Im-Politic: Selective CCP Virus Finger-Pointing

Tags

Barack Obama, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Dan Diamond, Daniel Lippman, Defense Production Act, DPA, George W. Bush, health security, healthcare goods, Im-Politic, Jessica Silverman-Greenberg, Mainstream Media, MSM, Nahal Toosi, National Security Council, Nicholas Kulish, pandemic, regulations, Sarah Kliff, The New York Times, Trump, ventilators, Wuhan virus

Mainstream Media accounts of the Trump administration’s CCP Virus response keep appearing emphasizing how lousy and lackadaisical it’s been compared with the federal response to potentially dangerous disease outbreaks during the Obama years – and especially given supposedly prescient pandemic warnings that the Obama-nauts sounded to their successors that allegedly were ignored.

So RealityChek is going to have to keep pointing out major flaws in these accounts that both reporters and their editors should have noted, and questions they should have asked.

Keep in mind, moreover, that today’s pushback comes on top of (1) this blog’s description of a 2011 Commerce Department report on America’s increasingly dangerous vulnerability to foreign cutoffs of vital healthcare goods that was completely ignored; and (2) a similar presentation of federal economic data making clear the nation’s healthcare security – another way to think of this vulnerability – has been weakening for at least two decades.

Let’s start with the article in today’s New York Times detailing how a George W. Bush administration plan continued under Barack Obama failed to plug what its public health officials viewed as “one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators.” The effort entailed finding businesses willing to try to build ventilators that were cheaper, more portable, and easier to use than were then available, and then awarding the contract to the best proposal.

According to Times reporters Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg (and presumably their editors), the eventual failure mainly highlighted “the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis.”

And although this point wasn’t made, the obvious message that the piece meant to send readers is that the President continues making a big mistake by not unleashing the full power of the Defense Production Act (DPA)– which creates vast government power to order whatever companies it wishes to make whatever products it considers necessary as quickly as possible, and to prioritize sales to Washington, not other customers. Underlying this position, of course, is the (completely ignorant) belief that this 1950 law (amended several times since) enables a Chief Executive to snap his fingers and instantly start assembly lines churning out ventilators and face masks and pharmaceuticals, etc.

But let’s leave aside this DPA fetishism. As I tweeted, the following sentence in the piece isn’t completely uninteresting given the unmistakable importance of quick results: After an initial failure (that shouldn’t be pinned on either of those two administrations), “The federal government started over with another company in 2014, whose ventilator was approved only last year and whose products have not yet been delivered.”

That doesn’t sound like the regulatory process reflected particular urgency – and clearly the problem extended into the Trump administration. But this business-as-usual attitude reigned even though, as the article noted, the ventilator project “came in the wake of a parade of near-miss pandemics: SARS, MERS, bird flu and swine flu.” In other words, evidence abounded that pandemics weren’t a rarity. Recently, they were becoming frequent. And still apparently no thought was given to any regulatory fast-tracking.

Finally in connection with this episode. It’s commendable that these pre-Trump public health officials tried to do something new. Less commendable, and less understandable, is why none of them recognized the foreign vulnerability problem and the offshoring-happy trade policies that fostered them.

Two other recent articles seeking to pin the blame for U.S. CCP Virus unpreparedness on Mr. Trump came out March 16 and March 25 in Politico. The first documented that on January 13, 2017 – seven days before the Trump inauguration – a team of outgoing Obama administration officials held a briefing for a team of incoming Trump-ers “intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis” – the distinct possibility that a major, deadly pandemic would sweep over the United States from abroad.

Further, the briefers specified that the new administration “could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was ‘paramount’….” Unfortunately, continued the article by Nahal Toosi, Daniel Lippman, and Dan Diamond, the Trumpers seemed pretty apathetic. And that’s pretty damning, right?

In principle, yes. But why did the Politico staff bury this observation: “None of the sources argued that one meeting three years ago could have dramatically altered events today”? Because it would take much of the punch out of this supposed bombshell?

Also buried: An observation in the apparently actual briefing document that, when in terms of “U.S. hospital preparedness and response,” “State and local governments lead public health response.” That’s an important piece of the current American response – even though it’s been relentlessly portrayed in the press another example of the administration’s failure. And P.S. – this document said nothing about ensuring adequate national screening capability.

Politico wasn’t finished, however. Nine days later, it ran another piece – by two of the same reporters – charging that the Trump administration’s CCP Virus policies have “failed to follow” a detailed pandemic playbook prepared by the Obama National Security Council that, it seems, would have prevented much of the virus damage inflicted on the nation.

