Government & Politics

Comment of the Day: “Tariffs Have Been Needed For Decades”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I meant to post this retort to Steve Witherspoon’s guest column yesterday (as it was “Tariffs Monday” at Ethics Alarms, but was waylaid by life. Canadian EA correspondent Humble Talent began a long and lively debate thread with his Comment of the Day, and I encourage you to read it all, here. Meanwhile, here’s Humble…

Oh! I almost forgot: I read another anti-tariff piece today titled “I Shot the Tariff.” I should have thought of that. Phooey.

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I’m always disappointed when there’s something that I’m actually familiar with in the media, because a lot of the media smudging that happens around the areas that they’re familiar with stand out like a sore thumb.

Tariffs have been one of those things. And this attack on Free Trade is another.

You want to know what’s bullshit? The idea that any nation can pull of autarky (“a system where a country or region aims for self-sufficiency, minimizing or eliminating international trade and relying primarily on its own resources and production.”) No one can pull off autarky and maintain efficiency, product diversity, and quality of life. You will eventually need to trade for something.

You want an example for America? Potash. There are exactly three active potash mines in America, because the resource effectively does not exist in America. You import 96% of potash used for crop fertilizer. Without potash imports, you would be unable to add phosphorus to your crop input chemistry, and your yields would suffer. Which would then impact your already insufficient food production system. Your people would literally starve. Which means there will be trade.

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The National Parks’ Dumb Response To Trump’s “No DEI” EO Explains So, So Many Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The National Park Service website has an Underground Railroad page. It used to feature a large photograph of the remarkable female “conductor,” Harriet Tubman (left above). The page began, “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.” But some boob or combination of boobs thought that the Trump EOs and other measures aimed at purging divisive, partisan and often discriminatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs from the government, education and other private institutions mandated eliminating straightforward and historically accurate information. It wasn’t just the National Parks Service, of course. The Defense Department also eliminated many pages that celebrated important minority veterans, such as civil rights champion and icon, Jackie Robinson.

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Not Opinion, FACT: AG Bondi Is Wrong and Unethical To Suspend Justice’s Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Immigration Litigation

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
- This is your opinion? - It's a fact.

I was afraid of this.

I am completely in sympathy with President Trump’s determination to have only people he can trust as his department and agency heads after his first term debacle, when so many people stabbed him in the back that his suits must have looked like pin cushions. Nonetheless, appointing Pam Bondi as Attorney General was reckless and hard to defend, as Bondi and “legal ethics” have seldom been compatible. This episode is a particularly blatant example.

Erez Reuveni has worked at the Justice Department for nearly 15 years, most recently as the acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. Reuveni appeared in federal court in Maryland last week to respond to the court’s questions regarding the government’s admission that it should not have deported Kilmar Abrego García on March 15 as part of the airlift of purported gang members to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Reuveni acknowledged the mistake and told a judge that he did not know what authority the U.S. used to deport Abrego García. “My answer to a lot of these questions is going to be frustrating,” Reuveni told U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. “And I’m frustrated that I don’t have answers to a lot of these questions.” Xinis ordered the Trump administration to arrange the return of Abrego García, who is married to a U.S. citizen, by no later than 11:59 p.m. today.

Attorney General Bondi promptly suspended Reuveni. Bondi explained, “At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States. Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

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Tariffs Have Been Needed For Decades

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Guest post by Steve Witherspoon

[It’s shaping up as “Tariffs Monday,” at least in the morning! JM]

I worked as a Manufacturing Engineer in a metal fabrication plant for thirty years (I wore many hats in this small company) and I personally saw what other countries (especially, China, Mexico, and Canada) were doing to undermine manufacturing in the United States of America. The USA should have put tariffs on at least these three countries 20+ years ago, but instead they were allowed to continue to unfairly practice “free trade” with us unabated.

China took one manufacturing and assembly job after another, then China used its financial capital to seriously undercut USA steel manufacturing causing steel mills in the USA to slow to a dead crawl and increase their cost a lot. In addition to that, the steel coming out of China was rusty and didn’t meet quality standards and distributors were having real problems providing quality steel to long term customers like our company. We had to slow production of some products as a result of supply problems and that hurt some of our customers and that trickled down to problems for some consumers.

