Ukrainian grain

 The Russians have kidnapped Ukrainian children and shipped them off to assimilation camps. They've raped mothers in front of their children. They've bombed hospitals and historic theaters.

Is it any surprise that they're pulling this stunt?

Russia warned that from Thursday any ships traveling to Ukraine's Black Sea ports will be seen as possibly carrying military cargoes, after Ukraine said it was setting up a temporary shipping route to try and continue its grain exports.

The moves by both countries on Wednesday came just days after Russia quit a deal - brokered by the United Nations and Turkey - that allowed the safe Black Sea export of Ukraine grain for the past year, and revoked guarantees of safe navigation.

Ukraine has made clear that it wants to try and continue its Black Sea grain shipments and told the U.N. shipping agency, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), that it had "decided to establish on a temporary basis a recommended maritime route."

But Russia's Defence Ministry then said it would deem all ships travelling to Ukraine to be potentially carrying military cargo and "the flag countries of such ships will be considered parties to the Ukrainian conflict".

To emphasize its position, Russia did this:

Ukraine accused Russia on Wednesday of damaging grain export infrastructure in "hellish" overnight strikes focused on two of its Black Sea ports.

"In the ports that were attacked today, there was about a million tonnes of food stored. It is precisely that amount that should already have been delivered to consumer countries in Africa and Asia," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on Wednesday.

He said the terminal damaged the most held 60,000 tonnes of agricultural products intended for shipment to China.

The consequences have begun:

Insurers were already reviewing their appetite for covering ships into Ukraine.

A cargo insurance facility providing cover for Ukraine grain shipments traveling under the Black Sea deal has been suspended, the policy's broker told Reuters on Tuesday. The marine cargo and war facility provided cover of up to $50 million per cargo.

Norwegian shipping insurance group DNK, which provides war risk policies, told Reuters on Wednesday it was currently unable to provide cover for Ukraine.

And:

Wheat futures soared by nearly 9% on Wednesday and are on track to hit their highest level in three weeks as tensions in Europe rise following Russia’s surprise decision to pull out of a crucial deal allowing the export of grain from Ukraine.

This is probably the main sticking point I have with working up any kind of enthusiasm for Ron DeSantis in his bid for the presidency. (Well, and I can't forget his endorsements of Mastriano and Lake last year.) I have no problem with him wading into the culture wars. Public education has indeed turned into a sewer of indoctrination, and Disney started the dustup with Florida state government buy weighing in on the parental-rights bill. 

But a major presidential candidate who would characterize Russia's unprovoked stone-cold invasion of Ukraine as a "territorial dispute" causes me to have gargantuan reservations.  

I really have no use for anybody who doesn't bring moral clarity to this situation.

 

 

 

More at peace with myself by the day for writing in a presidential choice in 2020

 This post deals with a matter that's a recurring theme over at my Substack, Precipice, namely, the ever-narrower sliver of ideological terrain I inhabit.

My latest post here at LITD, "The Institutional Right In America Is At Least As Sick As It's Been for Eight Years," mentioned a couple of recent developments that particularly stand out as substantiation for my assertion. There are some updates for those. Not only does the speaker lineup for this year's CPAC make clear that that gathering has devolved into an irredeemable sewer, but it now appears organizer Matt Schlapp has a scandal issue, having allegedly felt up a Hershel Walker campaign worker, as well as in-the-pits staff morale.  And the documented coverup by Fox hosts and executives regarding MAGA claims of a stolen 2020 election has now gotten real.  Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are collectively suing Fox for $4.3 billion in damages. (Fox only has $4 billion in cash on hand.) News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said under oath in a Dominion-case deposition that he let the on-air talent continue to spew nonsense because it ensured the greatest flow of dollars to Fox.

I offered a whiff of that narrow-sliver-of-terrain stance by mentioning my misgivings about The Bulwark and Principles First. 

The shorthand for why I harbor misgivings is this: many prominent figures associated with those entities have publicly stated that they voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

That's a bridge too far for this conservative.

And no, I didn't vote for the Very Stable Genius in either 2016 or 2020. I wrote in Evan McMullin and Ben Sasse, respectively, in those elections.

Joe Biden has been happy to take his administration as far to the left as the most progressive elements in his party want to go.

He has taken the phone-and-pen notion of law-making by executive fiat even farther than his old boss Barack Obama. 

The CHIPS and Science Act, duly passed by Congress and signed into law by Biden last August, was already a collectivist leap, all about "investment," read wealth redistribution, in making the US semiconductor industry impervious to what the Chinese were doing. Now, Biden says these subsidies come with conditions. US manufacturers will have to have onsite daycare for employees, limit stock buybacks, and share "excess profits" with the government.

