(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Krugman’s (Embarrassingly) Phony Tariff History

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1920s, agriculture, Economic History Association, history, Paul M. Krugman, protectionism, tariffs, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, World War I, {What's Left of) Our Economy

To the many reasons I have to envy Paul M. Krugman (his high profile perch as a New York Times pundit, his Nobel Prize in economics, his surely stratospheric income), one more can now be added:  As strongly indicated by his latest column for The Times, he works for folks who allow him to publish any claim he’d like without being fact-checked or even questioned in any way.

In that piece, Krugman sought to debunk President Trump’s recently tweeted claim that “TARIFF is a beautiful word indeed” by showing that “the actual history of U.S. tariffs isn’t pretty.”  One major example he used:  Because America “took a sharply protectionist turn before the infamous 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act,” the country’s farmers “spent the 1920s suffering from low prices for their products and high prices for farm equipment, leading to a surge in foreclosures.”

“Part of the problem was that U.S. tariffs were met with retaliation; even before the Depression struck, the world was engaged in a gradually escalating trade war.”

Sounds pretty convincing, right? In fact, not even close. And not least of which because the only two sources cited by Krugman contain absolutely no mention of low farm prices or foreclosures or unaffordable farm equipment stemming from any trade-related developments. In fact, there’s not even a mention of “high prices for farm equipment” at all.

The sources – articles on the Economic History Association’s website on the 1920s tariffs, and on the U.S. economy in the 1920s (you can read them here and here) – demonstrate that agriculture’s woes during this period (not surprisingly) resulted from many cases. But tariffs don’t make the list. 

Simply put, the main culprits were excessive borrowing by American farmers late in the previous decade based on the assumption that agricultural output in war-torn Europe would remain long depressed, and that this market would for many years be importing ever greater amounts of U.S. farm products; and a subsequent price-depressing glut in American supply when European output recovered faster than expected once World War I ended.

A a result, U.S. farmers were left with lots of new acreage and machinery that suddenly became superfluous even though their new owners still needed to pay off the debts they incurred to buy them.  No wonder so many weren’t able to meet their mortgage payments.

Adding to American agriculture’s problems during this period were a productivity boom triggered by surging mechanization and other advances that permitted agricultural production to rise much faster than domestic (and foreign) consumption; and an economy-wide depression in 1920 and 1921 that primarily resulted from excessive monetary tightening by the Federal Reserve. Again, nothing about tariffs.

Importantly, the 1920s economic history article in particular is a gold mine of information about many developments of that time that shed considerable light on today’s major economic challenges – as I’ll be describing in some future posts.  In the meantime, I’d strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in the American economic invest the time needed to read it – starting with Paul Krugman.

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Im-Politic: The Mueller Letter Coverage Shows the Need for a Journalism Hall of Shame

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Attorney General, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, media bias, obstruction of justice, Pulitzer Prize, Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel, The New York Times, Trump, Trump-Russia, Washington Post, William P. Barr

Here are two suggestions for the folks at Columbia University’s journalism school who each year award the Pulitzer Prizes for that so-called profession: First, in addition to citing reporters and editors whose work supposedly embodies journalistic excellence, they should identify news people whose performance is a complete disgrace. Second, they could easily kick off this practice next year by shaming the Washington Post and New York Times articles this morning revealing that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has complained to Attorney General William P. Barr about Barr’s descriptions of his report on Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election and President Trump’s reactions to the Mueller probe.

Both pieces – and the reporters and editors responsible – completely mis-characterized the Mueller concerns that they eventually went on to portray accurately. And they committed the unforgivable journalistic (and broader ethical) sin of accentuating the negative when the case for focusing on the positive was at least equally strong.

Specifically, the thrust of the two pieces was that Mueller in a letter to Barr expressed objections to Barr’s March 24 letter to Congressional judiciary committee leaders summarizing the “principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation,” and informing them of the status of Barr’s “initial review” of the report.

But any reader who finished the articles would discover that, contrary to the headlines and the opening paragraphs, Mueller was most irked not by any of Barr’s actions or writings, but by the press coverage. According to the Post reporters (who claim to have seen the Mueller letter), the Special Counsel did write to the Attorney General (his Justice Department superior) that the March 24 Barr communique to Congress

“did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

(The letter has since been released.)

But farther into the story, readers are told that the following day, when the two spoke by phone, “Mueller said he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work, according to Justice Department officials.”

Moreover – and this is crucial – “When Barr pressed Mueller on whether he thought Barr’s memo to Congress was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not but felt that the media coverage of it was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.”

So the question needs to be asked: Why wasn’t the emphasis in the Post story Mueller’s statement that Barr had accurately summarized his report, and that he thought the press coverage was awful? And by extension, why wasn’t the headline something on the order of “Mueller praises Barr summary as accurate; slams media interpretations”?

