Currently viewing the tag: “Rather”
The situation in Syria continues to smolder:
Several deaths have been reported as anti-government protests got under way in several Syrian cities after Muslim prayers on Friday, activists have said. Protest marches against Baath Party rule demanding freedoms broke out in cities in the north and south, including the flashpoint city of Daraa. … Al Jazeera's Rula Amin, reporting from Damascus, said at least four people were killed in the afternoon after government forces started using live fire against the protesters in the Douma suburb.
The rallies, taking place for the third week in succession after Friday prayers, come two days after Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, labelled them a foreign conspiracy. Assad defied expectations during his first public address since the protests began that he would announce sweeping changes.
Witnesses in Daraa, a southern town that has been one of the main focal points of rising dissent, said hundreds gathered after leaving a mosque shouting "death rather [than] humiliation" and "national unity".
Enduring America has tons more footage from today.
He really wanted to be president of China. But the USA was all that was available. That explains why he’s been working so hard to turn this into a Third World communist country.
Via Sad Hill News.
On tips from J and Susan K.
Just as the insistent MoveOn.org lobbying campaign for PBS tells you something about just whom PBS is pleasing, disgraced former CBS anchorman Dan Rather being sympathetically profiled for Mother Jones tells you that all Rather's patter about corporations ruining the integrity of the news has a ready audience on the hard left.
Mother Jones insisted "At 79, the former CBS anchorman is still kicking ass and winning Emmys." (Dan Rather Reports actually won a news Emmy in 2008, so someone is still trying to reassemble Rather's shredded reputation.) They also notice almost no one watches his HDNet show, but suggest that's a terrible shame. Freelance writer Jim Rendon recounted how Rather worked on a story about electronic voting machines, a favorite of the paranoid Janeane Garofalo left, that thinks both Gore and Kerry beat Bush:
The former CBS News anchorman is recounting a story he'd reported in 2007 about problems with electronic voting machines. "We found out that these wonderful, electronic, technological marvels were manufactured in what amounted to a sweatshop in the Philippines—the Philippines, exclamation point!" he says, in that ascending tone so familiar to generations of Americans.
That sounds a little insulting to Filipino-Americans, perhaps?
"The equipment wouldn't fit in its boxes, so the workers, two of them, had to put their feet on the thing and shove it into the box. They've got to get it in there, it's got to ship, and so they've got four feet in there pushing this thing." He lets out a laugh. "In some cases, the company's explanation of why ." these things are good fell into the category of 'If bullshit were music, these guys would be a full symphony orchestra.'"
That's rich. Dan Rather was a full symphony orchestra of journalistic fakery with the phony documents in the George Bush Texas Air National Guard "expose." If there were a shred of journalistic professionalism in that story, his colleagues would have stuck with him. Instead, he's exiled at HDNet. Rendon acknowledged the debacle, but sticks to the violins and sympathy:
"He was incredibly hurt and angry," says Jim Murphy, then his executive producer. Rather nonetheless agreed to stay on with the 60 Minutes crew. That, he says, is when he realized he was in trouble. He proposed dozens of stories but few were approved, and the handful that he completed aired in the worst slots. He believes that Viacom, which acquired CBS in 2000, was trying to push him off the show to curry favor with the Bush administration.
"The fact that he keeps making these claims is outrageous," says Jeff Fager, the show's executive producer, who keeps pictures of Rather on his office wall even though the two have barely spoken in years. (Rather sued CBS, in part to unearth evidence of Viacom's political meddling, but his case was dismissed in January 2010.) "I think he was distracted, and it was hard for him to focus on just doing stories," Fager adds. "There might be something to his crusade, that the conglomerates in media don't want to take the chance of investing in reporting because it is risky. But not this company."
"These are people that I worked with, I trusted, who came under extreme pressure," Rather responds when I bring up Fager's comment. "I'd like to think they did things they preferred not to do, such as say that I wasn't working hard or that the quality of my work was low. Jeff knows better than that." He pauses for a long time. "He'll have to live with his conscience."
