Im-Politic: Bernie’s Conspiracy Charges are Wrong (So Far)

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Bernie Sanders, caucuses, Democratic Party, Democrats, election 2020, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, moderates, primaries, progressives, Super Tuesday

As must be clear to RealityChek readers, I’m no fan of Joe Biden’s. What may be less clear is that I have a soft spot for Bernie Sanders. That’s largely because the Democratic Socialist Senator from Vermont is the only one of his party’s current presidential candidates that I’ve dealt with personally – and in small meetings on the subject, and generally speaking, he’s been terrific on U.S. trade policy.

But even though I’ve always considered the former Vice President’s record on this key matter – and most others – miserable (see, e.g., here), it’s clear now, in the wake of the Super Tuesday Democratic primary results, there’s no case to be made that the party’s establishment-arians are effectively rigging the campaign against the more left-leaning Sanders, either because they abhor his policies or because they think he’ll blow the chance they see of defeating President Trump and performing well in House and Senate races this fall.

Instead, yesterday’s voting, along with the totals from earlier primaries and caucuses, show what polls have consistently found: Most Democratic voters have remained moderate, or at least so describe themselves. Relatively few view themselves as being “very liberal. And these Democrats, as so many candidates have pointed out, “don’t want a revolution.”

Of course, because politics and policy are never totally, or even largely, separate, the results of Election 2020 can also be read as supporting an alternative interpretation, but one that’s also been consistently found in opinion surveys: Even many Democrats who might align best with Sanders (or other progressive candidates, like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren), seem to be voting for moderates because they view them as the best hope for ousting Mr. Trump.

Moreover, the Democratic results debunk another major belief about Democratic primary voters in another curious way. The conventional wisdom has long held, and maintained this year, that activists closest to the party’s left-wing fringe would dominate turnout – or at least vote at rates considerably greater than their actual representation in Democratic ranks. (Similar conclusions have been drawn about Republicans, as this popular textbook demonstrates.) But the clear majorities voting for Biden and other moderate candidates throughout the campaign to date indicate that even many progressive voters are holding their ideological noses and pragmatically backing the candidates they believe will perform best against the President this fall.

And perhaps most interestingly, the Super Tuesday and other results place in an unusually interesting light the Democratic Party’s recent shift to the progressive end. Not that the shift hasn’t taken place. But at least according to the Pew survey linked above and this Gallup data series, it’s still left moderates and liberals with a slim majority. And these voters seem to be turning out this election year.

Two big related questions remain, though. First, there’s no doubt that moderate Democratic candidates like Biden and recent drop-outs Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Indiana mayor, and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, thought that the progressives held the upper hand in primary voting. That’s why they’ve pandered so heavy-handedly on issues like race relations and gender identity and immigration issues. Now that the Super Tuesday votes are (nearly all) in, will survivor Biden tack back to the center?

Second, even if he does, has the former Vice President made too many far-out statements on such matters already that they’ll still be effective ammunition for President Trump?

I don’t doubt that if the Democratic establishment thought that it needed to or could rig the process against Sanders, it would. Recent history makes that clear. I also understand that the quick campaign exits and Biden endorsements of Buttigieg, Bloomberg, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar look suspicious to Sanders World (and maybe to much of its Warren counterpart?). And of course, if Biden falters for whatever reason (health, a genuinely troubling gaffe, his son Hunter’s fishy activities in Ukraine and China), this establishment could spring into action in the back rooms once again.   

But at this point, unless you’re totally paranoid, you need to recognize that the Democratic primaries are reflecting what the party’s voters, not its bosses, want. And their obvious message is that moderate Joe Biden is “the One.”

Im-Politic: Elizabeth Warren, Nationalist?

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Elizabeth Warren, Emmanuel Macron, global poverty, globalization, Im-Politic, nationalism, progressives, Seattle WTO protests, third world, Trade, World Trade Organization, WTO

Whatever its historical roots, “nationalism” has recently become a dirty word. Among the dangers embodied by this concept, as determined by political correctness authorities such as France’s (politically besieged) President Emmanuel Macron, it’s “a betrayal of patriotism. By saying ‘Our interests first, who cares about the others,’ we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace, and what is essential: its moral values.”

How stunning, therefore, to read Elizabeth Warren’s recent speech on U.S. foreign policy. According to this definition, the Massachusetts Democratic Senator, progressive heroine, and likely 2020 presidential hopeful, is a card-carrying, selfish, immoral (amoral?) America First-style nationalist – at least when it comes to international trade and related globalization issues.

Skeptical? Just read the Warren transcript. On the one hand, she admitted that “The globalization of trade has opened up opportunity and lifted billions out of poverty around the world” – which by any standard is a pretty remarkable achievement. Yet on the other hand, Warren condemned the “trade and economic policies” behind this epic success for failing to deliver “the same kind of benefits for America’s middle class.”

In fact, she emphasized, “U.S. trade policy has delivered one punch in the gut after another to [U.S.] workers and to the unions that fight for them.”

It’s true that, elsewhere in her speech, Warren briefly referred to revamping American trade policy to ensure “that workers are meaningfully represented at the negotiating table and build trade agreements that strengthen labor standards worldwide.” But much more often, she lambasted agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its successor, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) for encouraging “outsourcing jobs to Mexico.”

In other words, either such outsourcing somehow failed to ameliorate poverty in Mexico (even though Warren credits it with uplifting the poor elsewhere), or she assigns little importance to achieving that goal. In either case, Warren has some major explaining to do.

Also fascinating about Warren’s speech: If it’s to be taken seriously (never a sure thing when it comes to politicians’ rhetoric), it would represent a significant, and in my view, welcome change in progressives’ take on trade, globalization, and what’s fundamentally wrong with them.

