Adios, Seattle

Alex Berezow has had it. He’s over Seattle. After fourteen years he’s decamping from one of America’s most beautiful cities and moving to the suburbs. One suspects that he leans toward the political left, but he does not say so explicitly. Perhaps he is a canary in the coal mine, but clearly a city that has produced some of America’s most dynamic companies—think Amazon, Starbucks and (on the outskirts) Microsoft is being damaged by leftist politics.

Berezow had seen some problems developing, so he met with his City Council member. He was shocked to hear what she had to say.

First, she explained that issues concerning litter and graffiti were not her problem:

I KNEW Seattle was no longer a place for me when I met with Debora Juarez — the District 5 City Council member I had voted for.

Last September, at what I thought was going to be a friendly one-on-one meeting between an elected official and her constituent, I expressed some concerns that were on my mind. I fretted over the deterioration of a city with which I had fallen in love — a city that, despite my 21 trips to Europe, I still believe to be the most beautiful in the world.

I told my council member that Northgate, my home, had seen a noticeable increase in litter and graffiti. To my dismay, she seemed to suggest these issues were someone else’s job, not hers.

And then, he moved on to homelessness… which, as happens in true blue cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, is destroying quality of life and bringing high levels of crime and disease:

When I first moved to Seattle 14 years ago, to attend the University of Washington, homelessness essentially didn’t exist at Northgate. Though I have never been a victim of or witness to a crime, some of my neighbors have been, and they believe homeless camps are the reason. Additionally, the conditions in such camps are often atrocious — not only are the homeless more likely to be victims of violent crime, they are susceptible to infectious disease, such as the hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego that sickened nearly 500 people and has killed 20.

Berezow recommended that the mentally ill homeless be involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment. Juarez was not moved:

Because many (but certainly not all) homeless people struggle with mental illness or drug addiction, I suggested that Seattle find a way to make it easier to provide treatment to these troubled souls — involuntarily, if need be. It could literally save their lives.

Juarez exclaimed, “What is this? Nazi Germany?”

One notes the subtle quality of her mind. How does it happen that a government official can conflate the wish to treat sick people with Nazi Germany. Does it get any dumber?

Multiculturalism and identity politics has made Seattle an angry place. Berezow explains:

Slowly but surely, Seattle has become an angry place. Councilmember Kshama Sawant called a police shooting a “brutal murder.” She also tweeted that it was “terrible” for a feminist organization to wish that Barbara Bush, on her death, rest in peace. As a congressional candidate, Pramila Jayapal supporters implied that her respectable opponent, Brady Walkinshaw, was a misogynist and racist. And former Mayor Ed Murray, whose pattern of alleged sexual behavior finally caught up with him, remained defiant until the bitter end.

And, of course, local government has rendered the city unaffordable:

The toxic politics are bad enough, but the city also has become unaffordable for the middle class. Partly, that is due to high demand (which is a good problem for a city to have), but it’s also due to self-inflicted wounds, such as a restrictive housing policy that artificially caps supply. Seattle is well on its way to becoming the next Vancouver, British Columbia, with the median housing price having spiked to an eye-watering $820,000, far outside the reach of the middle class. Unless they are able to save for about 14 years to afford a down payment, millennialscan forget about homeownership entirely.

The new and higher minimum wage has made things worse:

The $15 minimum wage has added gasoline to the fire. Though it hasn’t even been fully implemented yet, the most recent study last summer revealed that when the minimum moved from $11 to $13 an hour, low-wage workers lost about $125 per month. That means that the law raises costs for businesses and customers while actually harming employees it was meant to help.

But, rather than deal with the issues that affect the everyday lives of Seattle’s citizens, the City Council is fighting the good fight against… climate change. And it is also involved in important foreign policy issues.

But stubborn facts and a hurting middle class don’t seem to faze the City Council, which seems far more concerned about issues over which it has zero control — such as climate change and foreign policy — than it does about issues over which it has at least a modicum of control, such as the cost of living, homelessness, crime, traffic and potholes. For our City Council, virtue signaling is more important than governing.

Well, at least the Council is diverse. After all, that’s what really matters.

Et tu, Howard Schultz

The decline and fall of corporate America proceeds apace. I am not thinking about profit and loss. I am thinking of moral character, especially the moral character required to stand up for principle... especially politically incorrect principle.

