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Month: May 2015

Sanders: “I Am Running in This Election to Win” by @Gaius_Publius

Sanders: “I Am Running in This Election to Win”

by Gaius Publius

In too many places I’ve heard the speculative voices saying the Sanders candidacy isn’t serious — that Bernie Sanders is running to “make a statement,” or to “move Clinton to the right” (whatever that means in this world of post-2008 promises), or something.

So I did some digging, starting with this, from USA Today (my emphasis):

Bernie Sanders: ‘I am running in this election to win’

… “I’ve been traveling around the country for the last year trying to
ascertain whether there really is grass-roots support in terms of people
standing up and being prepared to take on the billionaire class,” the
independent senator said in an interview Wednesday with USA TODAY as he
prepared to officially announce his candidacy Thursday. “I believe that
there is.”

The fiery, 73-year-old Vermonter said Americans are disenchanted with
“the greed of corporate America”
and with a political establishment that
doesn’t talk about the issues that affect their lives. …

“I am running in this election to win,” he said. “We’ve got a long
path forward. Most people in America have never heard of Bernie Sanders.
More than 90% of Americans have heard of Hillary Clinton. … I will
absolutely be out-spent. But I do believe we have a chance to raise
significant amounts of money through small, individual contributions.”

About
60% of the money he received in his successful 2012 campaign for a
second Senate term came from small contributions from individual donors,
Sanders said. He won that election with 71% of the vote. …

Sanders said it is up to Democratic voters — not him — to say whether he
is a better candidate than Clinton, whom he did not criticize at all
during the interview.

Then there’s Thom Hartmann in the clip below. Hartmann has been interviewing Sanders for years in his weekly “Brunch with Bernie” segments. Hartmann says he’s absolutely convinced that Sanders is running to be President.

Sen. Bernie Sanders announces his candidacy (via Thom Hartmann, who adds his own comments)

Quoting from the clip above (starting at 5:25, though the lead-up is well worth listening to):

Do not … do not … underestimate Bernie Sanders. And do not think he’s making this run to have an impact on Hillary Clinton. He is making this run because he’s seriously running for President of the United States. As was Ross Perot in 1992, … Ross Perot, on just one issue, trade, got 20% of the vote. … And Ross Perot was a troglodyte on everything else….

So the question then becomes, where is America right now? Is America with Bernie Sanders? Or is America with all the various other people who have announced for president?

Then Hartmann goes through recent polling on issues that Sanders and progressives support. Turns out America strongly supports them too:

Should the government be able to negotiate drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid?
79% of Americans say Yes.

Give students the same low interest rates as big banks [less than 1%]?
78% of Americans say Yes.

Fair trade, not “free trade” [like NAFTA and TPP]?
75% of Americans say Yes.

End tax loopholes for corporations that ship jobs overseas?
74% of Americans say Yes.

End gerrymandering?

73% of Americans say Yes.

There were many more items like that, he said. It’s clear to me that on the issues America is with Bernie Sanders.

Sanders Is Running to Win

I’m hearing this a lot from people who know or have watched Sanders closely — that this run is real. It’s not a vanity run. It’s not a windmill run. It’s an issues run, like Ross Perot’s in 1992, by a man strongly motivated by issues the country strongly supports. If he’s going to lose, he will have to be made to lose — by Clinton, or the media, or both.

The game is on. Let the people decide. If you wish to add your weight to the Sanders side, you can help out here.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

Je ne suis pas David Cameron

Je ne suis pas David Cameron

by digby

The emboldened Tories are running with their mandate:

A counter-terrorism bill including plans for extremism disruption orders designed to restrict those trying to radicalise young people is to be included in the Queen’s speech, David Cameron will tell the national security council on Wednesday.

The orders, the product of an extremism task force set up by the prime minister, were proposed during the last parliament in March, but were largely vetoed by the Liberal Democrats on the grounds of free speech. They were subsequently revived in the Conservative manifesto.

