GLOBALIZE THIS!

Friday, February 27, 2004

BUSH ADMIN AGAIN BALKS AT CONFRONTING CHINA

Where political channels have failed to successfully pressure the Bush administration to take action against unfair trade practices in China (currency manipulation, human rights violations, failure to meet WTO commitments, and so on), many are looking to alternative legal channels. A Number of groups have legal suits on deck to be filed with the US Trade Representatives office seeking remedy for unfair trade practices.

Seeking to pre-empt such a suit, the US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick remarked yesterday at a press briefing, "There's really no WTO obligation not to have a fixed exchange rate," which would seem to obviate any kind of trade remedy action against China in the WTO.

Perhaps. But China's continued currency manipulation is in violation of its commitments under the IMF Articles of Agreement:

Article IV, Section 1.iii clearly states: "Recognizing that the essential purpose of the international monetary system is to provide a framework that facilitates the exchange of goods, services, and capital among countries, and that sustains sound economic growth, and that a principal objective is the continuing development of the orderly underlying conditions that are necessary for financial and economic stability, each member undertakes to collaborate with the Fund and other members to assure orderly exchange arrangements and to promote a stable system of exchange rates. In particular, each member shall...avoid manipulating exchange rates or the international monetary system in order to prevent effective balance of payments adjustment or to gain an unfair competitive advantage over other members." (Emphasis added).

The IMF charter could not be more clear in recognizing how such currency manipulation constitutes an unfair trade practice, which China is bound not to do.

The question of appropriates venue for legal action aside, China is violating international economic agreements to gain unfair competitive advantage--at the expense of the United States, as well as other developing countries who compete for a share of the US market.

¶ 2/27/2004 01:40:16 PM

PRESIDENTIAL-SPEAK

Rhetorician extraordinaire David Kusnet will be doing a bi-monthly column called "Stump" in The New Republic.

Kusnet will focus on the rhetoric of the 2004 presidential campaign.

¶ 2/27/2004 11:14:56 AM

Thursday, February 26, 2004

WHAT I'M READING TODAY: State Department Report on Human Rights Practices 2003

Since the brouhaha over the trade and jobs issue that erupted when Bush's chief economist Greg Mankiw accidentally revealed to America how economists view the world, the global punditocracy has responded to the call of duty, circling their wagons and decrying protectionist China bashers.

Just out of curiousity about what these "China-bashers" are charging (that Chinese exports are being subsidized through egregious human rights violations, etc., etc.), I went straight to the source. No, not The Nation. I'm talking about that bastion of knee-jerk liberalism and ire of conservatives everywhere, Collin Powell's State Department.

Here's what I found out about what is going on in China:

The report mentions no less than 40 times by my count (I may have missed some) the cheery sounding reeducation-through-labor camps widely used in China (and it ain't talking about an AFL-CIO activist training). Rather, Chinese citizens (some 250,000 of them) were confined without judicial process and force to work "in facilities directly connected with penal institutions...[or in some cases] they were contracted to nonprison enterprises. Facilities and their management profited from inmate labor." Who were these prisoners? Activists for religious freedom, democratic reform, labor rights, women's rights, people who fall out of favor of the party, people who protest to demand back pay for wages that are withheld (more on this below), and generally people who rake too much muck. "Chinese prison management relied on the labor of prisoners both as an element of punishment and to fund prison operations."

"In 1992, the U.S. and Chinese Governments signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU)...express[ing] the intention of the governments to cooperate to assure that Chinese prison-made products were not exported to the United States. However, Chinese cooperation under the MOU and SOC has been poor," meaning, of course, we have no way of knowing whether all those cheap wares adorning the shelves at Walmart are made by compulsory labor. (Regardless, the mere existence of forced labor undermines the rights and protections of all workers in China and the countries with which China trades).

In case you were wondering, China has not ratified the ILO core labor standard prohibiting forced compulsory labor, although they are bound to it via other treaties and, not to mention, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. US law (Section 301(d) of the Trade Act) specifically regards such human rights violations as an unfair trade practice.