I hope you don't need me to point out what makes this so pernicious.

But in case you find yourself in a discussion about this with someone less steeped in principle-driven thought, here are the most obvious objections:

• It blurs the lines between the executive and legislative branches beyond what is constitutional.
• It engages in social engineering - specifically, in weakening the family.
• It demonizes profit, which is the gauge by which business organizations monitor their health.
• It uses bribery to tell private organizations how to conduct their affairs.

Biden is using the same tactic with regard to student loan forgiveness.  Per Dan McLaughlin, writing at the New York Post:

On Tuesday, the Court heard challenges to Biden’s attempt to spend half a trillion dollars cancelling the college and graduate school debts of 43 million people.

With whose money? The national debt, of course, because Congress didn’t appropriate funds for this or raise taxes or fees to pay for it. 

Biden claims to be using the emergency powers of the HEROES Act passed after 9/11, the purpose of which was to let presidents suspend some student loan rules for soldiers serving abroad. 

Even Nancy Pelosi and Biden’s own Department of Education warned him that he didn’t have the power to do this.

And as if his Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government executive order of January 2021 wasn't enough of an identity-politics intrusion, now comes the order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. It creates "Equity Teams" in every stinking agency of the Beltway leviathan that will  annually submit "Equity Action Plans" to the Office of Management and Budget.

A question: Does there come a point at which these "underserved communities" are no longer "underserved"? That is, does this annual-submission-of-equity-plans edict have an anticipated shelf life?

Actually, I have another question. What does "underserved," and, by inference, "served," mean? What kind of "serving" falls within the proper purview of government?

No, I can unequivocally state that voting for Joe Biden in 2020 was no act of rectitude. 

Now, here's where we get back to the narrow-sliver-of-terrain metaphor. The main reason the Biden is getting away with these crowbar whacks to our freedom is that nearly everyone decrying them is a Neo-Trumpist wackadoodle. They happen to be correct about the Democrats, even if they are every bit as poisonous to the American experiment. 

I didn't quit being a conservative when I quit being a Republican.

Some folks whose intellects would be useful right now did.

It's a good thing the gout in my right foot is subsiding. It's getting every harder to maintain my balance on this sliver. 

 

Protectionism didn't work

 Current American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar and former Senate Banking Committee chair Phil Gramm and current Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey have a right-between-the-eyes-takedown of the protectionism that was a defining characteristic of Trump-era economic policy on the opinion page of today's Wall Street Journal.

I'll be excerpting at length, because this is supremely important to share far and wide.

What Trump was trying to do was sell a return to some mythical golden age that, to the extent it really existed, cannot be replicated:

Donald Trump was America’s first post-Depression presidential nominee to make protectionism a major plank of his platform. During the 2016 campaign he presented it, along with tax cuts and deregulation, as an antidote to President Obama’s weak economic recovery—the weakest of the postwar period. In his first two years as president, Mr. Trump lifted regulatory burdens and pushed through a major tax cut, which triggered a broad-based rise in income and employment. He then turned to his protectionist agenda, which reduced economic growth and failed to deliver Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin in the 2020 election. Protectionism failed both as economic policy and political strategy.

Much of the allure of U.S. postwar protectionism comes from nostalgia for an enduring myth: the “golden age of American manufacturing.” There was a manufacturing bonanza in the 1950s and ’60s, but it wasn’t engineered by policy makers then and couldn’t be replicated now. It was an unsustainable anomaly created by World War II. 

The U.S. emerged from the war with an almost totally new industrial base, a carry-over from a wartime role as “the great arsenal of democracy.” With much of the rest of the developed world in rubble, America enjoyed a virtual monopoly in heavy manufacturing for a quarter-century. In the 1950s, real average hourly earnings in manufacturing leapt 34.5%—seven times their growth in the 1970s.

By the mid-1970s, Europe and Japan had risen from the ashes of the war and South Korea and Taiwan had industrialized. By 1976, U.S. manufacturing exports had returned to prewar levels, as a percentage of global exports, and after 1979 U.S. manufacturing employment fell in absolute terms as a push was undertaken to automate, reduce labor costs and regain competitiveness. While manufacturing jobs declined from 32% of total employment in 1953 to 8.7% in 2015, manufacturing as a share of real gross domestic product has remained virtually constant due to increases in productivity.

The job increases resultant from Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum associated with their production were negated by losses in industries further down the supply chain. The reason is simple: those industries were paying higher prices for raw material.

