Im-Politic: The Washington Post Goes All Fake News on Trump, Biden, and the UN

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Anne Gearan, Ashley Parker, Biden, election 2020, General Assembly, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Mainstream Media, Philip Rucker, Trump, Ukraine, UN, United Nations, Washington Post

On Sunday, I wrote about an Associated Press article dealing extensively with manufacturing that I said might not have been Fake News, but sure came close. Today, the Washington Post published an article about President Trump’s activities at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York City that unquestionably deserves that label.

The theme of the article was made clear by the headline: “Trump uses U.N. meeting to wage domestic political attack on Biden.” Sounds pretty disgraceful, right? I mean, after all, every September the world’s leaders gather for this event, and address weighty issues ranging from threats to peace to climate change (a big focus this year). And here comes this notoriously egomaniacal and selfish boor of an Oval Office occupant determined to ignore his responsibilities as steward of the national interest and global leader – and the tradition of domestic politics stopping at the water’s edge. Instead, all he cared about was using this solemn conclave to slime former Vice President Joe Biden, a likely opponent during the next presidential election campaign.

As often not the case these days, moreover, the article itself faithfully reflected the header. According to authors Anne Gearan, Philip Rucker, and Ashley Parker, the President “turned” the General Assembly, “where foreign leaders converged to confront climate change and other global pandemics, into the backdrop for an assault on a domestic political opponent.”

They continued: “Trump used his meetings with heads of state to flay Biden, celebrate his personal attorney’s altercations and tend to his media feuds.”

For good measure, they wrote that Mr. Trump “seemed to revel in the opportunity to kick up dust around Biden, who has led Trump in virtually every public poll for several months.”

In other words, could the President be more of a reckless lout?

Readers were also told that participants in the global gathering were “baffled by the sudden interjection of a complex Trump scandal that they found mystifying.” And the authors dutifully quoted (globalist) “experts” to validate their emphasis on the President’s allegedly alarming weirdness:

“‘It puts foreign leaders in a difficult if not impossible position,’ said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. ‘How do you manage this complicated person who doesn’t play the game by the rules, and how do you somehow protect this important relationship? Everybody’s a bit wary.’

“Victoria Holt, managing director at the Henry L. Stimson Center, said the arcane details of the Ukraine story and its overlap with U.S. politics are largely beside the point for other leaders here. ‘I’m sure they are scratching their heads,” she said. “The United States is supposed to be leading on major issues” such as climate change.’”

Except a glancing reference in its paragraph completely destroyed the alarming premise of the article. As the authors briefly noted, the controversy over Mr. Trump’s own and the Biden family’s dealings with political leaders and oligarchs from Ukraine “hung over Trump’s first day at the annual U.N. meeting, beginning with a volley of shouted questions from journalists….”

Another unintentionally revealing observation: “Trump stayed away from the Ukraine topic in his only major prepared remarks of the day….”

That is, it wasn’t Mr. Trump who injected domestic politics into this year’s General Assembly and its work. It was journalists like the Post reporters. (Unless you attach lots of importance to the fact that the President tweeted about the subject beforehand – which the Post reporters clearly didn’t, since they devoted no other passages to it.) Talk about blaming the victim.

The Washington Post, of course, is the newspaper that throughout the Trump administration has been sanctimoniously warning that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” As so often the case, though, it’s ignored how shamefully biased reporting by democracy’s supposedly impartial watchdogs represent an equally dangerous threat.

(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.

Making News: Manufacturing Views Quoted in the Washington Post…& More!

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American Greatness, China, Denver Post, Hollywood, Making News, manufacturing, Modern Machine Shop, recession, tariffs, Thaddeus McCotter, Trade, Trump, Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that three recent news reports – two on the state of American manufacturing, and one on China’s growing influence over the American movie industry – have cited my views and analyses.

On July 25, this Washington Post article included my – cloudy- forecast about industry’s near future due to all the uncertainties created by President Trump’s tariff-centric trade policies.  It was also gratifying to see a Mainstream Media piece mention my observations about technical manufacturing recessions – I believe that’s a first.

For more on recent manufacturing recessions, including the one in which industry is still stuck, see this recent post of mine.

This Washington Post piece was also reprinted in several major dailies around the country, like the Denver Post.