But wait, there's more. It is common practice in China to keep workers in "bondage" by withholding their pay (which is by default forfeited if a worker decides to quit). Since workers in China have no right to associate freely in trade unions, to bargain collectively or to strike (all also established as universal human rights), they have little recourse but to submit to this exploitation. Even so, spontaneous "protests by workers seeking unpaid wages continued throughout the country" are common place throughout China. Protesting workers have resorted to blocking roads and railways, to threatening suicide, and even to self-immolation. (The reason we don't hear too much about it is because it is illegal in China to photograph and film labor protests, or even groups of unemployed people standing around).

This is just the tip of the iceberg: human trafficking, children sold into forced labor, women sold into prostitution, workers exposed to dangerous chemicals and unsafe working practices, and so on. It is really horrifying reading. Don't read it right before bedtime as I did. This little excerpt from the report kept me up for hours last night:

"Some students worked in light industrial production within or for their schools. In March 2001, an explosion in Jiangxi Province at an elementary school that was also used to manufacture fireworks killed 42 persons, most of them schoolchildren who worked to assemble the fireworks."

All this comes just from the 2003 report, but the State Department has reports posted on its website going back to 1993.

So, as this government report clearly proves, all those whacky China-bashers are protectionists looking out for their own self-interest in their effort to send America back to the economic dark ages. End of argument.

¶ 2/26/2004 06:13:54 PM

MY PASSION FOR THE PASSION

I think Bertrand Russell said it best in his lecture, "Why I Am Not A Christian," and I won't try to improve upon him here:

Defects In Christ's Teaching

Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance: "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then He says: "There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he certainly was not superlatively wise.

The Moral Problem

Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person that is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance, find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.

You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of this sort into the world.

Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues: "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched, where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world, and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as his chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when he came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever'.... and Peter.... saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to History. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.

The Emotional Factor

As I said before, I do not think that the real reason that people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshipped under the name of the "Sun Child"; and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the High Priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says: "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called Ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or ever mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

How The Churches Have Retarded Progress

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so, I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life," and no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children. This is what the Catholic church says. I say that that is fiendish cruelty, and nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which at the present moment the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

Fear, The Foundation Of Religion

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

What We Must Do

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

¶ 2/26/2004 10:40:22 AM

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE

But not a drop to drink in the capital of the free world. Clean water, pillar of civilization, is becoming ever more scarce due to a combination of corruption, bureaucratic ineptitude and neoliberal acrimony for investments in critical public infrastructures.

The DC Water and Sewer Authority is warning that children under the age of 6 and pregnant women should not drink the water. In lieu of clean water, DC WASA is offering children under the age of 6 and pregnant women free tests for lead poisoning. So I guess it evens out, more or less.

¶ 2/25/2004 10:44:25 PM

CULTURE WAR: CIVIL RIGHTS FOR GAYS

It's times like these that I ask myself WWCD? That's right, What Would Cato Do?

At the same debate in the summer of 2002 where I heard Grover Norquist say that Nazi Germany and the school board of Des Moines, Iowa are the same form of totalitarian government, I heard Cato Chairman William Niskanen orate on the principles of limited government and individual liberties established in the US constitution.

A public service announcement from your local school board.

Cato, of course, is a well known shill for corporate America and a close ally of the Bush administration, providing the bulk of its pseudo-intellectual rhetoric for tax cuts, privatizing Social Security, and generally deconstructing the social fabric painstakingly built in the years since America's gilded age.

This is by no means an endorsement of Cato, but--right or wrong--Cato has largely stuck by its ideological underpinnings (for example, Cato supports decriminalization of illicit drugs).

Now the Republicans, the party of non-interventionsit government, want to greatly expand the government's powers to curtail individual civil liberties by amending the very document that it purports establishes limits on the power of government to intrevene in the lives of individual Americans. Truly twisted.

So, WWCD?

¶ 2/25/2004 03:31:27 PM

MORE ON THE FLEDGLING US HAMBURGER SECTOR

Dedicated public servant and Bush's newly appointed Assistant Secretary for Manufacturing.

Late last week I wrote about how Bush's Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Greg Mankiw wanted to reclassify flipping hamburgers as a manufacturing activity in order to boost those pesky shrinking manufacturing jobs numbers.

Now Congressman John Dingell is throwing in his two cents about whether government statistics should count McDonald's as a manufacturing industry.

I think I got stuck inside the new Assistant Secretary's head on the playground one time...

