On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Dean Baker about China trade policy for the January 10, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (12/17/24)

Janine Jackson: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US/China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like “more Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel”—later followed, quaintly, by “a lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”

But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who, a source says, “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, Friedman says, “we will be toast.”

The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts,” i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport.

Okay, it’s very Thomas Friedman. But how different is it from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally?

Dean Baker is senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, where Beat the Press, his commentary on economic reporting, appears. He’s the author of, among other titles, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He joins us now by phone from Utah. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dean Baker.

Dean Baker: Thanks for having me on, Janine.

JJ: We will talk about news media, of course, but first, there is Trump himself. It’s not our imagination that Trump’s trade ideas, his actions and his stated plans—about China, but overall—they just don’t make much consistent or coherent sense, do they?

Reuters (11/26/24)

DB: Obviously, consistency isn’t a strong point for him, but it does obviously matter to other people. So before he is even in office, he’s threatening both Mexico and Canada. It wasn’t even that clear, at least to me, maybe they got the message what he wants them to do, but if they don’t stop immigrants coming across the border with fentanyl, then he’s going to impose 25% tariffs—I’m going to come back to that word in a second—on both countries.

Now, we have a trade deal with both countries—which, as far as I know, and he certainly didn’t indicate otherwise, they’re following. And it was his trade deal. So what exactly is he threatening with? He’s going to abrogate the trade deal he signed four years ago, because of what, exactly?

And they actually have cooperated with the US in restricting immigrants from coming across the border. Could they do more? Yeah, well, maybe. Canada tries to police fentanyl. So it’s not clear what exactly he thought they would do. Now he’s just said he wants to annex Canada anyhow, so I guess it’s all moot.

But the idea of making these threats is kind of incredible. And, again, he’s threatening, coming back to the word tariff, because a lot of people, and I think including Donald Trump, don’t know what a tariff is. Tariffs are a tax on our imports, and I’ve been haranguing reporters, “Why don’t you just call it a tax on imports?” I can’t believe they can’t use the three words, one of them is very short, instead of tariff, because a lot of people really don’t understand what it is.

And the way Trump talks about it, he makes it sound like we’re charging Canada or Mexico or China, he’s imposing his tariff on, we’re charging them this money, when what we’re actually doing is, we’re charging ourselves the money.

And there’s an economics debate. If we have a 25% tariff on goods from Canada, how much of that will be borne by consumers in the US? How much might be absorbed by intermediaries, and how much might be the exporters in Canada? In all cases, it’s not zero, but almost all, and there’s a lot of work on it, finds that the vast majority is borne by consumers here.

Face the Nation (12/1/24)

So he’s going to punish Canada, going to punish Mexico by imposing a 25% tax on the goods we import from them, which I think to most people probably wouldn’t sound very good, but that is what he’s doing, and it’s kind of a strange policy.

Now, getting to China, I’m not sure what his latest grievance is with China. I’m sure he’s got a list. But he’s talking about a 100% tax on imports from China, and following on the Friedman article, China is at this point, I’m not going to say a rich country, in the sense that, if you look at the average income, it is still considerably lower than the US, and you have a lot poor people in rural areas in China. But in terms of its industrial capacities, it’s huge, and it actually is considerably larger than the United States. So the idea that somehow he’s going to be bringing China to its knees, which seems to be what he thinks—I’m not going to try and get in his head, but just based on what he says, that seems to be what he thinks—that’s a pretty crazy thought.

JJ: And, certainly, we have learned that tariffs are a misunderstood concept by many in the public, and some in the media, as well as some in political office. But that whole picture of Trump threatening to pull out of a deal, in terms of Canada and Mexico, that he made himself, all of that sort of stuff gets us to what you call your “best bet for 2025,” which is improved and increased trade relations between Europe and China. Let’s not be surprised if that happens, for the very reasons that you’re laying out about Trump’s inconsistencies.

Dean Baker: “Trump is saying he doesn’t care about whatever agreements we have, including the ones he signed.” (image: BillMoyers.com)

DB: Basically, Trump is saying he doesn’t care about whatever agreements we have, including the ones he signed. And this has been the way he’s done business throughout his life: He signs a contract, and he doesn’t make good on it. So he has contractors that do things for him, build a building or put in a heating system, whatever it might be. He just says, “no, I’m not going to pay you, sue me.” And maybe he pays half, maybe he pays nothing. He’s prepared to go to court, and spend a lot of money on lawyers. It’s come to be the pattern that most people, including lawyers, insist on getting paid in advance, because they know if they do their work and then come to collect from Trump, they’re not going to get it.

And that’s his approach to international relations as well. So treaties don’t mean anything to him.

And we could have lots of grounds for being unhappy with China. They have a bad human rights record. I’m not going to try to defend it. I don’t think anyone would try to defend it. There are other things you could point to that are not very pretty about China, but just from the standpoint of doing business, they largely follow through on their commitments. Trump doesn’t.

So from the standpoint of Europe, if you want to have trading partners that are reasonably reliable, and won’t pull things out of the air and say, “I want you to do this, I want you to do that,” China looks a hell of a lot better than the United States.

JJ: And so we shouldn’t be surprised, or immediately begin assigning nefarious intentions to European countries who would rather make a deal with China, at this point, than with the US under Trump. It doesn’t make them sketchy or anti-US, necessarily.

Reuters (1/8/25)

DB: That’s right. I mean, I don’t really think they have an alternative, in the sense he takes pride in it. He seems to, at least he says, “I like to be unpredictable.” Well, that’s fine, but if you’re a company in Germany and France, you’re trying to plan for the next five years, ten years: Where’s your market? Where should you build a factory? Where should you look to expand your business? You don’t want to deal with someone who changes everything every day of the week. So China just looks much better from that point.

And also, again, we’re talking about respect for international law. We just saw Donald Trump yesterday saying he doesn’t care about NATO. He’s threatening military force against Greenland and Denmark, implicitly also Canada and Panama, kind of incredible.

So, in that sense, this is not a guy who respects commitments. So I think it’s just kind of common sense from the standpoint, if I were operating a major business in Europe, I would certainly be looking much more to China than the United States right now.

JJ: I did want to say I was hipped to that Friedman piece by CODEPINK’s Megan Russell, who wrote about it, and she had trouble with the idea, among others, that China’s investment in its manufacturing was a recent development that was solely in response to Trump toughness. And that’s what led to what he’s calling their “Sputnik moment.” What do you make of that claim?

FAIR.org (9/29/17)

DB: Well, first off, the investment in manufacturing is longstanding. Because, I saw the Friedman piece, I assumed he was referring to their move into high tech. I think he’s, again, I don’t have access to the inner workings of China’s leadership, I think he is almost certainly exaggerating the extent to which its move was a response to Trump, but they did certainly recognize that they were dealing with a different world with Donald Trump in the White House than Obama, previously.

But the hostilities to China, I mean… Obama, the last couple years of his administration, at least, he was selling the Trans Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that we ended up not completing, as a way to isolate China. I don’t recall if he used that term. “Marginalize” China, I think that was the term they had used.

