Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Moros Islamic Warriors In the Phillippines. Nothing Changed in 100 Years.

Over 100 years ago, U.S. forces battled savage Islamic warriors called the Moros in the Phillippines. Things haven't changed at all. Just one year ago, in May 2017, an armed group of pro-ISIS fighters, called the Islamic Maute, wearing black and carrying ISIS flags, overthrew Marawi City, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. They conducted jailbreaks, killed Christians, beheaded Catholic priests and police officers, and torched homes, schools and universities. Over 400,000 Christian residents fled. The Maute destroyed the city.
President Rodrigo Duterte, then on an official visit to Russia, cut his trip short and flew back to the Philippines. He immediately declared martial law across Mindanao, which is still in effect today. Muslims make up about 5 percent of the country’s 100 million people and most live in Philippines’s only Islamic city, Marawi. The siege was triggered when the military tried to arrest top ISIS leader Isnilon Hapilon.
The Maute declared the city a new caliphate of ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group. Initially, Duterte predicted the battle would be over within weeks. It is still going on. Now, Duterte has another concern. That the Islamic Moros will join forces with the remaining ISIS Maute terrorists for another war. Who are the Moros? We need to go back over 100 years for the rest of the story.
In the early 1900s, U.S. forces battled the Philippines' fiercely independent Islamic Moros. The Moros, a Malay Muslim warrior elite, numbered 300,000 persons and controlled Mindanao, the second largest of the Philippine Islands. They were seafarers, pirates and slave-holders. The Moro philosophy, "That he should take who has the power, and he should keep who can."
Their Christian neighbors on Mindanao counted only 65,000. They hated each other. Christians saw the Moros as cruel, cunning raiders, polygamists and slavers, whereas the Muslim Moros viewed the Christians primarily as land-thieves, bullies and cowards. Sound familiar?
Moro fighters included Amoks and Juramentado. An amok was a Moro who went berserk and tried to kill as many of the enemy as possible before meeting his own, expected death. Juramentados were religiously motivated by Islam and swore a formal oath before the proper Muslim authority to attack anybody considered to be a foe of Islam. Those fanatics were secure in their belief that they would be whisked to the Muslim paradise for their valorous self-sacrifice. The Moros as Muslims believed that one who takes the life of an infidel increases his own rewards in paradise. Spanish soldiers who attempted to subjugate the fanatical Muslim Moros were dragged into the jungle, tortured for hours over a slow fire, and castrated after the Moros sliced off his legs.
In 1898 the United States declared war on Spain. As a result, Spain agreed to sell the Philippines to the United States. The Moros expected independence after America defeated Spain in 1898. All a Moro wanted was to be left alone to rob, plunder and fight. Those who denied him these "rights" were his enemies, and the Moro knew how to deal with an enemy in only one way. If the Americans wanted to abolish slavery let them come and try. The Moro people resisted U.S. invasion of the island of Mindanao, Philippines, that the armed resistance to U.S. occupation was extended till 1913.
Amoks and Juramentados attacked with the Malay Kriss, a wavy-edged sword, in length halfway between a long dagger and a saber and easily disguised under their clothes. In addition, they were deadly with a blowgun and poison darts, and were quite good with their muzzleloading rifles. Moro warriors wore black trousers for fighting. They made their own weapons like the "Barong", a 16 inch long butcher's meat cleaver with a thick back and a razor thin cutting edge used to decapitate easily.
In the spring of 1902, the U.S. military command sent 40-year-old Captain John Pershing. He believed that the Moros were savages who respected nothing but force. John Pershing wrote of the Moros: "The only principle for which they fought was the right to pillage and murder without molestation from the government." The U.S. Army adopted the Colt .45 Model 1911 semiautomatic pistol after American soldiers found that the .38 caliber Long Colt and Smith and Wesson revolvers they had previously used were unable to stop the fierce Moro Warriors of the Southern Philippines who often appeared drugged for battle. Eyewitness accounts describe Moros continuing to kill American soldiers with their Barongs and Kriss after receiving multiple rounds from the .38 pistols and .30 caliber rifles.
The American position in the Philippines was not to destroy the Moros, but intended instead to suppress piracy, eliminate their slave trade, prevent intertribal war and bring the “natives” into the modern world. But piracy, slavery and fighting were as much a part of the Moro way of life as was Islam. Pershing left in 1903, but returned in 1909 as governor. He supported reforms but chafed at the persistent disorder. His solution was to disarm everyone.
In 1913, when the Moros challenged their enemies in the ultimate battle with 6,000 to 10,000 Moros, the Moros lost to superior U.S. weaponry, with at least 500 killed.
The Philippines did not gain independence until 1946, but by the 1930s the Philippine army was battling Moro rebels, and it still is today. The Islamic Moros never accepted rule from Manila. Powerfully armed and trained by wealthier Muslims, they clamorously demand self-rule. 300 years after the Spanish assaults and 100 years after the American efforts, the Moros are as resistant as ever.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

North Korea. How we got here.