¶ 2/25/2004 11:40:51 AM

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

FACTS ON SPECIAL INTEREST MONEY: KERRY V. BUSH

Thanks to Brad DeLong for tipping me off to this site called the Annenberg Political Fact Check.

As you may know, the Bush campaign recently released a libelous internet attack add calling John Kerry unprincipled for his acceptance of special interest money (why on the internet? because legitimate TV stations would not air such tripe).

While most of the media picked up on the attack, most of them missed the point that the attack ad was riddled with misleading, misquoting and decepitve statements.

"While it is true that Kerry got $640,000 over the past 15 years from individual lobbyists, that's only one type of special-interest money. And the Bush campaign itself has reported raising $960,000 from individual lobbyists in the past year alone.

The Bush campaign's internet screed conveniently ignores other forms of special interest money, namely PACs that give way more money than individual lobbyists. Oh yeah, by the way, Kerry raised $73,784 through PACs for his presidential campaign. Bush got over $2 million in PAC money for his campaign, and he doesn't even have a primary contest.

If one looks at all the special interest money pouring into the Senate, Kerry actually ranks 92 of 100, which "puts him on a different planet from President Bush."

¶ 2/24/2004 10:34:33 PM

CLASH OF IDEAS

I was poking around the Amazon.com website today and noticed that the market Leninists over at Cato have a recommended reading list on the topic of globalization. Not to be outdone, I created my own list whcih can be seen here.

I have read a lot of books on globalization, and most of them are crap, or what my political economy professor likes to call globaloney. A lot of them are written by idealogues and/or cranks from a wide-range of political persuasions, others are more well-intentioned but ill-informed or apologisms.

Here, I've tried to put together a list of some real gems that made me think beyond the conventional wisdom and outside the confines of economic science.

¶ 2/24/2004 03:40:10 PM

LAND REFORM, THE CAPITALIST WAY

Flagrancy to reason has an interesting treatise--fueled by Hernando DeSoto--on the uncomfortable confluence of interests between free marketeers and Kautskian agrarian reformists in the effort to return land to the masses.

De Soto's idea, in essence, is that poor people are poor because they are not rich, by which he means they don't own capital (for most people around the world, their most substantial investment of capital is place where they live). Because these people cannot lay claim to the productive uses of this capital, they systematically get the shaft in terms of economic and human development opportunities via their socioeconomic relationship with owners of capital entailed by their landlessness. Thus, the poor remain mired in poverty. Most Wobblies and raving Nation readers would have no problem agreeing with this analysis.

The reason most people can't lay claim to this source of wealth, DeSoto argues, is the incomplete development of a system of property rights rules, which are at heart a political issue over the choice of the institutional regimes to underpin market exchange. His solution, to expand property rights--dividing property into ever smaller parcels--to offer people the protection and reward of their share of property.

DeSoto's is an interesting idea, and refreshingly pragmatic in the debate on global poverty and micro-level development, however the smaller chunks of property there are, the easier they are to trade (just look at the trading volumes of the S&P 500 futures and the e-mini futures), and the more vulnerable small property holders are to the asymmetrical power of large market actors, which produces what I like to call gentrification. Nuf said.

So, DeSoto, close (and the right direction), but no cigar.

¶ 2/24/2004 01:30:32 PM

Monday, February 23, 2004

MaxSpeak, You Listen: NADER '04

"Nader has had eight years to create something beyond a personal PR machine to show for his efforts...I am not averse to third party efforts, but Nader's outfit is not a party. His autocratic disinclination to submit to any broader political discipline is obvious, since he has disdained the very Green Party that endorsed him in 2000...His campaign is a mistake and an unfortunate sink for progressive energies. We should be able to do much better. If you are willing to bear another four years of Bushism, you should want something substantial to show for it. What did you get from Nader after the 2000 election?"

Well put, Max.

¶ 2/23/2004 09:38:39 PM

BABY STEPS TO GLOBAL FINANCIAL EMPIRE

Citigroup, the world's largest financial services company, is buying into the South Korean market. Citi's ability to make such direct investments in Korea's financial sector is the direct result of the sweeping structural reforms unrelated to the short-term liquidity problem South Korea faced during the Asian financial crisis that Korea was forced to accept as a condition for an IMF assistance package.

