The US-China trade war has always been serious. Now it's starting to get scary.
The US-China trade war has always been serious. Now it's starting to get scary.
China allowed its currency to drop sharply on Monday to the weakest level in more than a decade. And China announced its companies have halted purchases of American agricultural goods.
The Trump administration escalated tensions even further late Monday by taking the historic step of labeling China a currency manipulator. This comes after US President Donald Trump vowed last week to impose tariffs for the first time on a wide swath of US consumer goods from China.
The trade conflict has reached a new level of seriousness that will be difficult to reverse. The risk is that the trade war is approaching the point at which it causes a severe economic slowdown or even a recession.
By digging into their positions, both the United States and China increase the risk of breaking an economy that is already starting to crack. Each round of escalation gets them closer to a recession — and to a point of no return.
Trump has long feared a possible recession and what it could do to his re-election chances—so amid talk of a downturn, he and his defenders
According to three people who’ve spoken to Trump about recessions and the American economy since 2017, the president has repeatedly voiced concerns—or bitter annoyance—about what he views as media outlets’ ability, or even alleged desire, to help create economic recession through self-fulfilling prophecy.
“[Trump] thinks recessions or booms are often self-fulfilling prophecies,” another one of the sources said. “He’s said when the media starts beating the drum about a recession coming, that negativity gets into people’s heads and they change their behavior: less purchasing, fewer entrepreneurs starting small businesses, people moving money out of the market, [and so on]. That’s why he’s so concerned about the coverage of a potential recession… He believes he can will the economy in a positive direction by feeding optimism to the ‘American spirit.’”
Neither I nor anyone else is predicting a replay of the 2008 crisis. It’s not even clear whether we’re heading for recession. But the bond market is telling us that the smart money has become very gloomy about the economy’s prospects. Why? The Federal Reserve basically controls short-term rates, but not long-term rates; low long-term yields mean that investors expect a weak economy, which will force the Fed into repeated rate cuts.
So what accounts for this wave of gloom? Much though not all of it is a vote of no confidence in Donald Trump’s economic policies.
You may recall that last year, after a couple of quarters of good economic news, Trump officials were boasting that the 2017 tax cut had laid the foundation for many years of high economic growth.
Since then, however, the data have pretty much confirmed what critics had been saying all along. Yes, the tax cut gave the economy a boost — a “sugar high.” Running trillion-dollar deficits will do that. But the boost was temporary. In particular, the promised boom in business investment never materialized. And now the economy has reverted, at best, to its pre-stimulus growth rate.
At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that Trump’s belligerence about foreign trade isn’t a pose; it reflects real conviction. Protectionism seems to be up there with racism as part of the essential Trump. And the realization that he really is a Tariff Man is having a serious dampening effect on business spending, partly because nobody knows just how far he’ll go.
The United States cannot deport its way out of a dysfunctional immigration system.
The fact is that relatively few Americans want dirty, dangerous jobs that pay $12 per hour, while requiring some employees to report to work at 3 a.m. One study commissioned by the dairy industry suggested 3,500 dairy farms would close if half the country’s foreign-born workers were deported; another survey, from North Carolina, showed that in 2011, a minuscule number of the state’s nearly half-million jobless workers applied for 6,500 available farm jobs, and most of those who were hired couldn’t hack the work; most of the jobs were then filled by Mexicans.
Second, any large-scale enforcement action will inevitably result in families being broken apart — including those whose children are U.S. citizens. In 2017, two-thirds of unauthorized adult migrants had lived in the United States for more than a decade, according to the Pew Research Center; their median duration of residence was 15 years. Officials may not like the optics of crying toddlers and preteens whose parents have been taken away, but they shouldn’t be surprised.
Third, businesses like the ones in Mississippi that employ undocumented workers are subject to federal prosecution. But it was Republican leaders in the House of Representatives last year, on Mr. Trump’s watch, who blocked legislation that would have required private employers to use E-Verify, a data system used to check whether employees are legally present in the country. Farm groups, including those who represent major employers in Republican districts in California and elsewhere, are dead set against requiring E-Verify, knowing it would produce severe labor shortages.
ICE officials and federal prosecutors are right that deportation sweeps are within their purview as lawful enforcement actions. The problem is that the law is so blatantly misaligned with economic, social and political realities that it is magical thinking to believe that enforcement alone, in the absence of sweeping reform of existing laws, can make a dent in the nation’s population of 10.5 million undocumented immigrants.