Again, it’s a plausible claim – although, like the first Politico piece, this article left out the development of the Trump administration’s own pandemic strategy by the fall of 2018 (which means that work on it throughout the federal government began months before).

Also, like the first article, it failed to pose these crucial questions: If the Obama pandemic specialists were so utterly convinced that a pandemic would strike sooner rather than later, and that Team Trump was falling down on the preparation job, why didn’t they alert Democrats in Congress, or Never Trumper Republicans? Certainly there’s been no shortage of lawmakers (especially Democrats) looking for any opportunity to slam the administration (especially if this activity could do some good).

Additionally, if these pandemic warriors did send their message to these lawmakers, why did the public hear so little about it?

My hunch: For three years, the Never Trumpers of both parties had much higher priorities. Think “Russia” and “impeachment.”

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The (Dangerously) False Choice Between the Virus and a Restart

Tags

Angus Deaton, Ann Case, Big Business, CCP Virus, coronavirus, Deaths of Despair, growth, Jobs, lockdown, public health, shutdown, small business, stress, The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Trump, unemployment, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

And here I thought that Americans were starting to understand that defeating the CCP Virus and thus protecting public health on the one hand, and restarting economic activity as soon as possible on the other, are not sharply conflicting imperatives. They’re mutually reinforcing – including for public health reasons. Silly me.

One sign was this column by The New York Times‘ Thomas L. Friedman – not someone who’s career-defining predictions and analysis (like the always beneficial and inevitable expansion of economic globalization) have stood up real well. All the same, as one expert quoted by Friedman observed:

“Income is one of the stronger predictors of health outcomes — and of how long we live. Lost wages and job layoffs are leaving many workers without health insurance and forcing many families to forego health care and medications to pay for food, housing, and other basic needs. People of color and the poor, who have suffered for generations with higher death rates, will be hurt the most and probably helped the least. They are the housekeepers in the closed hotels and the families without options when public transit closes. Low-income workers who manage to save the money for groceries and reach the store may find empty shelves, left behind by panic shoppers with the resources for hoarding.’’

P.S. – This expert is a noted public health authority, not an economist callously focused on money and output.

If you still doubt how worsening economic fortunes can literally be a large-scale killer, check out the work of the husband-wife team of Angus Deaton and Ann Case. Yes, they’re economists. But since 2015, these Princeton University scholars have been documenting how deteriorating well-being has helped fuel an historic rise in mortality among middle aged, working class whites. This year, they’ve published the results of their research in a book (appropriately) titled Deaths of Despair. Serious health problems with economic roots have been identified among African Americans as well.

Nonetheless, President Trump’s statement yesterday setting a target date of Easter (April 12) for restarting economic activity was greeted by a howl of protests accusing him of ignoring public health experts’ pleas, and placing his reelection hopes (which, the argument goes, depend almost exclusively on his economic policy record) over the lives of [FILL IN YOUR FAVORITE NUMBER] of Americans. Could anything be eviller?

There’s a counter-argument of course, at least in theory: Cash payments to workers could keep their incomes up and address these economy-related health threats even as most of the economy remains closed. The problem, though, is that without support for business (especially smaller companies, which are big employers collectively but often lack big cash cushions or access to affordable credit even in the best of times), massive payments could (which would be needed as long as workers have regular bills to pay) last a lot longer than the current health emergency because many such companies are likely to close for good, and leave their workers in the lurch, if they don’t start regaining customers fast.

Moreover, these small business vulnerabilities don’t exist in isolation because so many make much of their money selling to big businesses. So when the latter run into trouble because of a weak economy, the little guys – and their workers – inevitably will suffer, too.

So unless you’re a diehard Never Trump-er, and/or know absolutely nothing about the economy or Americans’ health and are unwilling to learn, you’ll recognize that the supposed choice between reopening the economy before too long (if not necessarily by Easter) and saving American lives is a false one. American policy, in other words, will have to learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time. The good news is that, as The Times‘ Friedman and others have noted, any number of approaches are available to achieve the best of both worlds that the nation urgently needs.

Im-Politic: Why the Haters are Wrong About Trump and the Coronavirus

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CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, Council on Foreign Relations, Im-Politic, impeachment, pandemic, public health, Senate, The New York Times, Think Global Health, Trump, WHO, World Health Organization

President Trump sure is getting slammed for his response to the coronavirus outbreak, both by the Mainstream Media, many Democratic Party politicians, and even some public health specialists. (See here and here.) Their main indictments: He’s been hopelessly behind the curve. Or has it been that he’s been too alarmist? Both charges have been made, making clear that the substance doesn’t matter much to the critics.