The Times story followed the same pattern and therefore embodied the same fatal flaws. In particular, it wasn’t until the seventh paragraph that readers learn that

“‘The special counsel emphasized that nothing in the attorney general’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading,’ a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said in response to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.”

As a result, it, too, could have been – and indeed should have been – structured along lines favorable to Barr, not critical of him. Indeed, here the argument for such an approach is even stronger than for the Post piece, since the evidence of Barr’s accuracy comes from a named official spokesperson, not from anonymous sources.

Last week, a major national poll found that American voters’ distrust of “political news” had hit an all-time high of 54 percent. The Post and Times coverage of Mueller’s words all but guarantees that new records on this score will soon be set – and is sending a message to the Pulitzer folks that something like a Hall of Shame is needed to start getting journalism off its current irresponsible track.

Im-Politic: After Mueller/Barr, Can Trump Be Trump?

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America First, Attorney General, Betsy de, budgets, conservatism, conservatives, establishment Republicans, foreign policy, globalism, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, Kevin McCarthy, Obamacare, Populism, Republicans, Robert Mueller, Ross Douthat, seasonal workers, Special Counsel, Special Olympics, tax cuts, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, Trump-Russia, visas, William P. Barr

A week ago, I posted on the likely political impact of the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of what have become known as the Trump-Russia scandals and of the release of Attorney General William P. Barr’s summary of its principal conclusions – which appear to put these charges and the threat of presidential impeachment they created behind Mr. Trump.

Now it’s time to think about a related and at least equally important subject: the policy effects. They could be profound enough to redefine the Trump presidency and the chief executive’s chances for reelection – even though the early indications seem to be saying exactly the opposite in ways that are sure to disappoint much of Mr. Trump’s political base. Here’s what I mean.

Ever since his administration’s opening months, I’ve believed that Mr. Trump’s policy choices have been strongly influenced by impeachment fears. Specifically, (and I have zero first-hand knowledge here) because President Trump feared that the Democrats and many mainstream Republicans were after his scalp, he concluded that he needed to appease his remaining allies in the latter’s ranks with policy initiatives they’ve long supported even though they broke with his own much less conventional and more populist campaign promises. 

In other words, it was the Russia and related scandal charges that were preventing “Trump from being Trump.”  

Moreover, this reasoning makes sense even if the President was certain that he faced no legal jeopardy. For impeachment ultimately is a political process, and although establishing criminal guilt is clearly helpful, it’s not essential.

The main evidence for my proposition has been the early Trump decision to prioritize Obamacare repeal over trade policy overhaul and infrastructure building; his almost libertarian-like initial budget proposal (at least when it comes to non-defense discretionary federal pending); his business-heavy tax cut; and numerous foreign policy moves that more closely resembled the globalist approaches he decried while running for the White House than the America First strategy his promised.

But although President Trump now seems certain to finish out his first term in office, he still seems to be currying favor with the Republican establishment. Just look at his latest budget proposal, and decision to go after Obamacare again – the healthcare move reportedly made despite the pleas of establishment Republicans like House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy to move on from an issue now stamped as a major loser politically and threat to the party’s 2020 election prospects across the board.

It’s true that many of Mr. Trump’s trade and immigration policies still clash with the donor-driven agenda of the Republican establishment, and especially the party’s Congressional leaders. But even on these signature issues, the President arguably could be breaking even more sharply with the longstanding Republican and conservative traditions.

For example, Mr. Trump continues to keep suspended his threat of higher tariffs on many imports from China in apparent hopes of reaching a successful trade deal even though Beijing still seems determined to avoid significant concessions on “structural issues” (like intellectual property theft and technology extortion) and on enforcement.

On immigration, the President has just raised the 2019 cap on visas for unskilled largely seasonal foreign guest workers to levels never reached even during the Obama years. His administration also has permitted visas for farm workers to hit record levels and done little to stem the growth of work permits for foreign graduates of U.S. college and universities that critics charge suppress wages for high skill native-born workers.

One intriguing explanation for this continuing policy schizophrenia comes from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. In a piece this past weekend, Douthat made the case that, although President Trump’s actual record has been largely heretical in mainstream conservative terms, when it comes to staffing (and especially key staff positions)

“there are effectively two Trump presidencies. One offers something like what the president promised on the campaign trail — a break with Paul Ryan’s green-eyeshade approach to entitlement reform, a more moderate tack on health care, an indifference to Obama-era conservative orthodoxies on fiscal and monetary policy.

“The other offers a continuation of the Tea Party’s insistence on spending cuts and Obamacare repeal, and appropriately its present leader is a former Tea Party congressman — Mick Mulvaney, the Zelig of the administration, whose zeal is apparently the main reason that the Obamacare lawsuit now has administration support.”

And the main reason for this confusing mix? The President has relied “on personnel who are associated with 2010-era G.O.P. orthodoxy, rather than elevating the kind of conservatives who have actively theorized for a more populist right.”