East Texas voters aren't going for Trump because they're stupid, writes Joe Lansdale, but because they like the fear-based mythology of the Trump show.
Republicans since the ’60s have run elections on hatred of the outsider, imagined hordes of freeloaders, or merely those who are different, working up fears of roving gangs of negro youth prowling the streets in search of mischief, along with invading Mexicans who want nothing more than to drive drunk and unlicensed and run over innocent white children. Another fear that seems rampant is women wanting to have a say over their own reproductive organs, and you might as well throw in negativity toward transgender folks who would like to use public restrooms: Hard-shell Republicans prefer they go pee-less.
It’s a jungle out there. At least, to hear the Republicans tell it. But what it’s really about, in earthier conservative circles, is a chance for people to feel important, to think they are standing on the lines of freedom, fighting back the zombie hordes. What drives these folks is fear; but for many, it’s a delicious fear.
It’s a chance for the bored and disappointed to play army, a way to justify having tons of guns and ammunition. They feel that if not for their vigilance, dead-eye aim, and concealment due to camouflaged pants and a Duck Dynastycap, we would be standing on the edge of a precipice looking into the bowels of hell.
This view, well sold to many, has contributed mightily to the current rabid gun culture. People I know, this is all they talk about: stopping power, how far you can sight a target, and having a stock sturdy enough to crack a skull at close quarters when you run out of about a zillion bullets.
Guns are a symbol of fear, but they are also a symbol of power, a way for the everyday person to feel important and potent, to be a participant in the great game show of life. Guns have replaced the previous religion of Texas, which was football, and Trump is the high priest. Fear sells, and it stimulates. Trump and his cronies constantly tell us, without actual facts, how bad crime is and how evil all foreigners are — especially if they dress funny — and they repeat over and over the false information that the economy is on the verge of collapse and you better build that bunker and stock up, because if you don’t, all you’ll have for protection from the certain rise of crazed liberals is harsh language.
There are a lot of similarities between the president and George Wallace of Alabama. But there’s also one big difference.
Historian Kevin M. Kruse on the similarities between presidential candidate and segregationist George Wallace and Donald Trump:
Mr. Wallace’s words electrified crowds of working- and middle-class whites. “Cabdrivers and cattle ranchers, secretaries and steelworkers, they hung on every word, memorized the lines, treasured them, savored them, waited to hear them again,” noted an Esquire profile. “George Wallace was their avenging angel. George Wallace said out loud what they nervously kept to themselves. George Wallace articulated their deepest fears, their darkest hates. George Wallace promised revenge.”
Mr. Trump has tapped into that sentiment, winning over white voters with a willingness to buck “political correctness” and voice their anger and anxieties directly. “He says what we’re thinking and what we want to say,” noted a white woman at a Trump rally in Montana. “We wish we could speak our mind without worrying about the consequences,” explained a white man at a Phoenix event. “He can speak his mind without worrying.”
By articulating their audiences’ hatred, both men effectively encouraged them to act on it.
Trump and his views are the real infestations in America.
Furthermore, there is nothing benign in Trump’s language. Infestations justify exterminations. There is a reason that Martin Luther King Jr. said, “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.” The mouth that demeans may not always be attached to the hand that destroys, but they are most assuredly connected in spirit and in spite.
It would be easy to prosecute a case against Trump on policy, but policies are not at the center of the creature. White supremacy, white nationalism and white patriarchy are.
The core of this man is racist in a way that is so fused to his sense of the world that he is incapable of seeing it as racist. It is instinctual for him to attack people of color. It is instinctual for him to denigrate the places they live and the countries to which they trace their heritage.
He has so bought into the white supremacist narrative that his ideology no longer requires, in his own thinking, a label. For him, this lie of it is just the truth of it, and what is “right” can’t be racist.
The most common word in headlines across the country about the Robert Mueller hearings appears to be “disappointment.” Mueller, according to pundits, was “shaky” and “hesitant,” and Democrats are “disappointed” that he failed to provide the technicolor...
The most common word in headlines across the country about the Robert Mueller hearings appears to be “disappointment.” Mueller, according to pundits, was “shaky” and “hesitant,” and Democrats are “disappointed” that he failed to provide the technicolor fireworks they were hoping to see.