So the fact that the United States was becoming increasingly anti-China, or hostile to China, that began under Obama. Trump clearly accelerated that. I’m quite sure China would have moved in a big way into high tech in any case, but I suspect this was an accelerant there, that they could say, “Here’s more reason to do it.”

But they’ve been increasing the sophistication of their manufacturing and their technical skills for a long time. They have many, many more computer scientists, engineers, go down the list, than we do. So the idea that it wouldn’t have occurred to them that it’d be good to develop high-tech industries—no, that wasn’t Trump.

JJ: Let me ask you to just unpack, to the extent you feel like it, the big idea that we get from the US press, which is that, No. 1, China is worrisome. Their economy’s growth is inherently troubling and dangerous to the US. And, No. 2, we should consequently insist on, among other things, trade policy that is “tough” on China, somehow, and that will be good for “us.” I mean, there can be nuance, of course, but that seems like the frame a lot of outlets place their China trade coverage within: China is inherently frightening and dangerous to the US, and so we have to somehow use trade policy to beat them back. How useful is that framing?

AP (5/13/24)

DB: I think it’s very wrong-headed in just about every possible way. Obviously, the US has been the leading economy in the world for a long time, so we would always say, well, other countries should recognize that we grow together, so that by having access to cheaper products, better technology, they benefit, trade benefits everyone. That’s the classic story, and economists have been pushing that for centuries. And there’s more than a little bit of truth to that. And that continues to hold true when we talk about China.

So the idea that somehow China growing wealthier is a threat to us is, to my view, kind of wacky. Now, you could raise military issues, and there can be issues, but as far as the economics of it, we benefit by having China be a wealthier country. And we could—I just was tweeting on this—China is now selling electric cars, which are as good as most of the cars you’d get here, for $15,000, $16,000. I think it’d be fantastic if we can get those.

I’m sympathetic to the auto industry, particularly the people in the UAW. I mean, those are still some good-paying jobs. But, damn, you’re looking at Elon Musk, who is charging $40,000 for his cars. I don’t drive an electric car, but I’ve heard people say that the Chinese cars are every bit as good as his cars, and they’re less than half the price. We can’t buy them, though; we have a 100% tariff on them.

So this idea that we’re going to compete—why don’t we talk about cooperating? Why don’t we look for areas where we can cooperate?

And there are clearly some big ones. The two obvious, to my mind, are healthcare and climate. If we had more sharing of technology, think of how much more rapidly we could develop our clean technology, clean industries, electric vehicles, batteries, if we had shared technology more freely.

And in terms of healthcare, again, the pandemic’s not ancient history. If we had shared all of our technology, first and foremost vaccines, but also the treatments, the tests, we could have been far more effective containing the pandemic earlier, and probably saved millions of lives.

And that would apply more generally, obviously, going forward. Hopefully we won’t have another pandemic like that, but we obviously have a lot of diseases we have to deal with, and sharing technology and healthcare would be a fantastic way to do it. But that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda right now. Almost no one is talking about that, from anywhere in the political spectrum, and I just think that’s incredibly unfortunate.

DC Report (1/2/24)

I’ll also add—obviously, I have material interest here—that if you talked about sharing technology, our drug companies might not get patents, and might not make as much money, and they’re not happy to see that. But if the point is to advance public health—and also, for that matter, of the economics; we waste a lot of money on drugs with the current structure—sharing technology would really be a great thing to do.

And I’ll also throw in one more point. This is obviously speculative, but if we want to talk about promoting liberal democracy, seems to me having more contact with people in China, having our technicians or scientists working side by side with them, developing better technology, better ways to deal with disease, better ways to advance clean energy—that’s a really good way to try and influence views in China, because the odds are that a lot of scientists, the technicians who are going to be working side by side with people in the United States are going to be brothers and sisters and children and parents of people who were in the Communist Party, people who were actually calling the shots there.

So when we first opened up to China, allowed them into the WTO in 2000, there was a line that was pushed by proponents of that, saying, “Oh, this is the way to promote democracy.” And I and others said, “I don’t quite see that. We’re going to promote democracy by having people work in shoe factories for two bucks an hour? I don’t quite see that.” And that doesn’t seem to have been the case.

But I think it’s a very different story if we say, “We’re going to have your best scientists working side by side with our scientists, and if you believe in liberal democracy, if you really think that’s a good thing, I think there’s a good chance that will rub off.” So that’s speculative, but I’d like to see us try.

JJ: And I think that’s where a lot of people’s heads are at. A lot of people have family in other countries. They just see things in a global way. It’s weird to be talking, in 2025, it lands weird to talk about “foreign adversary nations,” and how we have to have “trade wars,” in part because of what you’re saying, the positive aspect of working together, in particular by sharing technology, but also it lands weird because Boeing isn’t at war with China. There are conflicts, in other words, but as you’re explaining, the lines aren’t drawn where media suggest they are, at national borders. So that misrepresentation of who the fight is between is part of what obscures these more positive visions.

DB: Yeah, exactly. And Boeing’s at war with Airbus, too. No one’s suggesting—well, I shouldn’t say that; Trump might be suggesting—but most people wouldn’t say that France and Germany are our enemies because Airbus is competing with Boeing. That’s a given. They’re going to compete.

And, again, I’m enough of an economist, I’ll say we benefit from that. So if Airbus produces a better plane, I think that’s great that we’re going to fly on it. If it’s a more fuel-efficient, safer plane than what Boeing has, that’s fantastic. Hopefully Boeing will turn around and build a better one next year.

But it’s supposed to be, we like a market economy. At the end of the day, I do think a market economy is a good thing, so we should think of it the same way with China.

And, again, there are conflicts. Europe subsidizes the Airbus. No one disputes that. China has subsidies for its electric cars. And those are things to discuss, to work out in treaties, but it doesn’t make them an enemy.

JJ: And it doesn’t improve our understanding of our own interest, as individuals, in what’s going on, to have there be this kind of “us and them,” when media are not breaking down exactly who the “us” are. And if we had, in this country, a policy where we wanted to protect workers, or we wanted to ensure wages, well, nothing’s stopping us from doing that on its own.

I think we can expect all of this to amp up, as Trump finds utility in identifying enemies, everywhere and anywhere, that call for conquering, in such ways that enrich his friends. But to the extent that that bellicosity is going to show itself in economic policy, are there things you think we should be looking out for in coverage, being wary of, things to seek out as antidote to maybe the big story that we’re going to be hearing about the US and China?

DB: First and foremost, I am declaring war on the word “tariff.” Given the confusion that word creates, I don’t understand how any reporter could in good faith use the term, at least without adding in parentheses, “taxes on imports,” because it’s not a difficult concept.

And, again, I’m an economist. I’ve known what a tariff is. Obviously many people do know what a tariff is, but the point is a lot of people don’t. So taxes on imports, taxes on imports, taxes on imports. When Donald Trump says he wants to tariff someone, he’s saying he wants to put a tax on the goods we import from them; that’s what he’s doing. And that’s not an arguable point. That’s simply definitional. So that’s one thing, front and center.

