The AP reported on a promising development. A Taliban leader says that girls and women should be allowed to get an education. But don’t celebrate until there is an actual policy change.
A senior Taliban figure has urged the group’s leader to scrap education bans on Afghan women and girls, saying there is no excuse for them, in a rare public rebuke of government policy.
Sher Abbas Stanikzai, political deputy at the Foreign Ministry, made the remarks in a speech on Saturday in southeastern Khost province.
He told an audience at a religious school ceremony there was no reason to deny education to women and girls, “just as there was no justification for it in the past and there shouldn’t be one at all.”
The government has barred females from education after sixth grade. Last September, there were reports authorities had also stopped medical training and courses for women.
In Afghanistan, women and girls can only be treated by female doctors and health professionals. Authorities have yet to confirm the medical training ban.
“We call on the leadership again to open the doors of education,” said Stanikzai in a video shared by his official account on the social platform X. “We are committing an injustice against 20 million people out of a population of 40 million, depriving them of all their rights. This is not in Islamic law, but our personal choice or nature.”
Stanikzai was once the head of the Taliban team in talks that led to the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.
It is not the first time he has said that women and girls deserve to have an education. He made similar remarks in September 2022, a year after schools closed for girls and months and before the introduction of a university ban.
Think about it: in Afghanistan, women can be treated only by female doctors, but women are not permitted to study beyond sixth grade. How can women get any healthcare if women are not allowed to study and become doctors?
Don’t the Taliban care about the well-being of their mothers, their sisters, their daughters?
Reuters reports that Trump sympathizes with Putin’s desire to keep Ukraine out of NATO. Presumably that sentiment justifies Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago and its destruction of homes, schools, churches, the power grid, hospitals, and entire towns and cities.
As usual, Trump can be counted on to defend his dear friend Putin. He is indeed Putin’s puppet. Trump probably doesn’t know that Finland and Sweden shed their neutrality and joined NATO after Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Trump is sad that he won’t have a chance to meet his good buddy Vlad before Inauguration Day.
Reuters reported:
WASHINGTON, Jan 7 (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday he sympathized with the Russian position that Ukraine should not be part of NATO, and he lamented that he will not meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before his inauguration.
Speaking at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump also blamed outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden for allegedly changing the U.S. position on NATO membership for Ukraine…
Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have officially expressed support for Ukraine’s eventual membership since the Bucharest Summit of 2008, and the Biden administration continues to support Ukraine’s eventual NATO accession, though Ukraine has never been extended an invitation.
Trump’s aides and allies generally oppose NATO membership for Ukraine, at least in the foreseeable future, seeing it as an unnecessary provocation toward Moscow.
Sure, why provoke Putin unnecessarily? He might go to war. Uh. He did.
What will Trump do and say if Putin invades Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia? They are already members of NATO. Putin has said that he wants to rebuild the Soviet empire. He’s a big man. We can’t offend him.
Michael Burry, a woodworking teacher at a private trade school in Boston, had the thrill of working on the restoration of Notre Dame. The Roth Bennett Street School was founded in 1881 to teach immigrants the skills they needed to get gainful employment. Today, it operates as a school to teach hand crafts like violin making, bookbinding, and furniture making.
How did an American earn the great privilege of working on the restoration of Notre Dame? Read on.
Michael Burrey, a teacher at North Bennet Street School, recently worked on the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris. DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF
In 2019, as Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was burning, Michael Burrey was 3,000 miles away, in the North End of Boston, watching the television coverage with his students and asking himself a question: What can we do to help?
It’s a thought many people had. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of individual donors would contribute toward the cathedral’s reconstruction. But Burrey was in a unique position — he’s an expert in medieval carpentry who spent 11 years as an interpretive artisan at what was formerly called Plimoth Plantation, and he is currently a teacher at the North Bennet Street School, one of the country’s leading traditional trade schools.
The spire of the Notre Dame Cathedral collapsed as the landmark was engulfed in flames in central Paris on April 15, 2019.AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Soon Burrey would begin a journey that would end with him becoming one of just a handful of American artisans to work on the French team that completed a stunning reconstruction of one of the world’s great cultural artifacts.
“It’s the pinnacle of my career,” Burrey said recently, following the grand reopening of the cathedral on Dec. 8. “I have such great appreciation for being able to be a part of the group effort that demonstrated that the traditional trades that built Notre Dame 800 years ago are still here, still viable and teachable and learnable for people today.”
His work on the project was made possible by Handshouse Studio, a nonprofit based in Norwell that focuses on building large historical objects as educational projects. In the past, the studio has recreated a Revolutionary War-era wooden submarine as well as a 17th century Polish synagogue.