The measures would give the police powers to apply to the high court for an order to limit the “harmful activities” of an extremist individual. The definition of harmful is to include a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, alarm or distress or creating a “threat to the functioning of democracy”.

The aim is to catch not just those who spread or incite hatred on the grounds of gender, race or religion but also those who undertake harmful activities for the “purpose of overthrowing democracy”.

They would include a ban on broadcasting and a requirement to submit to the police in advance any proposed publication on the web and social media or in print. The bill will also contain plans for banning orders for extremist organisations which seek to undermine democracy or use hate speech in public places, but it will fall short of banning on the grounds of provoking hatred.

It will also contain new powers to close premises including mosques where extremists seek to influence others. The powers of the Charity Commission to root out charities that misappropriate funds towards extremism and terrorism will also be strengthened.

Cameron will tell the NSC: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance.

“This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach. As the party of one nation, we will govern as one nation and bring our country together. That means actively promoting certain values.

“Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights regardless of race, gender or sexuality.

“We must say to our citizens: this is what defines us as a society.”

So he’s going to ban intolerant speech in the name of free speech and tolerance. And they’re giving the government the power to disrupt people who might be “alarming” or “distressing.”

It’s a good thing he knows which are the bad guys and which are the good guys or that could get really confusing.

I’ll give this election win to the terrorists. They’re racking up victories all over the place.

And, by the way, this is what censorship really is. This is what free speech advocates should be up in arms about.

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O Rotten Gotham by @BloggersRUs

O Rotten Gotham
by Tom Sullivan

The court ruling in Manhattan Monday against Nomura and the Royal Bank of Scotland over mortgage losses may be the tip of an iceberg we never see the bottom of. The firms knew they were “packaging and selling bad loans to unwitting victims, but did it anyway, because the money was good,” writes Matt Levin for Bloomberg. Wall Street long argued that “the banks did not generally break the law.” Finally, a court has found otherwise.

Levin writes:

There’s some good anecdotal history of how hard everyone was working to churn out mortgage securitizations. I liked this bit about the real estate appraisers who testified at trial (page 167):

They performed hundreds of appraisals apiece each year during the housing boom, but assured the Court that they never took shortcuts and in fact spent many hours on each and every appraisal. Clagett reported that he performed more than 700 appraisals each year in the period of 2005 to 2008, and took about five to six hours on each of them. Platt performed about 300 to 400 appraisals each year in 2005 and 2006, taking a minimum of four to five hours to perform each one despite the fact that he was also working fulltime as a fireman. For the period of 2004 through 2008, Morris conducted approximately 600 appraisals per year, which is about 12 per week. To justify those numbers, Morris claimed to have worked long hours seven days a week.

Apparently appraisers needed to appraise 70-80 hours a week, every week, for four years, to feed the mortgage securitization beast.

Speaking yesterday of culture, and of culture, and of culture, yet again no one will go to jail for the massive Nomura/RBS bank fraud. That too is cultural, filtering from Wall Street down to fireman/appraisers in Maryland. As they say, the fish rots from the head.

It seems people still reference Tom Wolfe’s essay, “O Rotten Gotham—Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink,” published as the last chapter of “The Pump House Gang” in 1968. Touring the city with anthropologist Edward T. Hall of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Wolfe examined how New York affects people, referencing the work of ethologist John B. Calhoun. From Wikipedia:

The ethologist John B. Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink” to describe the collapse in behavior which resulted from overcrowding. Over a number of years, Calhoun conducted over-population experiments on rats which culminated in 1962 with the publication of an article in the Scientific American of a study of behavior under conditions of overcrowding. In it, Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink”. Calhoun’s work became used, rightly or wrongly, as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study has become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general.