The day before, this post on Modern Machine Shop‘s blog quoted from my recent offering on how U.S.-based companies have dealt with Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

Finally, on July 19, former Michigan Republican Congressman Thaddeus McCotter’s essay for the American Greatness website on Hollywood’s latest kowtow to Chinese investors mentioned a tweet of mine on the subject.  Here’s the link.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming and recent media appearances, and other developments.

Im-Politic: A Century-Old Way Forward on Defining “True Americanism”

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assimilation, Christianity, conservatism, Henry Olsen, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, libertarianism, Louis D. Brandeis, national conservatism, national identity, progressivism, social conservatism, Trump, Washington Post

That sounds like a pretty interesting and important Washington, D.C. conference that took place last week that gathered a bunch of politicians, pundits, intellectuals (how I hate that word!) and activists of all kinds on the political Right. Their aim: Developing a form of “national conservatism.” Think of it as a large-scale attempt to create Trump-ism without the – ah – idiosyncracies of its namesake.

Not that it will be easy to accomplishing this worthy goal – which appears to amount to seeking to replace the economic libertarian- and globalist-dominated views that have predominated on the Right for so long with something much better suited to advance the interests of working-class Americans.

After all, like it or not, the President’s controversial character in general clearly pleases a big chunk of the electorate, and it’s probably a major contributor to the near-universal support he enjoys with avowedly Republican voters. Moreover, Trump-ism as practiced by the President includes a lot of economic libertarian-ism, as indicated by his early and avid support for a business-heavy tax cut plan, for major cuts in the discretionary portion of the federal government, and for substantially easing environmental and other regulations. And for good measure, as I’ve written, his foreign policy honors America-First precepts in the breach at least as often as not. 

So the presidential version of Trump-ism has not surprisingly attracted backers from all over the Right, and the big disagreements that apparently broke out at the conference were just as predictable. One of the thorniest has to do with the intertwined issues of identity politics and immigration, But however emotional such disputes are likely to remain, they seem to me among the easiest to resolve – at least if Trump-ism is to have any viable long-term political future, and more important, to play a constructive role in resolving them.

According to one sympathetic conservative writer, Henry Olsen, too many of the conservatives at the conference, and too many Trump supporters generally, seem insistent on emphasizing “the country’s past as a British Protestant nation, one where the vast supermajority of citizens took their moral cues from the Bible as the guide to its future.”

The author, a Washington Post columnist who is supportive in particular of much of the “nationalist” part of national conservatism (especially on the crucial trade and immigration fronts), argues correctly that “Since the 1890s, the country has successfully defined what it means to be American without recourse to denominational persuasion or British heritage.”

And in my view, he’s equally correct in contending that claims (mainly from the social conservative wing of conservatism) like “Christianity was the force that created America” simplistically overlook the more inclusive beliefs of the Founding Fathers, ignore centuries of massive demographic change, and “argue for modern America’s de facto dissolution.”

So what does hold us together – and just as important, has held us together for so long? Olsen’s pinpointing of 1890 brings the answer very close. Because its precise chronological location is the year 1915. That’s when soon-to-be-appointed Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis gave a speech in Boston titled, “True Americanism.”

If you think the title means that Brandeis was a jingoistic xenophobe, think again. He was the son of immigrants from Prague, the first Jew to sit on the high court, and a genuine titan of that era’s progressive movement. And in this address, he presented probably the strongest, most eloquent descriptions of what is unquestionably the most admirable, and effective, unifying forces a work throughout American history – what most of us would call the “American way of life.”

Indeed, Brandeis’ theme that day was why the country should welcome the immigrants arriving during that era in record numbers, and how it could maintain the consensus on bedrock national values and governing practices that’s vital to any society’s coherence – and therefore success.

I’ve quoted from this speech before, but it’s worth revisiting at some length. In Brandeis’ words, since its founding, America had

“admitted to our country and to citizenship immigrants from the diverse lands of Europe. We had faith that thereby we could best serve ourselves and mankind. This faith has been justified. The United States has grown great. The immigrants and their immediate descendants have proved themselves as loyal as any citizens of the country. Liberty has knit us closely together as Americans. Note the common devotion to our Country’s emblem expressed at the recent Flag Day celebration in New York by boys and girls representing more than twenty different nationalities warring abroad.”

He also implored his audience, “let us not forget that many a poor immigrant comes to us from distant lands, ignorant of our language, strange in tattered clothes and with jarring manners, who is already truly American in this most important sense; who has long shared our ideals and who, oppressed and persecuted abroad, has yearned for our land of liberty and for the opportunity of abiding in the realization of its aims.”