It’s so hard to argue with Douthat’s facts that I won’t. But they still leave the main puzzle unexplained – why so many of the President’s personnel picks have been so un-Trumpian. And much of the answer points to a problem that was clear to me ever since Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy achieved critical mass and momentum, and that doesn’t seem solvable for the foreseeable future.

Specifically, as I’ve previously noted, conservative populists (I’m never been thrilled with this description of “Trumpism,” but for the time being it’s convenient) have never created the institutions and therefore cohorts of first-rate policy specialists remotely capable of staffing a conservative populist administration. Even if you want to identify immigration as an exception – where organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies put out top-flight studies – it’s clear that nothing of the kind has ever existed on the trade and foreign policy fronts.

And even worse, because of the long lead-times needed to achieve these goals, Mr. Trump appears doomed to dealing with shortages of competent true-believers as far as the eye can see. In fact, he’ll face a special challenge in the next few months, as the second halves of first presidential terms tend to see the departures of many early, often burned out appointees. And of course, the Trump presidency has already experienced much more than its share of turnover.

So I’m expecting an indefinite continuation of the eye-popping sequence of events of the previous week – in which Trump Education Secretary Betsy deVos announced an end to federal funding of the popular Special Olympics program, a public outcry ensued, and the President abruptly reversed her decision.

It’s hard to imagine that this kind of zigging and zagging can win President Trump reelection. But it’s also conceivable that the post-impeachment situation will “Let Trump be Trump” just enough – especially if the Democrats err in picking an overall strategy for opposing him.  After all, nothing has been more common in recent American political history than completely off-base predictions of Mr. Trump’s demise.

Im-Politic: Out of the Mouths of Globalists – A Case for the Wall

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Afghanistan, America First, border security, border wall, foreign policy, globalism, government shutdown, Im-Politic, Immigration, jihadism, Middle East, State of the Union, terrorism, The New York Times, Trump

With the possibility of another Border Wall-related government shutdown hanging over tonight’s State of the Union – and all of American politics – it’s pretty astonishing to recognize that The New York Times editorial board, which strongly opposes the wall, and which has long championed a globalist approach to foreign policy issues, has just unwittingly endorsed a Trump-ian, America First-style approach to border security.

The endorsement came in The Times‘ recent editorial calling for a prompt U.S. military pullout from Afghanistan – a position that’s also decidedly Trump-ian.

According to Times editorial writers, the main rationale originally cited for fighting in Afghanistan was flawed from the start. It focused too tightly on

“the idea that war abroad could prevent bloodshed at home. As [then President George W. Bush] explained in 2004: ‘We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities.’”

Globalists well to the left of Bush endorsed this rationale as well, notably former President Barack Obama. His first bid for the White House stressed that Afghanistan was a “good war” and a conflict that “had to be won” in order to “take the fight to the terrorists” – in stark contrast to Mr. Bush’s “dumb” war in Iraq.

But The Times – which admirably recognizes that it bought this line as well – now suggests that this argument never made much sense. Although acknowledging that “since 9/11, no foreign terrorist group has conducted a deadly attack inside the United States,” it adds that

“there have been more than 200 deadly terrorist attacks during that period, most often at the hands of Americans radicalized by ideologies that such groups spread. Half of those attacks were motivated by radical Islam, while 86 came at the hands of far-right extremists.”

The Times doesn’t draw the obvious implication, but it couldn’t be clearer even to a minimally perceptive observer: The kinds of terrorist threats the paper spotlights have appeared in the United States in large measure because border security has been so shoddy for so long. In particular, American immigration authorities have never adequately screened newcomers from countries where radical Islam has taken root, and who are therefore unusually vulnerable to radicalization.

It’s conceivable that border security could effectively address these challenges without the kind of physical barriers now sought by President Trump – and demonized by most of Congress’ Democrats. But at the least, The Times‘ rationale strongly militates for other Trump-ian, America First-style border security measures, like applying travel bans against countries that are known hotbeds of terrorism and strict limits on admitting refugees and asylum-seekers from these same points of origin.

And barriers look especially important given the extensive legal/due process protections now automatically awarded to anyone who sets foot on American soil, including from countries whose threadbare (at best) governments lack the capacity to document the identity of their residents satisfactorily. Therefore, adequate vetting by the U.S. government will be excruciatingly difficult, to put it mildly.

But if The Times wants to clinch the case for withdrawing promptly from Afghanistan, it should make a point I’ve made repeatedly: It will be far easier to protect against terrorist threats by relying mainly on border security because access to the country is something Washington can reasonably hope to control. Protecting against terrorist threats mainly by chasing jihadists around a completely dysfunctional region of the world whose greatest strength is spawning extremism would base American strategy on something Washington can’t reasonably hope to control.