There was further fallout:

The uncertainty concerning which industry would be hurt next caused private investment to decline across the economy. GDP growth, which had been accelerating in 2017 and 2018, fell 20% in 2019, from 2.9% to 2.3%, in line with the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the negative effect of the protectionist policies.

Protectionism even hurt manufacturing in the states it was supposed to help. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing employment in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which had increased in 2017 and 2018, started to fall in 2019 as the trade war intensified.

Populist/nationalist types speak disparagingly of "globalism," but the fact is that supply chains in the twenty-first century are irreversibly international, and that's a good thing. It's the free market playing itself out. Economic actors are playing to their strengths, each one doing what it does best, resulting in a whole that is high-quality and conducive to further advancement. 

What got Trump his blue-collar votes in 2016 was a vague appeal to hope rather than confidence in specific results:

If Mr. Trump’s trade message helped him in the 2016 election, it was because he was expressing concern about the plight of working people who had suffered disproportionately during the Obama “secular stagnation,” not because protectionism itself was popular. Even among Trump supporters, a post-2020 election poll by YouGov showed that 60% believed foreign trade helps the economy. The voting pattern of Lordstown, Ohio—where Mr. Trump promised in 2017 to save local factory jobs—suggests that it was the concern Mr. Trump expressed, not his ability to save the General Motors plant, that attracted their votes in the first place. The plant closed anyway, and the area voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 by an even bigger margin than in 2016.

Ironically, Biden seems to want to continue this approach, as evidenced by his use of the term "made in America."

The broad lesson to be gleaned from this is that, once again, we see that politicians telling voters that government can do things to make their lives better is nothing but snake oil. As free human beings, creatures imbued with agency, we are largely responsible for our destinies. 

The task before those who understand this is to convince the public at large that they shouldn't want it any other way. That's a tall order. The opposite mindset is pretty entrenched.

This op-ed is a good move in the right direction. 

 

 

 

We can cross "stood up to China" off the list of supposed great things the Very Stable Genius did

 You know how Trumpists would - and still do, at least among the bitter-enders - at some point in a discussion of the VSG's fitness/unfitness for office toss out a list of what they were utterly certain were his great achievements as president? 

After about three or four that they know a conservative would agree on - judicial appointments, deregulation, embassy to Jerusalem - the list would start to get pretty shaky. One item that would always show up is "stood up to China."

Yeah, well, maybe it's time to take that one off:

Driving the news: China isn't even close to fulfilling its end of the deal — having come up 42% short of its commitment, Chad Bown, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, reported late last week.

• The phase one deal was meant to be the Trump administration's reward for U.S. farmers, manufacturers and other business owners who had been bludgeoned by Trump's tax on American businesses via the trade war's tariffs.

What was supposed to happen: The trade war was billed as a plan to bring China to its knees by choking off the all-important American market with 25% tariffs on many imports that would rein in the U.S. trade deficit, boost American exports and slow China's rise as a global superpower.

What really happened: "The trade war with China hurt the US economy and failed to achieve major policy goals," a recent study commissioned by the U.S.-China Business Council argues, finding that the trade war reduced economic growth and cost the U.S. 245,000 jobs.

• Last year, the U.S. trade deficit widened to its largest on record. In the fourth quarter, the U.S. goods trade deficit hit its highest share of GDP since 2012 and the U.S. current account deficit jumped to its highest level in more than 12 years in the third quarter.
• Foreign direct investment to the U.S. fell 49% in 2020 — outpacing the overall global decrease of 42%.
• These trends had all been moving in this direction since 2017, and were accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic as Trump refused to remove tariffs despite their strain on businesses.

The big picture: "The tariffs forced American companies to accept lower profit margins, cut wages and jobs for U.S. workers, defer potential wage hikes or expansions, and raise prices for American consumers or companies," analysts at Brookings noted in August.

This is yet another example of how Trumpists' characterization of their object of worship and the movement to which they belong is in no way conservative. 

Not all conservatives are purists about advocating free-market economics, but most see it as at least a lodestar, even if adjustments must be made in an imperfect world. But rank protectionism is not part of any conservative's economic policy. It's a distortion of the free market with the purpose of  having some vague notion of "putting America first." 

No, we can see that it is among Trump's greatest bungles. The guy had no idea what he was doing. Same goes for Peter Navarro and Wilber Ross. 