CEPR (5/25/24)

The second thing, I really wish people would understand what’s at stake. And the reporting, I think, does not do a good job of it. And when we talk about putting taxes on the imports, particularly with China, that we’re making items that would otherwise be available to us at relatively low cost, at ridiculously high cost.

So cars first and foremost, but we’re doing with the batteries from China, a lot of other things. If we’re concerned about global warming, we should want to see this technology spread as quickly as possible.

I wrote a piece on this a while back. So let’s say that the US had a plan to subsidize the adoption of clean technologies around the world. We’d all applaud that, wouldn’t we, say that was a great thing. Well, China’s doing that, and we’re treating them like it’s an act of war.

So, again, I’m sympathetic to auto workers. I have a lot of friends over the years who were auto workers, and I respect enormously the United Auto Workers union, but it’s not an act of war for them to make low-cost cars available to us.

And just the third thing, when we talk about protectionism, I’ve made this point many, many times over the years. The most extreme protectionism we have are patent and copyright protections. These are government-granted monopolies.

Now, I understand they’re policies for a specific purpose. They promote innovation, they promote creative work, understood. But they’re policies, they’re protectionism, they’re not the market.

And that’s something we should always be aware of, in trade and other areas, even domestically; we’re raising the price of items that are protected enormously, and treating this as just the market. So drugs that cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars, almost invariably cost $10, $20, $30 in the absence of patent protection.

And people should understand that this is a really big deal. It’s a big intervention in the market, and also a huge source of inequality. I like to make the joke, Bill Gates would still be working for a living—he’d probably be getting Social Security now, he’s an old guy—but he’d probably still be working for a living if the government didn’t threaten to arrest anyone who copies Microsoft software without his permission. And it really does make a big difference, and it’s literally never discussed.

So those are some items. I can give you a longer list, but those would be my starting point.

JJ: All right, then; we’ll pause at your starting point, but just for now.

We’ve been speaking with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find their work, and Dean’s Beat the Press commentary, at CEPR.net. Dean Baker, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DB: Thanks for having me on.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

New York Times (12/17/24)

This week on CounterSpin: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s December 17 piece, headlined “How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve US-China Relations,” contained some choice Friedmanisms, like:  “More Americans might get a better feel for what is going on there if they simply went and ordered room service at their hotel.” (Later followed quaintly by: “A lot of Chinese have grown out of touch with how China is perceived in the world.”)

But the big idea is that China has taken a “great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing” because of Donald Trump, who a source says “woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort.” And if the US doesn’t respond to China’s “Sputnik” moment the way we did to the Soviet Union, “we will be toast.”

The response has to do with using tariffs on China to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” (described as a “homegrown” manufacturer), and for China to “let in more Taylor Swifts”—i.e., chances for its youth to spend money on entertainment made abroad. Secretary of State Tony Blinken evidently “show[ed] China the way forward” last April, when he bought a Swift record on his way to the airport.

OK, it’s Thomas Friedman, but how different is it from US media coverage of China and trade policy generally? We’ll talk about China trade policy with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of Luigi Mangione.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The U.S. Department of Education has fined a Michigan college $2.5 million for years of “substantial misrepresentation” of career outcomes.

The department said in a news release on Tuesday that its investigation of Baker College found that the institution’s misrepresentations “could harm students, who may reasonably rely on this information when considering their higher education options and potential outcomes.”

The federal review was launched following a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Detroit Free Press in 2022 that detailed the college’s low graduation rates and the heavy debt that many students shoulder. For decades, the college promoted a near-100% employment rate, which, the investigation found, was based on shaky, self-reported data. The nonprofit college regularly spent more on marketing than on financial aid, and experts identified conflicts of interest in its governance structure.

In 2023, the news organizations — along with The Chronicle of Higher Education — reported on growing financial problems at the institution.

As part of a settlement, the college agreed to make no misrepresentations in the future, provide the department with its marketing materials for review over a period of three years and tell current students and employees about how they can submit complaints or information to the department about alleged misconduct.

President Jacqui Spicer said in a statement that the college maintains that it did not commit any misrepresentations and that the settlement contains no admission of wrongdoing. The findings “did not assert the College provided false information, as part of our marketing and recruitment data,” she said, but rather instances “in which our materials had what the DOE viewed as insufficient background or explanation.”

“Baker College is committed to continuous improvement and meeting and exceeding DOE’s expectations and has already taken steps consistent with that commitment,” Spicer said in the statement.

Dan Nowaczyk, a 2016 graduate from Baker’s now-closed Flint campus, cheered news of the penalty and settlement.

“I hope it’s something that can help their administration take a step back and analyze what went wrong and fix it,” Nowaczyk said in a text message. “Although they’re being fined for this, I wish that something more was done to help shield the people who were exploited by this false advertising. But I do think it’s a good step to show that the DoE takes these things seriously.”

Nowaczyk was among the former students who previously told reporters about their troubling experiences at Baker, including some who said they didn’t realize they’d have to pay back their loans.

Another former student said he wished the department had gone further.

“My first thought is that I am honestly shocked they are allowed to remain open and accredited. If they were able to lie like this before, they will absolutely do it again,” Bart Bechtel said in a text message.

A Baker graduate, Bechtel said he took out more than $40,000 in student loans for an online associate degree. “My second thought is that it sucks. I still owe $5,000 remaining on a $16,000 loan because of those liars.”

Kevin, a graduate of Baker’s Flint campus who asked that his last name not be used, agreed. “This seems like a slap on the wrist,” he said.

“From what I can see, there’s no restitution for students,” he added. “They should be losing accreditation. But that’s not up to the Department of Education. That’s up to the Higher Learning Commission, which may very well happen down the road.”

The HLC is the private accreditation agency that monitors Baker. It was unable to be immediately reached for comment.

The original investigation by the media organizations found that 10 years after enrolling, fewer than half of former Baker students made more than $28,000 a year, the lowest rate among colleges of its kind in Michigan, according to federal data.

The settlement comes in the waning days of the Biden administration, which had promised to crack down on deceptive advertising by colleges, particularly around outcomes. Many experts have said they are worried these types of investigations will disappear under the incoming Trump administration.

The investigation, conducted by the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid, found that:

• Baker published misleading career outcome rates on its websites, which gave the false impression that all graduates were represented in the outcomes statistics when it was just a portion of them.
• Baker advertised in emails that it had a 91% overall career outcomes rate and that its automotive program had a nearly 96% rate, but the college didn’t say how it reached those calculations or what career outcome meant.
• Baker included a list of employers on its website that it claimed had hired the college’s graduates. But 14 of the more than 100 listed employers had hired those individuals before they started at Baker.
• Baker misrepresented its graduates’ earnings, using national figures from the U.S. Department of Labor rather than data from its own graduates.
• Baker published inaccurate data about employment outcomes for students in its culinary programs.