One allegation seems justified to me: The President’s latest (fiscal 2021) budget request included a 16 percent cut in outlays for the Centers for Disease Control, the branch of the Cabinet-level federal Department of Health and Human Services in charge of the nation’s health security. The budget document was made public eleven days after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak to be an international public health emergency, and six days after Mr. Trump promised in his State of the Union address to take “all necessary steps” to protect Americans from the disease.

But the main problem with the CDC decision, as I see it, is political. Clearly, the timing was terrible, and was bound to be jumped on by reasonable and unreasonable critics alike. Indeed, all of the President’s budget requests have sought such cuts – which also deserves criticism even though Mr. Trump eventually accepted higher funding in the final budget deals each time.

Substantively, however, it’s inconceivable that had any of the sought cuts been actually made, they would have made a discernible difference in the nation’s early-stage anti-coronavirus efforts at least. After all, how could even more money have enabled the agency to predict or identify the virus once it broke out, since it cught China itself by surprise; and since Beijing still refusedsto let U.S. officials as such into the country to aid its own efforts?

It’s true that last year, the Trump administration ended a program in the U.S. government’s foreign aid agency aimed precisely at improving the detection of corona-type viruses “with pandemic potential.” According to ABC News, the program (called PREDICT) “is credited with identifying nearly a thousand” of these maladies since its creation in 2009. Which sounds great. Except the coronavirus clearly wasn’t one of them.

But as for being slow on the coronavirus uptake (a line of attack that’s – understandably – shown more staying power than the “overreaction” claims), timelines showing milestones in the virus’ identification and spread, and principal Trump administration responses demonstrate nothing of the kind. (My main sources are the Think Global Health initiative of the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading U.S. think tank; and The New York Times.)

They remind us that the first recorded onset of symptoms, in Wuhan, China, came on December 1, that Chinese authorities first told the World Health Organization (WHO) that something was rotten in that city on December, 31, and that Beijing took its own first anti-virus action the following day – closing a seafood market thought to have been the the origin point.

On January 21, the United States confirmed finding the first domestic American case of the virus – in a man who had traveled to Wuhan. By this time, China had reported six virus-related deaths, and several hundred cases.

A day later, WHO convened its first coronavirus meeting, and ultimately decided against declaring the outbreak to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. On January 23 came the first Chinese travel restrictions and quarantines.

Between January 24 and 26, Washington identified four more American cases, and on the 27^th, by which time 3,000 victims around the world had contracted the disease and 60 had died, announced screening programs at domestic airports that handled 90 percent of passengers coming from China along with CDC initiatives “to identify potential cases.” In addition, a high level State Department travel advisory had been announced for Wuhan, and President Trump had spoken with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and offered assistance.

On January 28 and 29, the United States began evacuating its nationals from Wuhan – dates which are significant because it wasn’t until the following day that WHO finally decided to declare the virus an official public health emergency. On the 31^st, as The New York Times reported, the administration announced that it “would bar entry by most foreign nationals who had recently visited China and put some American travelers under a quarantine as it declared a rare public health emergency.” At the time, worldwide deaths totaled 213 and cases approached 9,800 (eleven in the United States). Also significant – these actions came a day before the first coronavirus death outside China was reported (in the Philippines).

Official U.S. actions by no means stopped then. On February 5, all Peace Corps volunteers were evacuated from China and the CDC starting sending diagnostic kits to more than one hundred laboratories in the United States. (The Food & Drug Administration authorized the tests to be conducted by the kits the day before.) Two days later, on the seventh, the administration pledged $100 million to the global coronavirus fight.

The last week of January, incidentally, was kind of interesting for another reason: President Trump was being tried in the Senate on two articles of impeachment – which themselves represented the culmination of what I’m sure we’ll all agree was a great deal of work by Democrats in the House and Senate, as well as voluminous reporting by the national media. The journalism of course, included the publication of scoops of any number of supposed bombshell revelations about the President’s misdeeds, and even though acquittal seemed certain to most, they clearly sent the President and his top aides scrambling on an ongoing basis and surely occupied a great deal of their time.

Moreover, the trial didn’t end (with the acquittal vote) until February 5 – the date that the Peace Corps volunteers were being evacuated and the CDC diagnostic kits were being issued.

I fully accept that Presidents need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, and that indeed, the ability to manage crises successfully, and during the worst of circumstances, is the most important qualification for the job. It’s also possible that the administration has already lost crucial time in the anti-coronavirus fight, and that consequently it will never catch up.