 

The Bonehead-in-Chief goes protectionist against our neighbor to the north

 With the economy at a particularly precarious moment, the VSG thought it would be a fine time to start a trade war with Canada:

Canada said Friday it will slap retaliatory tariffs on $2.7 billion worth of U.S. goods, the latest development in a new trade feud sparked by President Donald Trump’s decision to reimpose aluminum duties on the U.S. ally.

“Canada will respond swiftly and strongly,” Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at a news conference.

“We will impose dollar-for-dollar countermeasures in a balanced and perfectly reciprocal retaliation,” she said. “We will not escalate and we will not back down.”

Freeland said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will spend the next 30 days consulting with Canadian citizens and businesses on a broad list of aluminum-containing products. Canada’s new duties on U.S. imports, she said, will total 3.6 billion Canadian dollars ($2.7 billion).

Trump, during a speech Thursday at a Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Ohio, announced that he had signed a proclamation reimposing 10% tariffs on aluminum imports from Canada that had been lifted more than a year earlier. The president complained that Canada was putting American workers in the aluminum industry at a disadvantage.

“The aluminum business was being decimated by Canada,” he said.

Trudeau vowed to enact countermeasures against the U.S. just hours after Trump’s announcement.

Freeland is clearly not amused:

Freeland on Friday . . . argu[ed] that the tariffs will hurt American consumers already suffering from the economic devastation inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“In imposing these tariffs, the United States has taken the absurd decision to harm its own people at a time when its economy is suffering the deepest crisis since the Great Depression,” Freeland said.

“These tariffs are unnecessary, unwarranted and entirely unacceptable,” she added. “They should not be imposed. Let me be clear: Canadian aluminum is in no way a threat to U.S. national security, which remains the ostensible reason for these tariffs, and that is a ludicrous notion.”

Freeland also noted that the new tariffs come just over a month after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement – the Trump-backed trade pact that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA – went into effect.

“Now is the time to advance North American economic competitiveness, not to hinder it,” she said. 

"Team player" is an utterly foreign concept to the VSG. 

 

The Very Stable Genius's protectionism is backfiring

One of the few themes of the VSG's candidacy and subsequent presidency that has had any coherence was this business about putting America first and bringing back manufacturing jobs.

It seems something he insufficiently considered was what an expensive hassle it os to uproot a manufacturing facility and relocate it:

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The new North American free trade agreement that came into effect on July 1 was touted by US president Donald Trump as an engine of American job creation. But Japan’s automakers are largely opting instead to keep their Mexican operations in place and pay their workers more or even just pay tariffs.

The US-Mexico-Canada agreement requires 40 per cent or more of parts for each passenger vehicle to be manufactured by workers who are paid at least $16 an hour as a condition to make them tariff-free in the region. Mr Trump hailed that feature as a way to boost production in the US, which has a higher hourly rate than Mexico.

However, this looks to be wishful thinking. The ratio of US-Canada parts among Mexican-assembled vehicles sold in the US was 13.5 per cent in 2018, according to the US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Mr Trump’s theory was that US production would inevitably increase to meet the 40 per cent requirement, but Japanese automakers — which had already positioned their production bases according to the old Nafta regime — are not willing to up sticks and redeploy.

One reason is the cost of moving production. Honda-affiliated parts maker Keihin will raise the hourly wage of employees at a factory in Mexico to $16 by next month — triple the average rate of a parts factory in Mexico but still cheaper than making a move. Because the pandemic has hurt earnings, the cost of moving production will probably be too burdensome over the foreseeable future. Auto component maker Piolax will raise the hourly wage at its Mexican plant to $16 within the year, and is also installing robots to mitigate rising labour costs, said Yukihiko Shimazu, company president.

Toyota, which built a new plant in Mexico in 2015, is not finding it easy to change plans either. The new plant started full-scale production of pick-up trucks in February. The trucks are popular in the US and will be subject to a 25 per cent tariff if they do not meet the content requirements of the USMCA. But if Toyota does not operate the factory, it cannot recover its investment.

“We don’t want to be whipped around by a policy that we don’t know how long it will last,” said an executive at a Japanese carmaker. 

Republican Senators have no clear notion of what Trump's agenda would be for a second term.  When given the floor to articulate a vision by the ultimate bootlicker, Sean Hannity, he came up really short. 

Yo, chief. Wanna look like a winner? Try an actual free-market approach to the economy. 

Employing some tact with our allies, even if we were a little frustrated with them, would have proved useful now that China is an even bigger threat

Matthew Continetti has a must-read piece at National Review today on the pressing need for the US to rally its allies in standing up to China. It's not going to be a walk in the park, given the feathers that Donald Trump has ruffled.