For since these issues became front-page news during the debate over NAFTA, at the start of the 1990s, critics to the left-of-center have proclaimed that U.S. trade and related policies would remain unacceptable unless they boosted living standards everywhere, not just in America – and that they had betrayed workers in developing countries as completely as their counterparts in the United States.

American progressives’ emphasis on the devastation created in the third world by U.S.-spearheaded trade arrangements came to a head during the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in 1999 – as did the companion belief that win-win solutions for workers and consumers everywhere should be and could be the very raison d’etre of the global economy. And as indicated by this 2015 statement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it remains their party line today.

The point here is not that no conceivable form of globalization can ever produce globe-wide benefits. Instead, it’s that the road to mutual gain is unlikely to proceed in a straight, smooth, uninterrupted line, and that without recognizing that hard choices are likely for the foreseeable future, and that those global benefits may not be distributed evenly, the worst of all worlds is all too likely.

So here’s hoping that her speech is evidence that Warren is becoming aware of these at-least-likely complications, that she’ll start prompting such globalization realism on the American Left – and that she won’t be deterred by apologists for a failed status quo who, along with most of her fellow progressives, have been reduced to portraying nationalism as part of the problem, rather than potentially part of the solution.

Im-Politic: What Kamala Harris Didn’t Tell You About the Founding Fathers and Immigration

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Declaration of Independence, Founding Fathers, Fourth of July, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Independence Day, Kamala Harris, progressives, slavery

Freshman (person?) Democratic Senator Kamala Harris of California clearly thought she had made a slam dunk point in the national immigration debate on July 4, when she sent out this tweet:

“A reminder this Fourth of July: it was eight immigrants who signed the Declaration of Independence. Happy Independence Day.”

And lots of the Twitter-verse evidently agreed, for the tweet received more than 132,000 “Likes” as of this morning. The messages she sought to send and that they received were clear:  Anyone who diverges from the Open Borders gospel they’re preaching is ignorant of and maybe even opposed to fundamental American values, especially like inclusiveness and diversity; and these supposed nativists either don’t know or don’t want others to know that the foreign-born have made outsized contributions to the country’s historic success.

Unfortunately for Harris and her fans, she should have done a little more research. For it turns out that most of these eight immigrant signers of the Declaration shared another characteristic that’s consistent with another claim often pushed by many of Harris’ fellows on the progressive Left: that the Declaration signers and the Founding Fathers generally were white racists who have at best little to teach the nation today. (Click here, here, and here for some examples – the latter from a University of Michigan Law School professor, no less.)

Specifically, no less than five of the eight immigrant Declaration signers were slave-holders. Here’s the evidence for Button Gwinnett of Georgia and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania (both born in England, rather than in one of the thirteen colonies); for George Taylor of Pennsylvania (born in Ireland); for John Witherspoon of New Jersey (born in Scotland); and Francis Lewis of New York (born in Wales).

Even worse, two of the five (Morris and Lewis) were significant players in the slave trade.

Of course, many of the remaining 48 Declaration signers who were born in the colonies owned and/or traded slaves, too, along with other Founders. And why should anyone be especially surprised? All were products of their time. Some were honest enough with themselves to recognize the self-evident conflict between slavery on the one hand and the principles of liberty and freedom and equality that they espoused on the other. Some weren’t. Nor should this observation be the least bit surprising: Where they were born was completely irrelevant.

As for the Open Borders crowd in general, it needs to admit that, ethically speaking, in its view there’s no difference on average between foreign-born Americans, native-born Americans, immigrants, and aspiring immigrants either. You can throw in refugees and asylum seekers (real and fake) as well.

Let’s of course by all means continue to have a robust debate on U.S. immigration reform. But let’s focus on genuine policy dilemmas, like economic impact, financing the costs, proper assimilation measures, and national security screening, instead of trying to write a morality play. Dropping the immigration fake history (and Harris is hardly the first such trafficker in this genre) would be a great place to start.

Im-Politic: A Left-Wing Attack on Trump Tariffs that the Offshoring Lobby Could Love

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"resistance", China, Democrats, globalism, globalization, Im-Politic, liberals, multinational companies, NAFTA, Nomi Prins, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring lobby, progressives, strange bedfellows, tariffs, The Nation, Trade, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Trump tariffs

Although I view it as being small-minded, short-sighted, and often over-the-top, I can’t completely fault many left-of-center American trade policy critics for failing to support (and even attacking) most of President Trump’s trade policy initiatives. Not so with Nomi Prins’ new indictment in The Nation. She’s taken this dimension of Never Trump-ism and “Resistance” to a wholly new and troublingly counterproductive level,

Mr. Trump has assaulted many of the trade deals that liberals, progressives, and many Democrats themselves long resisted (like NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – and the the Trans-Pacific Partnership – TPP). And he’s dealing decisively (so far!) with many other foreign trade policy transgressions and global trade institutions they’ve long assailed (like China’s dumping of steel and aluminum and wide array of other predatory trade practices, and the World Trade Organization, or WTO).

But many on the Left (and indeed, all over American politics) are understandably disgusted with some of the President’s rhetoric and record in immigration and gender issues and race relations, and with his family’s continuing domestic and foreign business ties (including with China), which look like conflicts of interest and at the least can look hypocritical (e.g., using immigrant workers both legal and illegal). Moreover, you don’t have to be a Never-Trumper to be upset with the ties between many Trump administration appointees and industries they’re supposed to be regulating.

