RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.