Part of the reason we find ourselves at this juncture was the overly sunny view previous administrations had of the Middle Kingdom in its modern Maoist iteration:

America’s attempt to integrate China into the global economy as a “responsible stakeholder” failed. China’s economy has become more statist, its political system more repressive, its foreign policy more bullying, its ambitions more outsized than they were 20 years ago. China did not challenge American leadership directly. It altered the character of international institutions from within.

And the US in those days still had the naive view that various international bodies it had helped create were living up to their charters. The reality was that the world's bad guys were using them to further their aims:

 The multilateral institutions that comprise the American-led liberal international order have been decaying for some time. Coronavirus has accelerated the deterioration. NATO, the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization — they are unresponsive, unaccountable, divided, demoralized, defunct. The world is a more dangerous place.

We are used to autocratic domination of the U.N. General Assembly and the secretariat’s various commissions. No one bats an eye when Russia or China vetoes a Security Council measure. Less publicized were the concessions made to China as part of the Paris Climate Accord. Or the fact that the World Trade Organization treats the world’s second-largest economy as a “developing” nation. But the way Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the WHO, caviled and covered for Beijing as the coronavirus spread throughout the world is impossible to ignore. Drift, confusion, and chaos result.

And then along came the Very Stable Genius with his bull-in-a-china-shop (excuse the pun) modus operandi:

Where others might try a kind word or some quiet diplomacy to inspire reform and collaboration, he turns against the very institutions America created to force them to live up to their commitments. He browbeats NATO members into spending more on defense. He cheers for Brexit and supports the EU’s internal critics. He cripples the WTO’s arbitration mechanism and threatens to withdraw entirely. He suspends funding for the WHO.

There may be some short-term wins to point to, but there are implications to those:

Allies may accede to your demands, but resentment builds. The foundations of the alliance weaken. Unpredictability inspires fear and caution. If sustained for too long, though, it conveys irresoluteness and fecklessness. Adversaries begin to probe. They buzz flights and collapse the oil price, resume shelling U.S. troops and harassing U.S. naval vessels, begin tailing container ships in the South China Sea.

There's also cyber-espionage, intellectual property theft, the use of American film studios and communications companies with considerable Chinese ownership stake to spread propaganda and sow a general feeling of chaos.

So what is to be done?

By all means, punish the World Health Organization for collaborating with China. But also be prepared to stand up another mechanism to do the good work its founders intended. Go ahead, demand allies live up to their commitments. But also recognize that partnerships of like-minded nations were critical to success in the First Cold War. This is the time to build new institutions that reflect the realities of a 21st century that pits liberal democracies against an authoritarian surveillance state. For every moment that passes without American leadership brings us closer to a world where the sun never sets on the five golden stars.

Building these new institutions is going to require vision, a commodity that appears to be at a premium at present.

The Very Stable Genius is an economic illiterate - today's edition

There's this tweet:

Has it occurred to him that the farmers wouldn't be in their current pickle if the free market hadn't been tampered with?

And "massive tariff money" is a ripe bit of hyperbole.

Is it massive enough to be fully funding this level of expenditure?

The Trump administration gave more taxpayer dollars to farmers harmed by the administration’s trade policies than the federal government spends each year building ships for the Navy or maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal, according to a new report. A National Foundation for American Policy analysis concluded the spending on farmers was also higher than the annual budgets of several government agencies. “The amount of money raises questions about the strategy of imposing tariffs and permitting the use of taxpayer money to shield policymakers from the consequences of their actions,” according to the analysis.

Larry Kudlow, can you not exert any persuasion over this guy? Or, God forbid, have you swallowed the Kool-Aid, too?

Saturday roundup

Love me some natural gas!

The decade in energy saw the returns from the shale boom of oil and gas pay off.

The shale revolution from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, which started to take off in 2006 but peaked this decade, helped get the United States to the verge of being a net energy exporter for the first time since 1953, moving off its dependence on Middle East oil and closer to “energy independence."

“The entire psychology of energy as a country shifted this decade to one of scarcity to one of adequacy and eventually abundance,” said Kevin Book, managing director for research at ClearView Energy. “What it means is Americans are not afraid of running out of energy like they used to be.”

The rise of gas has allowed the U.S. to wield energy as a geopolitical weapon. 

Before the shale boom, the U.S. was expected to become a big importer of liquified natural gas — the chilled, liquid form to which gas must be converted for shipment in giant tanker vessels across the sea. 

