RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech on economic policy in Michigan, just after Donald Trump had laid out his own economic agenda. Mrs. Clinton’s presentation was an exercise not in economics, but in mythology.

A seemingly trivial but nonetheless illuminating example of her fundamental intellectual unseriousness on economic questions was her repetition of the ancient, repeatedly discredited myth that Henry Ford raised his workers’ wages on the theory that doing so would enable them to buy Ford cars, thus increasing his company’s profit. Nothing of the sort ever happened, in reality, and the economic assumptions behind this myth — that one can spend one’s way to prosperity — is preposterous. Economically speaking, this is flat-Earth stuff, pure hokum from a woman who likes to smugly proclaim: “I believe in science!”

It is economically illiterate, but Mrs. Clinton sincerely believes it, arguing that, in the same vein, raising the federal minimum wage would actually help U.S. employers by giving consumers more money to spend at their businesses. That money of course must come from somewhere, and where it comes from is businesses (who, of course, pass on some of those costs in a variety of ways). Some consumers would have more to spend, and businesses would have less to spend. Mrs. Clinton, who does not know very much about any business other than charging $10,000 a minute for speeches (which is, to be sure, an excellent business model) perhaps has never been informed that the biggest customer of the typical small American business is — pay attention here — another business, small and family-owned firms making the majority of their sales to commercial operations rather than to individual consumers.

Her policy isn’t bootstrapping — it’s pure magical thinking.

The email controversy that Hillary Clinton hoped had died out when federal prosecutors closed their investigation last month now looks likely to shadow her campaign all the way through Election Day.

Rolling releases of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary of state, combined with her own failure to provide succinct, consistent answers on her email practices, have kept the issue simmering.

“Any time she talks about it or engages someone on the issue, it just keeps the story alive rather than letting it go away,” said Andrew Ricci, a former aide to two Democratic congressmen who is a vice president at the public relations and crisis communications firm Levick.

The drumbeat is undercutting Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and hindering her efforts to seize fuller control of the presidential race by painting Republican rival Donald Trump as an unacceptable alternative.

Last October, 42% of people polled said her use of a private email system while secretary of state was an “important factor” in whether to vote for her, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed. A survey last month found that figure had jumped to 55%.

What’s more, half of voters surveyed said she lacked the right judgment to be president based on a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe that showed she was careless in handling sensitive government information, compared with one-third who said she does have the right judgment.

John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, said: “She’s said probably about a hundred times now, it [the private email server] was a mistake, wouldn’t do it again. She’s learned from it.”

However, Mr. Podesta conceded the issue has lingered. “It’s a problem that we’ve had to cope with, but I think it’s one we’ve tried to put behind us and people are going to have to weigh that against an opponent on the other side who remains kind of outrageous every day,” he said.
The campaign’s decision to eschew news conferences also limits Mrs. Clinton’s ability to put the issue to rest. The Democrat hasn’t held a full news conference since Dec. 4, 2015, although aides said she has taken more than 2,600 questions from reporters this year on a variety of subjects, many in one-on-one interviews with television anchors.

Mrs. Clinton did take questions from reporters after an appearance last week, and offered a new, and muddled, response to the email flap that stirred fresh headlines. CONTINUE AT SITE

Many elections redefine political parties.

The rise of George McGovern’s hard-left agenda in 1972, followed later in the decade by Jimmy Carter’s evangelical liberalism, drove centrist Democrats into the arms of Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan.

These so-called neoconservatives (“new conservatives”) grew tired of liberals’ perceived laxity about fighting the Cold War. In foreign policy, the neoconservatives were best known for supporting idealistic nation-building abroad. They distrusted the rise of what would become political correctness and ever more government. They worried about violent crime and higher taxes. So decades ago, these Democrats joined the Republican party.

Since the 1980s, the neoconservatives have made up the elite of their newly adopted party — despite their unease with the conservative orthodoxy of border enforcement, fierce resistance to gun control, and opposition to abortion.

Now, a few neoconservatives are reinventing themselves again and returning to the Democrats to support Hillary Clinton. We could call them “neoliberals.”

They believe that socialist Bernie Sanders made the hard-Left Clinton seem like an acceptable centrist. As neoliberals, they hope that beneath her opportunistic embrace of Obamism, Clinton still could recalibrate herself as more of a Democrat of the 1990s, a period when her husband, President Bill Clinton, championed balancing the budget while intervening abroad.