Burrey has been collaborating with Handshouse for a quarter century, and they, too, were looking for ways to help Notre Dame. Thus, the Handshouse Studio Notre Dame Project was born.
The first thing they did, both as an educational exercise and out of a show of solidarity with the French, was build a full-scale model of one of the wooden trusses that supported the roof of Notre Dame. These were the hidden structures inside the massive cathedral where the devastating fire started.
Burrey brought a team of students from his restoration carpentry class atNorth Bennet Street to Washington, D.C., in 2021. For two weeks they worked with skilled traditional craftsmen from the Timber Framers Guild to build the massive wooden structure, known as Choir Truss #6, working all the way from white oak logs hewed with broad axes to the finished product.
“It was a way for us to say that building something as it was originally made is not only possible but also important,” said Marie Brown, executive director of Handshouse Studios. The original hope, she said,was that they might donate the truss to the French for inclusion in the cathedral. But something else happened, something even cooler.
The build was so successful that the two architects overseeing the reconstruction of Notre Dame, Rémi Fromont and Philippe Villeneuve, traveled to the United States to see the structure. As a result, they invited two American timber framers to join the reconstruction team in France. One invitation went to Michael Burrey. The other went to Jackson Dubois, a Washington state man who is president of the Timber Framers Guild.
For three months in the summer of 2023, Burrey and Dubois joined 18 carpenters from a French company called Asselin working on the wooden components of the Notre Dame spire. They operated out of the medieval town of Thouars in western France, about three hours from Paris, and Burrey worked on the decorative elements of the spire — the quatrefoils, trefoils, railings, and dormers. There were language barriers, Burrey said, but the one thing they had in common was that they all spoke carpentry.
“[Burrey] called me a couple times from France and was telling me about what he was working on, where he was sitting, what he was seeing in this medieval town,” said Claire Fruitman, the provost and interim president of North Bennet Street School.
Burrey (third from left) joined French carpenters for a picture. The French carpenters built the quatrefoils for the nave of Notre Dame cathedral. MICHAEL BURREY
“No one ever wants any sort of heritage to have something go wrong,” she added. “But when it does it’s amazing to say we have people who can fix it and bring it back to life, and the lessons he learned over there are things he’s brought back into the classroom for the next generation of preservationists.”
Burrey, who lives in Plymouth, was not the only local craftsperson to work on the project. Hank Silver, who owns Ironwood Timberworks in Hatfield, worked as lead carpenter for the nave, the central, large space of the cathedral that accommodates the congregation during religious services. Silver declined an interview request, but told Elle Décor that “for someone like me, being able to work on this building, which is the birthplace of this technique, is particularly meaningful. When I look at Notre Dame, I will be able to say, ‘I built that.’”
Burrey, meanwhile, has not been to the cathedral since it reopened, but he said he has marveled at the photos of the completed work.
“There’s nothing but a smile on my face, and a feeling of deep appreciation for being part of a group effort, when I think of everybody coming together to get things back the way they should be,” he said.
Several days ago, Elon Musk tweeted his endorsement of an extremist political party in Germany, the AfD, which is known for its xenophobic and hateful views. A number of pundits said he had thrown his support to a Neo-Nazi party. J.D. Vance soon added his praise of the extremist party.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a scholar of extremism, wrote at the MSNBC website, about the alarm bells that Musk and Vance set off.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk posted on X, prompting backlash from conservative and mainstream German leaders and the global Jewish community about a key Trump adviser’s endorsement of a party that has flirted with Nazi and white supremacist slogans and espoused dehumanizing and hateful rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims. In the wake of the criticism, Musk doubled down, writing the next day that “AfD is the only hope for Germany.”
Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions.
Vance’s more tacit endorsement for AfD came in the form of a post responding to claims that AfD is dangerous. “It’s so dangerous for people to control their borders,” Vance tweeted sarcastically Saturday, implying support for the party’s anti-immigration positions. “So so dangerous. The dangerous level is off the charts.”
Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions. The AfD has called for mass deportations, argued that children with disabilities should be removed from regular schools, and runs social media ads blaming immigrants for crimeand sexual violence. One anti-immigrant ad run by the AfD showed the belly of a pregnant white woman with the phrase “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.” Another campaign billboard used a 19th century painting of a slave market — depicting a nude, white woman having her teeth inspected by turban-clad, brown men — to warn that Europe could become “Eurabia,” a reference to a conspiracy theory favored by white supremacists.
To finish reading, open the link.
Trump’s advisers are showing their hand awfully early. Know them by those they admire.
Did you see Trump’s bizarre Christmas message? He made outlandish claims, lied, and threatened the sovereignty of other nations. Heather Cox Richardson puts his boasts into perspective. All in all, the prospects are alarming.