“This settlement demonstrates the department’s ongoing commitment to enforcing higher education laws and regulations and protecting students and taxpayers,” the department said in its announcement.

In a 2023 message to the campus community, responding to reporting by the news outlets, Baker noted that “numerous in-state and out-of-state colleges and universities engage in marketing activities in Michigan; Baker College is not unique.”

Baker was founded as a for-profit business college in Flint, before converting to nonprofit status in 1977. It grew rapidly, becoming an early adopter of online learning and opening multiple campuses. It was once the largest private nonprofit college in Michigan.

The growth made for a healthy balance sheet. At the end of the 2013-14 academic year, Baker was bringing in $219 million in revenue and had $226 million in expenses. But by the end of the 2022-23 year, revenue was $58 million and expenses were $93 million. From a high of about 45,000 students in 2011-12, enrollment is now about 4,000.

Baker, however, still holds an endowment of about $362 million, according to its 2023 tax filing. Given that, Cleamon Moorer Jr., a former administrator and faculty member, wondered about the impact of the fine. “$2.5 million, out of a $300 million endowment — I’m not sure how punitive that is for an organization of its size,” he said.

Baker is in the midst of a radical shift in its target market, closing campuses in historically industrial places like Flint and Allen Park and building a new one in the more well-off suburb of Royal Oak.

But many students said Baker’s growth came from deceptive practices, and they filed complaints with several agencies, including the Department of Education. About 60 complaints were received by the Federal Trade Commission between 2016 and mid-2023, ProPublica and The Chronicle previously reported. Between January 2021 and June 2023, records from the Department of Education show that 500 borrower defense applications, claiming deceptive practices, were filed against Baker, an unusually high number for a nonprofit school.

Among the complaints collected by the FTC in 2022 was one from a student who wrote: “Baker College is a supposed non-profit institution, but they have made false claims about their employability of graduates, finances, and programs.”

Another wrote: “I was lured into a sense that I would be attending a college that valued their students, only to learn that they valued my financial asset to the college and not my education. I feel that I have been deceived and used for their financial gain.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Anna Clark, ProPublica, and David Jesse, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I love baking and I wanted to document my journey with it. So the blog itself was just meant to be kind of a diary of just things that I made.

It wasn’t really until the pandemic hit that I was like, “Oh, I feel nostalgic for all the flavors I grew up with.” Then I started riffing off of existing recipes but turning them more into a fusion concept.

I didn’t intend for it to get bigger than it was. I just kept posting on social media, on Twitter, Instagram, and Twitter was where my literary agent, Emmy, found me and was like, “Hey, are you thinking of writing a cookbook? You should do it.” I really wasn’t thinking about that as a goal but having someone think that you can do it just really emboldens you to do it. I only had two blog posts under my name, which was kind of wild.

I worked on my proposal in January and then sent it out May 2021. It’s months of just talking to editors, trying to see if anyone’s going to bite when you’re putting out your proposal. I ended up signing with Harvest, which is Harper Collins’ imprint.

So I was working from January until May 2022 to get all the recipes done, the writing done, and then rounds of revisions. And the book came out February of 2023.

So much has happened, but that’s the nitty-gritty of the book. But I’ve been baking since I was 13 for fun, just learning by myself online. That’s my journey in a nutshell.

I’m sure it feels like such a whirlwind for you as well. When you’re living something like that, it feels like you’re just on autopilot probably, right?

Yeah, I feel like for my own mental health, my editor would only tell me things coming up. Now that I’ve gone through the process from beginning to end, I’m like: “Would I have done this if I had known how much work this is going to be?” And honestly, yes. No regrets, obviously. I think it’s just like you’re building the ship as you’re sailing it.

It was really nice to have something that was very much my vision from the beginning, and I think it came out better than I thought it could. So yeah, I’m very proud of the book that happened out of it.

That’s amazing. Yeah, it seems like the recognition you’ve been getting for it too has been incredible. How did you react to getting the James Beard nom?

Oh my God, I was so shook. In January, my editor reached out to me and was like, “Hey, we’re thinking of nominating your book, putting in your written name in the ringer.” So you write a little blurb of why you think you deserve a James Beard nomination and then you don’t find out if you’re actually nominated until April 30th.

My first text was from my friend Bettina, who’s an amazing writer at Eater, and she’s like, “Congrats.” And I was like, “For what?” So I checked the James Beard website and they had the nominations online. I cried. I called my best friend, she cried.

I called my mom, who is an immigrant from the Philippines. She was like, “What’s that?” And I was so excited to tell her.

She was like, “Oh, I’m so proud of you. That’s so exciting!” I think everyone has different relationships with their parents, especially when you’re first generation. My mom has always been: “As long as you’re happy, but also you should maybe be an accountant or maybe work at LinkedIn to get money.”

My parents are proud of me but in some ways I don’t think they realize the gravity of certain things that I do or because it’s such a new thing for them in creative fields.

There’s a certain invalidation or deescalation of a creative field or position as a legitimate role so much of the time because they’re so used to corporate structures where there’s a ladder and a clear hierarchy. But when you’re in a world of artistry and creativity, there’s no sense of hierarchy in that way. You can win an Oscar—the James Beard as the Oscar of the food world—and it’ll still be like, “Your cousin went to Harvard and got an MBA.”

It’s an uphill battle for sure. And it’s tough because at certain points when you’re aware that you don’t need this because there’s validation you get from your partner or your friends and people that know you, you beat yourself up more. You’re like, “Wait, I shouldn’t feel sad about this. I know they mean well.” But everyone who’s Asian American and creative I’ve talked to has also felt some levels of this. Sometimes it’s just really difficult.

Would you say that you’ve always considered yourself an artist?

Yeah, I was an overachiever and really wanted to do well. The things that I naturally shined at were writing and soft skills. I always thought my path was going to be a business woman. When you’re a kid, you think you’re going to get a briefcase and you’re going to go on business trips, and you’re going to have clients.

I stuck with that for so long, well into college, but when I realized I wasn’t good at finance and I wasn’t good at accounting, I was like, “Well, I guess it’s going to be marketing.” I always liked the storytelling aspect of marketing. This is a way to be creative, but in a corporate structure.

But creatively I just have so much more fun writing for myself. I blogged for the school newspaper and I did a music blog that is now defunct, but it was basically me interviewing independent artists, usually artists of color, and talking about their journey and I was just really excited hearing how other people accomplish their goals and their dreams creatively. So yes, I would say I was always a creative person, but for a long time I didn’t know how to implement that in my career.

How did you make the pivot to food?

I love Filipino flavor but I learned how to make cupcakes or cookies first. A lot of Western types of desserts are my forte so let me just try to implement that into this mold. I am from California, I live in New York; my worldview is very diverse around the people that I grew up with. So there’s many influences that are global, which is at the heart of being American.

How does your personal style impact your creations and your creative living?