Moreover, the President is attacking American trade and related globalization policies from an economic nationalist/America First standpoint. Having worked with left-of-center trade critics for nearly 30 years, I can tell you that this has never been their perspective. Though this is an overly broad generalization, they have been loathe to acknowledge that what’s best for America and what’s best for the rest of the world may not be identical – especially in the short and even medium-terms. As a result, their criticisms of many long-standing U.S. trade policies have often demonstrated at least as much concern for their impact on workers in developing countries as on their counterparts in the United States.

In fact, they tend to reject the idea that the main fault-line in the global economy has been the United States (and even the U.S.’ productive economy) versus “the rest”. In the view of these left-of-center critics, the main fault line instead is between the capital holders of the world versus the workers of the world.

The point of this post is not to insist that the nationalists have been right and the progressives et al have been wrong. It is to note that Prins’ new Nation piece disturbingly edges into Trump Derangement Syndrome territory. The main reasons: Her stated problems with the administration’s trade policies aren’t based on any of the above counter-arguments. Instead, her main anti-Trump points are almost indistinguishable from those made by the establishment supporters of the trade and globalist status quo – including not only the foreign policy “Blob” that has always backed seeking geopolitical and diplomatic gains even when they come at the expense of U.S. workers and the domestic economy, but those multinational business groups comprising the “global capitalist” interests that the trade policy progressives have always targeted!

Thus we hear from Prins both that the actual and prospective Trump tariffs have angered America’s “closest allies” in the Group of 7 industrial countries of Europe and the Far East, along with “our regional partners” in NAFTA. She’s repeated the canard that the President’s trade moves scarily resemble the Hawley Smoot tariff that “sparked the global Great Depression, opening the way for the utter devastation of World War II.” She consistently portrays the world’s other major economies as genuine paragons of free trade. (Not even China is chided.)

Even more striking, the main evidence she cites for the claim that the President “is sparking a set of trade wars that could, in the end, cost millions of American jobs” comes from Offshoring Lobby pillars like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the Brookings Institution (which, not so incidentally, takes lots of money from most of the leading foreign economies that will be hit by Trump tariffs).

It’s been noted often since the NAFTA’s negotiation in the early 1990s ushered in the offshoring-happy phase of U.S. trade policy that the resulting domestic political divisions have created some “strange bedfellows” alliances – i.e., coalitions that have had little in common other than common views on this front. Will the Prins article help usher in the strangest trade bedfellow coalition yet – between the left-wing anti-Trump resistance and the Fortune 500? Such groups are singing much the same tune on issues like immigration policy, so this prospect isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Further, don’t forget that voters who consider themselves Democrats and those leaning in this direction are viewing trade in general much more favorably these days than during any other recent period – at least according to polls. (Republicans and GOP leaners have shifted in the opposite direction.) And the appearance of an article containing these arguments, and evidence drawn from corporate and corporate-funded sources, has appeared in The Nation – long one of the American Left’s flagship publications – is another ominous sign.

One reason for optimism (if you agree that U.S. trade policy needs a big-time overhaul): Many left-of-center trade policy critics have (albeit grudgingly) supported the main thrust of the President’s trade policies. Even though most still retain their “globalist loyalties,” their complaints about the administration’s approach have centered on its instances of backtracking on Mr. Trump’s campaign promises, and (like me) on apparent inconsistencies. So it will be especially interesting to see if they push back strongly, or at all, versus Prins’ views. The answer could help determine the future of the politics of American trade policy – and of the policy itself.

Im-Politic: The Wall Street Journal Slimes both Trump and TR on Immigration

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assimilation, Cheap Labor Lobby, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jason L. Riley, nativism, progressives, racism, The Wall Street Journal, Trump Theodore Roosevelt, xenophobia

Silly me. I read the headline for Jason L. Riley’s newest Wall Street Journal article, “What Trump and Teddy Roosevelt Have in Common” and assumed he was talking about trade. That is, I thought Riley knew what he was writing about.

I’ll sure never make that mistake again! For Riley’s column was not about the economic nationalism that Roosevelt unmistakably championed – including tariffs – and that President Trump says he’s trying to put into effect. Instead, the subject was immigration – and “almost wholly incomplete” is a charitable description of Riley’s portrayal of TR’s outlook.

According to Riley, Roosevelt was a combination xenophobe and partisan hack who wouldn’t even distinguish immigrants from first generation Americans, and who sought to curb arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe in particular because, like all Republicans, he “was concerned that too many of these latest arrivals ultimately would vote Democratic.”

Consequently, Roosevelt allegedly was all too happy to endorse the common nativist stereotype of the latest wave of immigrants as (in Riley’s words), “vermin [having] human heads with swarthy complexions, and [wearing] hats or bandannas labeled ‘Mafia,’ ‘Anarchist’ and ‘Socialist’” – not to mention assassins like Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants who had gunned down President William McKinley in 1901.

Sound familiar? As made clear by the column, that was Riley’s intent. But whatever you think of President Trump, or current or recent immigration policy, there can be no question that Riley’s portrayal of TR renders the former president practically unrecognizable.

The heart of the legitimate case that Roosevelt harbored many of the prejudices that would shape American immigration policy between 1924 and 1965 entails the former president’s own oft-stated worldview. Entirely consistent with the main currents of progressive reform thinking of his era, he believed that different peoples of the world occupied (as one scholar has put it) “different civilization levels,” and those occupied by Americans and Europeans were at the top. Just as consistent, therefore, was Roosevelt’s support for simply cutting off immigration from China and Japan.

At the same time, his concerns may not simply have been racial. According to one scholar, as Roosevelt saw it:

“the entire ‘coolie’ class from China threatened labor relations because Chinese laborers were lured to the American shores under false pretenses and were forced to work for low wages. The deal made with Chinese labor was bound to result in a lowering of the standard of living and cause future problems. Roosevelt’s response was to close the door for Asia.”