Despite the troubles, it came as a shock for Rather when, in June 2006, the network declined to renew his contract. Even today, it takes considerable prompting to get him to open up about it. While invariably warm and polite, rushing to open doors for a reporter half his age, Rather harbors an old-school journalist's reluctance to color stories with personal sentiment, even when the story happens to be about him. "I felt like hell, of course I did," he finally admits. "I particularly feel bad for other people who lost their jobs." He adds that he was never bitter; he had a supportive family, freedom from financial worries, and a career that had long since surpassed his wildest hopes. But Mapes, his old producer, says Rather felt betrayed. "When you work for a company for that long," she told me, "when you cover everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Vietnam War, and then to find out that the company was not loyal back—that was really painful to him."
This is not the kind of parade Dan Rather would get from Mother Jones if the target of his phony-document story was Al Gore or Ralph Nader. But it is required for Rendon to get access to Rather and cash his freelance check.
New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter is brought on late in the piece to lament that he has never written about Rather's show, since HDNet not only has few viewers, but are lame at public relations. Does Stelter really mean to tell the public that he doesn't write about anything unless publicists push him hard enough? It's more likely that unlike Rendon, he thinks Rather is damaged goods and doesn't deserve any puffery. That would also be the journalistically honorable position.
For his part, Rendon is still selling how Rather somehow isn't being exploitative by doing a story with an alleged victim of childhood sex abuse from a Catholic priest. (No sensationalism in that subject.)
BACK IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, Rather is interviewing Don McLean, a real estate developer who was molested by two priests when he was 10 years old. Faced with lawsuits from dozens of abuse victims, the Catholic diocese in San Diego filed for bankruptcy protection. But a judge caught the church hiding assets, and Rather's reporting had uncovered a similar pattern in other dioceses. With McLean's wife and children looking on, Rather asks him about the church's response to his accusations, the property that the church had neglected to reveal, and how the abuse changed his life. But he avoids asking about the exact nature of the abuse. "He did come close to tearing up," Rather muses to his crew when we're all back in the car. "I hoped that he wouldn't. We've all seen, all provoked the archetypal tearful breakdown. We were not after that today."
Rather tends to avoid the cheap sensationalism driving today's news cycle. His story was fundamentally about accounting—and the church acting more like a big corporation than an institution of faith. That tension, not the titillating detail, is what interests him.
As if it isn't "titillating" to insist that the world's largest church tolerates pedophilia. It sounds very generous for Rather not to ask the alleged victim for specifics. But doesn't that suggest that he automatically believes the subject? And doesn't that suggest the usual anti-church bias? This is Mother Jones, so no one asks. Instead, we get sappy tributes to how hard Old Man Rather still works:
I heard his alarm sound at 6 a.m. through the thin hotel wall. He was on camera by 8 and then drove from interview to interview all day, never slowing down until 10:30 p.m., when he capped off dinner in Newport Beach with two scoops of ice cream and a yarn about crash-landing in a small plane in Alaska. It was an easy day, he quipped. "He's 79 years old and he's working at the same pace he did when he was 18," Peyronnin marvels.
Whether he's creating a symphony orchestra of BS apparently doesn't matter….as long as the symphony pleases the hard left.
On February 4, Dennis Kucinich asked DOD to allow him to visit Bradley Manning so he could assess his conditions of confinement. On February 8, Robert Gates wrote Kucinich a short note telling him we was referring his request to Secretary of the Army, John McHugh. In a letter dated February 24-but apparently not received in Kucinich’s office until March 1-McHugh told Kucinich he was referring his request to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs.
In short, a full month after the date when a member of Congress requested a visit with Manning, DOD is still stalling on a real response with bureaucratic buck-passing.
As to the substantive response McHugh offered Kucinich? It matches all the disingenuous boilerplate responses the rest of DOD has offered-claiming that Manning is treated as any other “similarly situated” pretrial detainee at Quantico, without mentioning that there is at most one other Max prisoner, and none who have been held on Prevention of Injury watch for eight months.
PFC Manning experiences the same confinement conditions as other similarly situated pretrial prisoners at the MCBQ Pretrial Confinement Facility.
In addition, McHugh appeals to the same bogus privacy excuse that Quantico is now using to avoid explaining why they’re submitting Manning to the same treatment they used at Abu Ghraib.