The U.S. now exports LNG to 36 countries, double the 18 destinations at the beginning of the Trump administration, which has sought to ship more gas to Europe to reduce its dependence on Russia.

“The geopolitical leverage of dominant pipeline suppliers like Russia has been weakened, enhancing our energy security and helping move China to less polluting fuels,” said Jason Bordoff, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former White House energy adviser to President Barack Obama.

The proliferation of natural gas is also the biggest reason U.S. carbon emissions have declined this decade, defying projections from the Energy Information Administration in 2010 that emissions would continue rising, but at a slower pace. Natural gas, a fossil fuel that emits half as much carbon as coal, has mostly replaced coal in the electricity sector, generating 35% of U.S. power in 2018, the most of any source.

Scotland officially goes all in on the mass delusion of our time:

 Adults will be able to choose between 21 sexual orientation options in the next Scottish census under plans to expand the categories.

Sexual orientation will be featured for the first time in the 2021 census. The National Records of Scotland (NRS) has suggested increasing the range of categories from four: straight or heterosexual, gay or lesbian, bisexual, or other orientation.
The new choices include: androphilic, androsexual, asexual, bicurious, bisexual, demiromantic, demisexual, fluid, gay, gynephilic, gynesexual, homosexual, heterosexual, lesbian, pansexual, polysexual, queer, questioning, skoliosexual, straight, unsure.

In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

2 Timothy 3:12 

Islamic State released a video purporting to show its militants beheading 10 Christian men in Nigeria, saying it was part of a campaign to avenge the deaths of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and its spokesman.

The militant group posted the footage on its online Telegram news channel on Thursday, the day after Christmas, with Arabic captions but no audio.

The video showed men in beige uniforms and black masks lining up behind blindfolded captives then beheading 10 of them and shooting an 11th man.

An earlier video seen by Reuters said the captives had been taken from Maiduguri and Damaturu in Nigeria's northeastern state of Borno, where militants have been fighting for years to set up a separate Islamist state.

In that video, the captives pleaded for the Christian Association of Nigeria and President Muhammadu Buhari to save them.

Reuters could not verify the authenticity of either video.

Memo to the Very Stable Genius: knock off the protectionism:

President Donald Trump’s strategy to use import tariffs to protect and boost U.S. manufacturers backfired and led to job losses and higher prices, according to a Federal Reserve study released this week.

“We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices,” concluded Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, in an academic paper.

While the tariffs did reduce competition for some industries in the domestic U.S. market, this was more than offset by the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs, the study found.

“While the longer-term effects of the tariffs may differ from those that we estimate here, the results indicate that the tariffs, thus far, have not led to increased activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector,” the study said.

Tit-for-tat trade retaliation is an idea best relegated to the past, given the presence of globally interconnected supply chains, the Fed researchers found.

The top ten manufacturing industries hit by foreign retaliatory tariffs were producers of: magnetic and optical media, leather goods, aluminum sheet, iron and steel, motor vehicles, household appliances, sawmills, audio and video equipment, pesticide, and computer equipment.

But that would probably also require him to quit winging it in everything he does:

Trump’s fancy-free scheduling approach is no mistake. In "The Art of the Deal," he explained that he thought too much planning curbed his creativity and impeded his thinking. That philosophy is alive and well in the White House, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials.

Between the lines: Trump believes to his core, one former senior White House official told Axios, that he's better off not preparing for some meetings. He thinks preparation hinders his ability to read the room and act with spontaneity, this former aide said.

• "I play it very loose," Trump wrote in 'The Art of the Deal."
• "I don't carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can't be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you've got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops."

One of the key challenges for his staff: He doesn't like long or complex documents.

• He'll skim newspaper articles, news summaries and bullet points, but hates anything longer. So his evening briefings look quite different from his predecessors'.
• "Trump does review briefing materials, at least if you make it a point to have him do so," said a former senior White House official who has direct knowledge of Trump's reading habits. "But only if you talk and guide him through it as he's reading."
• Trump receives national security materials and news summaries every evening. But the package is more visual than those of his predecessors, with screenshots from the Drudge Report homepage, pictures of his own tweets and snapshots of cable news chyrons from throughout the day, according to people who've seen Trump's nightly briefing packages.

Maybe the decade now in its final hours was one of big accomplishments - in terms of commonly recognized credentials and symbols of personal advancement -  for you. Then again, maybe it was your decade for inner accomplishments, which sometimes require even more character and perseverance.

 Turkey seems less interested in being a NATO member in good standing or even a Western nation by the day. Now it's seriously considering shutting down US access to the Incirlik and Kurecik military installations. Those are where we store nuclear weapons and have critical radar capability.