It’s as though corporate leaders have chosen to worship a Messiah named Barack Obama and are willing to purge their ranks of anyone or any group that dares to speak a disparaging word about their Savior. One is somewhat surprised to see how much corporate America is in the pocket of the American left, how much corporate leaders have been brainwashed into believing leftist ideology, how much they will immediately cave in on any principle when they are threatened by a charge of racism.

Today’s story, from Tablet, (via Maggie's Farm) concerns the effort by Starbucks, led by one Howard Schultz, to purge the minds of its employees of the last smidgeon of racist sentiment. You see, one manager in one Starbucks in Philadelphia supposedly asked two black male non-customers to leave the store. The men refused and the manager called the police. For her dereliction all Starbucks will be closed one day for sensitivity training. Every Starbucks employee will be forced to suffer this indoctrination because one woman made a bad call—or was it the non-customers who refused to leave when asked to do so. The leaders of Starbucks do not know that sensitivity training aggravates the problem. It creates resentment.

But, that’s not the end of the story. We will begin with Tablet’s summary:

After two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks earlier this month for doing nothing more than waiting for a man they were meeting, the coffee giant announced that it would provide employees in its 8,000 US locations with diversity training, and named the four experts it said will help lead the effort: Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, Heather McGhee of the liberal think tank Demos, and Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO.

So far, so good. Or so it seems. Look at what happened next:

But Tamika Mallory, a leader of the Women’s March and vocal supporter of Louis Farrakhan, objected, saying in a tweet that the ADL was an organization dedicated to “constantly attacking black and brown people.”

Mallory’s bigoted observation might’ve swayed someone at Starbucks: Last week, the chain announced that while the other three experts will still lead the training, Greenblatt will not, and that the ADL will now be demoted to a secondary role alongside “a diverse array of organizations and civil rights experts” that will provide limited consulting to Starbucks.

Notable anti-Semite Tamika Mallory— organizer of the Woman’s March— has the Anti-Defamation League demoted. 

Keep clearly in mind. Jonathan Greenblatt is not a member of the vast right wing conspiracy. He is a lifelong Democrat and worked for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Now, in today’s new Democratic Party he is a bigot. Why is he a bigot? Because he is Jewish, dummy? What did you expect when you place Louis Farrakhan’s protégé as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee? What did you expect when you put Jeremiah Wright’s protégé in the White House?

What does Howard Schultz say about all of this? What does today’s Democratic Party think about all of this? Clearly, the war against white privilege has morphed into a war against Jewish privilege:

... anyone following the current state of the Democratic Party shouldn’t have too much trouble piecing together the surprising dismissal of one of America’s most veteran and venerated civil rights groups. Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ executive chairman, is a lifelong Democratic supporter, and has donated heavily to Barack Obama’s campaign. And the Democratic Party these days is the sort of place where siding with Farrakhan—a man who calls Jews the chosen of Satan and accuses them of having played an active part in orchestrating the Holocaust—is a badge of radical chic, not a reason for disqualification.

Tablet concludes:

Considering the fact that Jews are, by far, the most prominent targets of hate crimes in America these days, giving in to anti-Semites and removing the ADL from a diversity training initiative of a major American corporation is particularly heinous. Shame on Starbucks for giving in to bigotry.

Tablet does not mention one other salient fact. Howard Schultz is Jewish.

[Addendum: The Daily Caller reported this morning that at least one Jewish group has stood up to Starbucks. Good.]

Educational Malpractice

You will find this hard to believe, but college has become a racket. American college, that is. 

John Leo has the story (via Maggie's Farm) and it is not encouraging.

First, he notes the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report on high school graduates. How proficient are they in math and languages? Not very proficient at all.

Whatever they are doing, America’s high schools are not teaching much of anything. Leo explains:

The nation’s public schools are a mess. Only 37 percent of 12th graders tested proficient in reading and only 25 percent in math. 

Proficient is a baseline. We are not talking about excellence… which, under these circumstances, feels like a joke.

And yet, lack of proficiency does not prevent these students from going to college:

Yet the inability to read or do math seems to be no barrier to college. Unprepared students are flooding into college in record numbers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 70 percent of white high-school graduates and 58 percent of black graduates in 2016 enrolled in college. In his syndicated column, veteran columnist Walter E. Williams asks, “If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them? It’s inconceivable that college administrators are unaware that they are admitting students who are ill-prepared and cannot perform at the college level. “

How do colleges adapt to the situation? They dumb down the curriculum, by offering a great deal of remedial education. That is, with the coursework that students should have completed in high school.

