they seemed as determined to ignore or marginalize their views as the official U.S. medical establishment has been.  As long as both America’s healthcare leaders and its Mainstream Media so doggedly oppose full debate on the real lessons taught by the pandemic, it’s hard to imagine that the nation will be prepared for the (inevitable) arrival of the next deadly pathogen. 

Glad I Didn’t Say That! What a Difference Nine Months Makes

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Biden, David Brooks, Democrats, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Mainstream Media, pundits, The New York Times

“The Biden Approach is Working””

– Headline on David Brooks’ New York Times column, August 5, 2021

“Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn — Fast”

– Headline on David Brooks’ New York Times column, April 28, 2022

 

(Sources: “The Biden Approach is Working,” by David Brooks, The New York Times, August 5, 2021, Opinion | The Biden Approach Is Working – The New York Times (nytimes.com) and “Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn – Fast,” by David Brooks, ibid., April 28, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/opinion/seven-lessons-democrats-need-to-learn-fast.html)   

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Russia Sanctions May Be Sending a Crucial Message About U.S. China Policy

Tags

Adam Posen, Antony J. Blinken, Biden, Biden administration, Bloomberg.com, Chad Bown, China, dollar, Donald Trump, finance, Foreign Affairs, foreign policy establishment, Mainstream Media, multilateralism, Qin Gang, reserve currency, Russia, sanctions, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, unilateralism, Wang Yi, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has produced a genuinely strange – and potentially crucial – turn in the way American leaders and the political class of pundits and think tankers and the rest of the countrys influential chattering class are viewing and even conducting China policy. Because China could in theory significantly help Vladimir Putin’s never-impressive economy evade the full impact of global sanctions, they’re not only talking of only punishing the People’s Republic if it follows this course. They’re exuding confidence that Beijing could be cowed into backing down.

In other words, the conventional wisdom throughout the U.S. foreign policy,  economic policy, and media establishments now holds that Washington can bend China to its will because the Chinese ultimately need the United States much more economically than vice versa. Because this position looks like such a total reversal of what these folks insisted during the trade war supposedly started by Donald Trump with China, it raises these questions: If America’s leverage is great enough to change Chinese behavior that would mainly threaten another country’s security, isn’t it also great enough to change Chinese behavior that for decades has increasingly damaged America’s own economy, and also to pursue decoupling from the Chinese economy more energetically?

The Biden administration certainly is acting like it holds all the cards over China on anti-Russia sanctions. As a “senior administration official” told reporters in an – official – White House briefing last Friday, the President in his virtual meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping that morning “made clear the implication and consequences of China providing material support — if China were to provide material support — to Russia as it prosecutes its brutal war in Ukraine, not just for China’s relationship with the United States but for the wider world.”

The day before, previewing the Biden-Xi call, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said  “President Biden will be speaking to President Xi tomorrow and will make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression, and we will not hesitate to impose costs.”

And the national policy establishments are giving these statements their Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. According to Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who emerged as the Mainstream Media’s go-to critic of the Trump trade wars, “On the pure economic question, if China were to have to make the choice – Russia versus everyone else – I mean, it’s a no-brainer for China because it’s so integrated with all of these Western economies,”

His views, moreover, came in a Reuters article whose main thrust was “China’s economic interests remain heavily skewed to Western democracies….”

A Bloomberg.com analysis posted a week ago similarly asserted that China “needs good relations with the U.S. and its partners to meet its economic goals, particularly as growth slows to the slowest pace in in more than three decades.”

And although that point was keyed to the current state of China’s economic health – as opposed to the situation during the Trump years, the article also noted that Beijing has “resisted taking retaliatory measures that would hurt its own economy even when the U.S. has directly targeted Beijing. During the height of the trade war, China threatened but never implemented an ‘unreliable entities’ list, and even state-run banks have complied with U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong. It also delayed imposing an anti-sanctions law on the financial hub after businesses expressed concern.”

In all, it’s a stark contrast with the days during that Trump period when the Mainstream Media – relying heavily on analysts like Bown, who work for think tanks heavily funded by Offshoring Lobby interests – routinely ran stories headlined “Why the US would never win a trade war with China.”

Now sharp-eyed readers will notice one big difference between then and now: The Trump China and other tariffs were unilateral. It’s assumed – quite reasonably – that any Biden China sanctions would be undertaken jointly, along with many and possibly most other major national economies.

At the same time, no less than Peterson Institute President Adam Posen has just written in (no less than) Foreign Affairs that it’s the strength of the West’s financial services industries that “are what has truly advantaged the West over Russia in implementing effective sanctions, and what has deterred Chinese businesses from bailing Russia out.”

But these advantages are overwhelmingly the product of the dollar’s reserve currency status and the dominance of U.S. finance in that dominant Western finance sector. So even he’s indirectly admitted that U.S. power specifically has been the key. As a result, wielding the finance cudgel could have pushed the Europeans and Japanese to join in with the Trump China tariffs.