Indeed, he reached an agreement with the Japanese government, in 1907, to resume limited immigration from Japan to the United States proper, and more extensive flows into the American territory of Hawaii. This bilateral deal also specified that the San Francisco Board of Education’s post-earthquake re-segregation of Japanese and Korean schoolchildren (with Chinese!) be reversed.

Further complicating the picture: Roosevelt’s definition of political undesirables was not limited to southern and eastern Europeans. He was just just as worried about “German-Americans active on behalf of imperial Germany in World War I.” More broadly, he by no means assumed that those ostensibly more desirable northern and western Europeans would assimilate effortlessly into American society and culture. They would need to make active efforts to give up their Old World political and religious loyalties.

And although Roosevelt’s promptings led Congress to establish in 1907 the Dillingham Commission, whose voluminous reports laid the groundwork for the ethnically restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, with the exception of the Asians, the former president, according to another scholar, “advised against discriminating on the basis of national-origin or religious beliefs.” (Asians still excepted of course.) He also opposed requiring immigrants to pass literacy tests, which were proposed largely to discriminate against newcomers from the non-English speaking world.

In addition, to a great extent, Roosevelt’s championing of urban economic and social reform stemmed from his encounters in New York City with the impoverished lives and oppressive working conditions of recent immigrants – especially from southern and eastern Europe.

Obviously, too many of TR’s attitudes on the allegedly superior and inferior qualities of whites and non-whites, and even of Europeans from different regions on the continent, are completely unacceptable by today’s standards. But a fair-minded analysis would also recognize that he was more than simply a “man of his [prejudiced] time.” In particular, unlike many of even his progressive contemporaries, Roosevelt didn’t seem to view these differing racial qualities as fixed forever by biology. He apparently believed that nurture could augment nature, and however condescending, this view unmistakably – if too implicitly – accepted the inherent equality of all.

Similarly, Roosevelt’s support for various immigration restrictions was based not on a desire to bar permanently all undesirables, however they were defined. It was based on a belief that inflows that were too great and too rapid would undercut the wages of American workers and threaten the cohesion of a country already undergoing a series of tumultuous transitions, and especially one that he and other progressives viewed as supremely important to a successful national future – the creation of a nation whose hitherto fragmented institutions (both public and private) would centralize enough to cope with the challenges of an increasingly complex and rapidly emerging economic and technological modernity.

So if a pundit or any type of analyst wanted to create a truly accurate picture of Roosevelt’s views on immigration – and their implications for America today – he or she clearly would have tried to communicate at least some of this nuance and (genuinely instructive, not exculpatory) context. But if the purpose was to produce a hatchet job aimed at serving the interests of the nation’s Cheap Labor Lobby, Riley’s column will do just fine.

Following Up: Democrats’ Safety Net-Heavy Policies Still Missing the Mark for Trump Voters

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2016 election, Center for American Progress, Democrats, Economic Policy Institute, Elizabeth Warren, entitlements, Following Up, manufacturing, middle class, Mitt Romney, Neera Tanden, private sector jobs, progressives, safety net, Trade, Trump, Welfare State, working class

A little over a week ago, I wrote that much of the American Left was way off-base in believing that working class Americans who supported Donald Trump’s successful presidential run had voted against their economic interests. My thesis: These Trump voters were (rightly) much more interested in the family wage private sector jobs his campaign was promising rather than the various forms of welfare that Democratic candidates were strongly suggesting were adequate substitutes. And revealingly, compelling confirmation for my claim arrived just this week – in my email box!

The evidence came in the form of fund-raising pitches from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center for American Progress CAP). Yes, it’s true that such solicitations aren’t the same as detailed policy papers. It’s also true that both organizations have in the past supported at least some of the trade policy overhauls emphasized by Mr. Trump as vital to job creation in the genuinely productive sectors of the U.S. economy – especially manufacturing. It seems that their interest in new trade policies continues to some extent. And it’s true as well that funding appeals are practically by definition aimed mainly at core or likely supporters – so they don’t necessarily reflect the full output of thinking of these think tanks.

Nevertheless, as a result, fund-raising pitches almost by definition reveal much about these core backers’ priorities, and those of an organization. And in both the EPI and CAP emails, creating more good jobs via trade was a concept conspicuously absent, while what I’ve described as cleverly disguised (even when necessary or desirable) welfare measures were front and center. And here’s a fact that goes far toward clinching the case that the Left remains largely clueless re helping the “ninety-nine percent” it claims to champion. These think tanks in many ways represent the two main wings of progressivism and the Democratic party– what have been called the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton camps.

Take EPI’s pitch – which came in the form of a note from Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Warren certainly identified a big problem faced by working class voters and bearing much blame for the neglect they obviously feel: “A lot of people in this country work hard, but they aren’t building any security—and they are angry about it.”

Warren continued:

“They’re angry that bonuses go up for CEOs while their own paychecks are stuck in the same place year after year. They’re angry that basic costs like housing, health care, and childcare have skyrocketed. And they’re angry about a tax system that benefits the rich and powerful.

“They’re angry because our economy and our government work for those who have already made it big, but don’t work for them.”

And in my view, she correctly identified a goal that needs to be achieved for greater and more broadly based American economic success: “Our top economic priority must be improving the lives of working people in this country—because everyone in this country should have a fighting chance to build a future.”

But what did Warren emphasize as the policies most needed to help the working (and middle) class? “[F]ighting to raise the minimum wage to a living wage [and expanding] Social Security for millions of Americans…” along with addressing “the gender and race wage gaps….” The words “trade,” “offshoring,” and “globalization” simply don’t appear.