A friend from South Carolina got a masters at NYU in the 1980s, commuting in each day from Brooklyn. She said, “I learned to navigate the city. Where to go. Where not to go. But when I got on the subway every morning, packed in with a thousand people, I knew I was different. I knew I didn’t have to live this way.” Or as Wolfe put it:

In everyday life in New York– just the usual, getting to work, working in massively congested areas like 42nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Lexington, especially now that the Pan-Am Building is set there, working in cubicles such as those in the editorial offices at Time-Life, Inc., which Dr. Hall cites as typical of New York’s poor handling of space, working in cubicles with low ceilings and, often, no access to a window, while construction crews all over Manhattan drive everybody up the Masonite wall with air-pressure generators with noises up to the boil-a-brain decibel levels, then rushing to get home, piling into subways and trains, fighting for time and space, the usual day in New York– the whole now-normal thing keeps shooting jolts of adrenaline into the body, breaking down the body’s defenses and winding up with the work-a-daddy human animal stroked out at the breakfast table with his head apoplexed like a cauliflower out of his $6.95 semispread Pima-cotton shirt and nosed over into a plate of No-Kloresto egg substitute, signing off with the black thrombosis, cancer, kidney, liver, or stomach failure, and the adrenals ooze to a halt, the size of eggplants in July.

I mean, really. The poor dears on the Street can’t help acting like criminals, all nervous and agitated (and medicated), shuttered up for long hours staring at computer screens, slaving away for their bonuses. We should just thank them for what they add to the Potemkin economy and ask them not to do it again, again.

Bob Baer muses about Hersh

Bob Baer muses about Hersh

by digby

This is a fascinating interview by Ian Masters with middle east expert Bob Baer on Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden story.  It’s full of his own musing about what was wrong with the official government story, why he doubts it and how he’s also heard from his own sources certain elements of Hersh’s story.

Listen here

Of course, this just means that Baer is also a dotty old conspiracy theorist like Hersh.  But perhaps you’ll be entertained by it anyway.

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QOTD: Alex Seitz-Wald

QOTD: Alex Seitz-Wald

by digby

[I]f you want to know what Clinton thinks about something … start by reading her book.

Seitz-Wald is on the Clinton beat and unlike many of his fellows is actually coming at the story from a fresh perspective instead of recycling tired old tropes about cackling, calculating 90s era “narratives” that offer absolutely nothing relevant for political observers in 2015.  So far, his work is quite informative.

In this piece he notes that Clinton’s book Hard Choices, like all serious campaign books, offers a good starting point from which to understand the candidate’s philosophy policy positions. It’s not comprehensive, of course, but it serves as a reasonable blueprint of her priorities going into this campaign. If you read it you will have a good starting point from which to question more deeply or tease out details that are relevant to a particular issue. Not to mention answers to at least a few of what seem to be burning questions among the Villagers who continuously complain that she is refusing to say where she stands. They clearly haven’t bothered to read it.

She is not the first to plan her campaign around such an outline and use her book as the basis for her run. Indeed, unless a candidate decides to write a polemic about God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, for instance (which is also a legitimate approach, by the way) it’s a standard approach.

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Dudebros on parade

Dudebros on parade

by digby

… making sure we know that no matter how puerile they are they still run the world:

As the Telegraph reports in an opening sentence designed to make your breakfast come up,“It has become a thing for people to interrupt live video broadcasts to shout into the mic “f__k her in the p___y”. A thing. An actual thing that idiots do and then giggle about. 

It’s a little thing but it says so much.

But hey, I don’t want to play “identity politics” here so we’ll let it go. Never mind.  What were you saying?

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Ike’s warning still operative

Ike’s warning still operative

by digby

This is exactly what he was talking about:

Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers has formed a new pressure group, now active in Iowa and New Hampshire, to serve as the “premiere national security and foreign policy organization during the 2016 debate” and to “help elect a president who supports American engagement and a strong foreign policy.”

Roger’s group, Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, is hosting candidate events and intends to host a candidate forum later this year. The organization does not disclose its donors. But a look at the business executives helping APPS steer presidential candidates towards more hawkish positions reveals that many are defense contractors who stand to gain financially from continued militarism:

Advisory Board Member John Coburn is chairman and CEO of VT Systems, a company that delivers communications technology for the Defense Department.