Trump is first and foremost an entertainer. He spent many evenings watching wrestling matches. And he had that big role on The Apprentice, which gave him a fake persona as a tough manager. He is not noted for his knowledge of domestic or foreign policy. He clearly knows nothing about history. His understanding of the Constitution seems to be hearsay. Read this post and tell me: is he ignorant, stupid, or senile?
She writes:
It is starting to seem like the best way to interpret social media posts from President-elect Donald Trump is through the lens of professional wrestling. Never a true athletic competition—although it certainly required athletic training—until the 1980s, professional wrestling depended on “kayfabe,” the shared agreement among audience and actors that they would pretend the carefully constructed script and act were real.
But as Abraham Josephine Reisman explained in the New York Times last year, Vince and Linda McMahon pushed to move professional wrestling into entertainment to avoid health regulations and the taxes imposed on actual sporting events. That shift damaged the profession until in the mid-1990s, wrestlers and promoters began to mix the fake world of wrestling with reality, bringing real-life tensions to the ring in what might or might not have been real. “Suddenly,” Reisman wrote, “the fun of the match had everything to do with decoding it.”
Nothing was off-limits, and the more outrageous the storylines, the better. “[F]ans would give it their full attention because they couldn’t always figure out if what they were seeing was real or not.” This “neokayfabe” “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.”
Reisman concluded that producers and consumers of neokayfabe “tend to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.” In that, they echo the world identified by German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,” she wrote, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
Yesterday, on Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah, Trump posted a “Merry Christmas to all” message that went on to claim falsely that Chinese soldiers are operating the Panama Canal, that President Joe Biden “has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.” The heart of his message, though, was that the U.S. should take over both the Panama Canal and Canada, and that Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark, “is needed by the United States for National Security purposes,” and that “the people of Greenland…want the U.S. to be there, and we will!”
Trump’s sudden pronouncements threatening three other countries—he has been quiet about Mexico since its president pushed back on his early threats—have media outlets scrambling to explain what he’s up to. They have explained that this might be a way for him to demonstrate that his “America First” ideology, which has always embraced isolation, will actually wield power against other countries; or suggested that his claim against Panama is part of a strategy to counter China; or pointed out that global warming has sparked competition to gain an advantage in the Arctic.
The new focus on threatening other countries, virtually never mentioned during the 2024 campaign, has driven out of the news Trump’s actual campaign promise. Trump ran on the promise that he would lower prices, especially of groceries. Yet in mid-December he suggested in an interview with Time magazine that he doesn’t really expect to lower prices. That promise seems to have been part of a performance to attract voters, abandoned now with a new performance that may or may not be real.
There is also little coverage of the larger implications of Trump’s threats to invade other countries. Central to the rules-based international order constructed in the decades after World War II is that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty. Between 1942 and 1945, forty-seven nations signed the Declaration by United Nations, the treaty that formalized the alliance that stood against the fascist Axis powers. That treaty declared the different countries would not sign separate peace agreements with Germany, Italy, or Japan.
They would work together to create a world based on the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which called for the territorial integrity of nations and the restoration of self-government to countries where it had been lost, and for global cooperation for economic and social progress. In 1945, delegates from fifty nations met in San Francisco to establish a permanent forum for international cooperation.
What emerged was the United Nations, whose charter states that the organization is designed “to maintain international peace and security” by working together to stop “acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace,” and to settle international disputes without resort to war. “The Organization is based on the principle of sovereign equality of all its Members,” the charter reads. “All members shall refrain…from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations,” it reads.
Russian president Vladimir Putin is eager to tear down the international rules-based order established by the United Nations and protected by organizations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). His invasion of neighboring countries—Georgia in 2008, then Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022—demonstrates his desire to return the world to a time in which bigger countries could gobble up smaller ones, the ideology that after the invention of modern weaponry meant world wars.
On Christmas Day, Russia fired more than 70 missiles and more than 100 drones at Ukraine, targeting its energy infrastructure. The Ukrainian forces shot down more than 50 of the missiles, but the attack damaged power plants, cutting electricity to different regions. Just two years ago, Ukraine began to celebrate Christmas on December 25, following the Gregorian calendar rather than the less accurate Julian calendar still favored by the Russian Orthodox Church for religious holidays. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said the change would allow Ukrainians to “abandon the Russian heritage” of celebrating Christmas in January.
Also yesterday, an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia failed, following a series of cuts to telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea in November. Today, Finland seized an oil tanker it believes cut the cables yesterday, noting that the tanker may be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” that is waging a shadow campaign against NATO nations at the same time that it is evading sanctions against Russia.