But crucially, he added, simple admission was not enough. Nor was the adoption by immigrants of “the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here” or even substituting “for his mother tongue, the English language as the common medium of speech.”

“To become Americanized,” Brandeis argued, “the change wrought must be fundamental. However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done, will he possess the national consciousness of an American.”

I won’t describe Brandeis’ specific definition of that consciousness (you really should read it), but I can’t imagine that any American of good faith would quarrel significantly with it (although Brandeis’ view that this system of beliefs was distinctive and distinctively virtuous wouldn’t sit too well with many on the Left).

What plainly has been even more controversial in recent decades, however, is the equally Brandeis-ian idea that these beliefs need to be actively propagated, and his emphasis on lifelong education makes clear that this mission needed to be carried out not just by the schools, but by many of society’s most important institutions: “the public platform [i.e., by political leaders]…discussion in the lodges and the trade unions….”

So if national conservatism wants to be truly national, and therefore, successful, it will have no choice but to rally round the view that anyone from any part of the world can become an American – if Americanizing them becomes a national priority again. Of course, that’s the key to success for liberalism, too – which unlike too much of conservatism, is fine with the “anyone” part of the above conviction, but seems convinced that diversity should be sought uber alles, and perhaps exclusively.

Which portion of the political spectrum will be the first to recognize the synthesis – which will be a win not only for its own fortunes but, as history has taught, for the nation as a whole? So far, I’d bet on the conservatives. But not heavily.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Latest Trump Tariff Debunkers Debunked

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Benjamin Della Rocca, Benn Steil, China, Council on Foreign Relations, goods imports, imports, merchandise imports, n, Peter Navarro, tariffs, Trade, tradewar, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Only in the free trade-worshiping American Mainstream Media could an op-ed piece titled “Debunking Trump’s Tariff Claims” be published that’s chock full of easily debunk-able claims itself.  

The first such allegation in the article, which came out on the Washington Post’s website yesterday, holds that the administration’s view that China “bears most of the burden of the tariffs” imposed by the President over the last year is based solely on adviser Peter Navarro’s explanation that China is lowering the prices of its goods in order to offset them. Authors Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca of the Council on Foreign Relations note, correctly, that U.S. government data show that prices of Chinese imports haven’t fallen by nearly as much as they’ve been increased by Trump tariffs.

What Steil and Della Rocca have left out, though, could fill a book. For instance, the tariffs still only cover $250 billion worth of America’s total goods purchases of China – which last year totaled just under $540 billion. So that’s well under half. In addition, the vast majority of these levies have been in place for considerably less than a year.

Moreover, the prices of imports from China – which stem from numerous influences aside from tariffs (U.S. and other foreign market conditions for the various products involved, levels of Chinese subsidies – including value-added tax rebates that were increased last September) – have definitely shifted gears. During the pre-tariff period May, 2017-May, 2018, they rose 0.40 percent. During the largely post-tariff period May, 2018-2019 (encompassing the latest available data), they fell by 1.4 percent.

Equally interesting: Those May China import prices hit their lowest absolute level since September, 2007, nearly 12 years ago. Coincidence? Overall non-fuel import prices are down, too – but stand only at a post-September, 2017 low.

Perhaps more important, though, Navarro has in fact not staked his stance only on import prices. As he told Fox Business on June 21 (before the Steil-Della Rocca article), “China producers pay for these tariffs in the language of economics, they bear the burden of the tariffs through lower prices, lower exports, lower profits.” And there’s abundant evidence to back him up.

Notably, since July, 2018 (when the first, $50 billion, tranche of Trump tariffs were imposed), America’s goods purchases from China fell on a monthly basis by 16.66 percent. The comparable results for the previous year – an increase of 0.92 percent. Over that span, U.S. non-oil goods imports (the best global control group for goods imports from China) weakened, too, but kept growing. The slowdown was from 6.65 percent to 1.82 percent.

Another way to look at these changes is to compare U.S. goods imports from China from January-May of this year with those purchases from the same five-month stretch in years past. During the first such Trump period (covering 2016-2017), before any tariffs were imposed, these merchandise imports from China increased by 8.10 percent. The purchases went up during the following five-month stretch –  to 9.54 percent.