Neoliberals — along with some members of the conservative establishment — consider Republican party nominee Donald Trump to be toxic. Many of them are supporting Clinton because they do not like Trump’s idea of building a wall on the Mexican border to stop illegal immigration. Nor do they appreciate Trump’s slogans about “putting America first” when negotiating trade deals, conducting alliances, and avoiding optional foreign interventions. They hate Trump’s crude, take-no-prisoners invective more than Hillary’s polished and refined lying.

The 2016 neoliberals were never very culturally conservative. So they are certainly not bothered by Clinton’s pro-choice advocacy. They do not mind her promotion of gun control, and they are open to global warming agendas and soft multiculturalism. They see Clinton as preferable to Trump and his unapologetic nationalism. Many of the neoliberal converts supported the Obama–Clinton intervention in Libya and oppose Trump’s get-tough trade stance on China.

Neoliberals also find themselves more in the same class — defined by income, education, and cultural tastes — with Clinton’s elite Democrats than with Trump’s new army of lower-middle-class cultural and economic populists.

Neoliberals get along well with the small elite class that fuels the Clinton machine — similarly wealthy, well-educated grandees on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, along with those in big media, academia, the arts, and the top echelons of state and federal bureaucracies.

Democrats no longer win over the middle classes, who lack the culture of the elite and the romance of the distant and subsidized poor. NASCAR and the NRA are anathemas to Democrats and were never popular with neoconservatives either.

Will the old neoconservatives/new neoliberals who support Clinton instead of Trump ever come back to the Republican party after the election?

It depends on three unknowns.

The surest way to become alienated from Donald Trump supporters is to invoke the word “global” with regard to trade or economic interests. Even if you embrace the Trump economic agenda for enhancing U.S. competitiveness by lowering taxes and easing regulation, even if you support an “America First” approach for tackling domestic shortcomings from education to infrastructure—there is still a negative stigma attached to proposing any kind of global economic initiative.

Yet by insisting that the U.S. Treasury label China a “currency manipulator” and by promoting trade that is both free and “fair,” Mr. Trump may be laying the groundwork for a significant breakthrough in international monetary relations—one that could ultimately validate the rationale for an open global marketplace and restore genuine free trade as a vital component of economic growth.

The notion that something good might come out of a Trump policy elicits guffaws in certain economic circles. And questioning whether today’s exchange-rate regime serves the cause of beneficial cross-border commerce is tantamount to advocating protectionism. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump’s emphasis on currency manipulation brings into focus the shortcomings of our present international monetary system—volatility, persistent imbalances, currency mismatches—which testify to its dysfunction. Indeed, today’s hodgepodge of exchange-rate mechanisms is routinely described as a “non-system.” Or, as former International Monetary Fund chief Jacques de Larosière termed it at a Vienna conference in February 2014, an “anti-system.”

If monetary scholars once diligently sought to explain the relative virtues of fixed-versus-flexible exchange rates on global economic performance, they have largely abdicated any responsibility for the escalating political backlash against trade that blames currency manipulation for lost business.

No serious economist would claim today that the “dirty float” intervention tactics practiced by numerous countries would be remotely acceptable within the freely flexible exchange-rate system envisaged by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. Nor would anyone suggest that any coherent mechanism exists comparable with the fixed-rate system anchored by a gold-convertible dollar that reigned in the decades following World War II. CONTINUE AT SITE

The decision to default one’s vote to Hillary Clinton comes in many forms. She is the lesser of two evils. She is the devil we know.

By all accounts, hell is still hell. Before volunteering to spend four years in it, voters about to commit the sin of despair might consider the consequences of a default vote.

The greatest is the economy. Mrs. Clinton will contribute nothing to lift the flatlined aspirations of the eight Obama years.

There is also the matter of Clinton mores, revealed again Monday in a Washington Post story about the way former Sen. Clinton dealt with the economic plight of upstate New Yorkers. Most relevant was the account of Sen. Clinton pushing federal money to the Corning company on behalf of its emissions-reduction technology:

“Corning’s chief executive co-hosted a 2015 fundraiser for her. The company paid her $225,500 in 2014 to speak to Corning executives. Corning also has given more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, its records show.”

Also worth reading are details of the $315,000 eBay gave her for a 20-minute speech last year, but we digress. Our subject is what surely will be the decline and final fall of the American higher-education system under a President Clinton.