But the above timelines reveal to me, anyway, that the American record so far measures up well versus that of any other national government, and especially well versus that of WHO, which is supposed to be the tip of the spear here. Moreover, the Trump administration response seems all the more alert upon remembering that, as the virus was breaking out, the President was, if not literally fighting for his own life, relentlessly besieged by adversaries both inside and outside his government.  I suspect that posterity, as a result, will need to struggle to judge his initial coronavirus policy decisions as failures.

Im-Politic: How Mexico’s Paying for the Border Wall After All

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AMLO, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, asylum seekers, border security, border wall, caravans, Central America, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, international law, Jorge Ramos, Mexico, Migrant Protection Protocols, migrants, The New York Times, Trump

Here’s quite the spectacular new entry in the “Life is Strange” category: President Trump has turned out to be right in predicting that Mexico would pay for a border wall to curb illegal immigration. Only this victory has taken a form that neither Mr. Trump nor anyone else could have possibly expected. It didn’t even totally entail developments at the border envisioned!

It’s a major win nonetheless, and if you doubt me, then take the word of Jorge Ramos, the well known anchor for Spanish language TV network Univision, a major champion of de facto Open Borders policies, and of course no fan of the President’s. 

For as Ramos has pointed out in a New York Times op-ed piece yesterday, Mexico has created at least the functional equivalent of a wall. He’s referring to the decision (forced by a very effective – though of course widely condemned – tariffs and border-closing threat by Mr. Trump, as Ramos ruefully observed) of Mexico’s new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (nicknamed “AMLO”) to use Mexican forces to prevent Central American migrants and various other supposed asylum seekers from entering the United States en masse. Nor has Ramos been the only mass immigration advocate to point out this specific Trump success.

Some of these Mexican National Guards personnel are helping the United States enforce its new policy that permits requiring many asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their cases are judged. This Migrant Protection Protocols program replaces the obligation created by international law that until now has been interpreted to rquire Washington to admit  U.S.-bound asylum seekers’ entry even before evaluation. Although motivated by entirely understandable humanitarian concerns, this measure never anticipated the type of mass migration and related asylum fraud situation faced by the United States nowadays.

Other Mexican National Guards have been deployed to the country’s southern border with Guatemala, where they’ve been unmistakably effective in preventing huge caravans of Central American migrants from traveling through Mexico to reach the U.S.-Mexico border.

The United States has been indirectly financing a small portion of these efforts (through training programs to help for Central American officials better control their own borders). But the vast majority of spending on these efforts is coming from Mexico.

The President is entirely correct in continuing to emphasize the need for more effective physical barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the essence of his famous campaign wall-building promise was to improve America’s own border security greatly, and to make Mexico pay the costs. And that’s exactly what’s now happening to a major extent. Even better – this approach is working. Illegal crossings at the U.S. border are down, and Mexico’s Lopez Obrador says that the migrants groups seeking to enter his country are shrinking.

President Trump has been supplied with abundant material for reelection campaign ads this week (notably, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ripping up of her ceremonial State of the Union transcript). Jorge Ramos’ op-ed has just given him some more.

Following Up: The New York Times’ Fake History of the U.S. is Spreading

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1619 Project, African Americans, education, Following Up, history, journalism, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, racism, Sean Wilentz, slavery, The Atlantic, The New York Times

Since Americans’ mistrust of the news media keeps getting stronger, it’s a safe bet that they’d be pretty upset to find out that one major news organization is playing a bigger and bigger role in shaping their childen’s education. And they could well become livid if they learned that this media influence in the schools is growing even as scholars in the relevant field are concluding that much of the material being propagated is bunk.

Yet that’s exactly what’s been happening with The New York Times‘ 1619 Project. As I reported in a post last year, the project, named after the year the first black African slaves were brought to North America, seeks to [its words] “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The Times‘ reason for undertaking this effort? Its conclusion that “our story” as a nation hasn’t been told “truthfully.”

As I explained last year, the big problem with the 1619 Project isn’t that reconsideration of any aspect of U.S. history (or any history) should be beyond the pale, but that a news organization like The Times has no qualifications to undertake this task. Even more troubling: The Times lately has endorsed the view that it should act like a news organization with a substantive agenda, or several of them. And one of them is writing “about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years” because “America [has] become so divided by Donald Trump.”

Now confirmation has just emerged making clear that this bias has significantly infected the 1619 Project, and it comes not only from the ranks of America’s academic historians, but from historians with decidedly progressive views. Their case was summarized (at length) by Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, who concluded in a piece in The Atlantic (itself a pretty progressive publication) that although the role of slavery and racism in American history “remains too little understood by the general public,” The Times in many cases sought to fill the gap “through falsehoods, distortions, and significant omissions.”