In a joint statement today, the European Commission, which is the government of the European Union, “strongly condemn[ed]” the attacks on Europe’s critical infrastructure and said it would be proposing further sanctions to target the Russia’s shadow fleet, “which threatens security and the environment, while funding Russia’s war budget.” It emphasized Europe’s commitment to international cooperation.
Also yesterday, an Azerbaijan Airlines jet traveling from the Azerbaijan capital of Baku on its way to Chechnya crashed near Aktau, Kazakhstan, killing at least 38 of the 67 people on board. Nailia Bagirova and Gleb Stolyarov of Reuters reported today that a preliminary investigation by Azerbaijan officials suggests that Russian air defenses shot the plane down.
Newsweek’s Maya Mehrara reported that on Russian media last night, a propagandist close to Putin cheered on Trump’s demand for Greenland. “This is especially interesting because it drives a wedge between him and Europe, it undermines the world architecture, and opens up certain opportunities for our foreign policy,” nationalist political scientist Sergey Mikheyev said.
Mikheyev supports Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine and has called for Russia to add to its “empire” not only Finland and Poland, but also Alaska, Hawaii, and California. Last night he explained that Trump’s approach would undermine the rules-based order that has shaped the world since World War II. If Trump “really wants to stop the third world war,” he said, “the way out is simple: dividing up the world into spheres of influence.”
Mehrara noted that academic Stanislav Tkachenko said that Russia should “thank Donald Trump, who is teaching us a new diplomatic language.” He continued: “That is, to say it like it is. Maybe we won’t carve up the world like an apple, but we can certainly outline the parts of the world where our interests cannot be questioned.”
But yesterday in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, Armenians and Azerbaijanis joined the protesters who are filling the streets to protest the government’s attempt to tie Georgia more closely to Putin’s Russia. They hope to turn Georgia toward Europe instead.
And President Joe Biden issued a statement concerning Russia’s Christmas bombardment of Ukraine to cut heat and electricity for Ukrainians in the dead of winter. “Let me be clear,” he said, “the Ukrainian people deserve to live in peace and safety, and the United States and the international community must continue to stand with Ukraine until it triumphs over Russia’s aggression.”
Tom Loveless has been analyzing international tests for many years. Before his retirement, he directed the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Previously he was a professor at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University. And before that, he taught sixth grade in the public schools of California.
The news from TIMSS is that scores fell. Was the decline an after effect of the pandemic? We don’t know. There is much speculation but no certain answers.
Loveless writes:
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is given every four years in 4th and 8th grade math and science. Seventy-two countries participated in 2023. Scores are typically released in December of the year following test administration.International assessments are complicated by the sheer scope of the enterprise, including the fact that schools in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have different school calendars. The 2023 scores were released on December 4, 2024.
U.S. scores fell sharply from 2019 to 2023, with the declines reaching conventional levels of statistical significance in math, but not science, at both grade levels. Comparing pre- and post-pandemic scores on the same test heightened interest in what the 2023 TMSS would show. TIMSS scores are only one data point, but the 2023 results reinforce other trends evident in the other two assessments that are designed to produce valid estimates of achievement at the national level: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Two trends stand out.
1. Larger negative effects in math than in other subjects. The most prominent explanation is that learning math is more dependent on formal instruction in schools.
2. Gaps increased between higher and lower scoring groups along several demographic dimensions, including race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and the 90th and 10th percentiles (high and low achievers).Note that many of the gaps began widening before the pandemic, but Covid seemed to exacerbate thetrends.
In addition to the gaps that continued to widen, a gap that had disappeared in earlier TIMSS assessments suddenly re-appeared, the gap between male and female scores. In 8th grade math, for example, U.S. score differences by gender were statistically significant in 1999 and 2003, fell short of significance from 2007-2019, then widened substantially in 2023. The 14-point scale score difference recorded in 2023 (males, 495, and females, 481) is the largest U.S. gender gap in 8th grade math since TIMSS began in 1995.
The re-emergence of the gender gap is unique to TIMSS. Results of the 2024 NAEP are scheduled for release on January 29, 2025. We will see if NAEP confirms or contradicts the trends discussed here. There are reasons to believe NAEP will offer a more optimistic snapshot of U.S. achievement. First, the scores were collected a year after TIMSS, allowing for an additional year of pandemic recovery. Second, state assessments administered in 2024 have generally shown improvement, albeit at a slower pace than many hoped for or expected.
Paul Cobaugh retired from the military after a 19-year career. He served in Special Operations and received multiple awards for his service. He focused on mitigating adversarial influence and advancing US objectives by way of influence. Throughout his career he has focused on the centrality of influence in modern conflict whether it be from extremist organisations or state actors employing influence against the US and our Allies. He writes at “Truth About Threats,” where this post appeared. He writes here about the dangers of ignoring history. To read the complete post, open the link.