PFC Manning’s custody and status classifications, like all pretrial prisoners at the MCBQ Pretrial Confinement Facility, are evaluated regularly by a board of corrections specialists pursuant to Department of Navy regulations. As United States laws prohibit the release of personal identification, including personal health information, I am not able to discuss PFC Manning’s specific custody and status classifications and other aspects of his care and treatment.
Effectively, they’re using “privacy” as their excuse not to admit that under POI, Manning is subject to some of the same degrading techniques we objected to in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
Kucinich isn’t missing that parallel, either. In his response today, he said,
My request to visit with Pfc. Manning must not be delayed further. Today we have new reports that Manning was stripped naked and left in his cell for seven hours. While refusing to explain the justification for the treatment, a marine spokesman confirmed the actions but claimed they were ‘not punitive.’
Is this Quantico or Abu Ghraib? Officials have confirmed the ‘non-punitive’ stripping of an American soldier who has not been found guilty of any crime. This ‘non-punitive’ action would be considered a violation of the Army Field Manual if used in an interrogation overseas. The justification for and purpose of this action certainly raises questions of ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ and could constitute a potential violation of international law. [my emphasis]
As I said, it has been a full month since Kucinich made a legitimate request to visit with an American citizen who, thus far, must be assumed innocent. Yet DOD seems to be deploying the most transparent kind of bureaucratic stall to prevent Kucinich form visiting Manning.
Update: Corrected date of Gates note.
Related posts:
We're headed toward seven years since Dan Rather disgraced himself by running a story based on phony Texas Air National Guard documents to ruin George W. Bush on behalf of that "war hero" John Kerry. Despite the liberal media's acknowledgment that Rather misled the public, he has relentlessly presented himself as a pillar of truth and probity.
Rather spoke on Tuesday night at the Newseum in Washington, DC to questions from Nick (Father of George) Clooney. Katy Adams and Nikki Schwab of the Washington Examiner's Yeas & Nays column reported Rather thinks he's the teller of uncomfortable truths, and the people objecting to phony documents are somehow the falsifiers and fantasists:
Clooney did take on the elephant in the room, though — Rather’s resignation from CBS News in 2005 for using bogus documents in a story about former President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. “We reported a story that was true, that was an uncomfortable truth for a lot of people,” Rather said. “As a result to that I was asked to leave the anchor chair, and eventually CBS News.”
While the Examiner offered credit to Clooney, it should be noted that Clooney and the folks who run the Newseum are undercutting their own reputations for media ethics and credibility by honoring Rather with this kind of invitation. Every institution that invites Rather to speak as if he were a TV legend instead of an older, whiter version of Jayson Blair brings discredit on themselves.
The Examiner gossips were asking him who he watches on TV (a tricky question full of potential for dissing colleagues), but he wouldn't do that. He even refrained from whacking Fox News:
“Well my answer is not one that will please you,” he said. “I like almost everybody on TV. I think the quality of the work, particularly the on-air talent, is quite good,” he said.
He even paid a compliment to the Fox News Channel. “Give Fox News credit, which a lot of people don’t want to do for various reasons, that they program quite well in the prime time period and they reap the benefits of that.” Do you like Fox News? “I like them all.”
Also: Fishbowl DC reported Rather said at the same event that news is a "crude art form." It's especially crude as he and Mary Mapes fashioned it.
We're headed toward seven years since Dan Rather disgraced himself by running a story based on phony Texas Air National Guard documents to ruin George W. Bush on behalf of that "war hero" John Kerry. Despite the liberal media's acknowledgment that Rather misled the public, he has relentlessly presented himself as a pillar of truth and probity.
Rather spoke on Tuesday night at the Newseum in Washington, DC to questions from Nick (Father of George) Clooney. Katy Adams and Nikki Schwab of the Washington Examiner's Yeas & Nays column reported Rather thinks he's the teller of uncomfortable truths, and the people objecting to phony documents are somehow the falsifiers and fantasists:
Clooney did take on the elephant in the room, though — Rather’s resignation from CBS News in 2005 for using bogus documents in a story about former President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. “We reported a story that was true, that was an uncomfortable truth for a lot of people,” Rather said. “As a result to that I was asked to leave the anchor chair, and eventually CBS News.”
While the Examiner offered credit to Clooney, it should be noted that Clooney and the folks who run the Newseum are undercutting their own reputations for media ethics and credibility by honoring Rather with this kind of invitation. Every institution that invites Rather to speak as if he were a TV legend instead of an older, whiter version of Jayson Blair brings discredit on themselves.