What’s arguably worse, as Wilentz’ account makes clear, The Times not only blithely brushed off all of the historians’ critique. It doubled down on its propagandizing.

And here’s what’s clearly worse: The paper’s efforts to introduce this shoddy excuse for scholarship into school curricula have been succeeding. According to this report, 1619 Project materials are now being used or will soon in school systems in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; and Buffalo, New York. A New York City school is teaching with the Project as well, And The Times is working with an important ally – the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has produced a variety of “curricular resources,” including “a reading guide for the issue, activities to engage students, and more.

It’s bad enough that American journalism keeps spewing out Fake News. It now needs to be spreading Fake History? And the nation’s schools need to be swallowing it?

Im-Politic: Still Clueless – About Trump – After All These Years

Tags

conservatives, election 2020, GOP, Im-Politic, Jeff Stein, Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Mainstream Media, Populism, Republicans, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

Since a U.S. Presidential election year is now underway and since the Mainstream Media, for all its credibility problems, still supply the news coverage that so many voters rely on in whole or in part, it seems important to present some evidence that, nearly four years after Donald Trump’s victorious presidential run, at least two newspapers arguably at the top of the journalistic heap still have no clue as to what or why it happened.

Both examples deal with President Trump’s capture of the Republican Party, and the most disturbing of the two examples comes from The New York Times. The title of its December 21 piece – “Fear and Loathing: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party” – tells you pretty much all you need to know about its perspective. Authors Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman do refer in passing to “Mr. Trump’s deviations from longstanding party orthodoxy on issues like foreign policy and tariffs,” but they apparently believe that they’ve had nothing whatever to do with the GOP’s transformation.

Instead, they portray the post-2016 party as nothing but a cult of personality, comprised of voters and a majority of office-holders so blindly devoted to and terrified of Mr. Trump, respectively, that they’re determined to overlook supposedly dispositive proof of the President’s unfitness for the White House as his Ukraine policies.

In fact, Martin and Haberman are so incapable of attributing the President’s success to the policy disasters spearheaded by the political establishment’s right wing (Google “financial crisis” and “Great Recession”) that one of their sources for this claim is no less than the head of the Club for Growth – a leading anti-Trump orthodox conservative organization.

And when they encounter a more convincing explanation – an observation by a North Carolina Republican Congressman that Mr. Trump “has a complete connection with the average Republican voter and that’s given him political power here” – they simply leave it hanging.

Somewhat better – but more bewildering – is Jeff Stein’s December 27 Washington Post report on “Trump’s quest to shatter GOP economics reached its culmination in 2019.” Let’s give Stein his due for focusing on the substance (even though he seems to forget that major Trump departures from Republican dogma began on his first day in office – when the President pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement).

But his two paragraphs could not be weirder – even from a standard political standpoint:

“Whether [the Trump era shift] will permanently remake the Republican Party, on the other hand, remains an open question.

“‘Republican lawmakers privately still believe the deficit is a problem and support free trade — but they’re not going to say that publicly, because it’s not where their voters are,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the libertarian-leaning Manhattan Institute. ‘I’m not sure Trump has changed the minds of Republican lawmakers as much as he has won over the base and lawmakers understand crossing the president is political suicide.’”

There’s no question that the long-term future of conservative, Trump-ian populism is still up in the air – if only because its triumph has been so sudden, and because largely as a result, its ability to create the institutional underpinnings needed for durability can’t be taken for granted.

But does Riedl really believe that Republican lawmakers matter to the party more than the base? That may be convenient for someone in a weakening establishment struggling to avoid the ash heap of history. But does Stein buy it? Or does his use of Riedl’s statement indicate that, like so many Mainstream Media reporters, he identifies with that weakening establishment, too?

Im-Politic: The Mainstream Media Keep Coddling Illegal Alien Crime

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Central America, crime, gang violence, gangs, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Long Island, Mainstream Media, MS-13, Open Borders, Rupert Murdoch, The New York Post, The New York Times, Trump

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and bloggers.

I’m in the middle of a planned little RealityChek break but sometimes you can be sitting around reading the papers lazily and an item (or two) just jolts you into action. In this case, it was the radically different coverage by The New York Post and The New York Times of Friday’s announcement of mass arrests on Long Island, New York, of alleged members of the Central America-based gang MS-13.

MS-13 is held responsible for any number of horrific murders and other crimes in the area (and around the nation), and the news made the front pages of both papers. The Post‘s initial display was more prominent, but then again, it’s a more regionally focused publication, so no one can have any legitimate beef with The Times somewhat lower key approach. Indeed, let’s not forget that The Times is a more than somewhat lower-keyed paper to start with.