Cobaugh writes:
As we get ready to transition into 2025 and a new Trump administration, let’s take a good look at the sheer, staggering idiocy of his campaign pledge to start a global tariff war. We’ve been here before and it was called the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It was a primary factor that led us into a Great Depression, a World War and the most disruptive period in modern US and world history.
For those that pay attention, history is often painfully instructive if left unheeded. It wasn’t just Tariffs in the US of the 1930s that laid devastating economic pain onto the backs of America’s working classes. Unregulated and poorly regulated greed contributed their fair share as well. The 1930s all together have some pronounced parallels to the America we now live in. Tariff wars are but one of those parallels. All combined, those same parallels represent acute threats to not only working-class Americans but to our republic itself.
During the Roaring Twenties, post WW I, America was prosperous, hopeful and on the rise. The Stock Market crash of 1929 and the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act brought all of this to an end, not only for the US but the globe. The Great Depression ushered in the 1940s , which saw the globe fully immersed in WW II and the beginning of the Cold War. Twenty years of intense global upheaval literally shook the world. Nothing would ever be the same again. If you consider the Great Depression as a precursor to WW II, then Smoot-Hawley was a primary cause of the Great Depression. Let that sink in.
The political landscape of the 1930s, was as diverse and active as at any time in our history. The Great Depression spawned a very large number of progressive movements and even a fairly strong socialist movement, both in pursuit of protecting the workers who had suffered badly from a lack of employment.
Today, diverse and contrary political movements include many as fascist as those of Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan, or as forward-leaning in support of American workers as today’s progressives. Unlike the 1930s, today’s political landscape does not include the record high 900,000 enrolled in Socialist movements that we saw up until 1932. By the late 1930s, the socialists were mostly gone but the American far-right movements lasted up until the day that America declared war on Germany, post Pearl Harbor. Today, the fascists still exist in the form of MAGA and related movements, while that socialism is still mostly absent from any significance on the American political landscape. Those on today’s political spectrum that work to protect workers almost always come from the political left, progressive or otherwise.
Smoot-Hawley was a bill designed in theory to protect American agriculture from foreign competitors. In the end, it hurt both deeply. This protectionist measure also played out against a backdrop of a deep American commitment to isolationism, as the rest of the world slowly but unstoppably marched towards a world war.
The Hawley- Smoot Tariff and
the Great Depression, 1928– 1932
In the 1920s, the focus of trade policy shifted from protecting manufacturing to protecting agriculture. Congress struggled to fi nd the right
way to assist farmers and relieve farm distress, turning to a tariff revision
after President Coolidge vetoed price- support legislation. The resulting
Hawley- Smoot tariff of 1930 proved to be the most controversial piece of
trade legislation since the Tariff of Abominations in 1828. The subject of
heated debate during its difficult passage through Congress, the legislation
helped push the average tariff on dutiable imports to near- record levels just
as the economy was sliding into the Great Depression. The early 1930s
saw an unprecedented contraction of world trade, during which time many
other countries retaliated against the United States and significantly increased their own trade barriers. The Hawley- Smoot tariff had far- reaching
consequences and it marked the last time that Congress ever set duties in
the entire tariff schedule.
- Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy
- This PDF is a selection from a published volume from the National Bureau
of Economic Research
- Volume Author/Editor: Douglas A. Irwin
- November 2017
The bottom line to Smoot-Hawley and presumably President-elect Trump’s threats against our neighbors and most other nations, is that tariffs start tariff wars, in which there are no winners. Also, it is working Americans that do the overwhelming majority of the suffering. At the moment, toxic oligarchy is keeping the prices of goods and services artificially inflated. No, not inflation, but just plain and simple, old-fashioned price-gouging.
There is legitimate fear of Trump’s approach to the economy. First of all, he’s inheriting President Biden’s hot, well-grounded economy, just like he did in 2016 from the Obama administration. He has already told us that he doesn’t think it will be easy to lower consumer prices and as we all have learned during his 2018 losing trade war with China, it is the American people who pay the cost of tariffs.