Because all that Mueller did was confirm that Donald Trump made multiple serious efforts to obstruct justice, interfered with witnesses, lied on his written responses to the special counsel, and engaged in support for illegal activity. Along the way, Mueller reminded the nation that Trump’s campaign chair, campaign co-chair, personal attorney, national security advisor, and a pair of foreign policy specialists were all indicted and convicted. And he reminded everyone that Russian interference in the 2016 election was extensive and extreme, and that Russia was not just planning to do the same thing in 2020, but is doing the same thing right now.
So, gee, it’s too bad Mueller didn’t have anything big to say.
And it’s not as if there wasn’t genuine new information that came out of the hearings. For example, Mueller revealed the reason he didn’t subpoena Trump to testify: The White House rope-a-doped the investigation. For more than a year, Trump and his attorneys strung the investigation along, making it seem that they were just about to agree to limits under which Trump would testify. By the time the special counsel team realized that Trump was never going to sit in its chair voluntarily, it decided it was too late. Because the investigators knew Trump would fight the subpoena, and Mueller worried that that might cause the investigation to run into the next election cycle. That seems like huge news. Only it doesn’t seem to have garnered a single headline.
Though Mueller was reluctant to break from the script and confirm things that were not in the report, one area where he did get energized was in the discussion of WikiLeaks. Responding to Trump’s litany of praise for the site that paired with Russia to publish stolen documents, Mueller didn’t just stop at calling Trump’s actions “problematic,” but went on to say that Trump was providing “support for illegal activity.”
The media may not have gotten the moment that it wanted, but Robert Mueller definitely provided everything anyone could possibly want to begin an impeachment.
If President Trump and the Republican Party want the 2020 election to be a referendum on unabashed white supremacy, that’s their choice. Voters who embrace the views of David Duke and other proud racists will have Trump to vote for. Voters who disagree will have a Democratic alternative. Simple as that.
At the moment, it is difficult to see the coming contest in any other light. Make America Great Again has completed its sinister transformation into Make America White Again, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise.
No sensible person should want such a fight. In a sprawling, diverse nation such as ours, with such a long and troubled history on issues of race, a certain amount of pretense is necessary. We try to bury our ugliest fears and resentments beneath a nobler commitment to the pluralistic ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At our best, we subsume our private prejudices beneath a sense of civic responsibility.
White nationalist John Tanton is dead, but the hateful organizations he founded live on like racist zombies. Once called the “most influenti
White nationalist John Tanton is dead, but the hateful organizations he founded live on like racist zombies. Once called the “most influential unknown man in America,” immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice notes, Tanton, an ophthalmologist by training and a racist by heart, founded the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, two anti-immigrant hate groups whose ideology, through the Trump administration, has now become official immigration policy.
“Trump action items like ending DACA and curtailing both legal and undocumented immigration have been on FAIR and CIS’ wish list for years,” America’s Voice continued, and while Tanton’s reach into the White House was new, his festering in the background was not. Tanton’s groups championed then-Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s successful effort to derail a comprehensive immigration reform package in 2007, with another Tanton group, NumbersUSA, awarding him a “Defender of the Rule of Law” award.
Staffers from Tanton’s groups have frequently been invited by anti-immigrant members of Congress to testify at their hearings, because “Center for Immigration Studies” sounds pretty innocuous, right? Except CIS has distributed writings from anti-Semites and Holocaust-deniers, one of whom called Jewish people “truly subversive,” “manipulative,” and “evil.” Tanton himself said that “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” immigration historian Carly Goodman writes.
Media has been complicit in spreading Tanton’s messages, because even through today, immigration reports commonly quote officials from CIS and FAIR as if they offer a legitimate stance on policy, in large part because they don’t throw around outright racist slurs like Trump, and their “neutral names” really do fool many. “This has allowed these groups to shift the terms of the debate far to the right,” Goodman also said. “Without proper context, readers and viewers don’t understand how outside the mainstream these groups’ views really are.”
The sheer size of the military establishment and the habit of equating spending on it with patriotism make both sound management and serious oversight of defense expenditures rare. As a democracy, we are on an unusual and risky path. For several decades, we have maintained an extraordinarily high level of defense spending with the support of both political parties and virtually all of the public. The annual debate about the next year’s military spending, underway now on Capitol Hill, no longer probes where real cuts might be made (as opposed to cuts in previously planned growth) but only asks how big the increase should be.
