RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear Readers: This is one of the most important articles I have written, along with this one: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/02/nuclear-posture-review/. If the Russiagate conspiracy against Trump and American democracy goes unpunished, accountable government in the United States will cease to exist. US security agencies have long been involved in coups against foreign governments. Now they are involved in one against America. There is great danger that Republicans are so worshipful of “national security” and so determined to protect the reputation of the US government that they will give a pass to the high officials who participated in a conspiracy against the United States. As for President Trump, he lacks a government that he can count on and is threatened by the military/security complex. The conspiracy could easily be whitewashed as merely a case of the FBI and DOJ not following proper procedures, with the media’s participation in the conspiracy being dismissed with mea culpas of “sloppy reporting.”

Will The Conspiracy Against Trump and American Democracy Go Unpunished?

Paul Craig Roberts

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The American people do not realize the seriousness of the Russiagate conspiracy against them and President Trump. Polls indicate that a large majority of the public do not believe that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the presidential election, and are tired of hearing the media prostitutes repeat the absurd story day after day. On its face the story makes no sense whatsoever. Moreover, the leaked emails are real, not fabricated. The emails show exactly what Hillary and the DNC did. The public knows that these transgressions were pushed out of news sight by the false story of a Trump/Putin conspiracy. The fact that the entirety of the US print and TV media served in a highly partisan political way to bury a true and disturbing story with a fake news story—Russiagate—is one reason some polls show that only 6% of Americans trust the mainstream media. All polls show that large majorities of independents, Republicans, and youth distrust the mainstream media. In some polls about half of Democrats trust the media, and that is because the media is servant to Democratic Party interests.

What do you get when you combine the Women’s March, the Nation of Islam and pure crazy? The Pot Plot. And now here’s Calypso Louie Farrakhan.

Farrakhan told the crowd that the “white people running Mexico are Mexican-Jews,”… Jews are “the mother and father of apartheid.” He also promoted the “Pot Plot” conspiracy that the Jews and the US government are manipulating strains of marijuana to feminize black men.

He even mentioned the Women’s March, saying that while he thought the event was a good thing, women need to learn how to cook so their husbands don’t become obese. Tamika Mallory, one of the March organizers, was in the audience, and got a special shout-out from Farrakhan. Mallory posted two Instagram photos from the event, which Carmen Perez, another Women’s March organizer, commented on with “raise the roof” emojis.

#IntersectionalFeminism.

But wait, what? Jews are using pot to feminize black men? Apparently the Pot Plot is a Nation of Islam thing and its premise is suspiciously similar to some :PLO and Hamas conspiracy theories about Israel.

During a September appearance at a mosque in Chicago, Nation of Islam student minister Wesley Muhammad claimed that Jews and the U.S. government are engaged in a “Pot Plot” to emasculate black men and turn them into homosexuals by distributing specially modified versions of marijuana.

During his nearly two-hour long tirade at the Chicago mosque, Muhammad explained that the “Pot Plot is not the paranoid racial fantasizing of your brother, but the Pot Plot is the actual scheme of your enemy.” He continued, “It’s the US government and the Synagogue of Satan’s scheme to use manipulated marijuana along with other drugs to de-masculinize and feminize the black male of America.” (The “Synagogue of Satan” is a phrase that Louis Farrakhan, NOI’s leader, uses to refer to Jews.)

YouTube is a Google joint. And Google really needs to be investigated.

The media left has been trying to obstruct an investigations of discriminatory practices by spamming fake discrimination lawsuits by lefties. But the evidence still keeps pilling up.

YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee.

“Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic,”

This is blatant discrimination. Google is denying it, but it would fit with what we know about the toxic crybullying atmosphere inside the search and online ad monopoly.

Arne Wilberg, a former longtime recruiter filed the lawsuit. It alleges that,

“In April of 2017, Google’s Technology Staffing Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. Plaintiff refused to comply with this request.”