Introduction to the research from the National Bureau of Economic Research
“The ghost of Smoot-Hawley seems to haunt President Trump.”1 As fears of a trade war between the U.S. and China grew after the U.S. presidential election of 2016, many commentators drew precisely this link between the events of 1930 and today. And the consensus was that the trade wars of the 1930s were an ominous portent of what might await the world if Donald Trump’s protectionist impulses were not checked
The conclusion of the research from the National Bureau of Economic Research
President Trump’s recent use of tariffs as a “weapon” to cudgel other nations into changing their trade policies has renewed interest in understanding what trade wars are and how they affect flows of goods and services across borders. As our research indicates, the current trade war was by no means the first one initiated by the U.S. The passage of Smoot-Hawley led to direct retaliation by important U.S. trade partners. Countries responded to its passage by imposing tariffs 24 targeting U.S. exports. Although protectionism was on the rise in the 1930s, we collect novel data and design empirical tests which show that retaliation against Smoot-Hawley was distinctive: it involved policies specifically directed at the U.S., the initial provocateur.
Using a new data set on quarterly bilateral trade flows as well as detailed information on who filed official protests during the legislative debate over the Tariff Act of 1930 and who (later) retaliated, gravity model estimates demonstrate that U.S. exports were severely affected by the Smoot-Hawley trade war. Even after controlling for financial crises, the effects of the global decline in aggregate demand, and the overall decline in partner countries’ imports from all sources, U.S. exports fell substantially. If they had just fallen in line with the overall reduction in imports in each country, we would have found no effect: instead, they fell disproportionately, by between 15 and 33 percent, depending on the specification and the countries involved. By examining the effects for protestors as well as retaliators, we are able to more extensively assess the retaliation against Smoot-Hawley: this was not limited to those countries traditionally regarded as “retaliators”.
Product-level regression estimates confirm that retaliators were strategic in their response to Smoot-Hawley (as they have been in more recent trade wars), choosing to bludgeon key U.S. exports differentially. Fast-growing U.S. exports of automobiles appear to have been particularly targeted by U.S. trade partners. Our results suggest that MFN constraints did not prevent countries from effectively retaliating. In addition to strategically targeted tariffs, retaliation involved such non-tariff measures as quotas, boycotts and increased sales resistance to American goods. Our results show that this retaliation was extremely effective in reducing U.S. exports. In March 2018, Peter Navarro famously predicted that no country would retaliate against U.S. tariffs. 29 The evidence from the 1930s suggests it is a mistake, even for a country as wealthy and powerful as the United States, to assume that it can engage in a trade war with impunity.
- THE SMOOT-HAWLEY TRADE WAR- NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
- Kris James Mitchener
- Kirsten Wandschneider
- Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke
- March 2021
Most families do not have room in their budgets to fight trade wars that make the oligarchical elite, wealthier, while their budget becomes overburdened because of tariffs. This is why tariffs are often described as a “tax” on consumers.
Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher, writes here about Scandinavian concepts that she admires. She points to the link between happiness and well-being, which we as a nation seem determined to ignore. These days, some people think it’s “woke” to want all children to be well-fed, well-cared for, their basic needs met. I’m willing to take that chance and that label. Call me woke.
She writes:
The ubiquitous FB meme:
In Iceland, books are exchanged as Christmas Eve presents, then you spend the rest of the night in bed reading them and eating chocolate. The tradition is part of a season called Jolabokafload, the Christmas Book flood, because Iceland, which publishes more books per capita than any other country, sells most of its books between September and November, due to people preparing for the upcoming holiday.
Nobody ever responds:That sounds awful! My family prefers watching our individual TVs!
Thanks to the Jolabokaflod, books still matter in Iceland, they get read and talked about. Excitement fills the air. Every reading is crowded, every print-run is sold. Being a writer in Iceland you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions, they love them or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.
“The Danish art of contentment, comfort, and connection…a practical way of creating sanctuary in the middle of very real life.”
Hygge (hoo-ga), which has no direct translation into English—surprise!—is many things to many people: Woolen socks. Candles and other gentle light. Board games. Comfortable couches and cozy quilts. Warm drinks.
Although hygge seems to have Scandinavian roots, it’s not exclusively a cold-climate thing, evidently. A rustic cottage on a lake, with its beat-up furniture, mildewed paperbacks from the 1950s and second-hand bathing suits is very hygge, according to Meik Wiking, author of “The Little Book of Hygge”and, not coincidentally, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. The mere fact that there is a Happiness Research Institute, somewhere in the world, makes me—well, happy….
Perhaps Scandinavians are better able to appreciate the small, hygge things in life because they already have all the big ones nailed down: free university education, social security, universal health care, efficient infrastructure, paid family leave, and at least a month of vacation a year. With those necessities secured, according to Wiking, Danes are free to become “aware of the decoupling between wealth and wellbeing.”
That’s where our intentionality lies in the U.S., where we’re spending our hard-earned tax dollars—canned curricula designed to raise test scores and alternative school governance models, endless expensive tests—when over 100,000 New York City schoolchildren were homeless last year. According to former Senator Orin Hatch, we don’t even have money for poor children’s basic health care. As a nation, we have linked simple human well-being to wealth, and sealed it with the tamper-proof cap of low opportunity.