The Examiner gossips were asking him who he watches on TV (a tricky question full of potential for dissing colleagues), but he wouldn't do that. He even refrained from whacking Fox News:
“Well my answer is not one that will please you,” he said. “I like almost everybody on TV. I think the quality of the work, particularly the on-air talent, is quite good,” he said.
He even paid a compliment to the Fox News Channel. “Give Fox News credit, which a lot of people don’t want to do for various reasons, that they program quite well in the prime time period and they reap the benefits of that.” Do you like Fox News? “I like them all.”
Also: Fishbowl DC reported Rather said at the same event that news is a "crude art form." It's especially crude as he and Mary Mapes fashioned it.
59% of independents.
If Congressional Republicans need a little spine-stiffener in the budget battle, Rasmussen provides just the tonic. This poll question differs from the earlier survey by The Hill on the question of a government shutdown. Rather than focus on blame, Rasmussen instead asked about priorities in the debate over spending, and clearly the priority of the […]
Sunday's Washington Post magazine recommended in its "Going Out Guide" that people catch "The Insider" when it shows at the Newseum as part of the "Reel Journalism" series with Nick Clooney, father of George Clooney and failed Democratic candidate for Congress. The added "bonus" is Mr. Phony Documents, Dan Rather:
When Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on his former big-tobacco bosses on 60 Minutes, he paved the way for major controversy and, eventually, this 1999 Academy Award-nominated film based on that controversy. The screening of the Russell Crowe/Al Pacino drama, part of Nick Clooney's ongoing series on journalism, will be followed by a Q&A between Clooney and former CBS newsman Dan Rather. We trust Rather will have a thing or two to say about CBS handles dicey news stories.
That's really polite in negotiating around the anchor's disgrace, like suggesting Pee Wee Herman "will have a thing or two to say" if he showed up at a pornographer's convention.
Two things are guaranteed about this event: First, the movie is less fictional than Rather's National Guard documents on George W. Bush. Two, Rather will tee off on how "The Insider" was probably not fair to his pals like Mike Wallace, but that CBS has buckled and is buckling to Corporate Power, that the media in general needs a "spine transplant." Whoever keeps inviting him to events like he has any credibility left needs a brain transplant.
Sunday's Washington Post magazine recommended in its "Going Out Guide" that people catch "The Insider" when it shows at the Newseum as part of the "Reel Journalism" series with Nick Clooney, father of George Clooney and failed Democratic candidate for Congress. The added "bonus" is Mr. Phony Documents, Dan Rather:
When Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on his former big-tobacco bosses on 60 Minutes, he paved the way for major controversy and, eventually, this 1999 Academy Award-nominated film based on that controversy. The screening of the Russell Crowe/Al Pacino drama, part of Nick Clooney's ongoing series on journalism, will be followed by a Q&A between Clooney and former CBS newsman Dan Rather. We trust Rather will have a thing or two to say about CBS handles dicey news stories.
That's really polite in negotiating around the anchor's disgrace, like suggesting Pee Wee Herman "will have a thing or two to say" if he showed up at a pornographer's convention.
Two things are guaranteed about this event: First, the movie is less fictional than Rather's National Guard documents on George W. Bush. Two, Rather will tee off on how "The Insider" was probably not fair to his pals like Mike Wallace, but that CBS has buckled and is buckling to Corporate Power, that the media in general needs a "spine transplant." Whoever keeps inviting him to events like he has any credibility left needs a brain transplant.
Another crucial point: “Americans were once proud to declare that their unalienable rights came from their Creator, the God of Judeo-Christian scripture. Today we sometimes seem embarrassed by this fundamental conceit of our founding. We prefer to trace our conceptions of liberty, equality, free will, freedom of conscience, due process, privacy, and proportional punishment to a humanist tradition, haughty enough to believe we can transcend the transcendent and arrive at a common humanity.”