Which is a good thing as it’s illegal.

The lawsuit is heavily documented. It documents for example that, “the manager of YouTube’s Tech Staffing Management Team, Allison Alogna, wrote an e-mail to the staffing team in which she writes, “Hi Team: Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups.”

It also states that, “Google on occasion would circulate e-mails instructing its employees to purge any and all references to the race-gender quotas from its e-mail database.”

Remember when companies tried to stay out of politics? I’d imagine Delta Air Lines is recalling those days very fondly. The airline bowed to pressure from liberal activists to stop offering a group discount to the National Rifle Association’s annual convention. Now it’s facing a backlash from Georgia Republicans. Given that Delta’s headquarters and biggest hub are in Atlanta, that’s a big problem.

Delta is wanly protesting that it wasn’t trying to make a political statement but to keep out of politics altogether. But it ended the discount in response to a political pressure campaign. And the company made a point of announcing its decision on Twitter, rather than quietly informing the NRA. If anyone at Delta thought that this wouldn’t be taken as a swipe at the NRA, that person really needs to make some time to meet a few human beings while visiting our planet.

Indeed, that was the point. NRA finances aren’t going to be devastated because members no longer get a small discount to attend its convention. Nor will NRA members stop supporting gun rights because Delta declares them unworthy of a cut-rate fare. They’re more likely to look for another airline.

The true aim of this exercise is stigma, not economic warfare. I suspect that Delta understood this, and simply miscalculated the risk of backlash.

Or perhaps it realized it no longer had the option of staying out of politics. FedEx, after all, refused to drop the NRA from its discount program in the face of similar pressure, declaring that the firm “has never set or changed rates for any of our millions of customers around the world in response to their politics, beliefs or positions on issues.” Now there are calls to boycott FedEx.

Why are we so eager to enlist companies in political battles? Ever since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision struck down key parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation, progressives have been angrily deriding conservatives for supposedly believing that “corpor­ations are people.” But if public corpor­ations are not people, why should they have political opinions?

Well, because politics, and identity, have already leached into our business relations, as retail markets have segmented into ever more rarefied niches. Fifty years ago, almost everyone — from the working class to the affluent — bought basically the same kinds of goods at the same few stores. Now we “shop our demographic” and, increasingly, our politics: Liberals can eat at Starbucks and Panera Bread while conservatives dine on Papa John’s and Chik-fil-A; crafters can split between Hobby Lobby and Michaels, and you can clothe yourself with blue-state American Apparel or red-state Rue21.

The beginning of the Trump administration’s rollout of long-promised protectionist measures for the U.S. steel and aluminum industry has been Beltway comic opera as Trump’s lightly informed economic enthusiasms interact chaotically with his staff’s attempts to keep him from indulging his worst impulses too deeply.

It’s not like nobody saw this coming: Trade protectionism — crony capitalism for well-connected and politically sensitive firms and industries — is bad policy, but it is one of the few issues about which Donald Trump has been consistent in his public statements going back decades, to the 1980s at least. He ran on a protectionist agenda and specifically named steel imports as a source of irritation.

The economics here are pretty straightforward. Trump thinks steel is just one more example of the Chinese getting one over on Americans, but China is in fact a minor player in the U.S. steel-import business, being No. 11 among nations exporting steel to the United States. A quarter of our imported steel comes from our NAFTA partners, mostly from Canada, which provides 16 percent of U.S. steel imports. Among Asian steel exporters, South Korea is our largest trading partner, not China. Moody’s projects that the country that will be most adversely affected by the tariffs is Canada, followed by Bahrain, a country that does not loom particularly large in our economic consciousness, having as it does an annual national economic output about one-fifth of the Ford Motor Company’s. It is better to punish one’s enemies than one’s allies.