May you live in interesting times! We do, and the times will grow even more interesting as Trump directs threats at other world leaders, reminding us that his “art of the deal” consists of bullying, bluster, blather and lying
President-elect Donald Trump is openly discussing provocative aspirations for U.S. territorial expansion as he prepares to return to the White House, warning about taking over the Panama Canal and wresting control of Greenland from Denmark.
His comments, delivered in public remarks and social-media posts on Sunday, come after he recently trolled Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by suggesting that Canada should become the 51st state and referring to Trudeau as a governor. During the recent presidential campaign, Trump said he would deploy the U.S. military to impose a naval embargo on Mexican cartels and order the Pentagon to use American special forces to take down cartel leaders.
Taken together, the president-elect’s broadsides signal that he will pursue a confrontational foreign-policy agenda, leveraging unconventional threats and pointed demands in an attempt to gain advantage over allies and adversaries alike. Trump is often prone to provocation, and it wasn’t immediately clear if he would try to follow through on his demands. But if he does, he is likely to face stiff resistance from world leaders, who would object to any effort to undermine their sovereignty.
“We’re being ripped off at the Panama Canal like we’re being ripped off everywhere else,” Trump said at a conservative conference in Phoenix on Sunday, demanding the return of the state-run canal to the U.S. “We will never, never let it fall into the wrong hands….”
Later Sunday, in a statement announcing his pick for U.S. ambassador to Denmark, Trump signaled his continued interest in taking control of Greenland. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump said. Denmark controls the self-governing island.
Timothy Snyder is the conscience of America. He has written books on tyranny, on democracy, and on the history of Europe. He cares passionately about the survival of democracy.
Imagine that the day has come for your brain surgery. You are lying, immobilized and vulnerable, on the operating table. Something is wrong, but you hope that it can be repaired. As the anesthesia sets in, you reflect. To be sure, your brain hasn’t always performed the way you wished it had. You have made some mistakes, and done some stupid things, regrettable things, wrong things. But still, it is the brain that allows for a reconsideration of all that, to adjust, to have some hope and some possibility of doing better next time. Your brain keeps you going, keeps you in touch with the world. Hopefully, yours can be repaired, and you can get back to thinking, being, becoming. You could get better. As darkness descends, you catch a glimpse of a person dressed as a surgeon, approaching your head with a knife and a smile. It’s Tulsi Gabbard. Hope gives way to horror.
This dark fantasy suggests, on a very small scale, the national trauma that lies before us. Gabbard is Donald Trump’s choice to operate American intelligence. In the intelligence system, a kind of national brain, the Director of National Intelligence oversees and coordinates the work of agencies charged with knowing the world, protecting the integrity of digital systems, anticipating and preventing terrorism, and evaluating national security threats. Gabbard is the opposite of qualified for such a role: she is a disinformer and as an apologist for the war crimes of dictatorships.
Gabbard appears on the world stage as a defender of a million violent deaths.
She is an apologist for two of the great atrocities of the century: the Russian-Syrian suppression of the Syrian opposition to the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which has taken about half a million lives, most of them civilians, some of them by chemical weapons; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also taken about half a million lives, and has brought the destruction of whole cities, the kidnapping of children, mass torture, and the large-scale execution of civilians.
That is it. That is her profile. Disinformer and apologist. Beyond the United States, in the larger world that US intelligence agencies are tasked to understand, she is associated with her pro-Assad and pro-Putin positions. (In third place, I suppose, would be her propensity to provide the Chinese state media with useful sound bites).
Until 2014, Gabbard said nothing remarkable about foreign affairs. In 2015, just before Putin intervened to save Assad, she began her extraordinary journey of apology for atrocity. In September of that year, Putin sent Russian mercenaries, soldiers, and airmen to Syria to defend Assad. The great advantage Putin could bring to Assad was to multiply the regime’s air strikes, which were turned against hospitals and other civilian targets. Hospitals were and remain a Russian specialty.
In June 2015, as a congresswoman from Hawai’i, Gabbard visited Syria. During her stay, she was introduced to girls who had been burned from head to toe by a regime air strike. Her reaction to the situation, according to her translator, was to try to persuade the girls that they had been injured not by Syrian forces, but by the resistance. But this was impossible. Only Syria (at the time of her visit) and Russia (beginning weeks later) were flying planes and dropping bombs.
Either Gabbard was catastrophically uninformed about the most basic elements of the theater of war she was visiting, or she was consciously spreading disinformation. Those are the two possibilities. The first is disqualifying; the second is worse.
