RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.)

The former First Lady’s forthcoming book is titled “Becoming”…..a memoir that will arrive on November 18, 2018- translated into 24 languages and an audio edition. Is this a first stab at running for public office?

Well one hopes that her writing skills have er….evolved since her Princeton days. The late, very liberal journalist Christopher Hitchens had this to say about her college thesis…”to describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/03/how_to_destroy_the_united_states_ditch_the_rule_of_law.html

With the clearly unethical and most likely criminal behavior of the upper management levels of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) exposed by Chairman Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee, there are two complementary areas that have been conveniently swept under the rug.

The first deals with the murder of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich, and the second deals with the alleged hacking of the DNC server by Russia. Both should be of prime interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, but do not hold your breath.

The facts that we know of in the murder of the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was that he was gunned down blocks from his home on July 10, 2016. Washington Metro police detectives claim that Mr. Rich was a robbery victim, which is strange since after being shot twice in the back, he was still wearing a $2,000 gold necklace and watch. He still had his wallet, key and phone. Clearly, he was not a victim of robbery.

This has all the earmarks of a targeted hit job. However, strangely no one has been charged with this horrific crime, and what is more intriguing is that no law enforcement agency is even investigating this murder. According to other open sources, Metro police were told by their “higher ups” that if they spoke about the case, they will be immediately terminated. It has been claimed that this order came down from very high up the “food chain,” well beyond the D.C. mayor’s office. Interesting.

One more unexplained twist is that on July 10, 2016, the same day Seth Rich was murdered, an FBI agent’s car was burglarized in the same vicinity. Included in the FBI equipment stolen was a 40 caliber Glock 22. D.C. Metro police issued a press release, declaring that the theft of the FBI agent’s car occurred between 5 and 7 a.m. Two weeks later, the FBI changed the time of the theft to between 12 a.m. and 2 a.m. Was the FBI gun used to shoot Seth Rich? Neither the FBI nor the Metro police will discuss.

Mary Stalcup Markward appeared nervous as she made her way into the cramped hearing room on the morning of July 11, 1951. A battery of photographers snapped away while she quietly took her seat. Behind her, the gallery was jammed with reporters and spectators who had come to hear one of the most prolific spies ever to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Markward didn’t fit the image of a mole. But there she was — a young mother and homemaker from Fairfax County, only 5 foot 1, looking prim in her rust-colored suit and white sailor hat — preparing to tell the committee about the nearly seven years she had posed as a loyal member of the District Communist Party.

She was there to name names.

“I can see her face, how innocent she looked,” recalls Murrey Marder, a reporter covering the hearing for The Washington Post. “The fact that she was such an average person, that is what was so unusual. This was not some seasoned counterintelligence operative.”

Her testimony — both in prior closed-door sessions and in the public hearings — was a sensation. Never before had anyone spoken in public with such knowledge about the inner workings of the party. Never before had it hit so close to home for Washingtonians. Markward gave the names of more than 240 past and present party members, providing the names of their husbands and wives and the exact dates of party meetings. When she finished, the crowd gave her a sustained round of applause.

The nation — especially its capital — was in the midst of an anti-Communist frenzy at the time of Markward’s testimony. Abroad, U.S. troops fought to contain the Reds in Korea. On the home front, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover announced that no fewer than 55,000 card-carrying members of the Communist Party lived in the country. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, the relentless Communist hunter, ominously declared that 205 of them were working in the State Department. And in a trial that shocked the nation that spring, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets.

For most of the period leading up to World War II, being a Communist was perfectly legal, if somewhat provocative. At the height of its popularity in 1939, the party had 100,000 U.S. members. But in the years after the war, Congress passed dozens of laws, most notably the Smith Act, to ensure the loyalty of federal employees by making membership in subversive organizations a crime.

The most pervasive action to weed out subversives was launched by President Harry S. Truman in 1947. Dogged by Republican charges that he was soft on Communism, he created the Federal Employees Loyalty Program. The program established review boards to investigate federal employees and terminate them if there was “reasonable doubt” as to their loyalty. “Reasonable” grounds included associating with known Communists.

What do you do if Hollywood has been rocked for months by the biggest sex-harassment scandal ever and the Academy Awards are coming up and you’re running a film-industry trade paper that’s in the habit of putting out an annual Oscars issue?

Well, if you’re the editors of Variety, you put your heads together and decide to grace your cover with the most courageous victim of Hollywood sexism ever – namely, Barbra Streisand.

Written by Ramin Setoodeh, the slobberingly obsequious cover story is entitled “Barbra Streisand on How She Battled Hollywood’s Boys’ Club.” It opens with what must be the millionth account of what, one gathers, was the great anti-woman crime of the twentieth century: the denial of an Oscar nomination to Babs for her direction of Yentl (1983). How dare they overlook her while nominating five males, including some Swede named Bergman! “It really showed the sexism,” Streisand tells Setoodeh.

She tells this to Setoodeh, mind you, “over a cup of tea at her her stunning Malibu estate.” That’s Hollywood female victimhood for you, folks!

Streisand isn’t embarrassed to still be whining about her supposed snub 34 years later. Then again, when has she ever displayed the slightest sign of embarrassment about anything? What’s a bit more surprising than her eternal self-obsessed kvetching is that neither Setoodeh nor his editors at Variety seem to have sensed any contradiction whatsoever between her endless complaints about patriarchal indignities she’s suffered in the film biz (once, when she was directing The Prince of Tides, her crew refused to work overtime) and the ample evidence of her own professional triumph served up in the article itself – from Setoodeh’s giddy description of her estate to the cover photo of her surrounded by a profusion of Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Golden Globes.

Think about it: since the takedown of Harvey Weinstein, dozens of Hollywood careers have been lost, scores of black dresses designed and fitted for the Golden Globes, hundreds of Time’s Up buttons proudly brandished, thousands of celebrity #metoo hashtags tweeted and re-tweeted, and heaven knows how many pious, pompous, publicist-written-and-approved speeches about male oppression in the entertainment industry delivered on talk shows, at rallies, and from the stages of awards galas. Formerly silenced and suppressed women in Hollywood, Setoodeh solemnly pronounces, are “finally gaining control of their own narrative.”