Reflecting on the North Korean summit, I realized how little I actually know about North Korea and how we got here. Here's a brief summary to help put things into perspective.
Contrary to what many folks believe, the division between the Koreas didn’t happen as a result of the Korean War. The schism occurred years before that. In 1910, Japan moved into the Korean peninsula as part of its colonization efforts and ruled the country for decades. Japan formally annexed the Korean Peninsula, which it had occupied five years earlier following the Russo-Japanese War. Over the next 35 years of colonial rule, the country modernized and industrialized significantly, but many Koreans suffered brutal repression at the hands of Japan’s military regime.
During World War II, Japan sent many Korean men to the front as soldiers or forced them to work in wartime factories, while thousands of young Korean women became “comfort women,” providing sexual services to Japanese soldiers. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the United States and the then Soviet Union divvied the peninsula up into north and south factions. The divide was at 38 degrees north latitude, better known as the 38th parallel.
In 1948, the pro-U.S. Republic of Korea (or South Korea) was established in Seoul, led by the strongly anti-communist Syngman Rhee. In the northern industrial center of Pyongyang, the Soviets installed the dynamic young communist guerrilla Kim Il Sung, who became the first premier of the DPRK.
One problem remained: The new governments each believed that they should control the peninsula. With both leaders claiming jurisdiction over the entire Korean Peninsula, tensions soon reached a breaking point. In 1950, with the backing of the Soviet Union and China, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, setting off the Korean War. The United States came to the South’s aid, leading an army of some 340,000 United Nations troops in opposing the invasion. After three years of bitter fighting and more than 2.5 million military and civilian casualties, both sides signed an armistice in the Korean War in July 1953.
The agreement left the borders of North and South Korea essentially unchanged, with a heavily guarded demilitarized zone about 2.5 miles wide running roughly along the 38th parallel. A formal peace treaty, however, was never signed. Eventually, the two Koreas reached an agreement with borders that largely mirrored their previous stance along the 38th parallel.
After the war, North Korea was ruled by Kim Il Sung, the same leader that the Soviets had installed in the 1940s. Under Kim Il Sung, North Korea became increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. The government kept a tight leash on its people, restricting travel and press, and regulating the economy.
After the Korean War, Kim Il Sung shaped his country according to the ideology of “Juche” (self-reliance). The state assumed tight control over the economy, collectivized agricultural land and effectively asserted ownership over all private property. Communist state-controlled media and restrictions on all travel into or out of the country helped preserve the veil of secrecy around North Korea’s political and economic operations and maintain its isolation from most of the international community. The country’s population would remain almost entirely Korean, except for a small number of Chinese transplants.
Thanks to investment in mining, steel production and other heavy industries, North Korea’s civilian and military economy initially outpaced its southern rival. With Soviet backing, Kim built his military into one of the world’s strongest, even as many ordinary civilians grew poorer. By the 1980s, however, South Korea’s economy boomed, while growth in the north stagnated.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc hurt North Korea's economy and left the Kim regine with Communist China as its only remaining ally. In 1994, Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Il.
The new leader instituted a new policy of “Songun Chong’chi,” or military first, establishing the Korean People’s Army as the leading political and economic force in the nation. The new emphasis widened existing inequalities between the military and elite classes and the vast majority of ordinary North Korean citizens.
Over the course of the 1990s, widespread flooding, poor agricultural policies and economic mismanagement led to a period of extended famine, with hundreds of thousands of people dying of starvation and many more crippled by malnutrition. The emergence of a robust black market to meet such shortages would force the government to take measures to liberalize the Communist state-run economy.
North Korea’s economic woes let up a bit due to improved relations with South Korea, which adopted a “sunshine policy” of unconditional aid towards its northern neighbor in the early 2000s. Around the same time, North Korea came closer than ever before to forging peace with the United States, even hosting U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Pyongyang in 2000.
But relations between the two Koreas, and between North Korea and the West, soon deteriorated, due to North Korea’s aggressive efforts to become a nuclear power. Though Kim Jong Il had pledged to abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signed in 1995, in the early 2000s reports began to surface of underground nuclear facilities and ongoing research into the production of highly enriched uranium.
By 2003, North Korea had withdrawn from the NPT, expelled international weapons inspectors and resumed nuclear research at a facility in Yongbyon. Three years later, Kim’s government announced it had carried out its first underground nuclear test.
After Kim Jong Il died after a heart attack in December 2011, the job of supreme leader went to the second youngest of his seven children, then-27-year-old Kim Jong Un.
State-run media reports Kim Jong Un was born January 8, 1982. He is the son of Kim Jong-Il and the grandson of Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Un is his father’s third and youngest son, and was born to his father’s third wife, Ko Young Hee. In the 1990s, he attended two private schools in Switzerland, the International School of Berne in Gümligen and the Liebefeld Steinhölzli school near Bern. He later returned to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, where he attended the Kim Il-Sung Military University.
Kim Jong Nam was the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. From roughly 1994 to 2001, he was considered the heir apparent to his father. He was thought to have fallen out of favor after embarrassing the regime in 2001 with a failed attempt to visit Tokyo Disneyland with a false passport, although Kim Jong Nam said his loss of favor was due to advocating reform. The incident caused his father to cancel a planned visit to China due to the embarrassment it caused him. Kim Jong Nam was exiled from North Korea in 2003, becoming an occasional critic of his family's regime.
In 2009, Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Nam's younger half-brother, was appointed to the state’s National Defense Commission. The next year, he was promoted to the rank of four-star general and was named vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and of the Central Military Commission. Kim Jong Un, was named heir apparent in September 2010.
When Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, Kim Jong Un was placed at the head of the party, the state and the army within a matter of weeks. Kim Jong Nam died on February 13, 2017 in Malaysia as the result of what the US Department of State eventually determined was an assassination conducted by North Korea using VX nerve agent. It was believed that Kim Jong-Nam had friendly ties to China. Outside analysts considered him as a possible candidate to replace Kim Jong Un if the North Korean leadership imploded and China, traditionally an ally, sought a replacement in its Communist state.
In 2012, state media reported that Kim was married to Ri Sol-Ju and has a daughter named Ju-Ae. The same year, Kim assumed the title of marshal of the North Korean army, the highest military rank in the country. He briefly disappeared from the public eye in 2014 and later reappeared with a cane.
In 2006, Kim Jong Un's father, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and his generals, started using nuclear weapons tests as a show of strength to force the Americans to the negotiating table. The goal was a peace treaty, followed by the withdrawal of US-troops from the Korean peninsula and a generous economic aid package for the starving rogue state.
Back then, the fact that a paranoid and secretive regime in Pyongyang acquired the bomb was highly troubling to China. A nuclear-armed North Korea upset the balance of power in East Asia and beyond. The relationship between China and North Korea, who in a 1961 treaty swore to each other eternal loyalty, has long since cooled off.
Kim Jong Il provoked the Chinese in the fall of 2005 when he decided to boycott the six party talks, which China had organized. The talks were to involve China, North and South Korea, the United States, Russia and Japan. The talks were originally designed to dissuade North Korea's leadership from pursuing its nuclear ambitions. With the bomb in hand, North Korea's military would hardly allow it to be negotiated back out of its arsenal.
Politically, the Chinese lost FACE in those talks. All diplomatic, financial and rhetorical attempts to dissuade North Korean from pursuing its nuclear ambitions utterly failed. The Americans, too, failed and stood before the ruins of their failed strategy. Since then they have repeatedly rejected direct talks with Kim because they don't trust him. The six party talks were supposed to help integrate North Korea into the international community, alas to no avail.
As a result, Washington's rhetoric became increasingly more bellicose:
"The United States condemns this provocative act. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for consequences of such action" was the typical bluster from Bush and Obama.
Perhaps North Korea's nuclear armament could have been avoided had Washington engaged in direct talks with North Korea from the start, thereby granting them the international recognition they crave. For years, North Korea has rattled its saber for attention and help. It looks like President Donald J. Trump listened when no one else would. What's next? The future has not yet been written.