I love clothes. I love jewelry. I love playing dress up. And I think that it has translated itself in my food. I gravitate towards a lot of color and a lot of my clothing is now food related. It’s cakes and fruits and strawberries. If I’m wearing a black parka in the dead of winter, I feel so sad.

When I’m not investing in myself the ways that I know I can, it really motivates me. This is another way for me to express who I am without having to say anything.

Being in New York is another blessing where no one will really bat an eye as much if you’re wearing something a little more out there. You can dress however you want and hopefully no one will judge you. It helps me practice, “Oh, I can literally do whatever I want.” And if people don’t like it, then people don’t like it. But if people do, then that’s great.

Do you find yourself stuck on the people who don’t like it, or do you have a pretty healthy relationship with that?

It’s so difficult because I’m a people pleaser and I really want people to like me. I’ve had the nicest interactions on social media and had the meanest, most horrible things that I’ve ever seen. Some people would just comment on my appearance like, “This troll doll doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” I was like, “Troll doll, a compliment!” The haters really do fuel me.

There’s a point where you just have to laugh. I am salty on the inside and taking the high road is hard for me but I do it because it’s worse to actually just go in the weeds and trenches and fight trolls for no reason.

I feel like the hardest comments are from Filipinos across the diaspora, but also in the Philippines. Those are the more hurtful comments that are actually tough on me. I’m trying really hard to just do my version of Filipino food and recognize that that is just one version of it. And people just think that in totality, this is Filipino food, but not necessarily.

I think that’s a lot of pressure for folks because as a Filipino American creator, there are not that many people like you in this field. Then the pressure of being the sole representative is unrealistic, right? Of course you’re not going to represent every experience because you are your own experience; that’s why your art and your food is so colorful and it’s so American and it’s very Filipino because that’s who you are. So what fuels you beyond the haters?

I feel rejuvenated by meeting other creatives, not even just in food. It’s an infectious kind of passion that I really gravitate towards. I always thought of myself as an introvert before but getting older, I do think I get my energy from other people. The reason why New York just makes sense for me is I feel like I can be in proximity with so many creative people.

You get to see the best versions of people and that kind of makes you want to be the best version of you.

It sounds like you’re pursuing your passions and following it and seeing where it takes you. I’m sure with meeting so many people throughout the process, it’s been like “Oh, that’s possible? I didn’t even know that was possible!”

Exactly. I feel like it’s weird too when you’re just in your head about a lot of things like, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that with this budget.” I’ve seen so many people DIY, but also have friends who are really good and talented. Being in community with other people, whether it’s online or in person, is so important.

A lot of artists, especially during the last four years, have seen a lot of existential crises around the frivolity of art, like does it even matter? For you working in food, specifically with desserts, it is literally sustenance but also just brings so much joy. You don’t need it but it is so vital to your existence.

It’s the duality of those experiences where I know crazy things are happening in the world and if I can do something to help, I will. The nature of capitalism is to produce, produce, produce and keep making things. But when you just want to do things for yourself or for your community, you have to sometimes take a step back and be like, “I can’t do this right now and I need to recharge and do better for next time.” You have to do what you can do to survive and to hopefully thrive later on.

Describe your personal flavor profile.

Loud. There’s ways to have a lot of flavor in something, but still be able to taste every single taste. Loud encapsulates everything about my personality and a love for being all parts of yourself, even though someone might think it’s too much to handle. But I think people are able to withstand it, so that’s great.

You’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea because if you were, you’d be water.

Exactly. When people actually have an opinion about something, whether it’s good or it’s bad, then that’s great. Then it’s worth having a conversation over.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.

I love baking and I wanted to document my journey with it. So the blog itself was just meant to be kind of a diary of just things that I made.

It wasn’t really until the pandemic hit that I was like, “Oh, I feel nostalgic for all the flavors I grew up with.” Then I started riffing off of existing recipes but turning them more into a fusion concept.

I didn’t intend for it to get bigger than it was. I just kept posting on social media, on Twitter, Instagram, and Twitter was where my literary agent, Emmy, found me and was like, “Hey, are you thinking of writing a cookbook? You should do it.” I really wasn’t thinking about that as a goal but having someone think that you can do it just really emboldens you to do it. I only had two blog posts under my name, which was kind of wild.

I worked on my proposal in January and then sent it out May 2021. It’s months of just talking to editors, trying to see if anyone’s going to bite when you’re putting out your proposal. I ended up signing with Harvest, which is Harper Collins’ imprint.

So I was working from January until May 2022 to get all the recipes done, the writing done, and then rounds of revisions. And the book came out February of 2023.

So much has happened, but that’s the nitty-gritty of the book. But I’ve been baking since I was 13 for fun, just learning by myself online. That’s my journey in a nutshell.

I’m sure it feels like such a whirlwind for you as well. When you’re living something like that, it feels like you’re just on autopilot probably, right?

Yeah, I feel like for my own mental health, my editor would only tell me things coming up. Now that I’ve gone through the process from beginning to end, I’m like: “Would I have done this if I had known how much work this is going to be?” And honestly, yes. No regrets, obviously. I think it’s just like you’re building the ship as you’re sailing it.

It was really nice to have something that was very much my vision from the beginning, and I think it came out better than I thought it could. So yeah, I’m very proud of the book that happened out of it.

That’s amazing. Yeah, it seems like the recognition you’ve been getting for it too has been incredible. How did you react to getting the James Beard nom?

Oh my God, I was so shook. In January, my editor reached out to me and was like, “Hey, we’re thinking of nominating your book, putting in your written name in the ringer.” So you write a little blurb of why you think you deserve a James Beard nomination and then you don’t find out if you’re actually nominated until April 30th.

My first text was from my friend Bettina, who’s an amazing writer at Eater, and she’s like, “Congrats.” And I was like, “For what?” So I checked the James Beard website and they had the nominations online. I cried. I called my best friend, she cried.

I called my mom, who is an immigrant from the Philippines. She was like, “What’s that?” And I was so excited to tell her.

She was like, “Oh, I’m so proud of you. That’s so exciting!” I think everyone has different relationships with their parents, especially when you’re first generation. My mom has always been: “As long as you’re happy, but also you should maybe be an accountant or maybe work at LinkedIn to get money.”

My parents are proud of me but in some ways I don’t think they realize the gravity of certain things that I do or because it’s such a new thing for them in creative fields.

There’s a certain invalidation or deescalation of a creative field or position as a legitimate role so much of the time because they’re so used to corporate structures where there’s a ladder and a clear hierarchy. But when you’re in a world of artistry and creativity, there’s no sense of hierarchy in that way. You can win an Oscar—the James Beard as the Oscar of the food world—and it’ll still be like, “Your cousin went to Harvard and got an MBA.”

It’s an uphill battle for sure. And it’s tough because at certain points when you’re aware that you don’t need this because there’s validation you get from your partner or your friends and people that know you, you beat yourself up more. You’re like, “Wait, I shouldn’t feel sad about this. I know they mean well.” But everyone who’s Asian American and creative I’ve talked to has also felt some levels of this. Sometimes it’s just really difficult.