And of course, connecting an end to massive American military involvement in the Middle East with the need for more secure borders could only bolster President Trump’s position, too.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: U.S. Companies Keep Feeding the China Tech Beast

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AI, artificial intelligence, Bloomberg.com, China, hacking, Karen Weise, Microsoft, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paul Mozur, technology, technology transfer, The New York Times, Trump

Wow! This was quite the revealing – and disturbing – nugget buried in a recent New York Times article about American tech companies’ trials and tribulations in China! According to reporters Paul Mozur and Karen Weise, Microsoft’s “long-established research and development center has turned out valuable products and launched the careers of a generation of artificial-intelligence experts who have started important new companies in China.”

Mozur and Weise mentioned this Microsoft activity in order to make the important point that even companies, like the Seattle software giant, that have bent over backwards to remain viable in China by keeping Beijing happy in various ways seem to be fighting a losing battle. For even these firms are falling victim to China’s persistent desire to replace them in the country’s huge market with Chinese rivals.

But the reference to Microsoft’s artificial intelligence operations could well matter more to the United States because it underscores a point I made several years ago in a Bloomberg.com op-ed that bears on American national security: For decades, U.S. tech companies have been transferring to Chinese entities cutting edge knowhow that has greatly strengthened Beijing’s ability to endanger key American interests. It’s the price they need to pay to keep playing in the Chinese market. But whatever the commercial justification, and whether these transfers are voluntary, coerced, or somewhere in between (including the training of China’s tech workforce), they’ve too long been neglected by American policymakers.

My Bloomberg piece focused on technologies related to cyberhacking – where transfers ironically were coming back to bite the U.S. tech firms themselves. Since then, in several posts for RealityChek, I’ve covered tech transfer that’s handing China more conventional advanced defense-related knowhow. (See, e.g., here and here.)

But artificial intelligence-related operations push the threat to an entirely new level. For these capabilities will likely be the biggest game-changers in national security for decades, and Washington is already so alarmed by the progress China has made that many specialists worry that Beijing could soon forge ahead. Nearly as troubling: The more such tech American companies keep handing over to the Chinese, the closer China gets to self-sufficiency – the point at which it won’t need American assistance anymore.

The Trump administration rightly keeps calling attention to China’s growing technological prowess and the resulting dangers to the United States, and even many long-time supporters of the reckless pre-Trump China engagement policies are starting to agree.

But tariffs to punish predatory Chinese policies aimed at building tech dominance, and curbs on Chinese tech investments in the U.S. economy are necessary, not sufficient responses. The above linked Financial Times article indicates the administration now recognizes need to staunch the flow of advanced knowhow to China by American companies. But every minute new curbs are delayed, the United States will keep feeding the beast.

Im-Politic: Why Journalists Should Tweet Even More – & More Recklessly

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Covington Catholic, Farhad Manjoo, Frank Bruni, Im-Politic, Jill Abramson, journalism, Lincoln Memorial, MAGA teens, Mainstream Media, March for Life, media bias, Nathan Phillips, National Mall, Native-Americans, racism, social media, The New York Times, Twitter

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo has a pretty self-serving explanation for why so many Mainstream Media journalists so prematurely joined the Outrage Mob that was so eager to condemn a group of Kentucky Catholic high school students for an alleged display of smirking racism on the National Mall on Friday: Twitter made them do it.

Sorry, but I ain’t buying it, and neither should you. And as I’ll see, Manjoo’s concluding recommendation – that these reporters and editors (and possibly pundits?) should abandon Twitter – is also completely wrong.

In case you’ve been ignoring the news for a while, these high school students, who were in Washington, D.C. for the “March for Life” last Friday were widely accused of treating a Native-American also in the capital for a (separate) protest with shockingly disgraceful disrespect and displays of outright bigotry. But this initial conclusion – which was based on a short video clip taken at the Lincoln Memorial scene of the confrontation – was quickly debunked by much longer videos that both absolved the students of all the serious allegations, and raised big questions about the role and background of Native-American protester Nathan Phillips and other groups on the scene.

Manjoo is absolutely right in lamenting how many journalists – including news reporters and editors, who are supposed to shunt aside their personal opinions on the job, go the extra mile to describe events as accurately as possible, and weigh information carefully – rushed to judgment about the students’ guilt. But he’s absolutely wrong to blame a social media platform – and in the process, spread the laughable idea that journalists who have been accomplished enough to secure employment at the nation’s most prominent news organizations are as incapable of resisting the temptations created by a new technology as a child is incapable of resisting gorging on candy.

According to the author:

“Instead of curious, intellectually honest chroniclers of human affairs, Twitter regularly turns many in the news — myself included — into knee-jerk outrage-bots reflexively set off by this or that hash-tagged cause, misspelled presidential missive or targeted-influence campaign.”

He adds:

“Twitter isn’t just ruining the media’s image. It’s also skewing our journalism. Everything about Twitter’s interface encourages a mind-set antithetical to journalistic inquiry: It prizes image over substance and cheap dunks over reasoned debate, all the while severely abridging the temporal scope of the press.”