The growth rate during the first five-month period featuring tariffs, in 2019? There was no growth. In fact, they sank by 12.34 percent. And interestingly, the overall U.S. economic growth rate during these spans was almost unchanged. 

Since the federal government doesn’t keep monthly figures on the gross domestic product (GDP), I’ve used the next best measure — the quarterly data kept by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. On a pre-inflation basis (the same gauge as used by the trade figures), during the first between the first two quarters of 2018, the economy grew by 2.93 percent. During the first two quarters of 2019, the pace quickened only to 2.95 percent. (Because the first results for second quarter GDP aren’t in yet, I’ve used the average of these widely followed “tracking figures” as a substitute.) 

An even clearer idea of Chinese losses can be gleaned from considering what U.S. merchandise imports from China might have been without any tariffs. These kinds of exercises are anything but precise, of course. But had they increased at the same 9.54 percent rate as between January-May, 2017 and 2018 rather than shrinking by 12.34 percent, they’d have totaled $224.97 billion during the first five months of this year – a swing of nearly $45 billion.

Steil and Della Rocca didn’t bother to look at the impact on China’s global exports, either – even though it looks sizable. Between July, 2018 and May, 2019 (from that first full month of U.S. tariffs through the latest data month), China’s global overseas merchandise sales fell by 0.80 percent on a monthly basis. From July, 2017 to May, 2018 (pre-any tariffs), they expanded by 8.94 percent. 

China’s overall economic growth took a big hit, too. On an annual basis, in the third quarter of 2018, (when those initial American tariffs were slapped on), Chinese GDP expanded by 6.5 percent. (And yes, I realize these numbers can be very dodgy.) By the first quarter of this year, it had dipped to 6.4 percent. From the pre-tariff third quarter of 2017 to the first quarter of 2018, China’s growth rate remained the same – a considerably higher 6.8 percent.

President Trump and his aides certainly can and should be much more precise when they talk about the trade war’s costs. But examining these claims using partial quotes and isolated figures is surely a much greater sin. In other words, the bigger the picture examined, the better the Trump administration’s contention that the Chinese economy is suffering a much greater burden from U.S. tariffs than America’s

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: The Washington Post’s Nazi-Baiting on Trump & Immigration

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Adolf Hitler, asylum seekers, border security, Central America, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Im-Politic, Immigration, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Mainstream Media, migrants, Nazism, Open Borders, refugees, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Washington Post

Just when I think that I couldn’t become angrier at the bile spewed by some of President Trump’s critics and too often reported as fact or respectable, newsworthy opinion by the Mainstream Media, Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers keep topping themselves. And this morning I saw a series of such statements so inexcusable that I’ve decided to post about them even though I’ve already expressed my views in a tweet.

The accusations came in a Washington Post article today titled “’Our country is FULL!’: Trump’s declaration carries far-right echoes that go back to the Nazi era.”

Reporter Isaac Stanley-Becker was referring to the remarks made by Mr. Trump last Friday during his visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, where even champions of what I’ve come to call the Functional Equivalent of Open Borders are now finally admitting that flows of migrants mainly from Central America are overwhelming federal government facilities set up to deal with foreigners seeking to cross into the United States.

Stanley-Becker, who is based in London, wasn’t simply content to observe that the President’s language “fits a pattern of far-right rhetoric reemerging globally. Fear of an immigrant takeover motivates fascist activity in Europe, where, historically, the specter of overcrowding has been used to justify ethnic cleansing.”

With the evident endorsement of his editors, he went on to write that “Adolf Hitler promised ‘living space’ for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project….”

In this vein, he sought to legitimize this analysis by quoting an historian (from the University of California at Berkeley) who contended “The echoes do indeed remind one of the Nazi period, unfortunately. The exact phrasing may be different, but the spirit is very similar. The concern about an ethnic, national people not having proper space — this is something you could definitely describe as parallel to the 1930s.”

In addition, Stanley-Becker reported that “The president’s words became even more freighted when he repeated them on Saturday before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, saying, ‘Our country is full, can’t come. I’m sorry.’” (Which sounds like an opinion, not the kind of fact that news reporters are supposed to present in their own voice.) And he supposedly documented the follow-on statement that Mr. Trump’s remarks “drew outrage” by citing precisely one tweeter and Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke.

The author was clever enough to slip into his story the kind of qualifier meant to convey objectivity but skated over far too quickly to alert most readers to their potential to invalidate the entire exercise. For example, Stanley-Becker briefly noted that “Hitler promised ‘living space’ for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project, which historians said distinguishes the Third Reich from today’s xenophobic governments.”