Advisory Board Member Stephen Hadley is a principal at the consulting firm RiceHadleyGates and serves as a board member to defense contractor Raytheon, a position that pays him $228,007 in annual compensation.

New Hampshire Board Member Rich Ashooh lists his employment as Director, Strategy at BAE Systems.

New Hampshire Board Member James Bell is the chief executive of EPE Corporation, a manufacturing company that says it is a “premier supplier to the defense community.”

Advisory Board Member John Engler is the president of the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group for major corporations, including defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies and Northrop Grumman.

New Hampshire Board Member Ken Solinksy is founder of Insight Technologies, a night vision and electro-optical systems firm acquired by L-3 Communications.

New Hampshire Chairman and Advisory Board Member Walt Havenstein is the former chief executive of BAE Systems and SAIC, two of the largest defense contractors in America. Havenstein, who left SAIC in 2012, was paid partially in company stock options.

And blogger Joshua Huminski worked in 2013 as a spokesperson for Aegis Defense Services, a contractor that provided security services to U.S. facilities in Afghanistan. Aegis did not respond to a request asking if Huminski is still employed there.

I guess this just sounds like an old hippie complaint and who ares right? But there is a lot of truth in another old saw which says that any military empire eventually collapses of its own wight as more and more of its wealth goes toward sustaining and expanding its empire. This is an obscene waste of money not to mention immoral and dangerous.

Oh, an by the way, Mike Rogers is employed as an “expert” on CNN offering up his allegedly unbiased opinion on national security matters.

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The GOP goes all Scientology on us

The GOP goes all Scientology on us

by digby

After I watched the documentary “Going Clear” a few weeks back, I noted that their strategy of using lawsuits to harass the government seemed like a likely right wing tactic with Lois Lerner being a good example of how they might be going that direction. It turns out to be the case. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

It’s important to note here that the right’s loathing of the federal government is actually quite narrowly focused on certain areas of interest. They are fully behind the neoconservatives’ imperial project — flag waving and martial strutting are fundamental to American conservatism. (Small government is a very imprecise term; they have no problem with a big military and police apparatus. In fact, those bureaucracies have a blank check.) But within that narrow anti-government focus of low taxes is their extreme hostility to government regulations.

So now we see the conservative movement — which, not for nothing, has historically regarded the profession of “trial lawyer” as something only slightly above “mafia hitman” in terms of social disapprobation — considering the idea of flooding the courts with frivolous suits. But perhaps an even more remarkable feature of this plan is that it’s being floated by none other than the man who brought us the racist right wing tract “The Bell Curve,” Charles Murray.

Murray has a new book coming out that is poised to take the conservative and libertarian world by storm. It’s called “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,” and in it Murray proclaims, “the government cannot enforce its mountain of laws and regulations without voluntary compliance.” His book proposes to create “a private-sector counterweight that pulls back the curtain and exposes the Wizard’s weakness.” The private sector counterweight, in this case, will be a billionaire-funded institution that will bankroll thousands of lawsuits against the government, which Murray fatuously names “The Madison Institute.”

Many of us who watched the recent HBO documentary “Going Clear” about the Church of Scientology and its long battle against the IRS — to win tax-exempt status as a religious organization — will recognize this strategy. Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch did:

Scientology besieged the IRS with 200 lawsuits from the church and more than 2,300 lawsuits on behalf of individual parishioners in every jurisdiction in the country, “overwhelming government lawyers, running up fantastic expenses, and causing an immense amount of havoc inside the IRS.” [Scientology leader David] Miscavige boasted that church lawyers had so exhausted the IRS’s legal budget that the agency couldn’t afford to send its lawyers to an American Bar Association conference.