Yet these arguments completely ignore what has to be the real explanation for this behavior: The journalists in question were all fully formed adults by the time they began tweeting recklessly, and have never prioritized telling their stories intellectually honestly. The only possible alternative? These folks weren’t fully formed adults by the time they began such tweeting, and/or by extension when they were hired. That sure doesn’t reflect well on the individuals and news organizations that gave them their weighty responsibilities.

Moreover, two prominent New York Times-related journalists themselves seem to disagree with Manjoo that the news business’ irresponsible tweeters should be let off the hook. Here’s Times columnist Frank Bruni, assessing how (and why) opinion journalists have dealt with the Mall confrontation story, and many other events recently:

“With everything from Twitter followers to television bookings, we’re rewarded for fierce conviction, for utter certainty, for emphatically taking sides and staying unconditionally faithful to what we’ve pushed for and against in the past. We each have our brand, and the narrower and more unyielding it is, the more currency it has and the more loyal our consumers. Instead of bucking the political tribalism in America, we ride it.

“We react to news by trying to fit it into the argument that we routinely make, the grievance that we usually raise, the fury or angst or sorrow that we typically peddle. We have our narrative, and we’re on the lookout for comments and developments that back it up. The response to the initial footage of the Covington boys — and, in particular, to the one who wore a red MAGA cap as he stood before and stared at the drumming veteran — adhered to this dynamic.

“Was that a smirk on the teenager’s face? A sneer? His expression was just indefinite enough to become a symbol of entitlement for the pundits who favor that locution, of the white patriarchy for another group, of the wages of Trumpism, of the fraudulence of Catholicism.”

But Bruni also wrote (correctly) that “the rest of the media didn’t behave all that differently” on and off Twitter. (A superb description of The Times own overall record in this incident – and the incident itself – can be found in this article in The Atlantic.)

His views also have been supported by no less than Jill Abramson, the recent (and fired) Times news chief. In a forthcoming book (as reported by Fox News‘ Howard Kurtz, and not denied by Abramson or anyone else at The Times), Abramson

“describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. ‘The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,’ she writes.”

And as is clear to anyone following them, most of the most aggressive and biased tweeters from the news profession are well short of middle age.

All of which is why I so strongly disagree with Manjoo’s belief that journalists, and especially straight news reporters, should tweet much less – and try to steer clear of controversy. Nothing would make it easier for them to keep hidden the biases that surely have been shaping their reporting and editing. In fact, I hope they tweet even more – and more candidly.

After all, the great early 20^th century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis rightly observed that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Twitter is proving to be a great source of the kind of light that unmistakably needs to be shined on journalism these days.

Im-Politic: More Mainstream Media MS-13 – and Illegal Alien Crime – Double Standards

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Hannah Dreier, illegal alien crime, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Long Island, Mainstream Media, MS-13, ProPublica, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Trump

Anyone still doubting that the Mainstream Media has turned into a brazen propaganda machine for Open Borders-friendly immigration policies, should ask themselves this: Why did The New York Times recently devoted a humongous article in its Sunday magazine to mistakes made by law enforcement on Long Island and elsewhere in the fight against Hispanic gangs like MS-13 – whose ranks are filled with illegal aliens – yet completely ignore stabbings by such gang members in the same Long Island community shortly after the magazine investigation appeared?`

The magazine article, by Hannah Dreier of “the independent nonprofit investigative-journalism organization” ProPublica was clearly viewed as more than just another freelance piece by the publication’s editors. As they state, it was “a collaboration” between the two organizations. Along with its length, this relationship makes clear that The Times viewed the subject as an unusually high priority.

In the December 27 article, Dreier does a good job – along with whatever assistance the newspaper provided her – of making a case that the intensified anti-MS-13 drive on Long Island and elsewhere in the country has caught up innocents. She also makes a reasonable case that the problem is rooted in the Trump administration’s dissatisfaction with its predecessors’ approach to the problem which, in her words, takes “time and on-the-ground work. Immigration agents spend months mapping out networks and gathering evidence using informants and wiretaps.”

Less convincing is her clear implication that this approach was remotely satisfactory, especially in light of her implicit acknowledgment that, while this more patient, more careful strategy was being pursued, MS-13 thugs on Long Island had

“periodically taken part in brutal killings. In 2003, in Central Islip, members beat and stabbed to death a young man who they thought was a rival and stuffed his body in a drain pipe. Also in Central Islip, the gang shot a toddler and his mother in 2010 and left their bodies in a patch of woods.

“In the last few years, Long Island’s MS-13 members and victims have gotten younger. In 2016, MS-13 gang members murdered five Latino Brentwood High students with bats and machetes. In 2017, the gang killed three more local Latino students and left their macheted bodies in a park in Central Islip. Some two dozen young men from Brentwood and Central Islip were eventually charged with the murders. A few were as young as 16.”

Also interesting: The author writes that “Many [Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ICE] agents wanted to arrest and deport suspected MS-13 members under President Obama. But they were constrained by an Obama-administration policy that required ICE agents to focus on undocumented immigrants who had committed serious crimes.” Meaning that Mr. Obama didn’t consider the above killings “serious crimes”? Just wow.