The appeal for the Center for American Progress came from its president, Neera Tanden. You might be familiar with Tanden from the presidential campaign. As a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter, she’s been a fixture on many of the Sunday morning talk shows. She was also one of the most prominent Democrats embarrassed by the hacked and leaked emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.

Tanden’s email yesterday was titled “Defend Our Economic Security” – and therefore seemed full of promise. I thought that it might deal with neglected issues I’ve written profusely about, like the weaknesses that have emerged in the American defense manufacturing base, or the recklessness of permitting the nation’s best tech companies transfer much of their best (and defense-related) knowhow to China.

No such luck, however. Tanden’s focus instead was on “the issues that matter most to working families” – which of course is laudable. But as her letter makes clear, CAP is most concerned with “how the American middle class has been squeezed by the rising costs of health care, child care, higher education, housing, and retirement” and the greatest challenge it sees is preventing President-elect Trump and the incoming Republican-controlled Congress from cutting the government programs that have helped the middle (and working) class cope with these rising costs.

Again, I have no objection to ensuring the continued health of many of these programs, or entire safety net. But in CAP’s apparent view, they’re ends in and of themselves. I also understand the need to demonize political opponents in fund-raising literature. It’s a tried and true way to fire up the donor base.

But the organization doesn’t seem interested in policies to foster the types of private sector jobs that would enable Americans to reduce their burgeoning reliance on these measures. That notion is also difficult to find at the Economic Policy Institute. Both institutes may be right in viewing a safety net-centric economic game plan as a winning political formula. And if they were, in an ironic way, they’d be confirming one of former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s biggest verbal mis-steps during the 2012 election – his suggestion that 47 percent of Americans are welfare state takers.

But one of the clearest lessons of the 2016 election is that the masses of working class voters who opted for Mr. Trump aren’t buying it. All of which presents the Democrats – who have styled themselves as the Party of the Common Man – with a dilemma that’s not only momentous, but possibly existential.

Im-Politic: It Was Trump – and Nationalism – That Killed TPP for Good

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Campaign for America's Future, Congress, Democrats, fast track, free trade agreements, Im-Politic, Jobs, Lori Wallach, manufacturing, nationalism, progressives, protectionism, Public Citizen, Republicans, Tobita Chow, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump

However understandably it’s been overshadowed by the earthquake election of 2016, the demise of President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (TPP) is a very big, indeed historic, deal. Think of it this way: Do you know how many times since 1950 that a trade agreement concluded by an American administration has been turned back by public opposition? Try “none.”

As a result, it’s vital that trade policy critics correctly understand the ingredients of this victory – if only because they’ll decisively influence the nature of alternative approaches able to pass public and legislative muster. And in this vein, it’s becoming apparent that left-of-center trade activists – who deserve most of the credit for organizing impressive campaigns of opposition to U.S. trade policy since the NAFTA fight of the early 1990s – have especially important lessons to learn. The biggest ones: first, that Donald Trump’s election as president delivered the coup de grace against TPP; and second, and that his fundamentally nationalist arguments made the trade critics’ movement genuinely, and victoriously, bipartisan.

Just to review the history briefly, in 1950, President Truman decided that his plans to create a global trade body with strong enforcement powers were going nowhere, and so the White House announced in December that legislation to approve the globally endorse International Trade Organization would not be put before Congress.

Over the following six and a half decades, Congress did formally or informally rebuff three presidential requests to renew the executive’s trade negotiating authority in conjunction with expedited “fast track” voting procedures. But when actual trade deals came before the House and Senate, all of them passed. Not even the financial crisis and Great Recession were able to generate winning coalitions against new trade agreements, as lawmakers approved deals with Colombia, Korea, and Panama in October, 2011, when the current (historically weak) recovery was still in a relatively early and not especially strong stage.

During all of these trade battles, left-of-center forces such as labor unions and environmental groups provided most of the opposition’s political and financial muscle, its lobbying strength on Capitol Hill, and its grass roots organizing. And considering how tremendously outspent these groups were by Big Business (including Wall Street), and how vigorously the national media tried to marginalize them, these groups performed heroically.

Both President-elect Trump and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton ran deeply divisive campaigns. And Mr. Trump’s displayed a clear penchant for assailing numerous liberal social and cultural sacred cows. So it wasn’t entirely surprising that trade critics on the left consistently tried to minimize the overlap between their positions on globalization and those of the GOP candidate. Much more surprising, and less defensible, is how this practice has continued and even intensified since the Trump victory.

The most egregious example seems to have come from Tobita Chow, who heads a Chicago-based political organization called The People’s Lobby and, more important, just wrote on the president-elect and trade for the nationally influential Campaign for America’s Future. According to Chow, although Mr. Trump opposed TPP, he “plans to pursue bilateral trade deals with a number of Asian countries, including with Vietnam, which is also part of the TPP. Expect Trump’s trade deals to be even more damaging for people in the US and abroad than the TPP would be.”

Working a different but related angle, Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach claims that although President Obama’s continuing push for the TPP “helped to elect Donald Trump…Trump himself did not derail the TPP – people power united across borders accomplished that first by delaying the TPP’s completion beyond its 2012 deadline and then by ensuring that a majority in Congress could never be built to implement the deal since it was signed 10 months ago.