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Historic. Signed, Sealed and Delivered. North Korea and the United States.

Historic. Signed, sealed and delivered. The agreement between the US and North Korea. Kim Jong Un commits to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Joint Statement of President Donald J. Trump of the United States of America and Chairman Kim Jong Un of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at the Singapore Summit
President Donald J. Trump of the United States of America and Chairman Kim Jong Un of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) held a first, historic summit in Singapore on June 12, 2018.
President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un conducted a comprehensive, in-depth, and sincere exchange of opinions on the issues related to the establishment of new U.S. – DPRK relations and the building of a lasting and robust peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. President Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK, and Chairman Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Convinced that the establishment of the new U.S. – DPRK relations will continue to the peace and prosperity of the Korean Peninsula and of the world, and recognizing that mutual confidence building can promote the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un note the following:
The United States and the DPRK commit to establish new U.S. – DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the population of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity.
The United States and the DPRK will join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.
Reaffirming the April 27, 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, the DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
The United States and the DPRK commit to recovering POW/MIA remains, including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.
Having acknowledged that the U.S – DPRK summit — the first in history — was an epochal event of great significance in overcoming decades of tensions and hostilities between the two countries and for the opening up of a new future, President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un commit to implement the stipulations in this joint statement fully and expeditiously. The United States and the DPRK commit to hold follow-up negotiations, led by the U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and a relevant high-level DPRK official, at the earliest possible date, to implement the outcomes of the U.S. – DPRK summit.
President Donald J. Trump of the United States of America and Chairman Kim Jong Un of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have committed to cooperate for the development of new U.S. -DPRK relations and for the promotion of peace, prosperity, and security of the Korean Peninsula and of the world.
(Signed)
DONALD J. TRUMP
President of the United States of America
KIM JONG UN
Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
June 12, 2018
Sentosa Island