Indeed, writes Dreier, “President Trump took office at the peak of this local wave of violence” – hence his decision “that he was making the gang a federal law-enforcement priority.” The dragnet created by the Trump Justice Department and local law enforcement on Long Island (and in other communities that participated in such programs) has no doubt erred in instances. But there’s also no doubt that the old methods were failing.

In other words, I wish that Dreier (and her Times collaborators) had presented a much more balanced view of the situation and the results of the two strategies, but let’s grant that in a single article – even one as long as this one – has every right to maintain an overall emphasis.

It’s the follow-up – or, more accurately, its complete absence – that puts The Times in such a bad light. Specifically, on January 9 – only some two weeks after this magazine article’s appearance – two teenagers from one of the Long Island high schools on which Dreier focused were stabbed near a local fast food restaurant. The following day, the Suffolk County (Long Island) District Attorney charged that the three suspects arrested were MS-13 members, and all were illegal aliens. They all attended that same high school. For good measure, two of the accused assailants had been detained by ICE, which hoped to deport them, but were ordered released by federal judges.

Given the lengthy coverage The Times had just devoted to law enforcement mistakes, and given that Long Island is part of the paper’s home base, you’d think that a write-up of this incident would have been judged reasonably big news. Or any kind of news. But as of this morning – a week after the stabbings – not a single word about them had appeared in The Times.

Even stranger: In the weeks before Dreier’s lengthy article was published, the paper’s local coverage had run several articles on local MS-13 crimes. Its national staff has looked into the gang and its atrocities, too, but nothing as detailed as the Dreier “mistakes” piece has appeared. It’s in these national pieces, of course, that policy and policy debates are likeliest to be mentioned, and most such coverage stressed either that MS-13 isn’t such a big deal (e.g., here) or that its presence has little to do with illegal immigration and is being used by the President as a political prop (e.g., here), or that his descriptions of the Democrats’ views of the gang are misleading (e.g., here), that the president’s claims of progress versus its predation are exaggerated (e.g., here). And by now, it should come as no surprise that The Times has never published any item about victims of crime by illegal aliens, or about the failure of the pre-Trump programs in preventing such offenses, that’s been nearly as long as Dreier’s opus.  (Here‘s the only recent example of reporting on the subject.) 

Former Times news chief Jill Abramson is coming out with a book claiming, among other things, that the paper’s news pages have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.” The magazine’s Dreier article, and its other MS-13 coverage – and non-coverage – sure looks like a leading example.

Im-Politic: ‘Tis the Season – for Immigration Double Standards

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Associated Press, Chuck Schumer, CNN, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media. Nancy Pelosi, migrants, Open Borders, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

All reasonable participants in the often angry national debate about American immigration policy surely agree that the deaths of migrant children in U.S. custody and the killing of a police officer at the hands of an illegal alien are comparably tragic. Why, then, have the Open Borders supporters treated them like night and day, focusing intently on the former and literally ignoring the latter? And why has President Trump so needlessly fed his own critics’ charges of cruelty, racism, and xenophobia on immigration policy with some double standards-setting of his own on these matters?

The discrepancy on the part of Open Borders advocates has been especially dramatic when it comes to Congress’ leading Democrats – who will assume control of the House of Representatives in January. House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, and other major figures in the party (including its likely presidential candidates) have uniformly expressed outrage at the deaths this month of two Guatemalan children held by the U.S. immigration authorities after being brought to the border by parents on long, arduous trips from their home country.  (See, e.g., here and here.)

But the early morning December 26 killing of a Newman, California police officer (and an immigrant himself) by a suspect identified as an illegal alien by local law enforcement officials has elicited no response at all – even from Pelosi, who represents a California district.

The same pattern marks the coverage of these incidents by the Mainstream Media, which has made its Open Borders sympathies abundantly clear in recent years. For example, the Washington Post this morning was still highlighting on its front page the controversy over the children’s deaths. But the police officer’s death didn’t even make the print edition. The killing was mentioned on the paper’s website three times yesterday and today. But all three items were taken from the wire services, meaning that the Post hasn’t as of now assigned one of its own reporters to investigate.  (See, e.g., here.)

The New York Times did cover the policeman’s killing with one of its own correspondents – and ran the story on page 15 of the news section today. But an article on the children’s deaths, which are no longer breaking news, received front page coverage.

Visit the website of the Associated Press, the world’s largest bona fide news agency, and you’ll see an article on the most recent Guatemalan child’s death right near the top of the home page. But you need to scroll way down to find a piece on the police officer’s killing.

CNN also featured a follow up on the most recent child death prominently on its home page. But its coverage of the police killing doesn’t appear anywhere. You need to look for it with the search engine.