And it is no good at all to punish producers and consumers both, which is what tariffs do. Tariffs are a sales tax, in this case on a raw material that is used in everything from buildings to automobiles and industrial machinery — and the latter two are a big part of the U.S. export portfolio, something that ought to occur to a president who obsesses about the balance of trade. Steel is a necessary part of the machinery that produces the agricultural commodities, electronics, and industrial implements that are the heart of U.S. exports of goods. Advantaging a small number of politically connected firms at the expense of the broader manufacturing economy — which employs vastly more people and represents vastly more in the way of both economic production and exports — is damned foolish. As an economic matter, it is illiteracy in action. There’s a reason Caterpillar shares sank after the tariff announcement, along with Boeing, United Technologies, General Motors, and others.

He’s a distinguished scholar, but he doesn’t seem to understand a basic argument.

Notwithstanding his impressive academic and professional credentials, Gabriel Schoenfeld either has a poor grasp of obstruction law or has developed reading-comprehension problems. He has also become quick to level accusations of bad faith at people he has misunderstood, or who simply disagree with him. That makes it hard to have a conversation, which is too bad because I used to enjoy our conversations.

In his latest tirade at Lawfare, Gabe accuses me of “egregious misrepresentation.” He professes that I have “repeatedly insist[ed] that for an obstruction charge to be lodged, someone has to obstruct a ‘pending proceeding.’” But far from “repeatedly insisting” that this is the case, I have never said any such thing. Gabe has misread what I wrote in a column responding to his earlier attack on me. Rather than assume that I may have misspoken (or maybe even go back and read what I actually said), he accuses me of deception.

He further contends that I have changed my position on the Justice Department’s separate treatment of criminal and counterintelligence investigations. This is almost amusing. The 14-year-old column from which he claims I have “pirouetted” was about the infamous “wall” erected by the Justice Department in the mid-1990s. That is, I wrote the column precisely to stress that the Justice Department recognizes a sharp divide between the two types of probes, and to criticize how the divide was policed — on what turns out to be my incorrect assumption that Justice Department officials could be trusted to follow rules.

I haven’t changed my position. Gabe has failed to grasp the difference between the issue in 2004, which was intelligence-sharing, and the issue today, investigation and prosecution under governing regulations. Whether it was 1996, when the wall went up; 2001, when it was razed; 2004, when my column was written; or 2018, during a special-counsel investigation, it has never been permissible for the Justice Department to conduct a stealth criminal investigation under the guise of a counterintelligence investigation.

When it comes to men and women in the working world, it’s often assumed that the latter get the short end of the stick. As such, a great deal of time and attention is devoted to helping women break any and all glass ceilings that stand in their way.

But what if women have already achieved parity with the men and are in fact surpassing them?

Although it seems absurd given the cultural mantras we’ve been fed, research is beginning to show that such is the case. One recent NBER paper finds that college-educated men are struggling to stay in the “cognitive/high wage” workforce much more than women. Another NBER paper produced a similar result, finding that young men between the ages of 25 to 34 are specifically the ones in trouble. Richard Reeves and Eleanor Krause of the Brookings Institute elaborate on this trend:

“For all the worries about middle-aged men, it is actually men at the younger end of the prime-age years who have seen the sharpest drop in employment rates:”

Deep in the D.C. Suburbs—After a frightening New York Times column by Bret Stephens comparing Trump supporters to Stalinists and NeverTrump “conservatives” to anti-Communist freedom-fighters, several NeverTrumpers—fearing for their safety—have taken refuge in the suburban home of their de facto leader, Weekly Standard editor-at-large Bill Kristol. https://amgreatness.com/2018/03/02/into-the-nevertrump-gulag/

The group includes Stephens, Washington Post columnists Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot, National Review writer Mona Charen, and author Tom Nichols. Their self-imposed exile gives the courageous dissidents a chance to plot their next move, schedule their next MSNBC interview, and close their next book deal without fear of being crushed by the MAGA jackboots . . .