Best Summary Of America's Immigration Challenges - EVER

Before David Frum of the Atlantic became sick from Trump Derangement Syndrome, he wrote the best article I've ever read on immigration. If you want to understand America's immigration challenge in one quick read, this is it.
America's Immigration Challenge.
Coming to the United States would benefit millions—but policymakers seldom ask whether their arrival would benefit the United States.
DAVID FRUM
DEC 11, 2015
On Wednesday, FBI director James Comey alleged that the San Bernardino shooters were already plotting a mass-murder attack on the United States before Tafsheen Malik received the K-1 visa admitting her to the United States. Her husband-to-be, Syed Farook, was born a U.S. citizen. Yet his family’s immigration history should also raise searching questions about the process by which would-be Americans are selected.
Mr. Farook’s father was an alcoholic and could be violent, capable of lashing out at his wife and children, according to statements his mother, Rafia Farook, made in a series of divorce proceedings beginning in 2006. The father, also named Syed Farook, called his wife names, screamed at his children, hurled home appliances and, at the worst moments, grew so combative that his children had to step between him and his wife, she asserted.
The elder Mr. Farook forced his family to move out of their home in 2006, Ms. Farook said in court papers, but he continued to harass her. “My husband is mentally ill and is on medication but is also an alcoholic and drinks with the medicine,” she said. The marriage was formally dissolved this year...
A neighbor, Victor Venegas, said that the elder Mr. Farook had worked for him driving trucks until 2003 and would come around looking for money. “He would sometimes come over without calling,” Mr. Venegas said, and ask, “Can I have $10 to buy cigarettes?”
It’s not clear who exactly provided the first link in the chain of migration that brought the Farook clan to California and ultimately enabled the entry of Tashfeen Malik from Pakistan. That same chain, incidentally, also enabled the migration of Syed Farook’s brother, also named Syed, who volunteered for the U.S. Navy shortly after 9/11 and served aboard the USS Enterprise.
However one assesses that chain and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of legal immigrants choose to come—or, more exactly, are chosen by their relatives—for their own reasons. They are not selected by the United States to advance some national interest. Illegal immigrants are of course entirely self-selected, as are asylum seekers. Even the refugee process, reportedly the most tightly screened, operates to a considerable extent outside national control: The first assessment of refugees is typically made by the UN High Commission on Refugees from within camps it operates. That explains why, for example, Christian Syrians make up only about 3 percent of the refugees admitted to the United States, despite accounting for 10 percent of the country’s population: Fearing violence from Sunni Muslims, they apparently hesitate to enter UN camps in the first place.
Donald Trump’s noisy complaints that immigration is out of control are literally true. Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize—not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.
Nor is there much understanding of what has happened after it has happened. A simple question like, “How many immigrants are in prison?” turns out to be extraordinarily hard to answer. Poor information invites excessive fears, which are then answered with false assurances and angry accusations.
Nervous about Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris massacre? How dare you! Would you turn away Jews fleeing Hitler? Oh, you think that analogy is hyperbolic? Tell it to the mayor of New York City.
This frequent invocation of the refugee trauma of the 1930s shuts down all discussion of anything that has happened since. Since 1991, the United States has accepted more than 100,000 Somali refugees. Britain accepted 100,000 as well. Some 50,000 Somali refugees were resettled in Canada; some 40,000 in Sweden; smaller communities were settled in the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark.
How’s that going?
Minnesota is home to America’s largest Somali community, 33,000 people. The unemployment rate for Somali Minnesotans in 2015 was triple the state average, 21 percent. As of 2014, about 5,950 of the state’s Somali population received cash assistance; 17,000 receive food assistance as of 2014.
A close study of Somali refugees by the government of Maine (home to the nation’s second-largest Somali community) found that fewer than half of the working-age population had worked at any time in the five years from 2001 through 2006.
The U.S. unemployment rate of 20+ percent still represents a huge improvement over rates in Europe. Only about 40 percent of working-age Somali men in Norway are employed. In the Swedish city of Malmo, home to one of the largest Somali communities in Europe, only 20 percent work.
Somalis have so much difficulty finding work in the developed world because their skills badly mismatch local labor needs. Only about 18 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls attend even primary school in Somalia. UNICEF has given up trying to measure literacy rates. Much of the U.S. refugee population is descended from people held as slaves in Somalia, who accordingly lack any family tradition of education. Their children then flounder in Western schools, baffled by the norms and expectations they encounter there. In the U.K., Somali students pass the standard age 16 high school exams at a rate less than half that of Nigerian immigrant students.
Struggling with the transition from semi-nomadic-herder society to postindustrial urban life, young Somalis in the West are tempted by criminal activity. Danish Somalis are 10 times more likely to be committed of a serious offense than native-born Danes. At least 29 young Canadian Somalis were murdered in drug-trafficking-related deaths between 2005 and 2010. In July 2012, Richard Stanek, sheriff of the county that encompasses Minneapolis-St. Paul, testified to Congress about the rising danger of American Somali gangs. While stressing that most Somalis in Minnesota obeyed the law, Stanek worried:
Somali gangs have emerged as a serious threat to community safety both in Hennepin County and as a unique challenge to our law enforcement re- sources. These gangs are involved in multiple criminal activities that require sophisticated and resource-intensive law enforcement investigations. They are growing in influence and violence … and practice certain cultural behaviors that render some traditional U.S. criminal justice tools less effective.
Other young Somalis turn to political and religious violence. An estimated 50 American Somalis returned to fight for al Shabab, committing some of the most heinous acts of that insurgency. One carried out a suicide bombing that killed 24 people in 2009. Al Shabab claimed three American Somalis took part in the attack on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall in 2013 that killed at least 67 people. Al Shabab is now intensely recruiting American Somalis to undertake terror missions inside the United States.
We call upon our Mus­lim broth­ers, par­tic­u­larly those in the West... imagine what a ded­i­cated mujahid (fighter) in the West could do to the Amer­i­can and Jewish-owned shop­ping cen­ters across the world.
What if such an attack was to call in the Mall of Amer­ica in Min­nesota, or the West Edmon­ton Mall in Canada? Or in London’s Oxford Street, or any of the hun­dred or so Jewish-owned West­field shop­ping cen­ters dot­ted right across the West­ern world...
A growing number of Somali Americans in Minnesota have been charged with plotting to aid ISIS over the past two years, the 10th of them on December 9.
Immigration advocates understandably prefer to focus on the contributions of the refugees from Nazism than on less successful and more recent experiences.
Yet surely it is the more recent experiences that are more relevant. Pre-civil war Syria was no Somalia, but it was very far from a developed country. In 2010, the average Syrian had less than six years of schooling, less even than Egypt, according to the UN Development Index. Women were systematically subordinated: Only a quarter of Syrian women completed secondary education; only 13 percent participated in the workforce. Few Syrians will arrive with the skills of a modern economy, even apart from the language gap. Before the civil war, almost one-fifth of Syrians worked as agricultural laborers; about one-third worked in Syria’s notoriously inefficient public sector.
How will these new arrivals adjust to the very different job markets of Western Europe and North America?
The European environment will prove especially challenging. Totaling benefits, mandated vacations, and so on, employers in the German private sector paid an average of 31.80 euros per hour per worker. And Germany—as expensive as it is—is actually one of the cheaper places to do business in Europe. The average French private sector employee costs 35.20 euros, the average Dane in the private sector, 42.0 euros. The cost of labor explains why such familiar American jobs as parking lot attendants, food runners in restaurants, and so on seem hardly to exist in northern Europe. It also explains why workers who cannot generate more than 31.80 euros in value for a business languish in protracted unemployment.
Germany in particular has tried to cope with this challenge by aggressively promoting low-wage work for the benefit of workers in the former East Germany and new immigrants. Some categories of work are exempted from standard benefit packages and minimum wage laws. But if first-generation migrants willingly accept this bargain, their children likely won’t. Unfortunately, while a new population’s expectations will rise in one generation, the accumulation of sufficient human capital to fulfill those expectations takes significantly longer. The predictable result: protracted underemployment across visibly identifiable subgroups of the population—group perceptions of inequity and injustice—resentment, radicalization, and criminal and political violence: the second-generation European Muslim experience in a one grim economic equation.
For better or worse, producing low-wage jobs is one thing the U.S. economy can do in abundance. Where Americans have more difficulty is offering a path to upward mobility, especially for people born into the poorest one-fifth of the population. Not all migrants inhabit that bottom one-fifth. But disconcertingly many do—and contra the American Ellis Island myth, their children then stick there. America’s poor immigrants don’t usually arrive as refugees, of course. That distinction acquires great urgency in polemic. It has little meaning in real life.
If a refugee is someone “pushed” from his or her native land, and an immigrant is one “pulled” to a new country, then the vast majority of the tens of millions of people seeking to move from the poor global South to the rich North belong to both categories.
The tens of thousands of youthful border-crossers who claimed asylum in the United States in the summer of 2014 were described by supporters as refugees from gang violence at home in Central America. Yet 2014 was a year in which gang violence dramatically abated in Honduras and Guatemala. The “push” was stronger two years earlier ... but the surge responded to the “pull” of perceived opportunity.
Even with the Syrian refugees, “pull” matters as much as “push.” Most of the Syrians en route to Europe are immediately fleeing—not the dictator Assad’s barrel bombs—but the tedium and futility of Turkish refugee camps. When European border controls collapsed in the fall of 2015, Syrians and those claiming to be Syrian rushed, not to any European country at random, but very specifically to the countries with the strongest job opportunities and most generous welfare systems: Germany and Scandinavia. Every day, at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, young men described as “refugees” risk their lives to reach Britain from ... France.
The distinction between migration and asylum-seeking is grounded less in differences of motive, and more in an artifact of international law. Shamed by the exclusion of German and Austrian Jews in the 1930s, the post-World War II democracies signed treaties and conventions that conferred rights of asylum on persecuted people. If a person who wishes to resettle in one country can gain recognition as an asylum-seeker, he cannot easily be removed. Virtually all of the 51,000 Central Americans who jumped the border in 2014 still remain in the United States. The tens of thousands of Mediterranean crossers who falsely claimed to be refugees when they disembarked in Italy likewise mostly remain in Europe.
The immigration debate is defined by legal categories: migrant versus refugee; illegal versus legal. Those legal categories are subordinated, however, to a central political division: migrants who are chosen by the receiving country versus those who choose themselves. That political division in turn is connected to a fateful economic division: migrants who arrive with the skills and attitudes necessary to success in a modern advanced economy versus those who don’t.
Those divides are highlighted by a massive new study by the National Academy of Sciences of the acculturation of new immigrants to the United States: “The Integration of Immigrants into American Society.” The first reports on the study in October headlined comforting news: recent immigrants to the United States were assimilating rapidly—arguably more rapidly than their predecessors of the pre-1913 Great Migration. One must read deeper into the report to encounter the worrying question: Assimilate to what? Like the country receiving them, immigrants to the United States are cleaved by class. Approximately one quarter of immigrants arrive with high formal educational qualifications: a college degree or more. Their record and that of their children is one of outstanding assimilation to the new American meritocratic elite, in many ways outperforming the native-born. (The highest outcomes are recorded for immigrants from India: 83 percent of male immigrants from India arrive with a college degree or higher.) College-educated immigrants are more likely to be employed than natives, and their children are more likely to complete a college degree in their turn. Here is a mighty contribution to the future wealth and power of the United States.