Canada has been undermining aluminum and stainless steel manufacturing in the USA for over twenty years, as they practiced their unfair “free trade”  with us unabated. When Canada’s stainless steel production slowed we had to seriously slow the manufacturing of some products. One stainless steel product that had to be slowed we made for a local company and that product ended up on United States Navy submarines. I personally know people who worked (past tense) in aluminum mills and they watched as the plants slowed down to a crawl. People got laid off and retired early as Canada took over most of the market for some aluminums.

Then there is Mexico. That nation has been undermining USA assembly plants of all kinds for well over twenty years. Where do you think a huge portion of assembled consumer goods are coming from, including PC computers? Yup, it’s Mexico and usually just across the USA/Mexico border. These are not the only countries that have been unfair with all this “free trade” bull shit.

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Comment of the Day: Friday Open Forum [Tariffs Thread]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That’s the New York Times graph this morning showing stock markets since President Trump’s inauguration. The lowest line (in orange) is Japan; the next lowest line is the U.S. The reason for all of those declines are believed to be Trump’s tariff policies.

A commenter last week asked why Ethics Alarms hadn’t discussed Trump’s tariffs. My response was, 1) I didn’t see them as an ethical issue and 2) I wasn’t informed sufficiently on the topic to opine on it. Veteran EA commentator Chris Marschner said, “Hold my beer!” The post below is the result: you van review the whole thread, which includes more from Chris, here.

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I don’t know if this is an ethics angle per se but the tariff objections illustrate without question America’s unwillingness to suffer any short term discomfort in order to obtain long term security. I keep hearing that Trump is a narcissist such that he has this inappropriate sense of sense but one of the clinical signs of narcissistic behavior is a sense of entitlement. The minute anything Trump does causes some immediate discomfort or loss many in the public feel they are entitled to what they had before.

A large percentage of the stock market gains are illusory because much of that growth was driven by inflated profits and subsequently inflated stock prices. Consumer and producer prices rise before costs are actually incurred because labor costs are negotiated on longer term contracts as are so many of our commodities. The Biden administration fueled those inflated profits – and he said as much in a speech in the port of Baltimore – when he poured 2 trillion dollars into the economy with too few goods to buy. Employment gains in the last 4 years were in large measure government jobs that produce intangibles whose values are only measured in terms of their employment.

People need to realize that the algorithms used by traders are driving much of the sell off because tariffs are deemed to be anti-growth. What the buy/sell programs are not factoring in is the 6 trillion dollars worth of investment commitment which will revitalize our semi-conductor industry and other strategic industries. We have to buy spare avionics parts for our military and the base materials for our medicines from our political adversary who has a 100 year plan to dominate the globe.

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From Maine, A “Nah, the Democratic Party Doesn’t Embrace Censorship!” Head-Exploder….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Reacting to Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby‘s tweet above, the Maine House speaker and majority leader (Guess which party…) demanded that she take it down. Libby refused, so the body’s Democrats introduced a censure resolution. Their contrived reason: her post included photos and the first name of a minor, the male athlete who was allowed to compete in female-only sports. Both the photo and student’s name were publicly available and had been published by media sources. Obviously, this was an effort to silence an effort by an elected official to have the public understand “what’s going on here,” and, as we all know from the motto of an Axis-supporting newspaper of note, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

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What’s Up, Doc? UConn Med School’s Unethical, Woke, Ridiculous “DEI Hippocratic Oath”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Unbelievable.

In August of last year, UConn School of Medicine’s class of 2028 became the first to recite a newly revised version of the Hippocratic Oath:

“I will strive to promote health equity. I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

No, this is not a sick joke. No, I am not making this up. Yes, our institutions of higher education really are in the clutches of maniacs who think this kind of indoctrination is part of their job.