Would you say that you’ve always considered yourself an artist?

Yeah, I was an overachiever and really wanted to do well. The things that I naturally shined at were writing and soft skills. I always thought my path was going to be a business woman. When you’re a kid, you think you’re going to get a briefcase and you’re going to go on business trips, and you’re going to have clients.

I stuck with that for so long, well into college, but when I realized I wasn’t good at finance and I wasn’t good at accounting, I was like, “Well, I guess it’s going to be marketing.” I always liked the storytelling aspect of marketing. This is a way to be creative, but in a corporate structure.

But creatively I just have so much more fun writing for myself. I blogged for the school newspaper and I did a music blog that is now defunct, but it was basically me interviewing independent artists, usually artists of color, and talking about their journey and I was just really excited hearing how other people accomplish their goals and their dreams creatively. So yes, I would say I was always a creative person, but for a long time I didn’t know how to implement that in my career.

How did you make the pivot to food?

I love Filipino flavor but I learned how to make cupcakes or cookies first. A lot of Western types of desserts are my forte so let me just try to implement that into this mold. I am from California, I live in New York; my worldview is very diverse around the people that I grew up with. So there’s many influences that are global, which is at the heart of being American.

How does your personal style impact your creations and your creative living?

I love clothes. I love jewelry. I love playing dress up. And I think that it has translated itself in my food. I gravitate towards a lot of color and a lot of my clothing is now food related. It’s cakes and fruits and strawberries. If I’m wearing a black parka in the dead of winter, I feel so sad.

When I’m not investing in myself the ways that I know I can, it really motivates me. This is another way for me to express who I am without having to say anything.

Being in New York is another blessing where no one will really bat an eye as much if you’re wearing something a little more out there. You can dress however you want and hopefully no one will judge you. It helps me practice, “Oh, I can literally do whatever I want.” And if people don’t like it, then people don’t like it. But if people do, then that’s great.

Do you find yourself stuck on the people who don’t like it, or do you have a pretty healthy relationship with that?

It’s so difficult because I’m a people pleaser and I really want people to like me. I’ve had the nicest interactions on social media and had the meanest, most horrible things that I’ve ever seen. Some people would just comment on my appearance like, “This troll doll doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” I was like, “Troll doll, a compliment!” The haters really do fuel me.

There’s a point where you just have to laugh. I am salty on the inside and taking the high road is hard for me but I do it because it’s worse to actually just go in the weeds and trenches and fight trolls for no reason.

I feel like the hardest comments are from Filipinos across the diaspora, but also in the Philippines. Those are the more hurtful comments that are actually tough on me. I’m trying really hard to just do my version of Filipino food and recognize that that is just one version of it. And people just think that in totality, this is Filipino food, but not necessarily.

I think that’s a lot of pressure for folks because as a Filipino American creator, there are not that many people like you in this field. Then the pressure of being the sole representative is unrealistic, right? Of course you’re not going to represent every experience because you are your own experience; that’s why your art and your food is so colorful and it’s so American and it’s very Filipino because that’s who you are. So what fuels you beyond the haters?

I feel rejuvenated by meeting other creatives, not even just in food. It’s an infectious kind of passion that I really gravitate towards. I always thought of myself as an introvert before but getting older, I do think I get my energy from other people. The reason why New York just makes sense for me is I feel like I can be in proximity with so many creative people.

You get to see the best versions of people and that kind of makes you want to be the best version of you.

It sounds like you’re pursuing your passions and following it and seeing where it takes you. I’m sure with meeting so many people throughout the process, it’s been like “Oh, that’s possible? I didn’t even know that was possible!”

Exactly. I feel like it’s weird too when you’re just in your head about a lot of things like, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that with this budget.” I’ve seen so many people DIY, but also have friends who are really good and talented. Being in community with other people, whether it’s online or in person, is so important.

A lot of artists, especially during the last four years, have seen a lot of existential crises around the frivolity of art, like does it even matter? For you working in food, specifically with desserts, it is literally sustenance but also just brings so much joy. You don’t need it but it is so vital to your existence.

It’s the duality of those experiences where I know crazy things are happening in the world and if I can do something to help, I will. The nature of capitalism is to produce, produce, produce and keep making things. But when you just want to do things for yourself or for your community, you have to sometimes take a step back and be like, “I can’t do this right now and I need to recharge and do better for next time.” You have to do what you can do to survive and to hopefully thrive later on.

Describe your personal flavor profile.

Loud. There’s ways to have a lot of flavor in something, but still be able to taste every single taste. Loud encapsulates everything about my personality and a love for being all parts of yourself, even though someone might think it’s too much to handle. But I think people are able to withstand it, so that’s great.

You’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea because if you were, you’d be water.

Exactly. When people actually have an opinion about something, whether it’s good or it’s bad, then that’s great. Then it’s worth having a conversation over.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.

We speak with two leading economists about Thursday’s CNN debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, where the candidates sparred over tariffs, taxes, inflation and more. Trump repeatedly claimed that immigrants coming to the United States are stealing “Black jobs,” which is a “fascist notion,” says Darrick Hamilton, founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School. Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says Biden has much to boast about, including strong job growth and falling inflation, but that Biden’s delivery was “very muddled.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The New York Times‘ post–New Hampshire analysis of the presidential election by the paper’s senior White House correspondent, Peter Baker, bodes very poorly for how coverage of the 2024 election will proceed.

“The Looming Contest Between Two Presidents and Two Americas,” read the headline (1/25/24), followed by the subhead: “The general election matchup that seems likely between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump is about fundamentally disparate visions of the nation.”

That one of those “visions” involves an open embrace of authoritarianism is without question the central story of the 2024 election, and that ought to be covered fearlessly and relentlessly by the nation’s press corps. Yet Baker seemed to be doing his best to instead both-sides the issue in the way he does best (FAIR.org, 1/18/21), framing the contest simply as one of “two Americas” that don’t see eye-to-eye.

Proto-fascists or patriots—who can say?

The New York Times (1/25/24) framing the 2024 election as a contest between “two presidents” plays into the MAGA delusion that Trump actually won the 2020 election.

Baker wrote that the “election matchup…represents the clash of two presidents of profoundly different countries, the president of Blue America versus the president of Red America.”

He then gestured in the direction of the fundamental issue: “It is at least partly about ideology, yes, but also fundamentally about race and religion and culture and economics and democracy and retribution and most of all, perhaps, about identity.”

He continued:

It is about two vastly disparate visions of America led by two presidents who, other than their age and the most recent entry on their résumés, could hardly be more dissimilar. Mr. Biden leads an America that, as he sees it, embraces diversity, democratic institutions and traditional norms, that considers government at its best to be a force for good in society. Mr. Trump leads an America where, in his view, the system has been corrupted by dark conspiracies and the undeserving are favored over hard-working everyday people.