By contrast, about one-third of immigrants arrive with less than a high-school education. Immigrants from Latin America—the largest single group—arrive with the least education: Only about 13 percent of them have a college degree or more. They too assimilate to American life, but to the increasingly disorderly life of the American non-elite. Their children make educational progress as compared to the parents, but—worryingly—educational progress then stagnates or retrogresses in the third generation. For many decades to come, Latino families educationally lag well behind their non-Latino counterparts. The static snapshot is even more alarming: While 60 percent of Asian Americans over age 25 have at least a two-year diploma, as do 42 percent of non-Latino whites and 31 percent of African Americans, only 22 percent of Latino Americans do.*
Partly as a result, as David Card and Stephen Raphael observe in their 2013 book on immigration and poverty, even third-generation Hispanic Americans are twice as likely to be poor as non-Latino whites.
When children of immigrants grow up poor, they assimilate to the culture of poorer America. While Mexicans in Mexico are slightly less likely to be obese than Americans, U.S. Latinos are considerably more likely to be obese than their non-Latino counterparts. The disparity is starkest among children: While 28 percent of whites under 19 are obese or overweight, 38 percent of Latino children are. American-born Latinos likewise are more likely to have children outside marriage than foreign-born Latinos.
This downward assimilation has stark real-world consequences. U.S.-born Latinos score lower on standardized tests and are more likely to drop out of high school than their non-Latino white counterparts. While those Latinos who do complete high school are slightly more likely than non-Latino whites to begin college, they are less likely to finish. Starting school without finishing burdens young people with the worst of all educational outcomes: college debt without a college degree.
About half of all immigrant-headed households accept some form of means-tested social welfare program. Those immigrant groups that arrive with the most education are, unsurprisingly, the least likely to require government assistance; those with the least require the most. Only 17 percent of households headed by an Indian immigrant use a means-tested program; 73 percent of households headed by a Central American immigrant do. (It’s important to look at whole households because while undocumented immigrants who head a household may not be eligible for many means-tested programs, their U.S.-born children are.)
While Mexican immigrants are less likely to be sent to prison than the native-born, U.S.-born Hispanics are incarcerated at rates 50 percent higher than their parents and grandparents—and almost double that of U.S.-born whites.
In other words, immigrants to the United States are dividing into two streams. One arrives educated and assimilates “up”; the other, larger stream, arrives poorly educated and unskilled and assimilates “down.” It almost ceases to make sense to speak and think of immigration as one product of one policy. Without ever having considered the matter formally or seriously, the U.S. has arrived at two different policies to serve two different sets of interests—and to achieve two radically different results, one very beneficial to U.S. society; the other, fraught with huge present and future social difficulties.
How did this happen? Almost perfectly unintentionally, suggests Margaret Sands Orchowski in her new history, The Law That Changed the Face of America. The Immigration Act of 1965 did two things, one well understood, one not: It abolished national quotas that effectively disfavored non-European immigration—and it established family reunification as the supreme consideration of U.S. immigration law. That second element has surprisingly proven even more important than the first. A migrant could arrive illegally, regularize his status somewhere along the way—for example, by the immigration amnesty of 1986—and then call his family from home into the United States after him. The 1965 act widened the flow of post-1970 low-skilled illegal immigration into a secondary and tertiary surge of further rounds of low-skilled immigration that continues to this day.
Americans talk a lot about the social difficulties caused by large-scale, low-skill immigration, but usually in a very elliptical way. Giant foundations—Pew, Ford—spend lavishly to study the problems of the new low-skill immigrant communities. Public policy desperately seeks to respond to the challenges presented by large-scale low-skill immigration. But the fundamental question—“should we be doing this at all?”—goes unvoiced by anyone in a position of responsibility. Even as the evidence accumulates that the policy was a terrible mistake from the point of view of the pre-existing American population, elites insist that the policy is unquestionable ... more than unquestionable, that the only possible revision of the policy is to accelerate future flows of low-skill immigration even faster, whether as migrants or as refugees or in some other way.
Even as immigration becomes ever-more controversial with the larger American public, within the policy elite it preserves an unquestioned status as something utterly beyond discussion. To suggest anything otherwise is to suggest—not merely something offensive or objectionable—but something self-evidently impossible, like adopting cowrie shells as currency or Donald Trump running for president.
Only Donald Trump is running for president—and doing pretty well, too. He’s led polls of Republican presidential candidates for now nearly 5 consecutive months. Pundits (including me!) who had insisted that it was impossible that he could actually win the nomination are now beginning to ponder what will happen if he somehow does. And while it’s clear that the immigration issue does not constitute all of Trump’s appeal, it’s equally clear that the issue has been indispensable to that appeal.
Until this very year, Trump’s few sparse comments on immigration fell neatly within the elite consensus. In a December 2012 Newsmax interview, Trump blamed Mitt Romney’s recent presidential defeat on Romney’s “self-deportation” comments. Trump endorsed the then conventional that the GOP’s immigration message had been “mean-spirited” in 2012 and invite more people to become “wonderful, productive citizens of this country.”
What seems to have changed Trump’s mind is a book: Adios America by Ann Coulter. The phrase “political book of the year” is a usually an empty compliment, but if the phrase ever described any book, Adios America is it. In its pages, Trump found the message that would convulse the Republican primary and upend the dynastic hopes of former-frontrunner Jeb Bush. Perhaps no single writer has had such immediate impact on a presidential election since Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Adios America is an avalanche of an essay, a cascading torrent of quips, facts, and statistics. Furiously polemical, mercilessly indignant, utterly indifferent to balance and context, Coulter batters the reader with what might be called the “reverse valedictorian”: instead of the usual heartwarming stories of immigrant success, she immerses the reader in incidents of immigrant crime, failure, and welfare abuse.
A Chinese immigrant in New York, Dong Lu Chen, bludgeoned his wife to death with a claw hammer because she was having an affair. He was unashamed, greeting his teenaged boy at the door in bloody clothes, telling the boy he had just killed mom. Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Edward Pincus let Chen off with probation—for murder—after an anthropologist testified that, in Chinese culture, the shame of a man being cuckolded justified murder ... The female head of the Asian-American Defense and Education Fund, Margaret Fung, applauded Chen’s light sentence, saying that harsher penalty would “promote the idea that when people come to America they have to give up their way of doing things. That is an idea we cannot support.” At least Chen came to the United States based on his specialized knowledge of nuclear cell extraction biology. No, I’m sorry—Chen emigrated to the United States with his entire family when he was fifty years old—fifteen years away from collecting Social Security—to be a dishwasher.
Two of the most famous murder sprees of the 1990s were also perpetrated by legal immigrants. The 1993 Long Island Railroad massacre that left six passengers dead was committed by Jamaican-immigrant Colin Ferguson ... In 1997, Christopher Burmeister, a twenty-seven year old musician, was shot in the head and killed by Palestinian immigrant Ali Hassan Abu Kamal at the top of the Empire State Building. Burmeister’s band mate, Matthew Gross, also took a bullet to the head but—after eight hours of surgery—survived. Gross now lives in a group home in Montclair, New Jersey, with other brain-damaged men, taking daily medication for his seizures. The assailant, Abu Kamal, had immigrated to America with his entire family two month earlier—at age sixty-eight. It’s a smart move to bring in older immigrants well past their productive years, so we can start paying out Social Security right away.
Coulter’s core message, “immigration isn’t working as promised,” is joined to a second message equally central to the Donald Trump campaign: “We are governed by idiots.”
Those are messages that resonate only louder after the San Bernardino massacre, in which one of the killers entered the country on a fiancée visa issued to a nonexistent address in Pakistan.
But the truth is actually far scarier: No, America is not governed by idiots. It’s governed mostly by capable and conscientious people who are simply overwhelmed by the scale of the immigration challenge. The UN High Commission on Refugees estimates that 60 million people have been displaced by war or natural disaster. Millions of them would wish to move to Europe or North America if they could. That population will only grow in the years ahead: Nigeria, a country of an estimated 137 million people today, is projected to reach 400 million within the next 35 years, overtaking the United States. How many of them will wish to leave behind their failed state for opportunities in the global North? Even in Mexico, a middle-income country by global standards, more than half of young people in their 20s would like to move to the United States if they could.
One reason we hear so much about the Jewish refugees of the 1930s, to circle back to where I started, is the natural human tendency to wish away overwhelming problems. If the word “refugee” conjures up Albert Einstein, Kurt Weill, Hans Bethe, Lawrence Tribe, Billy Wilder, and Henry Kissinger—well, what country wouldn’t welcome as many as it could get?
But that’s not the story of Syria. Syria is embroiled in a civil war with hundreds of thousands of combatants. Most of the killing has been done by the army of President Bashar al-Assad and now, his Iranian and Russian allies. President Obama said at his November 16 press conference in Antalya, Turkey, “We also have to remember that many of these refugees are the victims of terrorism themselves—that’s what they’re fleeing.” Many of his hearers mentally amended the president’s words to a claim that the Syrian refugees are fleeing the terrorism of ISIS. But this president always speaks carefully, and that’s not what he said, even if he didn’t mind being misheard. Interviews with the refugees themselves confirm that most are fleeing the violence perpetrated by the Assad regime, not the deranged fanaticism of ISIS. While comparatively few Syrians—or Muslims anywhere—have any sympathy for ISIS ideology, the majority of Syrians espouse some form of Sunni fundamentalist religious belief, a fundamentalism that Western societies asked to open their doors are entitled to find disquieting.
Also disquieting is the way in which refugee advocates toggle back and forth between reassuring the West that there is nothing to fear—and warning of terrorist violence if the refugees are refused. Here’s Michael Ignatieff, a noted writer on refugee issues and former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in The New York Times in September:
What must Syrians, camped on the street outside the Budapest railway station, be thinking of all that fine rhetoric of ours about human rights and refugee protection? If we fail, once again, to show that we mean what we say, we will be creating a generation with abiding hatred in its heart.
Ignatieff is right to express concern about the hatred sweeping the Middle East. But to many Americans—and Canadians too, and Europeans, and other Westerners—it may seem reckless to respond to that hatred by inviting more of it into their own countries, and more reckless than ever after the Paris and San Bernardino jihadist atrocities.
Obama and much of the elite media find that reaction cowardly, contemptible and even “shameful”—his word. But in a democracy, leaders who dismiss and denigrate widespread concerns soon find themselves ex-leaders. Everywhere in the Western world there is a fast-growing constituency for new kinds of immigration and refugee policies. If anything is shameful, it is the shabby, thoughtless, and arrogant elite consensus that has to date denied that constituency a responsible political leadership. But that too is changing, yielding to heavy evidence and hard experience.
DAVID FRUM is a senior editor at The Atlantic. In 2001-2002 he was a speech writer for George W. Bush - during the aftermath of 9/11.