In my view, President Trump has dropped the ball here as well. It’s true that his administration has expressed regret over both migrant children’s deaths, is investigating these events, and seeking ways to handle the new flood of migrants more effectively. It’s also true that the administration has blamed the children’s parents in part for putting them in dangerous situations to begin with – and I agree. I also fully support the administration’s insistence that the U.S. government’s responsibilities to its own citizens are qualititatively different – meaning greater – than to citizens of other countries.

But although Mr. Trump has tweeted about the shooting (without condolences for his family or his colleagues) he’s made no comment at all about the children’s deaths. And just as the Open Borders folks exhibited a major blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special shame surrounding the death of a public official who risked his life every day on behalf of others by an individual who commonsense immigration policies likely would have kept out of this country, the President has exhibited a blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special sorrow surrounding the death of a minor who bore no responsibility for his circumstances. And he could so easily have done expressed such sentiments without conceding a single inch of ground in his campaign for the most stringent border security regime.

Im-Politic: Elites’ Learning Curve on Populism is Still Largely MIA

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American Enterprise Institute, asylum seekers, Brookings Institution, chattering classes, David Brooks, establishment, Europe, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, migrants, migration, Open Borders, Populism, refugees, The Guardian, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, working class

While we’re still (I hope!) in a Thanksgiving frame of mind, let’s not forget to give thanks to America’s ever clueless bipartisan political establishment and chattering classes. As just made glaringly obvious by a Hillary Clinton interview and a New York Times pundit, these utterly intertwined – and indeed incestuous – elites not only mostly remain just as dumbfounded about the developments that have triggered the rise of populism in the Western world as they were the day after Donald Trump became president. They helpfully keep reminding us of how little they’ve learned – and therefore how completely undeserving they are of returning to power.

Clinton’s obliviousness (again) came through loud and clear in a lengthy sit-down earlier this week with the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper. According to the Democratic presidential nominee, whose inept campaign strategy and transparently canned messaging helped key Mr. Trump’s victory, Europe “needs to get a handle on migration.”

That contention’s hard to argue with. But Clinton’s main reason was anything but. According to the former Secretary of State, European leaders’ overly “generous and compassionate approaches” to migration “lit the flame” that have “roiled the body politic” and strengthened the positions of Trump-like populists who have used “immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity….”

In other words, Clinton apparently has no concerns that a massive influx of migrants – or refugees, or so-called asylum-seekers, or even economically motivated immigrants – could drive down wages for the working class or lower income cohorts of a country’s native-born population, or wind up admitting criminals and terrorists from violence-ridden regions, or swamp a country with newcomers either ignorant or actively contemptuous of its cultural values (e.g., its treatment of women).

She’s simply advocating that establishment politicians do the proverbial – but never well defined “something” – to keep on the fringes counterparts who are mindful of the above, and completely legitimate, concerns. In fact, Clinton’s continuing contempt for such leaders, and their followings, is made clear by her contention that populist voters are defined by

“a psychological as much as political yearning to be told what to do, and where to go, and how to live and have their press basically stifled and so be given one version of reality.

“The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and only given one version of reality.”

In other words, “deplorables,” anyone?

If anything, New York Times columnist David Brooks is even brain dead-er on the lessons of 2016. On Thanksgiving day, the paper posted a column of his contending that at least some of America’s establishment has been “chastened” by populism’s successes, and recently has been “working together across ideological lines” to “build the bipartisan governing coalitions” that “pay attention to actual Americans and actual solutions” to the problems that have so divided the nation.

One of his prime examples? A joint effort by the establishment liberal Brookings Institution and the establishment conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to develop policies aimed at “Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class.”

On the one hand, it’s good to see that Brookings and AEI aren’t simply dismissing American populism’s main political base as racists and xenophobes. Even better: The report they’ve just issued recognizes job and income loss resulting from offshoring-friendly trade deals and other wrongheaded globalization-related policies as major sources of working Americans’ economic decline and political anger. And the recommendations for trade policy fixes are pretty good – even including an endorsement of unilateral U.S. tariffs in certain situations. In fact, combining these ideas with many of the more purely domestic policy proposals in the study could make a real difference.

On the other hand, the study’s authors decided to ignore the impacts of Open Borders-friendly immigration policies, because they regard “the perception that immigration is responsible for what ails the working class” as “mistaken.”

And some skepticism is warranted on the trade front as well. After all, experts from both think tanks have been among the strongest critics of Trump administration trade policies – no doubt because so many of their donors are businesses that profit from the trade status status quo, and (in Brookings’ case), many of the very foreign governments in the same category.

But what I found especially revealing was Brooks’ description of the report. It ignored the trade recommendations completely and zeroed in on the measures that, unless accompanied by trade and/or immigration policy overhauls (at least), would wind up as an approach that essentially substitutes various forms of welfare for work: “wage subsidies, improved parental leave, work requirements for some federal benefits, child care tax credits.”