That’s why more than 200 colleges put more than half of incoming freshmen in one or more remedial classes. Colleges keep searching for unchallenging courses that barely literate students can pass.

Of course, there is also grade inflation. Anything but allowing these students to learn that they have been lied to throughout their school years. They have been lied to by teachers who puffed up their self-esteem by feeding them a diet of unearned praise.

Beyond the remedial education, colleges have instituted a series of programs in what are called “studies,” which are designed for students who could never survive in real courses.

Leo continues, quoting Williams:

Williams says one clue to badly watered-down classes is the word “studies,” as in ethnic studies, cultural studies, gender studies and American studies. And what major is most selected by ill-prepared students? Education, Williams says. When students’ SAT scores are ranked by intended majors, education ranks 26th on a list of 38. I’m not sure about what can be done about education,” Williams writes. “But the first step toward any solution is for the American people to be aware of academic fraud at every level of education.”

Of course, it’s an academic fraud. One suspects that it must be good business. Classrooms and dormitories are filled with students who are forced to borrow their way through school, only to end up, assuming that the graduate, being barely proficient.

What do you think happens when these students enter the workforce and discover that they cannot compete? Will they vote for socialist candidates who will provide them with cradle-to-grave security? Will they complain about discrimination?

America’s schools have chosen to teach children to become culture warriors, to think the politically correct thoughts, to vote for the most left-wing candidates. It is educational malpractice on a very grand scale.

Robert Mueller's Perjury Trap

The New York Times has just leaked the questions that Robert Muller wants to ask President Trump.

As a rule I do not comment on legal matters, and I will not make an exception here. I will, however, report the thinking of law professor Ann Althouse, to the effect that the questions, especially those that concern state of mind, are a perjury trap.

Althouse writes:

I cannot imagine trying to answer questions about what was going on in my mind at all these precise points in the past. Do you have access to the contents of your mind like that? Even when an interaction is happening, I don't have a clear, precise view of my own motivations and intentions. Thinking about it immediately afterwords, I might puzzle about it, even when I'm under no pressure and it's only one incident. But I would never be able — even if I believed I deserved no criminal punishment — to sit down to a high-stakes questioning about many interactions that occurred over the course of many months and purport to tell the truth about what I was thinking on all those occasions. There would be no way not to lie. Continually.

Her analysis keeps it in perspective.

China's Great Economic Reform

Some think that China is still a Communist dictatorship and thus that it must be bad. And yet, economic modernization has turned China from a third world nation where nearly everyone lived in extreme poverty to a modern,  industrialized nation where nearly no one lives in extreme poverty.

For the record, extreme poverty means living on less than $1.85 a day.

The American Enterprise Institute  (via Maggie's Farm) has the chart and the numbers. The chart, you can see, comes to us from the World Bank. 

1. Chart of the Day (above) via Max Roser showing the share of China’s population living in extreme poverty:

1981: Almost everybody (88%).
2013: Almost no one (2%).

That has to probably be the most significant reduction in poverty that has ever taken place in world history for such a large population in such a short period of time (32 years, or about one generation).

You are not going to like it, but Deng Xiaoping must be recognized as the greatest economic reformer in human history. He did it by privatizing agriculture and promoting free market capitalism. He did not, of course, promote liberal democracy and political freedom. The Chinese people have never known liberal democracy and apparently do not miss what they never had.

China clings to Mao because it values national unity and social harmony. And yet, it has repudiated the Maoist legacy and has gone from extremely impoverished to relatively prosperous in three decades. Score one for capitalism.

Xi Jinping and the Korean Spring

Not to pat myself on the back, but the latest analysis of the breakthrough on the Korean peninsula affirms what I have been saying. The key players in this negotiation are President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Evidently, the Trump-hating left believes that the credit belongs to South Korean president Moon, but the truth is, the current thaw was engineered by Trump and Xi. Kim Jong-un did not have an epiphany and suddenly decide to trade his nuclear weapons for peace and prosperity. Not at all. He recently had a very public meeting with President Xi in Beijing. At that point, I have surmised the Chinese president told Kim what to do. Naturally, the players have to hide the fact that Xi is pulling the strings— in order to allow  Kim to save face—but the reality is the reality.

Anyone who thinks that China has been sidelined, is missing the point… bigly. You need but notice Trump’s highly respectful tweets about the role that Xi has played in the current events.

First, for the first time, China did not just vote for economic sanctions in the United Nations. As was reported in the Wall Street Journal, it has enforced them.