Builder Trump wows North Korea with possibilities.

BRILLIANT. The builder in Donald Trump said part of his approach to Kim Jong-un about giving up his nuclear weapons was a video that showed the benefits of shaking off the chains of near-global economic sanctions – including the possibility of developing his country and his country's beaches.
President Trump brought a professionally-produced video in his presentation to Kim Jong-un. The four-minute film showed Kim as a leader at a crossroads and urged him to choose a more economically and technologically open future for his country. A voiceover in the video described the summit as a special moment in time when a man is presented with one chance that may never be repeated. What will he choose? To show vision and leadership? Or not?:
'Will this leader choose to advance his country and be part of a new world? Be the hero of his people? Will he shake the hand of peace and enjoy prosperity like he has never seen? A great life, or isolation? Which path will be chosen?'
Part of the footage included a wide shot of a beach and an image of speedboats. Trump included images of MIAMI when he showed Kim a video about North Korea's future – as he said dictator could develop condos or hotels if he keeps nuke promises and sanctions come off. Trump said North Korea has 'great beaches' and is situated perfectly between the economic powers of China and South Korea. The main image, showing a pair of condominium spires, was shot in Miami He said he encouraged Kim to consider a future that included capitalist developments in his country.
"They have great beaches! You see that whenever they're exploding the cannons into the ocean, right? So I said, "Boy, look at that beach. Wouldn't that make a great condo behind–," and I explained it. Instead of doing that you could have the best hotels in the world right there. Think of it from a real estate perspective. You have South Korea, you have China, and they own the land in the middle. How bad is that, right? It's great! But I told him, I said, "You may not want to do what's there. You may want to do a smaller version of it or, you know." Although I tell you what, he looked at that tape, he looked at that iPad. And I'm telling you they really enjoyed it, I believe."