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The Naked Mayor Principle ( or “What an Idiot!”)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Tom Ross, the “non-partisan” mayor of Minot, North Dakota, has resigned. Guess why. He accidentally sent an explicit nude video of himself to City Attorney Stefanie Stalheim. For some reason, this moron waited for a city investigation to be completed before doing what he should have done the moment it happened, which was back in January. The investigation found that the mayor and Stalheim had concluded a town business related phone call about a Minot police officer who had committed suicide and the mayor sent her the “Ew!” video shortly thereafter.

Ross insisted he sent the video to the wrong address and had intended to send it to his girlfriend. So what? The Naked Mayor Principle, though never explicitly stated here because no previous mayor has been this stupid (or stupid in this particular way), is a natural corollary to the Naked Teacher Principle, which states that a secondary school teacher or administrator who allows pictures of himself or herself showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses to be seem online cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result. A high elected official who sends such a photo or video to an employee is in an ethically similar position. Bye!

The frisky mayor handed over his resignation letter prior to a Minot City Council special meeting called to deal with the scandal. The city investigator found that due “to Ross’s position as one of increased visibility, responsibility, and trust, and due to his decision to use a personal cell phone to conduct city business, that the fact that he would use that device to record and send videos of this nature is in and of itself reckless enough that he knew the risk he was taking by engaging in such behavior.” Yah think? The investigator also concluded that the incident met the city’s standard for workplace harassment, whether or not it was accidental. I don’t know about that, but it doesn’t matter. The town’s mayor takes naked photos of himself and sends it to people. Ick. Pooie. Elected officials shouldn’t be behaving like teenagers, even competently. He’s an idiot. Idiots shouldn’t be mayors.

Case closed.

Fencing Ethics: What’s Going On Here?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’m afraid I don’t know enough about fencing to comment as intelligently as I need to regarding this episode, but I’m going to charge on anyway…

USA fencer Stephanie Turner was scheduled to face Redmond Sullivan at the Cherry Blossom Fencing Tournament held at the University of Maryland. As the match was about to begin, however, Turner “took a knee” and removed her mask, signifying that she would not compete against Redmond the Division 1A Women’s Foil event. Redmond, you see, is a formerly male fencer who has recently “identified” as female. Turner had decided that as a matter of principle she would not compete in women’s fencing against a “man.” “I saw that I was going to be in a pool with Redmond, and from there I said, ‘OK, let’s do it. I’m going to take the knee’,” she explained

After her protest, Turner was slapped with a “black card” signifying that she was suspended and out of the tournament.

“I knew what I had to do because USA Fencing had not been listening to women’s objections,” Turner said. “I took a knee immediately at that point. Redmond was under the impression that I was going to start fencing. So when I took the knee, I looked at the ref and I said: ‘I’m sorry, I cannot do this. I am a woman, and this is a man, and this is a women’s tournament. And I will not fence this individual.'”

U.S. Fencing responded with a wokey, weaselly statement undoubtedly drafted by the DEI Dept.:

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Ethics Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

He still just doesn’t get that “President of the United States” thingy.

So the President had dinner with Bill Maher, Professional Asshole. 1) So what? and 2) Why in the world would Trump elevate Maher to this level?

See—duh!—a President elevates Maher’s status by deeming him worthy of a meeting, which he is not. This is Cognitive Dissonance Scale 101. Maher is nothing. Every bit of status and credibility he gains makes him more powerful and the public dumber. This weasel has been tacking to the Right lately because he senses his Leftist-young-ignorant-kneejerk-socialist audience is shrinking, and he gets cheap publicity by criticizing Democrats now and then. But he is neither smart enough nor astute enough to be an enlightening pundit. For Trump to treat him otherwise is foolish. It’s irresponsible, and inept leadership.

Oh, I know Trump has done this with other useless public “influencers,” like Kim Kardashian. It diminishes him and the office. Trump doesn’t seem to understand that he’s no longer part of the weird world of dubious celebrities. The President is above all that, far above, unless he cuts himself down to size. He just doesn’t get it. Presumably he never will. Next he’ll be having dinner with Joy Reid…