CNBC reports:

Beijing appears to have gone well beyond U.N. sanctions on its unruly neighbor, reducing its total imports from North Korea in the first two months this year by 78.5 and 86.1 percent in value — a decline that began in late 2017, according to the latest trade data from China. Its exports to the North also dropped by 33 percent to 34 percent both months.

The figures suggest that instead of being sidelined while North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made his surprising diplomatic overtures to Seoul and Washington, China's sustained game of hardball on trade with Pyongyang going back at least five months may have been the decisive factor in forcing Kim's hand.

With China enforcing sanctions, North Korea’s economy cannot survive:

Trade with China is absolutely crucial to North Korea's survival.

It accounts for the largest share of the North's dealings with the outside world and provides a lifeline to many of the necessities Pyongyang relies on to keep its nation fed and its economy from breaking down. Estimates vary, but it is believed that roughly half of all transactions in the North Korean economy are made in foreign currencies, with the Chinese yuan being the most common.

That gives Beijing tremendous leverage, though for political and national security reasons it has generally been reluctant to exert too much pressure on Pyongyang.

Alex Wolf, an economist with Aberdeen Standard Investments, offers his analysis:

— China's exports of refined petroleum have collapsed over the past five months — to an annual rate of less than 4 percent of what it exported last year. With the pace on a downward trend, he believes, total exports could actually fall further.

— North Korean steel imports from China have also collapsed in 2018, and the same goes for cars. Wolf notes that it's unclear if China is blocking such exports or North Korea simply can't afford them. But either one, he wrote in a recent report for the company, would be a clear signal the North's economy is "under a great deal of stress."

Wolf concludes that China wants to play a central, albeit behind-the-scenes role in resolving the crisis:

"While China's role over the past few months has often been overlooked or little understood, it appears a strategy could be emerging: China wants to play a central role in 'resolving' this crisis, but wants to do it on its own terms," he wrote. "It's increasingly clear that Chinese pressure is a driving force and China will play a central role in any future talks."

Georgetown economist William Brown concurs:

Georgetown University economist William Brown said he believes the North's current account deficit has risen dramatically since the strengthening last November of sanctions on North Korean exports by China, which he said are by now "certainly biting."

"Why is Kim venturing his offer now? My impression is he is feeling very strong pressure from China's virtual embargo on North Korea's exports, and what he must see as a gradual ratcheting down of needed imports, even petroleum," Brown wrote in a recent blog post. "This is an enormous economic hit of a sort the country has never had to deal with on this scale."

As mentioned in a prior post, the question remaining is: what does Xi want in return for his cooperation? I suspect that he made a deal with Trump. And I suspect that it had something to do with Taiwan. Time will tell.

The Obama Foreign Policy Record

It’s never a bad idea to look at the record. It’s certainly not a bad idea, at the current remove, to examine the Obama foreign policy record. One reason the progressive left has its knickers in a twist over Donald Trump is that it must, no matter the price, defend the indefensible Obama record.

Where, pray tell, didn’t Obama fail on foreign policy?

Over at the Powerline blog, John Hinkeraker lays out the case:

With today’s bombshell about Iran’s ongoing nuclear weapons program, the wreckage of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is coming into focus. Syria: the “red line” fiasco, with hundreds of thousands killed. North Korea: a do-nothing policy that brought America’s West Coast perilously close to coming under nuclear threat. Iran: a deal that would have been foolish even if the mullahs hadn’t cheated, $100 billion and sanctions relief now, in exchange for promises that Iran could walk away from at will. We now know that the deal was even worse than that.

Those were the biggest disasters, but not the only ones. Libya: incredibly, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton participated in the overthrow of a dictator without having a plan for what would come after. The result was a failed state, and a terrorist haven. Cuba and Venezuela: while the disastrous condition of both socialist countries is not Obama’s fault, his admiration for, and coddling of, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez contributed to sentencing the people of those countries to another generation of poverty and oppression. China: Obama failed to stand up to China’s military expansionism, or to its aggressive trade and economic policies that cost American companies many billions of dollars. Israel: Obama deliberately downgraded relations with one of our most important allies, and shamefully meddled in an Israeli national election in hopes of electing a Prime Minister as spineless as himself.

It doesn’t look very good. Of course, we are not allowed to talk about it. And that is why we ought to raise the issue. Pretending that it was all great because the Messiah did it puts reason in a coma. Besides, it’s grossly condescending not to hold Obama to objective standards of success and failure.