That is what Murray wants to do to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

If conservatives follow the Scientology strategy to the letter, they will file lawsuits against individual federal employees as well, making their lives miserable and putting them into personal financial jeopardy. Read on…

Oh, and here’s the GOP’s new theme song:

 

Dday’s in an ornery mood about the TPP @ddayen

Dday’s in an ornery mood about the TPP

by digby

And he’s telling it like it is on the TPP:

Here are ten moments where the President or his subordinates have lied – call it “misled” or “offered half-truths” or whatever; but I’m in an ornery mood so let’s just say lied – about his trade agenda:

1. 40 PERCENT: The President and his team have repeatedly described TPP as a deal involving nearly 40 percent of global GDP. This tells only part of the story. First of all, the U.S. by itself represents 22 percent of global GDP; a bill naming a post office would involve that much. Second, we already have free trade agreements with six TPP partners – Canada, Mexico, Australia, Singapore, Chile and Peru – and between them and us, that’s 80 percent of the total GDP in this deal. The vast majority of the rest is represented by Japan, where the average applied tariff is a skinny 1.2 percent, per the World Bank.

You can see this paragraph in graphic form here. The point is that saying TPP is about “40 percent of GDP” intimates that it would massively change the ability to export without tariffs. In reality it would have virtually no significance in opening new markets. To the extent that there’s a barrier in global trade today, it comes from currency manipulation by countries wanting to keep their exports cheap. The TPP has no currency provisions.

2. JOB CREATION: Saying, as the White House has, that the deal would support “an additional 650,000 jobs” is not true. This figure came from a hypothetical calculation of a report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which the Institute itself said was an incorrect way to use their data. “We don’t believe that trade agreements change the labor force in the long run,” said Peter Petri, author of the report, in a fact check of the claim.

The deal is actually more about building up barriers than taking them down. Much of TPP is devoted to increasing copyright and patent protections for prescription drugs and Hollywood media content. As economist Dean Baker notes, this is protectionist, and will raise prices for drugs, movies and music here and abroad.

3. EXPORTS ONLY: The Administration constantly discusses trade as solely a question of U.S. exports. A recent Council of Economic Advisors report touts: Exporters pay higher wages, and export industry growth translates into higher average earnings. But the Economic Policy Institute points out that this ignores imports, and therefore the ballooning trade deficit, which weighs down economic growth and wages. Talking about trade without discussing both imports and exports is like relaying the score of a ballgame by saying “Dodgers 4.” It is literally a half-truth. Recent trade deals have in fact increased the trade deficit, such as the agreement with South Korea. Senator Sherrod Brown notes that the deal has only increased exports by $1 billion since 2011, while increasing imports by $12 billion, costing America 75,000 jobs.

4. MOST PROGRESSIVE: Obama has called TPP “the most progressive trade deal in history.” First of all, so did Bill Clinton and Al Gore, when talking about NAFTA in 1993. Second, there’s reason to believe TPP doesn’t even clear a low bar for progressive trade deals. The Sierra Club, based on a leaked TPP environmental chapter, said that the deal is weaker than the landmark “May 10 agreement” for deals with Peru, Panama and Colombia, struck in 2007. Key Democrats who devised labor and environmental standards for those agreements, like Rep. Sander Levin, believe that TPP falls short. Even if the chapters were up to par, consistent lack of enforcement of the rules makes them ineffective. The U.S. Trade Representative has actually claimed the Colombia free trade agreement is positive because only one trade unionist in the country is being murdered every other week. Labor groups can only ask the White House to enforce labor rights violations, and for the past several years, the Administration simply hasn’t. So when Obama says violators of TPP will face “meaningful consequences,” based on the Administration’s prior enforcement, he’s lying.

5. CHANGING LAWS: On the controversial topic of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), where corporations can sue sovereign governments for monetary damages for violating trade agreements that hurt the company’s “expected future profits,” the White House has engaged in a shell game. They say, “No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws.” But the point of a corporation suing the United States or any trade partner is to put enough financial pressure on a government to force them to alter the law themselves. So ISDS doesn’t “cause” a change in law only in the narrowest sense. Even third-party countries have curtailed regulations in reaction to ISDS rulings, as New Zealand did with their cigarette packaging law, awaiting the outcome of a dispute between the tobacco industry and Australia (a suit that continues despite an initial victory for Australia).