Was Rose McGowan Set Up?

Actress and prominent MeToo activist Rose McGowan, who was the first one publicly to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse, and who was shunned at the Academy Awards by Harvey's Hollywood and political enablers, was indicted for cocaine possession by a grand jury. Rose McGowan claims she is innocent and maintains that she's been set up by the megaproducer she helped bring down: Harvey Weinstein and his cohorts.
The charges revolve around an incident on January 20, 2017, in which McGowan, 44, allegedly left her purse and two bags on a flight after arriving at the Dulles International Airport. The two bags tested positive for cocaine. The actress learned about the lost wallet and the found narcotics via an Instagram message. She said the cocaine was not hers and was planted by Harvey's goons. This happened two months after Rose accused Harvey Weinstein of rape.
BTW. Rose's best friend is Asia Argento, another actress who claims Weinstein sexually abused her, and the girlfriend of Anthony Bourdain, who recently committed suicide by hanging under suspicious circumstances shortly after Kate Spade did the same. Bourdain was extremely upset with the fact that the Clintons and Hollywood covered up for Weinstein for years. The twitter feeds of both Bourdain and Argento declare someone was after them. Does anyone think all these events are not connected?

Monday, June 11, 2018

More Priests Slaughtered By ISIS in the Phillippines.

Another Catholic priest in the Phillippines, 43, was shot dead by radical Islamic militants on Sunday, June 10, as he was preparing to say Sunday Mass. Another victim of the global Christian genocide that the media chooses to ignore. He was the 3rd Catholic priest to be killed in the last six months in the Phillippines following the murders of 37-year-old Father Mark Anthony Ventura and 72-year-old Father Marcelito Paez.
Here is a powerful letter about the KILLING from the Archdiocese to the people and President of the Phillippines:
Message to the People of God
by the Clergy of
the Archdiocese of Lingayen-Dagupan
on June 12, 2018
Our dear people of God:
They are killing our flock. They are killing us the shepherds. They are killing our faith. They are cursing our Church. They are killing God again as they did in Calvary.
Killing is the solution. Killing is the language. Killing is the way. Killing is the answer. Killing is encouraged. Killing is their job. Killers are rewarded. Killers boast of their murders.
They kill in the streets. They kill inside homes. They kill in tricycles and jeeps. They kill in plazas. They kill in the malls. They kill in the chapels. The nation is a killing field. They kill everywhere. They are happy to kill. But we are not a nation of killers.
Are you still clapping? Are you still laughing? You still find it funny? You still think "Dapat lang"? Are you still saying "Pagbigyan natin"? Are you still saying our people feel safer now? Are you still saying this is the best government we ever had? Is this the change you want? Are these the changes you dream of? Are you still saying "There are some good things happening! Focus on the good"? If they curse us again for speaking up, we will not be surprised.
Are you afraid to talk? You think silence is a virtue? You think we your shepherds should sow unity by being like the monkeys who see and speak and hear no evil? You think we can be the next target if we speak? Do you still care? Where is your faith? You talk in whispers. You are afraid to be heard? Have we become numb and dumb?
Today, the murderers are commended and the king is undisturbed.
We your Archbishop, the Bishop-elect of Bayombong, and the clergy of the Archdiocese of Lingayen Dagupan, represented by our Vicars Forane, say together:
We are not afraid. We trust in the Lord. We are ready to battle for God's honor. They want to bury us priests. But they forget that we priests are seeds. When you bury us, we will grow more and flourish. You cannot stop the Gospel from growing. You cannot stop God from being God. You cannot muzzle the voice of Truth.
From the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist, Dagupan City, June 12, 2018
+SOCRATES B. VILLEGAS
Archbishop of Lingayen-Dagupan
+JOSE ELMER I. MANGALINAO
Bishop-Elect of Bayombong
Father Alvin Gerald Platon
Vicar General and Chancellor
Monsignor Oliver Mendoza
Moderator Curiae and Economus
Monsignor Manuel Bravo
Minister for Evangelization
Vicar Forane of Saint Vincent Ferrer
Father Allan Lopez, OP
Episcopal Vicar for Religious
Father Winston Estrada
Vicar Forane of Saints Peter and Paul
Father Hernan Caronongan
Vicar Forane of Epiphany of the Lord
Father Estephen Mark Espinoza
Vicar Forane of Saint Thomas
Minister for Social Action
Father Antonio Ray Quintans
Vicar Forane of Saint Dominic
Father Kristoffer Allan Soriano
Judicial Vicar and Vice Chancellor
Father Eric Galivo
Minister for Worship

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Don't want to be separated from your children? Obey the law.


So parents who sneak across the border illegally with their minor children are upset that they are separated from their children after they are caught? Let me clue you in to something. Americans who commit illegal acts and are sent to prison are separated from their children, too. Don't want to be separated from your children? Obey the law.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Republican Party didn't despise its own voter base?

Just for ONCE, wouldn't it be nice if the Republican Party didn't hate and despise its own voter base and stood WITH them on illegal immigration instead of always obediently following the rich, RINO Establishment Elites who want to drive down labor costs to boost their precious corporate-mega profits through illegal alien labor instead of using American workers? We know why the Democrats want illegals. For votes. So do establishment Republicans. For corporate profit from cheap labor.
Who really loses here? American blacks, hispanics and whites who must fight against illegals, or reduce their hourly wages even further, to compete for good paying jobs to support their families. With all the talk about the "recovery" nobody ever mentions that wage growth has been non-existent and Americans can't make enough to support their families today. Why? Illegals are driving down American wages. Wake up.

Here's what really happened at G7.