Notice that Biden’s America “embraces…democratic institutions,” but the thing that makes Trump’s America so dissimilar apparently isn’t centered on election denialism or authoritarianism. That’s made even more apparent in the rest of the roughly 1,600-word article, which didn’t bother to mention democracy, or Trump’s open threat to it, again.

Instead, Baker focused on the polarization of the public:

Americans do not just disagree with each other, they live in different realities, each with its own self-reinforcing internet-and-media ecosphere. The January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was either an outrageous insurrection in service of an unconstitutional power grab by a proto-fascist or a legitimate protest that may have gotten out of hand but has been exploited by the other side and turned patriots into hostages.

As Baker frames it, there’s nothing to distinguish one reality from the other; they are crafted in a carefully symmetrical way so as to offer no appearance of Baker having taken a side. Of course, one is indeed reality and the other a dangerous fiction—but the Times is too spineless to label them accurately.

‘Party of the white working class’

Contrary to the media myth, if only people who made more than $100,000 could vote, Trump would have won in a landslide (New York Times, 11/3/20).

Emphasizing the polarization of the parties, Baker repeated a favorite media myth:

Mr. Trump has transformed the GOP into the party of the white working class, rooted strongly in rural communities and resentful of globalization, while Mr. Biden’s Democrats have increasingly become the party of the more highly educated and economically better off, who have thrived in the information age.

It’s treated as gospel in corporate media that Trump’s base is the white working class, so that no evidence is considered necessary to make the claim—but it’s completely false. The corollary, that Democrats have become the party of the wealthy, is equally false.

2020 exit polls showed that voters making less than $50,000 a year chose Biden by 11 percentage points, and those making between $50,000 and $100,000 preferred Biden by 15 points. It was only the quarter of respondents with an income of over $100,000 who favored Trump, by 12 percentage points.

Even when you break that down by race and look only at white voters—who voted for Trump in majorities across income levels—you see that it was among those making less than $50,000 where Trump was weakest. In other words, it’s not the white working class that’s driving the Trump machine (and the Democrats are not the party of the wealthy). But this myth conveniently allows corporate media to repeatedly urge Democrats to pander to white MAGA anxieties (FAIR.org, 6/5/16, 3/30/18, 11/13/18).

‘Things are not normal’

Washington Post interview (1/5/24) with historian Sean Wilentz: “I don’t even want to think about what historians are going to be saying if Trump wins. I just hope there are historians around.”

Baker went on to note “how divorced many Americans feel from each other,” and quoted centrist historian Sean Wilentz for expert commentary: “I think people have yet to understand just how abnormal the situation is.” But as Wilentz’s many warnings over recent years make clear, his central concern is not the feelings Americans on both sides have about each other, but the dangers Trump poses to democracy. Just a few weeks earlier, the Washington Post (1/5/24) published an interview with Wilentz in which he spelled it out:

One political party has basically collapsed. It still has the name of the Republican Party, but it’s no longer the Republican Party. It doesn’t exist as it did before. It is now a political movement dedicated to the well-being of an authoritarian figure, namely Donald J. Trump. If you think we’re still living in normal political times, you’re mistaken, just as they were mistaken in the 1850s.

Baker’s commitment to bothsidesism continued to shift the focus—and, essentially, the blame for the precariousness of the political moment—from the GOP’s authoritarian shift, led by Donald Trump, to a partisan polarization in which two sets of people simply can’t see eye to eye. This followed through all the way to his conclusion, which warned of dire possibilities following “victory by one [side] or the other”:

And while voters may already have some sense of how the winner will operate in the White House over the next four years, it is not at all clear how a divided country will respond to victory by one or the other. Rejectionism, disruption, further schism, even violence all seem possible.

As Mr. Wilentz said, “Things are not normal here. I think that’s important for people to understand.”

If they do, it certainly won’t be thanks to the top White House reporter at the country’s most influential newspaper.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

The post For NYT’s Baker, 2024 Is About ‘Disparate Visions’—Not Threat to Democracy appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

The article informs us that Greece was hit by an economic crisis a decade ago. It had, then, a load of debt – (doesn’t it now?) – which it could not repay and almost left the eurozone. So far so good.

The newspaper informs that today it is one of the fastest growing economies in Europe. Again, so far so good. And clearly, the famous credit rating agencies are upgrading Greece’s debt rating and thus, opening the way for large investors and the economy is growing at twice the rate of the eurozone average. That’s right. CEPR economist Dean Baker, commenting on the article after its publication, wrote with emphasis: “Since the eurozone growth rate for 2023 is projected to be 0.8 percent, growing twice as fast is a rather low bar.”

The journalist mentions that unemployment is at 11 percent, which one would say, with a dose of humor,  is “Greek statistics” because the probability is that unemployment is much higher. (Greece’s past government falsified fiscal data in order to enter eurozone.) Dean Baker will point out though, “The 11 percent unemployment rate is far higher than the rest of the European Union, which has a 5.9 percent unemployment rate.” Everywhere in Greece there is poverty, and mine conditions in society.

I am one of the Greeks living in New York, and I have received many messages and phone calls from Greek people who want to immigrate to America because they cannot make ends meet. Friends and family members ask me the same. They are forced to do two-three jobs to survive. The minimum wage is 780 euros (650 net). So, how is it that the article describes “a miracle”? One would say that even the examples of the people mentioned in the article are not typical.

And the tourists who have returned en masse, as the article states, has not helped to improve incomes. On the popular islands – that the average Greek cannot visit – usually, there are galley conditions for the workers.

Unfortunately, in Greek society, a small percentage of 5%-10% live well – “the oligarchs eat with golden spoons” – and the rest suffer. Children of the poor go to school hungry. The country has some of the most expensive fuel in Europe, expensive food, high VAT, and very expensive electricity. Many do not have money for dental care, to change tires on the car, or, to start a new family. The journalist writes “misery of austerity is still fresh”, no, it is not fresh; it is still present in the social conditions. Nowhere is mentioned that the government gave, until recently, “Soviet-style” Food Pass and Fuel Pass coupons, which helped the re-election by a landslide of the conservative leader Mr. Mitsotakis. This image is not beautified by the fact that the companies Microsoft and Pfizer are investing in Greece.

For reasons that are understandable, rating agencies like DBRS Morningstar and Moody’s do their job. Very likely for them, a strong economy means neoliberalism, purchasing power that is getting worse every year, and cheap labor. And Greece is a country that lacks personalities like AOC and Bernie. But the NYTimes should not present these assessments while ignoring the poverty that still exists in the country that gave birth to Democracy. The NYTimes has accustomed us to a more critical look at the suffering of ordinary people.

In conclusion, “can a dead man dance?” No! So, the information given by the NYTimes should create “a complete picture” and not the opposite. Perhaps, we can accept that somehow, the good American newspaper wants to help improve the desperate economic situation that continues to impoverish the Greeks and stop the transfer of wealth to the few. Good psychology is everything, even in economy. Until then, the country will continue to live its own difficult fate, its own 1929, similar to the conditions America experienced at the start of the Great Depression era.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dimitris Eleas.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The U.S. Department of Education has opened an investigation into Baker College, a large nonprofit school in Michigan, over its “recruitment and marketing practices,” according to a new public disclosure.