"Pardon me if I don't pop champagne"

The Phase One - or whatever it is - trade agreement between the Trump administration and China is rather underwhelming:

US officials announced a truce in the trade war with China with much fanfare, but economists and trade experts call it largely a victory for Beijing.

After a dispute that raged for close to two years, with several fumbled efforts at a resolution, the US agreed to cancel planned tariffs and rollback others immediately, without a similar commitment from China to lift tariffs it imposed on the US.

"Pardon me if I don't pop champagne, but aside from a cessation of continued escalation, there is not much worth cheering," leading China expert Scott Kennedy said in an analysis of the agreement.

"The costs have been substantial and far reaching, the benefits narrow and ephemeral."

After all our gyrations, China's still gonna be China:

. . . trade economist Mary Lovely said the deal could only be viewed as a "partial win" which "didn't move the needle very much."
"We were kind of on a brink, and we saw the negotiators reach a deal that pulled us back, and I think that is important," she said of the news Trump canceled the 15 percent tariffs on electronics that were due to hit Sunday.
But the gains in the deal do not compensate for the damage to US farmers and businesses, she told reporters.
"President Trump is desperately trying to get back to where the economy was 18 months ago," before taking this "unilateral, brute force approach," Lovely said.

Farmers in particular are still in limbo:

Donald Trump says China will spend $50 billion a year for U.S. farm products as part of a “phase one” trade deal between the countries. But doubts are surfacing whether that’s even possible, bolstered by China’s reluctance to confirm the figure.

While the president expressed confidence China would meet the goal “pretty soon,” doing so would require a huge jump in China’s imports, potentially stretching its capacity to absorb the products. Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, laid out some numbers to reporters, but declined to get very specific.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials repeatedly didn’t answer questions on the exact size of their commitment in a briefing Friday.

“I have been very skeptical,” said Joseph Glauber, a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “How would they do it?”

Look, it's been clear for some time now that China has not lived up to that brief moment of promise when, under Deng Xiaoping, it embarked on a program of economic reform. On the surface, it looks like an entirely different country than it did, say, during the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution. Its cities are teeming with sharp young go-getters, many educated in Western universities. Joint ventures with US firms abound. But, actually, lately, it has begun to not look so different after all, what with the implementation of a "social credit" system, the clear intention to impose a heavy hand in Hong Kong, and the re-education camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang. But the abrupt distorting the market value of goods and services, and the uncertainty it introduces into areas such as agriculture and manufacturing caused by tariffs is not the way to begin the process of extricating ourselves and taking our business elsewhere.

 

 

The Very Stable Genius continues to ruin US foreign policy

At some point last week, I saw a question posed somewhere - it might have been Twitter, or in some short opinion-site piece - that began with the observation that we'd been seeing "good Trump" for a little while. The question was whether that could be maintained during the NATO 70th anniversary gathering in London.

It's clear that we now have our answer. After indulging himself in lengthy pressers (52 minutes, 39 and 30) after meeting with some of the leaders present, at least one (the one with French president Emmanuel Macron) of which was acrimonious, he abruptly cancelled what was to be the official end-of-summit press conference and flew home.

About that Macron one-on-one, here's a taste of the vibe:

Macron tried to parry the flow of words, making clear that he disagreed with Trump on Turkey's intervention in Syria.

When Trump tried to joke about France taking back its citizens captured in the region — “Would you like some nice ISIS fighters? I can give them to you” — Macron responded.

“Let’s be serious,” he snapped back. “The very large number of fighters you have on the ground are ISIS fighters coming from Syria, from Iraq, and the region.”

“This is why he’s a great politician, because that was one of the greatest nonanswers I’ve ever heard,” Trump said, to Macron’s clear irritation.

There were several other blurting of note at that get-together, responses to media questions rather than barbs directed at Macron.

He would not commit to coming to any NATO member's defense if the nation was attacked, saying that in the case of countries paying less than the agreed-upon 2 percent of their defense budgets, saying, in his signature word-salad style, "Why is it they owe us for this year, but every time a new year comes along, they don't have to pay?" Um, they don't pay "us," they pay NATO, an organization that all the nations in question belong to.

The Very Stable Genius said of Chinese president Xi, "I don't think he likes me so much anymore, but that's okay." Probably the best face to put on the relationship given that the big trade deal the VSG has been saying was right around the corner is in fact still mired in sticking points, a development that cause the stock market to slide 250 points in real time.