Many more instructive observations follow below, in an articulate analysis of the reality of the Islamic supremacist vision that still seeks to dominate the globe, and of the roots and folly of foreign policy based on wishful thinking. “The OIC and the Caliphate: The Islamic agenda is not coexistence, but dominion,” by Andrew C. McCarthy for the National Review Online, February 26 (thanks to Ken):
The Organization of the Islamic Conference is the closest thing in the modern world to a caliphate. It is composed of 57 members (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority), joining voices and political heft to pursue the unitary interests of the ummah, the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. Not surprisingly, the OIC works cooperatively with the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most extensive and important Islamist organization, and one that sees itself as the vanguard of a vast, grass-roots movement — what the Brotherhood itself calls a “civilizational” movement.
Muslims are taught to think of themselves as a community, a single Muslim Nation. “I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously said of his own country in 1980, even as he consolidated his power there, even as he made Iran the point of his revolutionary spear. “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.” Muslims were not interested in maintaining the Westphalian system of nation states. According to Khomeini, who was then regarded by East and West as Islam’s most consequential voice, any country, including his own, could be sacrificed in service of the doctrinal imperative that “Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”
Because of that doctrinal imperative, the caliphate retains its powerful allure for believers. Nevertheless, though Islamists are on the march, it has somehow become fashionable to denigrate the notion that the global Islamic caliphate endures as a mainstream Islamic goal.
It was only a week ago that close to 2 million Muslims jammed Tahrir Square to celebrate the triumphant return to Egypt of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Khomeini-esque firebrand who pulls no punches about Islam’s goal to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” Yet, to take these threats seriously is now to be dismissed as a fringe lunatic, a Luddite too benighted to grasp that American principles reflect universally held truths — truths to which the ummah, deep down, is (so we are told) every bit as committed as we are.
The caliphate is an institution of imperial Islamic rule under sharia, Muslim law. Not content with empire, Islam anticipates global hegemony. Indeed, mainstream Islamic ideology declares that such hegemony is inevitable, holding to that belief every bit as sincerely as the End of History crowd holds to its conviction that its values are everyone’s values (and the Muslims are only slightly less willing to brook dissent). For Muslims, the failure of Allah’s creation to submit to the system He has prescribed is a blasphemy that cannot stand.
The caliphate is an ideal now, much like the competing ideal of a freedom said to be the yearning of every human heart. Unlike the latter ideal, the caliphate had, for centuries, a concrete existence. It was formally dissolved in 1924, a signal step in Kemal Atatürk’s purge of Islam from public life in Turkey. Atatürk, too, thought he had an early line on the End of History. One wonders what he’d make of Erdogan’s rising Islamist Turkey.
What really dissolved the Ottoman caliphate was not anything so contemporary as a “freedom agenda,” or a “battle for hearts and minds.” It was one of those quaint military wars, waged under the evidently outdated notion that Islamic enemies were not friends waiting to happen — that they had to be defeated, since they were not apt to be persuaded.
It was, I suppose, our misfortune in earlier times not to have had the keen minds up to the task of vanquishing “violent extremism” by winning a “war of ideas.” We had to make do with dullards like Winston Churchill, who actually thought — get this — that there was a difference worth observing between Islamic believers and Islamic doctrine.
“Individual Muslims,” Churchill wrote at the turn of the century, demonstrated many “splendid qualities.” That, however, did not mean Islam was splendid or that its principles were consonant with Western principles. To the contrary, Churchill opined, “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” Boxed in by rigid sharia, Islam could only “paralyse the social development of those who follow it.” Reason had evolved the West, but Islam had revoked reason’s license in the tenth century, closing its “gates of ijtihad” — its short-lived tradition of introspection. Yet, sharia’s rigidity did not render Islam “moribund.” Churchill recognized the power of the caliphate, of the hegemonic vision. “Mohammedanism,” he concluded, remained “a militant and proselytising faith.” […]
Muslims, of course, understood the implausibility of achieving such dominance in the near term. Still, Hurgronje elaborated, the faithful were “comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah bestowed victory upon his arms.” So even as the caliphate lay in ruins, the conviction that it would rise again remained a “fascinating influence” and “a central point of union against the unfaithful.”
Today, the OIC is Islam’s central point of union against the unfaithful. Those who insist that the 1,400-year-old dividing line between Muslims and non-Muslims is ephemeral, that all we need is a little more understanding of how alike we all really are, would do well to consider the OIC’s Cairo Declaration of 1990. It is the ummah’s “Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,” proclaimed precisely because Islamic states reject the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the United Nations under the guidance of progressives in the United States and the West. That is, the leaders of the Muslim world are adamant that Western principles are not universal.