For decades, Baker’s marketing touted a low-cost education and a near 100% employment rate for graduates of its campuses and extensive online curriculum. But fewer than a quarter of students graduate, far less than the national average for private four-year colleges. Former students and staff members described frequently changing requirements and programs that delayed graduation, sometimes indefinitely.

Those details and others painted a troubling picture of Baker in a 2022 investigation published by ProPublica and the Detroit Free Press.

On Monday, news of the federal inquiry, first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education, was welcomed by several students quoted in the ProPublica-Free Press investigation.

“I am stunned, to be honest,” said Bart Bechtel, a Baker graduate who took out more than $40,000 in student loans for an online associate degree.

Bechtel has previously described how the school encouraged his loans, even though the amount he borrowed exceeded his tuition. Financial aid officers, he said, told him he should take advantage of the full amount he was eligible for, since he might need money for Christmas presents and family expenses.

The 2022 story detailed how 70% of Baker students who took out federal loans had problems making payments two years after leaving college. An exceptionally large number of former Baker students with loans had filed claims with the federal government that they were defrauded or misled by the college. As of December 2020, according to data published by Yahoo Finance, of the 266 institutions with more than 100 “borrower defense” claims of deception, only five were long-standing nonprofits. Among those five, three were shuttered colleges, and one had recently regained accreditation 20 years after losing it. The other was Baker.

In an email to ProPublica, a spokesperson for the Department of Education said the agency does not comment on investigations, or acknowledge that they exist, “until any outcomes have been officially communicated to the institution.”

Messages sent on Monday to Baker’s vice president for marketing and communications and to President and CEO Jacqui Spicer were not returned. However, the college issued a brief statement attributed to Baker’s board chair, Denise Bannan, who, over nearly 40 years with the school, has previously served as provost, vice president for academics, president of the Owosso campus and liaison to Baker’s accreditor.

The statement said the college “received an information request” in connection with a department investigation. It said that Baker “is cooperating with the Department’s request and takes its obligations under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 seriously.”

In a Monday night email Spicer addressed to the “Baker team,” she promised the school was working to resolve the matter “as efficiently and transparently as possible.” She also warned recipients to be cautious of information from “external sources” and to “avoid contact, directly or indirectly, with the media.” The email was obtained by the Detroit Free Press.

The disclosure of an investigation was posted June 21 by the Higher Learning Commission, a private accreditation agency. The day before, Baker issued a news release describing a freeze on undergraduate tuition, a reduction of graduate tuition and some free housing opportunities in the coming academic year.

The commission’s disclosure notes that Baker remains accredited. The college is required to file a report with the accreditor no later than Aug. 18 “providing a detailed update regarding the status of the investigation.” The disclosure also says that the Department of Education’s office of federal student aid initiated the inquiry.

Despite serving many low-income students — and also having a large endowment — Baker College spent more on marketing than financial aid, ProPublica and the Free Press found. Ten years after enrolling, fewer than half of former Baker students made more than $28,000 a year.

“I think it’s a good move,” said Dan Nowaczyk about the federal government’s review of the college. A 2016 graduate from Baker’s now-closed Flint campus, he remembers fellow students who did not realize they would have to pay their loan money back.

“Based on all the stories I’ve heard since your report came out, and from your original report itself, auditing their financial aid processes and making sure it’s all being done right can help not just the students but Baker College itself too in making sure it’s there for the students first and foremost,” Nowaczyk added.

The ProPublica-Free Press investigation also found governance issues at Baker. Upon retirement, former presidents routinely served on the college’s Board of Trustees, which is supposed to provide independent oversight on the decisions of the school administration. One longtime former Baker president served as chair of the board while at the same time being paid more than a million dollars from the college for five years of part-time work.

Baker’s bylaws state that no salary should be “paid to trustees, as such, for their services,” but they do permit payment to a trustee who works for the college itself.

When asked about the source for the graduate employment rates that it promotes, Baker’s then-president cited the National Association of Colleges and Employers. However, the group said it does not evaluate individual institutions. It collects self-reported information from the colleges, often based on surveys.

Baker officials traced the school’s low graduation rate to its open enrollment policy of accepting virtually any applicant with a high school degree or equivalent, the 2022 story reported, and also said the college is not allowed to restrict student borrowers. In a statement, the college emphasized its continuing commitment to improving student outcomes and reducing student loan debt. Regarding Baker spending more on marketing than financial aid, the then-president told reporters that he believed this was necessary because the breadth of the college’s educational opportunities were not well-known.

Following the story’s publication, Baker sent a legal threat to a former faculty member who spoke to a reporter. Jacqueline Tessmer, who taught digital media at the now-closed Auburn Hills campus for 14 years, had told reporters that the college “has ruined a lot of people’s lives.” Soon after, she received a letter sent by a law firm on behalf of Baker, demanding she retract her statements, which it described as “false and defamatory.”

In the 18 months since receiving the letter, Tessmer said, she has not heard again from the college or its lawyers. The news of the federal investigation has her thinking of her former students.

“I hope Baker has to agree to forgiving at least some of the debt incurred by students who never graduated,” Tessmer said. “Or perhaps graduated but were sold degrees that pay so little they will never earn enough to pay them off.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Anna Clark.

President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address Tuesday, touting his administration’s achievements and laying out his plans for the next two years under a divided Congress, including on immigration, the economy, the climate crisis and more. We speak with Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez, who delivered a response to Tuesday’s speech on behalf of the Working Families Party, and economist Dean Baker, who both applaud Biden’s focus on income inequality and making the rich pay more in taxes. “He’s clearly moved to the left,” says Baker.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Peter Shirlow.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Peter Shirlow.

This week on CounterSpin: News media coverage of taxes falls broadly into two camps: There are, especially in April, lots of “news you can use”–type stories—like NBC‘s Today show on April 14 warning viewers to be mindful of typos and not be lazy about filing for extensions, or NBC Nightly News on April 18, noting that if you filed by mail, you might wait five to eight months for your return, due to backlogs at the IRS. Taxes as an “oh well, what are you gonna do” thing that all of us have to deal with.

Then there are other stories, disconnected stories, about tax policy: Who pays, how much, and why? We’ve talked about that a fair amount on this show, and we’re going to revisit two of those conversations today.

Last April, we spoke with Emory University law professor and author Dorothy A. Brown about how, though you can scour tax policy and find no mention of race, our tax system still affects Black people very differently, in ways most conversation obscures.

And in February 2019, we spoke with economist Dean Baker about why the idea of raising taxes on the superwealthy makes sense to many mainstream economists and to the general public, but still faces a perennial headwind in corporate media.

Two revelatory conversations about tax policy, this week on CounterSpin.

The post Dorothy A. Brown and Dean Baker on Tax Policy appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

The post Episode 100 – Are The Democrats The New Conservative Party? And Abolishing The Police w/Professor Beth Baker appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.