But here’s what should be the subject of a big beef. Even though immigration policy was by no means the Post article’s main angle, the print edition article did quote “a federal source” (federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities worked together on the investigations leading to the arrests) as saying that an estimated half of the defendants are non-citizens in the United States illegally. (This claim was left out of the on-line version.) Both versions of the article quoted (presumably other) officials as stating that the newly indicted, in the reporters’ words, “include illegal immigrants, US citizens, and non-citizens who are in the country legally.”

And at the very end, the article noted that “President Donald Trump has often cited the dangers of the MS-13 “infestation” to push for tougher immigration laws.”

All in all, then, this tabloid, owned by Australian conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and which often covers and comments on the President favorably, looks to have provided an account of the arrests with an appropriate degree of balance and context.

You’d think that The New York Times, which long has proudly boasted that it presents “All the News That’s Fit to Print” would have performed at least as well. But do you know how many times The Times coverage, in print or on-line, mentioned the legal status of any of those arrested? Exactly none.

The paper did manage, though, to report – quite prominently in the piece – that “The gang’s notoriety and bloody tactics have caught the attention of President Trump, who has often invoked its name and reputation as a way to justify his immigration policy. He has referred to the group as an ‘infestation’ and to its members as ‘animals.’ In 2018, he invited the mother of one MS-13 murder victim to be his guest at the State of the Union address.

“And on Friday, the president went on Twitter to use the arrests as an argument for his immigration policy, saying that the gang takedown was an example of how ‘we are getting MS-13 gang members, and many other people that shouldn’t be here, out of our country.’”

In other words, any’one relying solely on The Times coverage could easily have gotten the impression that Mr. Trump is simply using MS-13 as a baseless – or at least suspicious – way to fan immigration-related fears. 

Since it’s a free country, The Times is perfectly within its rights to pretend or to suggest that the spread of Central American-based gangs like MS-13 has absolutely nothing to do with American immigration policy — except in the minds of xenophobes like President Trump.  But this kind of treatment belongs in its commentary pages, not in hard news reporting where facts and accurate context are supposed to matter.

Sadly, though, the paper’s coverage is only the latest instance of Mainstream Media news organizations — and other Open Borders supporters — coddling a vicious criminal ring which would have only a minor presence in America had the nation’s previous Presidents and Congresses taken seriously their responsibility to enforce border security.  As a result, it’s legitimate to wonder how many more innocent residents of this country, legal and illegal, need to be victimized by illegal alien crime for its enablers to wake up. 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists Keep Abusing the Lessons of History

Tags

America First, globalism, John Maynard Keynes, Jonathan Kirshner, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Trump, Versailles treaty, Wall Street, Woodrow Wilson, World War I

Although I’m a long ways past high school, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that students are still being taught that the main lesson Americans should draw from their country’s foreign policy during the early decades of the twentieth century is that standing aloof from world affairs is a catastrophic mistake.

The most familiar feature of this claim holds that by preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations after World War I, America’s so-called isolationists guaranteed that no effective counter to fascist aggression could be mounted, and thereby guaranteed the outbreak of a far more destructive global conflict. But an economic indictment has been leveled against U.S. policy during those years as well.

As made clear between the lines of a December 7 New York Times op-ed piece, supporters of the foreign policy globalism opposed by President Trump and most of his backers have long ardently believed that international financial policies after the First World War also took a disastrous, “America First”-type turn. One big problem, though – history actually shows that the fundamental mistake Washington made was not too little international economic engagement after the war, but too much during it.

In the article – which usefully commemorates the hundredth anniversary of a seminal book by iconic twentieth century British economist John Maynard Keynes – Boston University political scientist Jonathan Kirshner rightly lauds Keynes’ eloquent case against the economic punishments levied against Germany by the 1919 Versailles peace treaty. He’s also right in criticizing the United States’ “stubborn” and “shortsighted” insistence that its allies fully repay the enormous war debts they’d racked up to America.

As Keynes himself insisted, those obligations were “a menace to financial stability everywhere,” imposing a “crushing burden,” that would be “a constant source of international friction.” An international financial order that was little more than a tangle of debts and reparations, he warned, could hardly “last a day.”

Kirshner, though, looks like he has a hidden – globalist – agenda. Echoing today’s criticisms of Mr. Trump’s trade and foreign policies (which, I need to note, have been far from models of consistent America First-ism), he condemned American leaders of the 1920s for ending a “brief flirtation” with internationalism (a pre-Trump term for globalism) under President Woodrow Wilson and returning to “nationalism and nativism.” “Domestic demands,” he continued, were placed above “global concerns.”