And by the way, of course Brooks endorses the study’s calls for more government aid for education that reduces the current emphasis on sending all young Americans to four-year colleges and increases the emphasis on “career education and training.” That’s fine except that there’s little point to vocational type training if family wage jobs keep fleeing overseas or becoming ever lower-wage jobs because immigrants keep supercharging the labor supply.

Nor have any of the education boosters ever responded to two related points I made in my globalization book, The Race to the Bottom: First, people all over the world as just as capable of being retrained and reeducated as Americans; and second, governments all around the world know this, especially in countries with such immense labor surpluses that they’ll long be able to under-sell American workers.

Brooks closes his article by wondering whether the United States contains “enough chastened members of establishments, who have governing experience, who acknowledge past mistakes, who take the time to reconnect with the country and apply their expertise in new ways” to lead the nation successfully. The Brookings-AEI report provides some grounds for optimism. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Brooks himself.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: America’s Persistent China Delusion Syndrome

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agriculture, China, comparative advantage, establishment, Made in China 2025, Mainstream Media, offshoring lobby, private sector, tariffs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The week has barely started and already the Mainstream Media have delivered some genuinely bizarre – indeed seemingly clueless – China-related moments.

There’s the big New York Times series titled “China Rules.” It usefully describes how the People’s Republic has completely confounded the bipartisan American political and policy establishment’s confidence that its growing integration into the global economy would turn it into more cooperative, more economically and politically open power. And thankfully, the series does point out this mistaken official U.S. optimism – which it notes spanned fully eight presidencies. But it says nothing about the massive amounts of money spent by offshoring multinational corporations in Washington, D.C. and the rest of the country’s political and policy communities (encompassing academia and think tanks alike) to foster China myth-making and spoon-feed it to the national media, which overwhelmingly swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

Given that this self-interested myth-making bears so much blame for China’s emergence as a major threat to America’s national security and prosperity, it’s imperative that The Times (and the rest of the Mainstream Media) start telling this story in detail – both to reveal how active and influential the myth-makers remain, and to reduce the odds that they’ll stage a comeback down the road.

The Times itself just provided one clear example of such influence in a tweet this morning about a piece on the just-concluded summit of Asia Pacific countries in Papua New Guinea – which tells readers that “The Chinese delegation sought to reaffirm its opposition to the protectionism and unilateralism that have been a focal point for criticism of the United States.” Honestly. “Reaffirm”? Like China’s (stated) opposition to protectionism as such is something to be taken seriously? Or that even China takes seriously?

Are such longstanding journalistic conventions the product of simple laziness? Or of literally decades of media reliance for information and analysis on myth-makers with strong vested stakes in portraying China as a steadily reforming economy? The answer, of course, is “both” – and that the latter fosters the former.

Another example of these habits’ persistence: today’s Wall Street Journal article describing how China’s central government and major local governments are now trying to support a “private sector” that “has become a weak link in a slowing economy.” Yes, there are entities in China that are now customarily called “private sector.” But in a command economy like China’s, where the state wields power in a wide variety of direct and indirect ways, they have about as much in common with genuine private sector companies as fool’s gold has with the real thing.

But perhaps the week’s most important China media reference – at least so far – appeared in a Journal article on how the country’s farm sector is coping with the advent of high tariffs on many U.S. agricultural products. It came in the form of some statements made by China’s President, Xi Jinping that deserve major coverage on their own, but that were presented as little more than boilerplate:

“Unilateralism and trade protectionism are rising, forcing us to take the road of self reliance. This is not a bad thing. China ultimately depends on itself.”

Xi was speaking specifically about agriculture, and can’t reasonably be criticized for wanting his country to be more self-sufficient in this sector. After all, what national leader could genuinely be happy about depending on other countries for food?

But there are two glaring problems brought up by his remarks. First, as I’ve written frequently, the contemporary global trading system, and the conventional economics underlying it, condemn the quest for self-sufficiency in any part of a country’s economy as a No-No. Trade (and therefore production) patterns are supposed to help develop the most efficient global division of labor possible. In plain English, this means that countries are supposed to specialize in what they make best, and to remain satisfied with importing most of the rest. And if food production isn’t their strong suit, they should be confident that they’ll always be able to buy from abroad all that they need.

Second, as I’ve also written, China’s quest for self-sufficiency is hardly confined to food. The country’s policy record makes clear that it’s the goal for its entire economy. The regime’s Made in China 2025 manufacturing and technology program is only the latest example. Among its objectives is reducing the country’s dependence on foreign-made parts, components, and materials for a wide range of manufactures. In other words, China’s leaders aren’t satisfied with importing goods and services where it currently lacks what economists call “comparative advantage.” They want to create this advantage for China – and according to a very specific schedule of highly concrete goals.

Whether dealing with another party, it’s crucial to define it correctly, and doubly so when that party is a “competitor” or a “rival” or outright enemy. Thanks to articles like those above, Americans have just been reminded vividly how far much of their leadership class remains from achieving this objective when it comes to China.