They are quite right about that. The Cairo Declaration boasts that Allah has made the Islamic ummah “the best community . . . which gave humanity a universal and well-balanced civilization.” It is the “historical role” of the ummah to “civilize” the rest of the world — not the other way around. […]
The Declaration makes abundantly clear that this civilization is to be attained by adherence to sharia. “All rights and freedoms” recognized by Islam “are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah,” which “is the only source of reference for [their] explanation or clarification.” Though men and women are said by the Declaration to be equal in “human dignity,” sharia elucidates their very different rights and obligations — their basic inequality. Sharia expressly controls freedom of movement and claims of asylum. The Declaration further states that “there shall be no crime or punishment except as provided for in Shari’ah” — a blatant reaffirmation of penalties deemed cruel and unusual in the West. And the right to free expression is permitted only insofar as it “would not be contrary to the principles of Shari’ah” — meaning that Islam may not be critically examined, nor will the ummah abide any dissemination of “information” that would “violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical Values, or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society, or weaken its faith.”
Americans were once proud to declare that their unalienable rights came from their Creator, the God of Judeo-Christian scripture. Today we sometimes seem embarrassed by this fundamental conceit of our founding. We prefer to trace our conceptions of liberty, equality, free will, freedom of conscience, due process, privacy, and proportional punishment to a humanist tradition, haughty enough to believe we can transcend the transcendent and arrive at a common humanity. But regardless of which source the West claims, the ummah rejects it and claims its own very different principles — including, to this day, the principle that it is the destiny of Islam not to coexist but to dominate.
We won’t have an effective strategy for dealing with the ummah, and for securing ourselves from its excesses, until we commit to understanding what it is rather than imagining what it could be….
Clarity.
Wisconsin teachers and other union activists at the state capital have already demonstrated that they have no clue on civics and history, with their accusations against Governor Scott Walker of being a “dictator,” and their comparisons to Hosni Mubarak, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler. The latter comparison got started with Democratic state Senator Lena Taylor, […]
Listen closely at around 1:30 and then again at 3:15. They’ve been talking tough about staying away for weeks or however long it takes until Walker crumbles, but this guy sounds awfully close to a “well, we’ve made our point” capitulation. Notwithstanding this morning’s Journal report of one Republican senator looking to add a sunset […]
Pilar Marrero reports on the latest ImpreMedia/Latino Decisions poll:
President Barack Obama’s approval rating among Latino voters increased again to 70% after decreasing in mid-2010. But that support does not translate into automatic votes for 2012.
The second part of a poll conducted by impreMedia and Latino Decisions (LD) also reveals that, although Latino voters will not automatically vote for Obama—only 43% are sure they will vote for him next year—doubts about the president and the Democrats are not turning into support for the Republicans….
"I think the most interesting story here is how badly the Republicans are faring with Latinos. It is as if Latinos are not pro-Democrat, but rather anti-Republican," said Gary Segura, a political science professor at Stanford University….
One thing is clear: they do not like Sarah Palin. Asked about their image of the former governor of Alaska, these voters said that it is predominantly negative: 53% unfavorable versus 23% favorable.
Reports that Americans are becoming increasingly hostile to trade are greatly exaggerated.
The French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) recently polled people in several countries to compare their attitudes on trade and economics. Asked whether international trade is good for the United States or bad, Americans were 50 percent more likely to answer “good” than “bad.” The U.S. survey found the following opinions:
- The development of international trade is rather a good thing for our country: 39 percent.
- The development of international trade is rather a bad thing for our country: 26 percent.
- Neither one nor the other: 35 percent.
Last November, a Pew Research Center poll found that most Americans believe increased trade with Canada, Japan, European Union countries, Brazil, or Mexico would be good for the United States. Support for increased trade with South Korea and China was within the poll’s margin of error.
The popular view that trade benefits the United States is correct. As data from The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom show, countries with low trade barriers are more likely to prosper than those that restrict international commerce.
Although the Pew poll found skepticism about free trade agreements, the assertion that international trade is bad for the United States clearly remains a losing proposition with Americans.