About the Kurds in Northern Syria, he said, "We have taken the oil. I have taken the oil. We should have done it in other locations, frankly, where we were. I can name four of them right now, but we've taken the oil."

What caused his take-his-toys-and-go-home pout was an informal cocktail-party gathering of heads of state at which there was a chuckle had over the VSG's disregard for niceties like promptness:

The video, which quickly went viral online, showed Trudeau, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and others speaking at a Buckingham Palace reception. The video begins with Johnson looking toward Macron and asking, "Is that why you were late?"

Trudeau jumped in, "He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top."

After a cut in the footage, Trudeau adds, "I watched his team's jaws drop on the floor."

In addition to this NATO fiasco, the VSG is applying his customary hot-headedness to Brazil's and Argentina's currency devaluations:

President Donald Trump announced Monday that the US will "restore" steel and aluminum tariffs on Brazil and Argentina, citing a "massive devaluation of their currencies." 

"Brazil and Argentina have been presiding over a massive devaluation of their currencies. which is not good for our farmers. Therefore, effective immediately, I will restore the Tariffs on all Steel & Aluminum that is shipped into the U.S. from those countries," Trump tweeted early Monday morning from Washington. He also called on the Federal Reserve to "act so that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies." 

Formal notices of the tariffs were not immediately announced by the Treasury or Commerce Departments or the Office of the US Trade Representative. Both Brazil and Argentina were exempted from 25% steel and 10% aluminum tariffs last year when Trump was attempting to avoid a trade war with those countries. 

Brazil's President, Jair Bolsonaro, said Monday that he has an "open channel" of communication with Trump, according to state news agency Agencia Brasil.

Bolsonaro said he would meet with Brazilian Finance Minister Paulo Guedes Monday to discuss the issue and make a call to Trump if needed. 

Argentina's Production and Labor Minister called Trump's decision to impose the tariffs "unexpected."

"There was no sign given to our government, to the Brazilian government or to the public sector that there would be a change in the deal with the United States," Dante Sica told state-run news agency Telam on Monday.

Sica said he met with Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie after seeing the tweet in order to "analyze the course of action" and told Telam that he had contacted the US Embassy in Argentina, as well "all contacts in Washington DC" to get more clarity on the situation.

The President's decision amounts to retaliation against two countries that have served as alternative suppliers of soybeans and other farm products to China, grabbing market share away from American farmers, a key constituency the President will need to win reelection in 2020.

Just great.

Two points among those that comprise a generally agreed-upon understanding of basic conservatism are an understanding of the supreme importance of US leadership for maintaining the world-order framework established at the end of World War II, and a fealty to free-market economics. This guy is obliterating both.

The Very Stable Genius has no idea what he's doing economically

The big fool tweeted this this morning:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Our great Farmers will recieve another major round of “cash,” compliments of China Tariffs, prior to Thanksgiving. The smaller farms and farmers will be big beneficiaries. In the meantime, and as you may have noticed, China is starting to buy big again. Japan deal DONE. Enjoy!

A few things:

One, tariffs are paid by US consumers.

Two, US farm delinquencies and bankruptcies are on the rise.  

Three, the Japan deal is not exactly done. Tariffs on Japanese automobiles are still being negotiated. 

The Protectionist-in-Chief is an unserious person.

Who's surprised by this?

When your back's against the wall and the ally you'd depended on exits the scene, you find new allies where you can:

Kurdish forces long allied with the United States in Syria announced a new deal on Sunday with the government in Damascus, a sworn enemy of Washington that is backed by Russia, as Turkish troops moved deeper into their territory and President Trump ordered the withdrawal of the American military from northern Syria.

The sudden shift marked a major turning point in Syria’s long war.

For five years, United States policy relied on collaborating with the Kurdish-led forces both to fight the Islamic State and to limit the influence of Iran and Russia, which support the Syriangovernment, with a goal of maintaining some leverage over any future settlement of the conflict. 

On Sunday, after Mr. Trump abruptly abandoned that approach, American leverage appeared all but gone. That threatened to give President Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian and Russian backers a free hand. It also jeopardized hard-won gains against the Islamic State — and potentially opened the door for its return.

The Kurds’ deal with Damascus paved the way for government forces to return to the country’s northeast for the first time in years to try to repel a Turkish invasion launched after the Trump administration pulled American troops out of the way. The pullout has already unleashed chaos and bloodletting.

And now we have State and Energy Department officials trying to find a good way to get US n nuclear weapons stored at Incirlik Air Base.

Real nice.

Oh, and we now know what the "big sanctions" are going to be: steel tariffs.