Even more pointedly, he repeated Keynes’ contention that it “will be a disaster for the world if America isolates herself.”

Nonetheless, you don’t need to buy into America First-ism or even simply criticize globalism to recognize that Kirshner (and Keynes himself, for that matter), have completely ignored the financial run-up to Versailles. During these years, private American banks lent massively to the belligerents before the U.S. entry into the war in April, 1917 (overwhelmingly to the allies, but including minor credits extended to Germany), and after America joined the conflict, Washington took over.  (Here’s a handy brief history.)

In other words, the eventually ruinous war debts amassed by the European victors were possible largely because Wall Street massively intervened in the conflict financially in its early years, and because the U.S. government continued underwriting the fighting in its latter stages.

Also – and comparably – crucial: Just as America’s very entry into the war both guaranteed its prolongation and ensured that its ending would become a exercise in self-righteous, destabilizing, and ultimately disastrous vengeance rather than the kind of cold-blooded but hard-headed diplomacy that had contained the damage from previous conflicts, its loans to the belligerents worsened the destructiveness of the fighting and the consequent challenges of reconstruction. Indeed, Wilson himself was worried that Wall Street’s largesse was helping the allies in particular to wage war far longer than they otherwise could have afforded, and helped ward off the sheer exhaustion that would force a negotiated peace.

Thus the real lesson of America’s early 20th century financial diplomacy isn’t that international engagement is always bad, or that international non-involvement is always good.  It isn’t even that the United States should never seek to have its cake and eat it, too – which was clearly the expectation of Wilson’s successors.  It’s that in this particular instance, America’s combination of actions backfired. 

And let’s not forget a broader lesson for students of foreign policy and its record that’s reinforced by Kirshner’s article:  Beware of scholars cherry-picking history.   

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: How Many Strikes Does Paul Krugman Get on Trade?

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automation, China, China shock, globalization, hyperglobalization, Jobs, manufacturing, manufacturing employment, offshoring, Paul M. Krugman, protectionism, tariffs, The New York Times, Trade, Trade Deficits, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Contrary to what many trade mavens must think, Paul Krugman’s recent confession that he (and nearly all of his economics colleagues) have seriously misjudged the impact of international trade on America’s manufacturing workers isn’t his first. At least twice before (see here and here), this Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist has admitted in print that the economics profession’s consensus was wrong to brush off (and often scorn) claims that post-Cold War trade agreements and similar trade policy decisions would foster a combination of wholly new and unbeatable (but economically unsustainable) forms of import competition for domestic industry, and related job and production offshoring. (I’m among those he’s mauled in print.) And he’s granted that trade policy critics who predicted these consequences and kept pointing to evidence of their emergence were right. (See here and here.)

Still, Krugman’s latest mea culpa is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it undercuts another tenet of trade economics dogma held almost as strongly believed as the belief that trade expansion in all circumstances is a net contributor to human welfare – the related conviction that imbalances like trade deficits don’t matter (at worst).

In particular, the author acknowledges that the rapid and massive increase in America’s manufacturing-dominated goods trade deficit – especially from super-low cost economies (and offshoring destinations) like Mexico and especially China – occurred at exactly the same time that U.S. industrial employment cratered. And not coincidentally, the destruction began right about when China was admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO). That mattered greatly because the Beijing subsidies and other predatory trade practices that benefited both foreign- and Chinese-owned producers in the PRC gained invaluable protection from unilateral U.S. responses.

How greatly? According to Krugman, the worsening of the trade deficit “reduced the share of manufacturing in GDP by around 1.5 percentage points, or more than 10%, which means that it explains more than half the roughly 20% decline in manufacturing employment between 1997 and 2005.” In other words, most of the manufacturing job loss during this crucial period – which is a particularly important one because that’s when critical masses of recently offshored factories got up and running and began exporting to the American market – should be blamed not on supposedly impersonal and clearly positive forces of progress like containerization in global shipping, and automation generally, but on actions by American leaders.

Not that Krugman abandons conventional trade economics completely. Specifically, he contends that trade deficits generally speaking are still ultimately unimportant, partly because countries can’t grow indefinitely indebted to the rest of the world and “must pay their way eventually.” The post mid-nineties surge in the manufacturing trade shortfall hammered domestic American manufacturing, he explains, only because it skyrocketed so suddenly.