But in case you’re tempted to conclude “That distinction seems pretty darned important,” the author hastily added, in a classic example of insinuation, “Still, experts found parallels” (by which he meant the aforementioned Berkeley professor).

Moreover, let’s not forget the towering double standard Stanley-Becker and similar Trump haters have created. For if the President’s words and (prospective) actions “echo” and “remind” of Nazism, what should be made of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt – under whose administration refugees from the Third Reich itself were turned away from American shores? Does this record reveal racist, anti-semitic, xenophobic Nazi sympathies? Or “echo” them etc.? In fact, Roosevelt’s name isn’t even mentioned in the article, even though he received cables from the ship on which they traveled begging for admission.

Does Roosevelt deserve such descriptions – and condemnation?  If not, why not?And to return to current circumstances, President Trump has clearly been reacting against the large numbers of U.S.-bound migrants falsely seeking asylum (which is awarded to those fleeing persecution) who are seeking better material lives. Roosevelt was denying entry to individuals and families clearly seeking to escape a regime that was obviously targeting them because of their identity.

Because this is a free country, Stanley-Becker, his editors, and his publisher have every right to accuse President Trump of using coded, pro-Nazi or Nazi-sympathizing dog-whistle attacks to advance his immigration policies. But their profession’s ethics prohibit them from portraying these views as unvarnished facts in news columns. And common decency demands they have the courage to make these charges openly, rather than using the weasel words and phrases and similar ploys so typical of character assassination.

Making News: Detailed Breitbart Report on Last Week’s Globalism Radio Interview

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., Breitbart News Tonight, Breitbart.com, globalism, John Binder, Making News, Robert Kagan, Washington Post

I’m pleased to announce that that “Breitbart News Tonight” radio interview of mine last Friday on the recent Washington Post tome defending globalism was featured today on the Breitbart “print” website.  You might be especially interested in this detailed summary by Breitbart reporter John Binder in part because his piece seems to have generated lots of buzz in social media – and lots of traffic for this blog.

All the more reason to keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Could Main Street Have Done Better Than the Fed?

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Ben Bernanke, bubbles, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Great Recession, Lawrence Summers, Leonard Vincent Gilleo, recovery, secular stagnation, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you’re seeking major insights into America’s recent economic and financial history, a barber’s obituary probably wouldn’t be the place you’d start looking. But if you checked out the notice placed in the Washington Post yesterday for Leonard Vincent Gilleo, you might rethink your assumptions. Because Mr. Gilleo plied his trade at the Federal Reserve. For decades. And although the bio written (presumably by his family) might have gotten a little tongue-in-cheek, it’s arguable enough that the Fed has helped make such a hash of the nation’s economy, especially for the last two decades, that a tantalizing claim in the obit deserves to be taken seriously.

According to the notice, Gilleo’s “clients included former Fed Chairmen Arthur Burns, Paul Volker [sic], Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, as well as US Ambassadors, Secret Service brass, White House Press Secretaries, and hundreds of PhD economists and State Department personnel.”

And his customers, we’re told, didn’t let him just stick to his scissors: “Standing behind his barber’s chair, Lenny served as the common man sounding board to many economic policy decisions made by the Fed.”

Now comes the kicker: “In fact, had his layman’s advice been taken seriously, Black Monday, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and the financial crisis of 2008 could have all been avoided.”

At first, this might look nonsensical – or the kind of good-natured fun that’s common when we want to remember the deceased fondly. But think of the economic news since Black Monday – the stock market crash of October 19, 1987. The nation experienced a short and relatively shallow recession around the turn of the decade; a strong but initially jobless recovery that turned into a record expansion fueled largely by a technology-driven stock market bubble; another short, shallow recession; a recovery that turned out to be another, much bigger bubble inflated by record levels of easy money supplied by (Alan Greenspan’s) Fed; a terrifying global financial crisis resulting from that bubble’s inevitable bursting; and the recovery from the ensuing Great Recession that began in mid-2009 – the weakest on record.

It’s true that Fed Chair Ben Bernanke in particular is credited by many with preventing the most recent financial crisis from becoming a catastrophic global depression – and rejecting the advice of politicians and economists who argued that the central bank was preventing a restoration of genuine economic health by providing crutches that were too strong for too long.