Some other consequential conclusions could flow from this new confidence about China. Maybe even without putting other big economies in the finance cross-hairs, Trump should have threatened – and if need be, imposed – the same kinds of financial sanctions on China instead of tariffs to try to force Beijing to end its predatory trade practices, and/or to press China to accept more U.S. imports. Or maybe a combination of the two would have been best. Maybe President Biden should add the finance sanctions to his decision to maintain most of the Trump tariffs. And if the United States enjoys this kind of leverage over China, wouldn’t the same hold for other troublesome trade partners, even big economies?

But perhaps the most convincing signs of the U.S.’ paramount leverage are coming from China itself. Last Tuesday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi asserted that Beijing would “safeguard its legitimate rights and interests” if hit by punitive U.S. and broader measures. But this language was pretty vague – and he also expressed China’s hope that it would avoid these sanctions to begin with. Moreover, yesterday, Beijing’s ambassador to Washington Qin Gang made clear that Beijing had rejected the option of sending Russia military aid – though he added that China would maintain its “normal trade, economic, financial, energy cooperation with Russia.”

Moreover, there’s no need to go all-in on the tariff, or other China specific sanctions (e.g., on tech entities) fronts yet.  Especially since China is facing mounting economic troubles at home (notably in its gigantic and thoroughly bubble-ized real estate sector) a string of increasingly aggressive “poke the dragon” measures could yield lots of useful information about how Beijing perceives its vulnerabilities without risking noteworthy countermeasures – and about the real extent of America’s capacity to deal with the China challenge.      

Im-Politic: The Washington Post’s Phony Probe of Policing Abuses

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crime, Im-Politic, journalism, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, police misconduct, police reform, policing, statistics, Vera Institute of Justice, Washington Post

As RealityChek readers surely know by now, reporting information out of context is one of my biggest gripes about journalism these days. (See, e.g., here.) So if there hadn’t been so much important news coming out of the Ukraine war and on so many other fronts this week, I’d have already written about an especially egregious example that appeared in the Washington Post this past Thursday.

Its big “exclusive” finding? “The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments [to resolve police misconduct claims] at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.”

Sounds like a bundle right? Even a criminally large amount of money. In isolation, of course. But information never exists in isolation. And any reporter or anyone else with a working brain or a lick of integrity would have tried to answer these two questions: How does this sum compare with the nation’s total policing budget over the same period? And how does it compare with the national cost of crime?

None of this background appeared in the Post piece. But it took me a grand total of thirtyseconds of searching on-line to find answers from reliable sources.

The national law cost of policing? That’s $115 billion per year, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, whose declared mission is ending “the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”

That is, the organization isn’t exactly an apologist for current policing performance. But it’s telling us that over ten years, the cost of settling police misconduct claims equalled 0.28 percent of America’s policing budget (of $1.15 trillion). Any decent person would like to see that number fall to zero percent, but 0.28 is pretty close. And it’s even better considering that, as at least Post reporters Keith Alexander, Steven Rich, and Hannah Thacker (along with their editors) had the honesty to observe (in the middle of this long article) that

“City officials and attorneys representing the police departments said settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. And settlements rarely involve an admission or finding of wrongdoing.”

The authors also state that their figures exclude payments of less than $1,000. Let’s suppose, however, that including these incidents doubles the total amount of payouts over the last decade. Then they’d represent 0.56 percent of the national policing budget. That’s still awfully close to zero for a line of work whose employees lay their lives on the line every day, and who constantly need to make split-second life-and-death decisions.

It’s of course certain that the number of police misconduct charges that produced payouts, whether they stemmed from genuine abuses or not, doesn’t include all cases of misconduct because so many undoubtedly aren’t reported. But even if all of them were, and consequently the total cost of misconduct got doubled, its share of total U.S. policing spending over the last decade would barely top one percent. So forgive me if I’m not overcome with outrage.

As for the second question, in February, 2021, a team of academics and policy analysts estimated that in the 2017, crime cost the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion. That single year number is more than 8oo times bigger than the Post‘s figure for the last ten years’ worth of costs for police misconduct payouts.

As a result, these police misconduct costs as a percentage of the costs of crime to America over a year – much less a decade – don’t even represent the proverbial “drop in the bucket.” They’re more like an aerosol particle in the bucket.

The researchers who came up with the cost-of-crime figure acknowledge that limitations on the available data for crime forced them to include modeling techniques in their calculations, and that more work (and more actual information) should be performed to produce greater accuracy. But even if the $2.6 trillion overestimates the national cost of crime by half, it would still render the police misconduct payouts total utterly trivial in comparison.

Policing abuses definitely need to be reduced dramatically. But how about setting the same goal for the kinds of rampant journalistic abuses most recently epitomized by this Washington Post investigation?