“By declaring he will formally bury the zombie TPP, the president-elect is merely acknowledging the obvious: The deal died under the weight of its own terms and could not achieve sufficient support in Congress.“

If Chow is indeed speaking for much of the progressive community, then he’s vividly demonstrated that this faction has become just as oblivious to the concerns of working class Americans as the corporate-funded Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Here’s why he has such a beef with the President-elect on trade. As he explains it, Mr. Trump’s fundamental mistake is basing his approach to trade

“on his nationalistic politics. Trump has promised to step in and stop competition across borders, and to defend ‘real Americans’ against the immigrants and foreigners whom are too often perceived as threats to their livelihood and their way of life. And in trade policy, Trump is a protectionist. The very name, ‘protectionism’, implies that jobs and investment in other countries are threats, and that we can and should ‘protect’ the American economy against these threats. A protectionist like Trump would have us believe that if we throw up trade barriers and stop investment in foreign countries and force goods to be made in the US, then we can ‘bring back’ jobs and factories from China and Mexico and return to the middle-class economy that flourished between WWII and the 1970s. This is what is captured in Trump’s slogan, ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Chow goes on to sound like a charter member of the nation’s offshoring lobby, or a Mainstream Media columnist, by insisting that

“[T]he slogan is a lie. You can’t ‘bring back’ jobs that don’t exist anymore. Manufacturing jobs are on the decline around the world–including in China. Economist Joseph Stiglitz sums it up: ‘Global employment in manufacturing is going down because productivity increases are exceeding increases in demand for manufactured products by a significant amount.’”

As I’ve written previously, countries much less important economically than the United States has long used their market power to influence multinational companies’ investment decisions and the contours of their supply chains to lure investment – and jobs – to their economies. Why does Chow believe that similar U.S. efforts are bound to fail?

I have other substantive issues with his arguments, but more important is Chow’s conclusion that what Americans should back instead is

“what is sometimes called progressive nationalism: an agenda to pursue a progressive agenda across borders to create a more just and sustainable global society. And since, as progressives, we understand that the labor movement is central to all our struggles, this means that a core goal of progressive internationalism must be to increase the power and status of workers internationally.”

Does he really believe that this will be a winning message in American politics for the foreseeable future? Is there any evidence that the working class that rallied behind Mr. Trump (including many union households) would respond favorably? And if so, what does Chow believe has changed over the last quarter century? After all, progressives have made these points at every opportunity during that period’s trade battles. They never galvanized enough voters to win.

Which brings us to the main weakness of Wallach’s case. She’s right about “people power united across borders” delaying TPP’s conclusion and ratification – and about the importance of buying such time. But ultimately the deal was signed by all the countries involved, and most prospective TPP members with reasonably democratic systems made clear that the U.S. Congress’ ratification was crucial to bringing the treaty across their own various finish lines. The reason was obvious: America’s market would have represented nearly two-thirds of the final free trade zone.

Now ask yourself about TPP’s fate had Clinton won her expected victory this year. Can anyone seriously doubt that she would have pushed for a few cosmetic changes and then worked with pro-TPP Republican Congressional leaders to win a final passage sometime early in her first term that mirrored President Obama’s fast track triumph last year? In fact, as Wallach repeatedly warned before Election Day, when Mr. Trump seemed dead and buried and Clinton seemed sure to win the White House, a TPP vote during a lame duck session of Congress was entirely possible.

Mr. Trump’s election was the event that finished off the treaty for good – both because of his own opposition and because of the shock effect of his upset victory, which revealed that a substantially transformed Republican party electorate wasn’t about to take its cues on trade anymore from the likes of offshoring lobby hired guns like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

In other words, President-elect Trump’s successful conversion of a critical mass of Republicans into energized trade policy critics who actually voted their convictions was what turned the opposition led for so long by the progressives into a truly bipartisan – and therefore winning – movement.

As a result, progressives face a major choice. They can ensure a more lasting defeat for job- and growth-killing trade deals – and lay the foundations for realistic plans to promote greater prosperity outside the United States, too – by acknowledging the political and substantive merits of more nationalistic American trade policies. Or they can keep inveighing against the President-elect and his approach, or provide at best niggardly support, and boost the odds that a genuine revolution in the politics of trade in the United States fizzles out.

Im-Politic: Why U.S. Progressives Need to Become Nationalists

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America First, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, free trade agreements, globalism, Im-Politic, Immigration, labor unions, nationalism, New Balance, offshoring, Populism, progressives, third world, Trade, Trump, white working class, working class

Tiny groups of individuals shouldn’t be mistaken for entire movements, or even significant factions of movements. Therefore, I don’t want to make too much of those Trump haters who burned their New Balance sneakers and/or slammed the company on social media because it stated that the election as president of a strong trade policy critic would be good for manufacturers seeking to make most of their products in the United States, like itself.

At the same time, the backlash against New Balance sheds lots of light on serious problems in the ranks of American progressivism that contributed to Trump’s triumph and that will need to be solved if the Left end of the country’s political spectrum is to win working class loyalties and convincingly claim populist chops.

Let me start with a little story (one of my father’s favorite phrases!). Back in the late-1990s, when President Clinton had requested new trade negotiating authority from Congress, I attended a meeting at AFL-CIO headquarters of activists seeking to block his ambitions. Early at the session, we agreed that we should explain to legislators and the public what kinds of trade policies we favored, not simply what we opposed, and someone (not me) suggested something along these lines as a unifying theme:

“The main purpose of U.S. trade policy should be to promote healthy growth for the American economy and higher living standards for the majority of the American people.”

That didn’t seem terribly controversial to me. But several hands immediately rose in protest. A representative of the Maryknoll Sisters made clear the objection. Why, she asked, were we ignoring the well-being of the rest of the world?

To his credit, the American labor leader who was running the meeting tried to argue that, however much he sympathized with her point, it was axiomatic that the first obligation of the U.S. government was to promote and defend the interests of the American people. But he didn’t make the argument very emphatically, and many of the others around the table – who came from left-of-center organizations – were even more conflicted. I tried to shore up the first speaker, but quickly realized I was in the greatly outnumbered and spent the rest of the session listening.