Readers, however, will ask themselves how the United States can pay its way in the foreseeable future when manufacturing still dominates its lopsided goods trade flows. And they should note that although the damage to manufacturing could still prove temporary, it’s already lasted nearly twenty years, with no imminent end in sight until the past year. (See this post for one of my recent claims that President Trump’s trade policies are starting to bend the curve.)

Second, and following logically from the first point, Krugman continues to insist that protective tariffs should be avoided. Now his opposition focuses on his contention that the trade-related danger to U.S. manufacturing is coming to an end. The China shock in particular, which spearheaded the recent period of “hyperglobalization,” was “a one-time event” that’s already showing signs of ebbing.

But if Krugman was so offbase in evaluating trade’s economic effects, why should such predictions deserve any credibility? Off the top of my head, I can think of several reasons for ongoing concern. For example, China still has massive reserves of super cheap, U.S. wage-depressing labor in its interior and, counter-intuitively, in its national student body. In addition, the progress Beijing has fostered in capital- and technology-intensive industries means that these sectors of American manufacturing will keep facing the same kinds of low-wage (but high productivity) challenges that decimated less advanced, more labor-intensive U.S.-based sectors in previous decades. Moreover, if China does lose competitiveness even in these portions of manufacturing, there’s no shortage of bargain basement third world population giants – like India, Indonesia, and Brazil – that would be more than happy to receive more manufacturing investment from the United States and other high-income countries.

Everyone’s entitled to make mistakes – even know-it-alls like Krugman, who’s known for torching those disagreeing with him as know-nothings and liars. And Krugman deserves praise for owning up to his own mistakes. But it’s also appropriate to ask this question: Since Krugman first established his economic chops as a trade expert, and since he’s clearly been proven wrong about the leading trade-related controversy of our time, how many more strikes does he get?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Trump’s Not Down on the Farm

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agriculture, Alan Rappeport, American Farm Bureau Federation, election 2020, farmers, Greg Sargent, Mainstream Media, regulation, tariffs, taxes, The New York Times, Trade, trade war, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

For anyone with any sympathy for President Trump’s China and other trade policies (like yours truly), one of the great pleasures of following the news coverage has been reading the bushel of stories that conform to the following pattern: a Mainstream Media reporter jets out to farm country expecting to find the nation’s agricultural community – which voted strongly for Mr. Trump in 2016 – up in arms about lost export sales due to foreign tariffs and other restrictions imposed in retaliation to new U.S. levies. And selfsame reporter winds up grudgingly writing that farmers and ranchers are by and large sticking with the President.  (See this classic example.)

This morning, such coverage took a turn that’s new and especially important given the approach of the next presidential election. In the process, the journalists involved unwittingly demonstrated how ignorant they continue to be about the full relationship between Trump administration policies and American agriculture.

The new turn was made clear by this claim today in a New York Times report: After “remaining resolute” in support of Mr. Trump, the difficulties faced by U.S. Farmers is finally “becoming a political problem” for the President. Indeed, wrote correspondent Alan Rappeport, “as the trade fight gets uglier, farmers are beginning to panic.”

And following a recent, increasingly incestuous trend in which reporters and pundits from one news organization breathlessly (and often instantly) hype the findings of a rival, a Never Trump-er Washington Post columnist based an entire essay today on the Times piece, declaring “There are indications that they are now getting genuinely angry over Trump’s efforts to gaslight them so shamelessly over the impact of his trade war with China.”

Or are they?

The original (long) Times article – in the next to last paragraph – informed readers that

“many farmers continue to support Mr. Trump and express hope that the president knows what he is doing in his dealings with China. A July survey from Farm Journal found that 79 percent of 1,100 farmers still back Mr. Trump despite the lack of progress in negotiations with China.”

Similarly, Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote: “Let’s stipulate up front [actually, this insight didn’t come until the middle of the article] that there is zero chance that farmers — or rural voters — break with Trump in 2020.”

At the same time, there’s no doubt that American farm exports, especially to China, are down this year. So what gives? Two major developments, both of which have been almost completely neglected:

First, the Trump administration has done very well by American farmers and ranchers by way of tax policy. And second, it’s done just as well by them by way of regulatory policy. At least, that’s what the biggest U.S. agricultural lobbying group has said, in reports here and here. P.S. The American Farm Bureau Federation is no fan of the Trump tariffs.

I could add that American farm prices and incomes began falling years before Mr. Trump’s inauguration – and have actually been leveling off recently. And that, when it comes to trade, farmers are strongly in favor of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada-Agreement – the Trump administration’s rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But that would be piling on.

It’s not that everyone shouldn’t be heartened by the upsurge in national press corps interest in American agriculture. But that’s only Step One in generating accurate coverage. Step Two is actually learning something.