A parable, to begin: in 2016, the 136 military bands maintained by the Department of Defense, employing more than 6,500 full-time professional musicians at an annual cost of about $500 million, caught the attention of budget-cutters worried about surging federal deficits. Immediately memos flew and lobbyists descended. The Government Accountability Office, laying the groundwork for another study or three, opined, “The military services have not developed objectives and measures to assess how their bands are addressing the bands’ missions, such as inspiring patriotism.” Supporters of the 369th Infantry Regiment band noted that it had introduced jazz to Europe during World War I. How could such a history be left behind? A blues band connected effectively with Russian soldiers in Bosnia in 1996, another proponent argued, proving that bands are, “if anything, an incredibly cost-effective supplement” to the Pentagon’s then $4.5 billion public affairs budget.
When the dust cleared, funding for the bands was not cut, because the political cost entailed in reducing the number of them by, say, half would have been enormous. The resulting $250 million in annual savings, on the other hand, while a significant sum for most government agencies, would have produced the almost unnoticeable difference of three one-hundredths of one percent in the Pentagon budget.
The sheer size of the military establishment and the habit of equating spending on it with patriotism make both sound management and serious oversight of defense expenditures rare. As a democracy, we are on an unusual and risky path. For several decades, we have maintained an extraordinarily high level of defense spending with the support of both political parties and virtually all of the public. The annual debate about the next year’s military spending, underway now on Capitol Hill, no longer probes where real cuts might be made (as opposed to cuts in previously planned growth) but only asks how big the increase should be. […]
Both nations tiptoed closer to the edge Thursday, as Iran shot down an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone near the Strait of Hormuz. Trump tweeted, “Iran made a very big mistake!” but the United States didn’t initially take any overt military action.
Here’s the danger ahead: Iran probably can’t break out of this squeeze play without creating a larger crisis that forces international intervention — perhaps an Iranian attack that kills Americans and triggers a harsh U.S. retaliation. The Trump administration doesn’t want such a war — at least, not yet — because officials know that with every day of sanctions, Iran becomes weaker.
But how does this end, if not in conflict? That’s the troubling question for strategists in Washington and abroad. The United States has offered negotiations (but not yet sanctions relief) through Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe; Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spurned the offer. In accepting international mediation to end the Iraq-Iran War in 1988, Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, may have drunk what he called “the cup of poison.” But Khamenei refuses, so far.
One thing’s for sure — if those long-rumored tapes of Trump using the N-word on the set of “The Apprentice” ever surface, congressional Republicans are going to do whatever it takes to ignore them.
To deal with a surge in asylum seekers, Trump is trying to rewrite federal law and impose terms unilaterally on Mexico and Guatemala. The asylum system does have problems, but that's not the solution.
Certainly, there’s an immigration problem that needs to be solved. The system has been overwhelmed by the uptick in migrant families arriving at the border; the backlog of cases in federal immigration courts is so severe that the average wait to have one’s status resolved is well over two years.
But for the umpteenth time in Trump’s presidency, the administration is ignoring federal law in an effort to circumvent Congress and to impose its will on America’s neighbors. The Immigration and Nationality Act unequivocally allows asylum seekers to come from anywhere and present themselves at any point along the border, not just at manned checkpoints. The main exception is for migrants coming from countries that have a “safe country” agreement with the United States, which Canada does but Mexico and other nations to the south do not.
Legal experts say that the administration will allow asylum seekers to apply for a reprieve from deportation before sending them back to their home countries, but it has set such a high bar for qualifying that few are likely to succeed. In that respect, the new rule is not only cruel, it may violate the international agreements that bar the United States from sending refugees and asylum seekers back into persecution. [...]
I thought he was an equal-opportunity bully. No more.
[Republicans are] silent not because they agree with Trump. Surely they know better. They’re silent because, knowing that he’s incorrigible, they have inured themselves to his wild statements; because, knowing that he’s a fool, they don’t really take his words seriously and pretend that others shouldn’t, either; because, knowing how damaging Trump’s words are, the Republicans don’t want to give succor to their political enemies; because, knowing how vindictive, stubborn and obtusely self-destructive Trump is, they fear his wrath.
But none of that is good enough. Trump is not some random, embittered person in a parking lot — he’s the president of the United States. By virtue of his office, he speaks for the country. What’s at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What’s at stake are the nation’s ideals, its very soul.