I don’t remember what the final version said, and doubt it was ever made public, but the phrasing of that opening point was definitely watered down. On my way out, some folks who worked for labor union offices outside the Beltway came over to me and asked, as they were shaking their heads, “What the heck was that all about?” I replied, “You’ve just learned a valuable lesson about American liberals. Many don’t believe that American workers’ interests should come first.”

They’d actually gotten many such lessons throughout the 1990s. As the first Bush administration and especially the Clinton administration turned U.S. trade policy into an exercise in offshoring, not domestic growth, their progressive critics decided that the best way to resist was to spotlight the harm this new strategy would inflict on workers and peasants in the developing world as well as in the United States. In fact, the third world and its grievances turned into a prime focus of those who famously protested the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

This approach made some tactical sense, as many liberals in Congress clearly were not constitutionally inclined to buy an America First trade policy. But although there are any number of ways in which U.S. trade policies could be changed to create more situations of mutual benefit between rich and poor countries (see this recent article for an example), the progressive stance also reflected a refusal to recognize that many hard choices have confronted – and still confront – the nation on trade.

In public policy trying to please everyone tends to wind up pleasing no one. So substantively, this wishful thinking was a formula for confusion at best. Politically, the impact was far worse: The progressives wound up muddying and therefore weakening the message trade critics were trying to send to the public.

Small wonder that even though the critics won some procedural trade fights during the 2000s, even after the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, President Obama managed to secure Congressional passage of three new free trade agreements. Not until a major politician forthrightly vowed to prioritize American interests in trade policy making did the powerful globalization status quo meet its match – and then some.

Based on their initial post-election statements, it seems that progressive leaders realize that rejecting the option of working with Mr. Trump on trade policy would be the height of folly. That is, it seems that they’re implicitly rejecting the notion that the President-elect is so odious that a company that employs American workers despite powerful pressures to offshore should be condemned not for endorsing the whole of his candidacy, but simply for noting that his election would likely aid those efforts.  Therefore, big changes on the trade front seem inevitable above and beyond the collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

Yet even the progressives’ leaders still face a towering obstacle in their own quest to regain the votes of the millions of working class voters – probably like many of those New Balance workers – who deserted their party’s standard bearer last Tuesday night. They have no chance of succeeding if they continue describing all forms of common sense immigration policies as bigoted. And for those of you who think that I’m just talking about the white working class, keep in mind that the phrase “union household” also describes this constituency.

In other words, during the 2016 elections, progressives in part tried to convince Main Street America that they would gain from a massive increase in the nation’s supply of unskilled labor through both amnesty and the powerful magnet effect it would generate. And at the same time, if these working class voters worried about the resulting downward pressure on wages, along with the effects on the nation’s cohesion of surging bilingualism and its security of newcomers from the culturally medieval Middle East, they were condemned by the Left as nativists, racists, and even worse.

The pointed references to Mr. Trump’s alleged xenophobia by both Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (earlier in the campaign) show that their faction of American politics has much to learn on this score. Until they understand that real U.S. populists can’t be globalists in this day and age, they’re likely to continue wandering the political wilderness.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Progress from Progressives on Trade

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America First, developed countries, developing countries, environmental standards, Financial Crisis, GATT, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, George W. Bush, Global Imbalances, Global Trade Watch, globalization, Hillary Clinton, Jared Bernstein, labor standards, Lori Wallach, multinational companies, NAFTA, national treatment, non-discrimination, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, progressives, Public Citizen, The American Prospect, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Ever since the debate over NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) more than twenty years ago turned trade policy into a nationally contentious issue, the American left has provided the overwhelming share of the political money and muscle aimed at creating urgently needed course corrections. So it’s great to see important signs that progressives have finally started touting two ideas that realistically could make a significant difference.

The evidence can be found in an article coming up in The American Prospect by Jared Bernstein, former top economist to Vice President Biden, and Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. To be sure, the article does dwell overlong on proposals that left-of-center figures have been making for decades, and that hold little, if any, promise of turning trade agreements and related policy decisions into engines of domestic growth.

For example, there’s the usual call for truly enforceable labor and environmental standards in trade deals – even though adequately inspecting enormous third world national manufacturing complexes is a logistically impossible task. Worse, the offshoring lobby and its minions in Congress and the Executive Branch have already twice used the tactic of making cosmetic changes along these lines in trade agreements to call progressives’ bluff: during the George W. Bush administration in deals with agreements with Panama and Peru; and in President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Don’t think Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton doesn’t recognize how successful this ploy has been in persuading fence-sitting Congressional Democrats to fall in line behind new trade deals.

Judging from the Bernstein-Wallach piece, moreover, the American left still believes that no hard choices need be made in trade and broader globalization strategy, and that with their proposed reforms, growing international commerce can become a win-win for first and third world workers alike around the world. As I’ve recently written, positive sum outcomes for developed and developing country workforces are possible – if, for instance, NAFTA was turned into a genuine western hemisphere trade bloc, as its leading founders once suggested they intended.

On a global basis, though, the surplus of developing country workers earning pauper wages (both in absolute terms and in relative terms in sectors like advanced manufacturing and high tech services) ensures that for decades the third world will remain much more important as a low-wage and low-regulation production site than as a source of new consumer demand. And as long as that situation holds, astronomical growth-, job-, and wage-killing trade deficits in the United States will be inevitable. Also inevitable will be the buildup of enormous international economic imbalances like those that set the stage for the last financial crisis.