And if she was spreading disinformation consciously, she was also doing so with a pathological ruthlessness. Anyone who would lie to the child victims of an air strike to their burned faces would lie to anyone about anything. In January 2017, she visited Syria again, this time to speak to Assad. She began thereafter to deny that his regime had used chemical weapons on its own people. That was a very big lie.
In Washington, in speeches in Congress, Gabbard showed an uncanny ability to turn almost any issue into a justification for defending the Assad regime. In 2016, concern for Christians in Syria was a pretext to defend the Assad regime. In 2017, she presented worries about terrorism as a reason to defend of the Assad regime. In 2018, the anniversary of 9/11 was her prompt for defending the Assad regime. In 2019, she found her way from the genocide of Armenians a century earlier to the need to defend the Assad regime. She even worked hard to segue from the lack of affordable housing in Hawai’i to the need to defend the Assad regime. Gabbard’s support of Assad was so well known that her colleagues, Republican and Democratic alike, were worriedthat she would reveal the identity of a Syrian photographer brought to Congress to testify about Assad’s atrocities.
For Russia, Syria was a testing ground for Ukraine. The atrocities perpetrated by Russians in Syria were repeated in Ukraine. In 2021, the largest donor to Gabbard’s PAC was an apologist for Putin. When the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February of the following year, Gabbard, a consumer of Russian propaganda, was immediately ready as a channel for the Russian line, including obvious Russian disinformation. Again and again, over and over, her public statements were strikingly similar to Putin’s,
Amidst the farrago of lies that Russia used to justify its full-scale invasion invasion was the completely bogus claim that Ukraine was site of American biolabs that were testing which infections would be most harmful to Slavs (and thus Russians). This lie originates in Russia and was spread by Russian media, along with some Chinese and Syrian echo chambers, and with a set of western helpers — one of whom was Tulsi Gabbard. She also urged, “in the spirit of Aloha,” that Ukraine react to the invasion by surrendering its sovereignty to Russia. She later justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by the notion, common in Moscow, that Russia was the victim of American attempts to overthrow Putin. She was specifically thankedby Russian state media for defending Russian war propaganda.
To be sure, the wars and the regions are complex. Even if Assad falls, as now looks increasingly likely, Syria will be a mess, with unsavory and dangerous people in power. There is, of course, room for disagreement about American foreign policy, including with respect to Assad and Putin and their twinned atrocities. That can all be taken for granted, and provides no excuse whatever for Gabbard’s very unusual behavior. It is strange, to say the least, that Gabbard says nothing about these regimes that they have not first said about themselves, and that she uses her platform to spread their own very specific disinformation.
One feature of disinformation is that it is factually incorrect: and so the very least (or most?) that can be said about Gabbard is that she is consistently wrong on matters of the greatest moral and political significance. But the other element of disinformation is that it is consciously and maliciously designed to confuse. These memes (biolabs!) are tested and perfected before they are released. Disinformation is the opposite of an innocent mistake: it is concocted to make rational reflection and sensible policy difficult. Disinformation, in other words, is a weapon that one regime tries to spread within another society or — in the dream of a hostile spy chief — within another society’s intelligence service. That is part of what Gabbard offers America’s enemies, and it is bad enough, because it means that systems meant to protect Americans instead put them in danger. It goes without saying that American allies would be unable to cooperate with the United States, and that patriotic intelligence officers would resign in droves. Informers around the world would cease their work. The US government would be cut off from the world.
As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would do enormous harm, unwillingly or willingly. She is not just completely unqualified for this role — she is anti-qualified. She is just the sort of person enemies of the American republic would want in this job. This is not a hypothetical — Gabbard is the specific person that actual enemies of the United States do want in the job. The Russian media refers to Tulsi Gabbard as a “Russian agent” and as “girlfriend,” with good reason.
Gabbard is worse than unfit. Her public record is as a disinformer and apologist for mass murderers. And there is nothing on the other side of the ledger. There are no positive qualifications. (Yes, she wrote a bestselling book. It became a bestseller because she scammed her followers into donating to a PAC which bought the book in bulk.)
Gabbard is just as qualified to operate on your brain as she is to operate the national intelligence services. Would you let her? She clearly wants to take up the knife. Whose idea, one wonders, was that?
Imagine, because it is true, that the day will soon come when we name the person who will operate the national intelligence services. To be sure, like our own minds, the intelligence services of the United States haven’t always performed well. There have been mistakes, and manipulation, and downright evil. But there has also been learning, and some recent, impressive showings, as in the precise and public prediction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Intelligence services are a central part of government. Just as a brain might need surgery, American intelligence needs reform. But it does not need to be butchered for the pleasure of enemies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 