Kristol: OK, brave warriors, here’s what we need to do given my decades of success in mastering the levers of power in Washington. We must first come up with a clever name, like the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, er, America. Then we draft a Statement of Principles. Then we write a strongly worded letter to the president but it’s really just a prop to get more interviews.

Nichols: [looks up from phone] Can’t we just tweet? It’s the only way I’ll ever get more followers than Hannity.

Kristol: [tries unsuccessfully to button cardigan sweater] Tom, I know you’re an expert and all, but you don’t understand. None of this means anything, we just have to sound like we know what we’re doing. Trust me, when this is all over, we will be welcomed as liberators of the conservative cause. Or at least considered as clever as I was when I made McCain pick Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Rubin: [Applies garish lipstick] Can we make this quick? I have to be on CNN in an hour and I don’t have all my screaming points done yet. [Looks at Boot] Max, what are you doing?

Boot: I’m writing my next column, “Letter from a McLean Mansion.” I mean, as a historian, I know Martin Luther King had it rough and whatnot, but he didn’t have to deal with social media or Fox News. If you really think about it, we are no different than the Little Rock Nine. Except there’s six of us.

Donald Trump doubled down Friday on his plan for steel and aluminum tariffs, telling his advisers he won’t exempt any countries from the new blunderbuss border taxes, and issuing on Twitter one of the greatest displays of economic nonsense in presidential history.

“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!,” Mr. Trump tweeted Friday morning.

Let’s parse that one, to the extent it is humanly possible. Mr. Trump believes that trade is a zero-sum game, with winning defined as having a national trade surplus. But trade consists of millions of acts of buying and selling by individuals and companies that are presumably for mutual benefit. Otherwise why would they do it? No one forces anyone to buy or sell across borders. The entire point of trading goods or services is that someone wants to buy the car or pay for the engineering design.

Then there’s Mr. Trump’s remedy, which is “don’t trade anymore-we win big.” So if the U.S. has a $100 billion deficit with Country X, simply stop trading with that country. Voila, problem solved.

But that $100 billion deficit represents an enormous amount of commercial activity, which creates jobs for millions of Americans. Someone in the U.S. has to sell that car made in Japan, or create an ad campaign to sell it. Mr. Trump’s trade-deficit remedy is to stop that trade cold and assume that somehow the production will magically arise in the U.S. Even if that were true, and it isn’t, he’s advocating what economists call autarky, or economic self-sufficiency that would result in a depression as commerce and investment crashed.

Some of our more sanguine friends see the tariffs and tweets as Mr. Trump’s familiar negotiating bluster, but we wouldn’t be too sure. Protectionism may be his only real policy conviction, and his tweet confirms he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is what the equity markets are saying as they discount trade-dependent companies.

Ronald Reagan was the protectionist Donald Trump might want to be, yet didn’t provoke market panic or a trade war.

Reagan slapped import quotas on cars, motorcycles, forklifts, memory chips, color TVs, machine tools, textiles, steel, Canadian lumber and mushrooms. There was no market meltdown. Donald Trump hit foreign steel and aluminum, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 600 points on Thursday and Friday.

Reagan was no genius administrator ( Herbert Hoover was), so that’s not the difference. Though he promised Michigan auto workers help with Japanese imports and was grateful when they voted for him, he never kidded himself that America’s problems were somebody else’s fault rather than homegrown.

Trade was less important in those days, before China’s rise and the globalization of the world’s assembly line, but that wasn’t the reason either. The 1987 crash proved soon enough that investors were ready to panic if trade partners (Germany and the U.S.) got into a serious tiff.

The real difference is that Reagan’s protectionist devices were negotiated. They were acts of cartel creation, not unlike the cartels that have been known to spring up illegally when industries under strain seek to preserve capacity while avoiding price wars. Mr. Reagan used quotas, not tariffs. He kept the peace by inviting America’s trade partners to share in excess profits at the expense of American consumers. (Recall that one upshot was a nationwide bribery-and-kickback scandal when Honda Accords were in short supply.)