According to Deryck Maughan, chief executive of Citigroup International: "There are a whole series of markets... that are now opening to foreign
direct investment. What we have accomplished in Mexico with Banamex or
Poland with Handlowy we feel we can accomplish in a number of Asian
countries."

Then US Treasury Secretary and now Director and Chairman of the Executive Committee at Citigroup Robert Rubin, incidentally, oversaw this structural transformation of the Korean economy.

Citigroup's expansion into South Korea is eerily reminiscent of their expansion into Mexico in the wake of the reforms extracted from Mexico in the Rubin master-minded bailout of the Peso in 1995.

Aside from Citi's global civic worth, which I've often documented, the globalization of financial enterprises raises a number of sticky concerns. Multinational banks have been shown to be a major instrument in the transmission of financial crises around the world through otherwise dis- or distantly connected economies. They also have been shown to reduce the level of credit available to consumers and domestic small and medium-sized enterprises--the building blocks of economic development.

¶ 2/23/2004 03:00:15 PM

MALAYSIA BUCKS THE CONSENSUS

Washington Consensus, that is. In a marked move of unprivatization, Malaysia's Perusahaan Otomobil Nasional, makers of the Proton, may buy back Mitsubishi's 15.8% stake in a joint venture with this state-owned company ahead of regional trade liberalization in 2005 w/in ASEAN.

Note the different spins given to the same story in the WSJ and in the FT .

The market fundamentalists over at the WSJ writes about Mitsubishi offering up its stake and in so doing creating more competition in the Malaysian market. The somewhat less fundamentalist marketeers at the FT write of Proton disposing of Mitsubishi's share. Given this move, Proton may be rather optimistic about its prospects in a liberalized market. So, who has the upper hand in the deal?

The WSJ writes: The proposed sale underlines Mitsubishi's diminished role in Proton, which increasingly has sought to cut its dependence on its Japanese partner by acquiring auto-engineering concerns such as the Lotus Group International of Britain. Proton, for example, has begun making its own engines, which it previously bought from its Japanese partners.

Malaysia, whose deployment of capital controls staved off most of the Asian flu afflicting most of its regional neighbors in the late 1990s, seems quite pleased with its with industrial policy as well. Proton may have succeeded in appropriating more advanced technologies from its partner, but it will remain to be seen how the state-owned firm will fare when the tarrifs come down.

¶ 2/23/2004 10:15:11 AM

Sunday, February 22, 2004

GLOBALIZATION IN PICTURES

Ode to the Monroe Doctrine.

Peter Daily, has a good take on the roots of the current situation in Haiti--in a sort of New York Review of Books unabridged style.

¶ 2/22/2004 10:45:12 PM

INSIDE BASEBALL: STATISTICAL POLITICS OF JOBS

The government collects labor statistics through two major surveys each month: the Current Population Survey--a survey of 60,000 households used to determine the unemployment rate--and the Current Employment Statistics Survey--a survey of establishmnets used to determine the number of payroll jobs.

A statistical phenomenon is at work in the current job-loss recovery. The population survey is showing more employment growth than the establishment survey, mainly because of overzealus estimates of population growth from undocumented immigration (the Census bureau is almost certainly overstating immigration, particularly when considering the tightened restrictions and militarization of US borders in the post-9/11 era, and the economic slowdown which dampens the incentive to migrate).

Pause here and imagine you are Karl Rove. Which jobs number would you choose to emphasize? Now remember, the one showing lower numbers (the establishment survey) is the one that was designed to measure jobs for the purpose of evaluating economic policy.

Guess which one the administration chose? That's right, the rose-tinted household survey, a move that startled even Alan Greenspan to comment on such a disingenuous use of statistics:

The Federal Reserve has just thrown cold water on the household data. It concludes that the gloomy payroll data is essentially accurate and that the household survey is probably off base.

"I wish I could say the household survey were the more accurate,'' Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, said in his testimony at a House hearing on Feb. 11. "Everything we've looked at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow.''

¶ 2/22/2004 06:29:04 PM

THANKS...

to Barbee for the technical assistance today with the website. Globalize This! and all its readers are grateful.

¶ 2/22/2004 06:20:44 PM