But the most encouraging aspect of the Bernstein-Wallach article was indeed encouraging: The authors argued that not all prospective U.S. trade partners should be treated equally – because they differ in crucial respects. Ever since the current global trading system began taking shape in the immediate aftermath of World War II, one of its biggest weaknesses – and one posing special problems for a relatively open economy like America’s – has been its insistence (largely at Washington’s behest, to be sure) on the principles of non-discrimination and national treatment.

In other words, regardless of how open or closed they are, or how wealthy or impoverished, the United States needed to deal equally with all countries belonging to the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and to the newer World Trade Organization (WTO). During the early post-war decades, these requirements legally forced American leaders to open their markets as much, say, to relatively open Britain as to hermetically sealed Japan, and to treat identically in the American market businesses from wildly varying countries.

When the end of the Cold War encouraged third world population giants like China and Mexico to introduce selected free market reforms and join the global economy, the option of mass production offshoring was created for multinational companies. As a result, these GATT and then WTO principles prompted the U.S. leaders influenced by these companies to expand trade whether or not the target countries could become significant net consumers, and thus create reasonably balanced trade flows and their economic benefits.

Bernstein and Wallach don’t favor discrimination on grounds like these. (That’s not surprising, since this practice would undercut their positive-sum first-third world trade optimism.) But they do urge selecting

“trade partners based on their countries’ records of compliance with the terms of past trade agreements, international labor and environmental standards, and human rights and other criteria. [The article makes clear that records of currency manipulation would be among them.] While no country has a perfect track record, there is a well-understood continuum of compliance, and known bad actors should be barred from the negotiating table until they’ve made proven, effective efforts to begin cleaning up their acts.”

That’s a start – and a potential wedge.

It’s also heartening to see Bernstein and Wallach emphasize “rewarding those who play by the rules” by creating and enforcing meaningful rules of origin in trade deals. As they rightly note, without such provisions, countries that have not signed various trade deals can still benefit from them because multinationals and other companies will be free to import into member countries goods largely made outside the new trade zone. That’s great of course for businesses seeking the great possible sourcing flexibility. But these practices inevitably render meaningless most of the rest of the given agreement.

And most encouraging of all – although the authors don’t mention this – an American trade policy (robustly) incorporating these features would be in violation of WTO rules. Free of a straitjacket that mandates policy uniformity in a highly diverse world, Washington would be free to choose another globalization lodestar – one that makes far more sense for a country with incomparable market power, potential for self-sufficiency, and thus unilateral leverage. A lodestar like “America First.”

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Trump-ian Trade Policies Needn’t Doom the Third World

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China, David Cay Johnston, developing countries, Donald Trump, James Pethokoukis, Jobs, Kenneth Rogoff, poverty, progressives, protectionism, The Daily Beast, third world, Trade, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

A major test of a worthy journalist is whether he covers stories that clash dramatically with his own sympathies and/or those of his biggest fans, and David Cay Johnston’s latest piece – on the immense toll taken on third world economies by corrupt leaders – passes with flying colors. Moreover, Johnston’s work also strongly undermines a major emerging claim during this presidential campaign – that Trump-ian trade policies should be opposed largely because they would his close down a major growth engine for developing countries.

In his May 3 Daily Beast article, Johnston – a Pulitzer Prize-winner during his years at The New York Times – spotlights the work of “investigative economist” Jim Henry, whose research contends that, since 1970, crooked politicians have stolen just over $12 trillion from the third world countries they’ve ruled. As Johnston notes, this humongous figure represents about five cents of each dollar of total global wealth and about two-thirds of America’s current annual economic output. And he rightly observes that “Were all of the flight capital returned and invested smartly it would reduce human misery by raising living standards, especially by reducing child mortality while increasing both health status and life expectancy.”

According to Henry’s findings, almost a third of this stolen wealth has come from five countries – China, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Venezuela. The first has certainly made impressive progress reducing poverty largely via trade with the United States and other rich economies, and expanded trade with America in particular clearly has created a modern manufacturing complex – with all its wide-ranging benefits – in northern Mexico.

But if Henry’s work is on target, it means that some $9 trillion has been looted from much poorer regions – notably in sub-Saharan Africa – that have been left far behind as trade and investment have created ever more extensive economic integration between the world’s North and South. The political ramifications for the politics of American trade policy would be profound.

For during this presidential campaign in particular, Donald Trump’s rise to the threshold of the Republican nomination has prompted trade policy supporters to retreat into the argument that, whatever the harm they’ve done to the U.S. middle and working classes, recent trade deals and similar decisions deserve backing because they’ve achieved a major moral goal: reducing third world poverty.

In the words of James Pethokoukis of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “Even knowing what we now know about the possible impact on U.S. jobs, should Washington have somehow limited trade and overseas investment with China — even at the cost of higher global poverty? Certainly the humanitarian answer is ‘No.'”

And according to Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, “In the name of reducing U.S. inequality, presidential candidates in both parties would stymie the aspirations of hundreds of millions of desperately poor people in the developing world to join the middle class.”

Moreover, making explicit a point Rogoff left implicit, a writer from liberal website Vox.com used the same argument against Democratic presidential challenger Bernie Sanders: “Limiting trade with low-wage countries as severely as Sanders wants to would hurt the very poorest people on Earth. A lot.

“Free trade is one of the best tools we have for fighting extreme poverty. If Sanders wins, and is serious about implementing his trade agenda…he will impoverish millions of already-poor people.”

In fact, this position has long been an article of faith even among avowed progressives who have been highly critical of current trade policies – to the point of fingering American protectionism as a leading obstacle to third world economic progress.

Henry’s research makes clear that developing countries and their self-styled champions can adopt a poverty fighting strategy that doesn’t require shafting American and other developed country workers – cleaning up their acts. Johnston deserves great credit for reporting on these findings. Any chance that America’s political leaders throughout the spectrum will start paying attention?