The onslaught of political correctness that overwhelmed American campuses the past year may not come up in the presidential debates. But for many voters the campus pillaging of free speech symbolizes a country off the rails.

The New York Times recently ran a piece describing how colleges and universities are experiencing a pull back in alumni giving because of the PC madness. Donations at Amherst fell 6.5% in the last fiscal year. A small-college fundraising organization named Staff reports that giving in fiscal 2016 is down 29% from the year before.

Enraged alumni vent frustration throughout the piece, but one in particular asks, “Where did this super-correctness come from?” There is an answer to that question.

A Clinton victory will empower, for a very long time, the forces now putting at risk one of the country’s incomparable strengths, its system of higher education.

What happened can be explained in one word: diversity. CONTINUE AT SITE

Funny how the word “email” continues to haunt Hillary Clinton even as she dismisses every new revelation as “old news.” The latest new-old news comes in the release by Judicial Watch of 44 emails from her personal server that Mrs. Clinton failed to turn over in the batch she told the State Department included everything that was work-related. The emails paint a picture of top Clinton aides at State eager to do favors for Clinton Foundation donors.

At the heart of these documents is the glaring conflict of interest that Mrs. Clinton carried into the State Department—and then spread to those around her. Only months after the Clinton Foundation agreed to ethics protocols designed to keep Mrs. Clinton’s department from mixing State with foundation business, these new emails show her two closest aides— Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills—doing the bidding of Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band.

On April 22, 2009, Mr. Band emailed Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills to say it’s “important to take care of [name redacted]. The subject line reads: “Fw: A favor.” Far from suggesting the favor was inappropriate, Ms. Abedin responded that the person was on State’s “radar,” and that “personnel has been sending him options.” Shouldn’t Americans know who this person was and why he was so important to Mr. Band?

The ties among Mrs. Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and State would become more incestuous. Two years after Mr. Band sent this email, he founded Teneo, a consulting firm. Ms. Abedin would soon draw a paycheck from Teneo at the same time she was also working for both State and the Clinton Foundation.

Another 2009 email has Mr. Band telling Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills that “We need Gilbert chagoury [sic] to speak to the substance person re lebanon.” Within hours, Ms. Abedin replies that the “substance person” is Jeff Feltman—the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. A follow up email from Mr. Band urges her to call him “now.”

The email doesn’t spell out what Mr. Chagoury wanted from the ambassador, but let your imagination run. Mr. Chagoury is a Lebanese-Nigerian whose family businesses thrived under Gen. Sani Abacha, the military dictator who ruled Nigeria for years. According to a 2001 British court decision, the Nigerian government agreed not to prosecute Mr. Chagoury and unfreeze his Swiss bank accounts if he paid back millions it claimed had been stolen. CONTINUE AT SITE

Normally, Iran’s execution of a nuclear scientist who gave information to the United States would draw no unusual attention — but this one popped up in Hillary Clinton’s infamous e-mails.

The then-secretary of state discussed Shahram Amiri with several aides in communications kept on her unprotected private server — including just days before he abruptly left America to return to Tehran.

That raises a fresh flood of questions about Clinton’s home-brewed setup — which she insists was well protected but the FBI believes was most likely hacked by “hostile” interests.

Amiri’s is a bizarre case, to be sure. For years, he reportedly provided info from inside Iran about its nuclear program. Then he went missing in Saudi Arabia in 2009, only to resurface a year later in two Internet videos. In one, he claimed he’d been kidnaped and tortured by the CIA. In the other, he said he was free and safe in America.

In July 2010, he appeared at the Pakistani embassy in DC saying he wanted to return to Iran, where his wife and young son still lived. He did so days later and was given a hero’s welcome — before vanishing.

Last week came word Iran had hanged Amiri for treason — having likely lured him home with threats against his family.

In one e-mail to Clinton, just days before he showed up at the embassy, Clinton energy envoy Richard Morningstar urged that “our friend has to be given a way out” and claimed his was a “psychological issue.”

Proper stuff for top folks at State to address — on secure systems, unlike Clinton’s. Even with zero sign that these e-mails contributed to Amiri’s fate, it still underscores just how reckless Clinton was with classified information — a fact she still won’t admit.

And if US enemies did hack her server, this may just be the tip of the iceberg.