6. NEVER LOST: The White House assumes that the only thing America cares about with ISDS is the upsetting of our own laws. So they’ve stressed that the U.S. has never lost an ISDS case. This is irrelevant. What ISDS does is offer bailout insurance policy to multinational corporations. If they run into discrimination or regulatory squeezing by a foreign government, they can use an extra-judicial process to recoup their investment. Workers screwed over by trade agreements have no ability to sue governments; only corporations get this privilege.

The United States attracts businesses through our relative rule of law. When that insurance is granted to countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, it weakens our competitive advantage, and makes it simple for countries to outsource their operations. Their investment is protected, as is their ability to exploit cheap labor. This makes it impossible for America to compete.

7. WEAKENING DODD-FRANK: Obama reacted strongly to Senator Warren’s charge that a future President could overturn financial regulations or other rules through trade deals. “I’d have to be pretty stupid,” Obama told Yahoo News, to “sign a provision that would unravel” signature achievements like Dodd-Frank. I suppose he is, then, because modern trade agreements often seek to “harmonize” regulations, effectively setting a regulatory ceiling. This harmonization could, as Warren says, “punch holes in Dodd-Frank without directly repealing it,” by forcing regulators to roll back capital or leverage requirements.

European negotiators want a trade agreement with the U.S. called the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to include a chapter “harmonizing” financial regulations. So far the Obama Administration has rejected this, while admitting the potential for regulatory harm. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told Congress in December 2013, “Normally in a trade agreement, the pressure is to lower standards” on regulations, “and that’s something that we just think is not acceptable.” A future President might find it acceptable, and today’s vote on “fast-track” authority would give trade deals an expedited process, with no amendments or filibusters by Congress, for six years, outlasting the current Administration. Scott Walker or Jeb Bush may decide it’s perfectly appropriate to undermine regulations in trade deals.

8. STOPPING CHINA: President Obama frequently casts TPP as a way to “contain” China. “If we don’t write the rules for trade around the world, guess what, China will,” he said on Friday. This is so facile as to be totally meaningless. China is a major Pacific Rim economy, and will have a presence regardless of our actions. As former Clinton Defense Department official Chas Freeman writes, “China has been and will remain an inseparable part of China’s success story.” Plus, as I’ve written in Salon, weak “rule of origin” guidelines could allow China to import goods into TPP member countries without any tariffs, while freed from following any TPP regulations.

9. SECRET DEAL: Obama has angrily dismissed the notion that TPP is a “secret” deal, saying that everyone will have public access to the TPP text for at least 60 days before a final vote. This is not the point opponents are making. The vote on fast track would severely limit Congressional input into the deal. And right now, members of Congress can only see the text in a secure room, without being able to bring staffers or take notes, or even talk about specifics in public. That makes the deal effectively secret during the fast track vote. “The president has only committed to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track,” Warren told Greg Sargent. The President wants to filibuster-proof the bill in secret, then employ pretend transparency on TPP after that.

10. JUST A POLITICIAN: This idea from Obama that everybody opposing fast-track is acting like a mere “politician,” aside from demonizing the concept of representing constituents, neglects the fact that he’s a politician too. His interest in building a legacy, when practically nothing else has the potential to pass Congress the next two years, is a political interest. His possible interest in rewarding campaign contributors who would benefit from TPP is also political, or his desire to earn the respect of the Very Serious People who always support trade deals. Since Obama has a large platform and will not publicly debate any opponent on trade, he can float above it all, acting like a principled soul only wanting to better the country rather than a transactional ward heeler. This may be the biggest lie, that Obama’s somehow superior to everyone else in this debate.

This is my favorite:

A recent Council of Economic Advisors report touts: Exporters pay higher wages, and export industry growth translates into higher average earnings. But the Economic Policy Institute points out that this ignores imports, and therefore the ballooning trade deficit, which weighs down economic growth and wages. Talking about trade without discussing both imports and exports is like relaying the score of a ballgame by saying “Dodgers 4.”

Ignoring the effects of a trade deal on the trade deficit has to be one of the greatest acts of chutzpah ever.

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