But it’s also clear that Bernanke, his successor Janet Yellen, and her successor Jerome Powell have chosen the easy way to end the crisis – simply flooding the economy with as much cheap credit as necessary to keep it afloat – and that they have no viable exit plan. It’s clear as well that Bernanke and his mid-2000s colleagues missed the glaring warning signs that the growth of the 2000s was dangerously unhealthy growth.

Less clear, but most important, the Fed’s response to the last financial crisis continued a practice of fostering acceptable levels of growth and employment by showering the economy with levels of stimulus that have been so excessive as to be unsustainable, and bound to risk damaging collapses.

Economist Lawrence Summers was the first to identify this pattern, which he calls secular stagnation.

I’m not saying that I believe Gilleo had better answers. I am saying that it’s not completely crazy to recognize how dreadfully these most credentialed of our economic experts have performed, and to suspect that less technical, academicky mastery and more real-world experience and common sense (plus some backbone) would have left the economy considerably better off than at present. And P.S.: I can think of worse uses of my time than contacting Gilleo’s family to see if they were serious, and if so, what his advice actually was.

Im-Politic: Trump Immigration Policy Caught Red-Handed – Working

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asylum seekers, border security, border wall, ICE, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mainstream Media, Michael Miller, MS-13, refugees, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Washington Post

Mirroring the broader, hysterical Never Trump-ism that’s overcome so much of America’s bipartisan political establishment and its grassroots supporters (along with their foreign counterparts), the Mainstream Media just keeps killing it in the Trump Derangement Syndrome Department. And hot on the heels of that Financial Times editorial I posted on yesterday that faulting a Trump nominee for lacking the leadership and intellectual “heft” of someone who should have been tried as a Vietnam War-related criminal comes a Washington Post article handling the President’s immigration policy record with equally clueless – and equally jaw-dropping – incompetence.

According to Post reporter Michael Miller (and his editors), Mr. Trump is way off-base targeting the murderous Hispanic criminal gang MS-13, and similar networks of thugs, to muster support for his restrictionist immigration policies. The reason? “[E]ven as [the President] warned again and again about the dangers posed by MS-13 members and the need for a wall to keep them out, killings connected to the gang were plummeting in many of the areas where MS-13 has been most active.”

In other words, what could be dumber? And/or more cynical?

But in the very same article, Miller told readers that “federal law enforcement officials say MS-13 violence fell last year as a result of intensified nationwide investigations.”

More specifically, the author writes, “While Trump’s attacks on the gang have been relentless, current and former immigration officials, law enforcement agencies and gang experts attributed the decline in MS-13 murders to an aggressive response by local and federal authorities.”

For good measure, accompanying the article is a photo with this caption: “Northern Virginia Gang Task Force officers partner with ICE [the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] officers to arrest an alleged MS-13 gang member in Manassas in 2017.”

Maybe Miller thinks the President has nothing to do with ICE and other federal authorities?

The author did present convincing evidence that President Trump has hardly been the first chief executive to crack down on MS-13. But he also presented evidence just as convincing that none of the success achieved by these campaigns has lasted. And if you think that the President’s insistence on more physical border barriers has been irrelevant to this crisis, consider this point made by the author: Following evidence of a reduction in gang activity, after 2014, “a surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America helped revitalize MS-13.”

And as made clear by a 2017 Post article linked in Miller’s piece, many of them made their way into the United States because inadequate border security enabled them to sneak in, or because, thanks to permissive federal policies for dealing with arrivals as a whole, “more than 150,000 such teens and children [to that point, two years ago] have been detained at the border, screened and placed in communities through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).”

And “Follow-up [for these resettlement efforts] is limited, and many youths fail to show up for immigration proceedings, a recent congressional investigation showed. At the same time, there are gaps in local efforts to reach vulnerable children and teens before the gang does.”

These problems could be greatly reduced by (1) better physical barriers that prevent would-be border crossers from setting foot in U.S. territory in the first place, and thereby automatically becoming eligible for the entire range of due-process protections to which citizens and other residents – legal and illegal – are entitled; and (2) related Trump administration proposals that would require refugee applicants and asylum-seekers to stay outside U.S. territory while their claims are examined.

In other words, Miller and his editors clearly thought they were serving up a classic Trump “gotcha” story. But even a minimally careful reading of the piece catches them red-handed in a disgraceful – as well as inept – example of media bias.