From what I've read so far, here's what I think happened at the G7. Trump goes to the G7 and threatens to end all trade with nations that refuse to end “unfair” trade practices and then shocks the heck out of everyone by calling for tariff-free TOTALLY FREE TRADE among all the countries. Trump rattles all the G7 nations with a startling proposal that all the nations DROP all their tariffs and trade restrictions. The biggest free trader of them all! Now what do they do? That's really going to mess with the media's "Trump is a protectionist" narrative!
“I don’t know if they were surprised with President Trump’s free-trade proclamation, but they certainly listened to it and we had lengthy discussions about that. If they thought they were going to lecture Trump on the glories of free trade, they got a rude awakening. He came to a gun fight armed with a stealth bomber.”
Trump tells the G7 that America wants reciprocal tariffs or none at all. He tells the G7 that American farmers and businesses won't be penalized any longer. He tells the G7 that America won't be the world's piggy bank any longer. Merkel agrees with Trump and says the devil is in the details. Trump also pushes for Russia to be reinstated into the G8. "We're running the world here and Russia should be at the table."
Trump says that America’s trading partners would be making a mistake if they retaliated against new U.S. tariffs.
“If they retaliate they’re making a tremendous mistake because you see we have a tremendous trade imbalance. The numbers are so much against them, we win that war 1000 times out of a 1000.”
All seven nations agree to sign a communique, which outlines a shared commitment to work on a variety of economic, social, environmental and security issues. The language on trade is general, with an acknowledgement that “free, fair and mutually beneficial trade and investment are key engines for growth and job creation” and a promise to “develop new rules where needed to foster a truly level playing field.” In other words, nothing substantive. Typical bureaucratic meaningless BS. It also includes a slap at Russia, calling on Moscow "to cease its destabilizing behavior to undermine democratic systems and its support of the Syrian regime.”
Then, after Trump’s departure from the G7, Trudeau holds a press conference to slam Trump and "show him" who's boss! Trudeau states that all of the member nations, including the U.S., have signed a communique pledging to lower tariffs and other trade barriers and that he was insulted by President Trump's tariffs on aluminum and steel. “I highlighted directly to the president that Canadians did not take it lightly that the United States has moved forward with significant tariffs on our steel and aluminum industry,” he said. Trudeau says his country will answer the US tariffs with levies of its own on July 1 unless Trump changes his mind.
Angry that Trudeau was grandstanding and did not make those statements to him personally at the conference, President Trump retracts his endorsement of the joint statement and threatens to mess with Canadian auto imports while on the plane to Singapore:
"Based on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's false statements at his news conference, and the fact that Canada is charging massive Tariffs to our U.S. farmers, workers and companies, I have instructed our U.S. Reps not to endorse the Communique as we look at Tariffs on automobiles flooding the U.S. Market! Justin acted so meek and mild during our G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, “US Tariffs were kind of insulting” and he “will not be pushed around.” Very dishonest & weak. Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!"
-President Trump
Trudeau responds weakly: “We are focused on everything we accomplished here at the G7 summit. The prime minister said nothing he hasn’t said before — both in public, and in private conversations with the president.”

Canada put a 270% tariff on dairy and messed with regulatory rules to artificially inflate prices in Canada. So why the big show with steel? Because this is how they all beat the previous US administrations. President Trump is not afraid to get TOUGH on behalf of the American worker!
Trudeau hates Trump. He thought these childish shenanigans would be a cool way to "get him." Team Trudeau is high-fiving right now - and getting love from every journalist, Globalist and US Democrat for clickbait headlines. But Trudeau has released the kraken: Trump is now coming for Canada's auto industry, that exports a million more cars to the U.S. than we import. Hope it was worth it.
If Trudeau is willing to take Canada into a trade war against the United States, maybe he should have built pipelines to tidewater -- Northern Gateway, Energy East & Trans Mountain. He derailed those three, so Canada is 100% dependent on the U.S. as their sole oil customer. Trudeau is not acting in Canada's best interests. Not smart at all. Trudeau knows that Canada needs America more than America needs Canada. He will lose.
Trump offered a tariff-free G7. If tariffs on the U.S. are the same as what the U.S. has on others, why didn’t Macron and Trudeau welcome and accept it? Because they know G7 countries have higher tariffs on the U.S. than what the U.S. has on them. They don’t want it to change.
Trump wants the US to charge other countries what they charge the US. It’s not free trade what’s going now; it’s crazy trade. The US subsidizes their various industries to the tune of $880 Billion annually due to pork barrel politics. To suggest a tariff-free G7 without a serious rollback of those subsidies is a non-starter. Will Congress give up what gets them elected? Not without some serious swamp draining, folks.

Larry Kudlow on Trudeau's press conference after the G7: "Trudeau really kind of stabbed us in the back with his amateurish attack. He did a great disservice to the whole G-7. Trudeau's comments were a betrayal and sophomoric. We negotiated in good faith. I personally negotiated with Prime Minister Trudeau. They have enormous tariffs.”


Director of Trade Policy Peter Navarro on Justin Trudeau:
"There's a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door. And that's what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference. That's what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did. And that comes right from Air Force One.
And I'll tell you this, to my friends in Canada, that was one of the worst political miscalculations of a Canadian leader in modern Canadian history. All Justin Trudeau had to do was take the win. President Trump did the courtesy to Justin Trudeau to travel up to Quebec for that summit. He had other things, bigger things on his plate in Singapore. And what did Trudeau did -- do as soon as -- as soon as the plane took off from Canadian airspace, Trudeau stuck our president in the back. That will not stand.

Canada's high tariffs on American dairy products, and planned retaliatory tariffs, are an attack on our political system. And as far as this retaliation goes, the American press needs to do a much better job of what the Canadians are getting ready to do because it's nothing short of an attack on our political system and it's nothing short of Canada trying to raise its high protectionist barriers even higher on things like maple syrup and other goods."

The rest of the story:

In the days leading up to the G7 summit, Trudeau and his socialist cronies took a big hit in Canada when Doug Ford’s conservative movement won in the Ontario Province.

Therefore, for political reasons, Trudeau needed a G7 win. He needed to upstage conservative U.S. President Trump and get him to sign-on to the G7 communique, giving the summit the appearance of influence and success. Then he stabbed Trump in the back and Trump took his win away. Bravo!

Doug Ford's populus victory returned the Conservatives to power in Ontario after 15 years in opposition.