{"id":17145,"date":"2022-02-19T15:35:47","date_gmt":"2022-02-19T20:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=17145"},"modified":"2022-02-19T16:10:11","modified_gmt":"2022-02-19T21:10:11","slug":"d-c-s-best-information-available-charade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/19\/d-c-s-best-information-available-charade\/","title":{"rendered":"D.C.’s “Best Information Available” Charade"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>American Institute for Economic Research, February 19, 2022<\/h3>\n

D.C.\u2019s \u201cBest Information Available\u201d Charade<\/a><\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
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\"JamesJames Bovard<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

On a sweltering June morning in 1993, I loitered in a long line of people stretched down a football-field length hallway on the third floor of the headquarters of the US Commerce Department. The queue started outside the entrance of the Public Affairs office of the International Trade Administration. Rulings were imminent on the hottest unfair trade cases of the decade.<\/p>\n

In pre-internet times, reporters, interns, and couriers would stalk the outside of a government office waiting for copies of key administrative rulings. They would rush press releases back to offices in the nearby National Press Building, or to news bureaus in downtown Washington. I spoke with several people in that line, and none of them had any curiosity regarding the details behind the pending announcements.<\/p>\n

Shortly before noon, the door to that office swung open and two bureaucrats walked out. They were quickly mobbed. Almost every person in that line grabbed a copy of the press release and went racing off, no questions asked.<\/p>\n

The Commerce Department had spent almost a year investigating, and supposedly had stone-cold proof of the villainy of scores of foreign steel companies. Steel imports were hit with penalty tariffs of up to 109 percent \u2013 effectively banishing most foreign steel from the US market, including many types and qualities of steel not produced in the United States. A gaggle of Congressmen were waiting to rejoice that shiploads of predatory imports from 19 nations were torpedoed by federal bureaucrats. The Commerce Department was intentionally shafting the US economy, since steel-using industries employed 30 times more Americans<\/a> than did domestic steel manufacturers.<\/p>\n

Foreign companies had spent roughly $100 million on lawyers and other professionals to help them through the Kafkaesque gauntlet the Commerce Department created with the steel cases. Dumping supposedly means that a foreign company is selling for less in the US than in its home market, or for less than its cost of production. But that\u2019s not how the law operated in practice.<\/p>\n

By law, the Commerce Department was obliged to issue complete rulings (up to 70 pages each) detailing the specific offenses committed by foreign companies. Instead, it merely passed out a press release with a list of the penalty tariffs imposed on foreign companies and American importers. There could be no question of their guilt because the Commerce Department \u201cproved\u201d foreign villainy down to the hundredth of a percentile point.<\/p>\n

The Commerce Department\u2019s ploy worked. Except for me. When the bureaucrats did their victory lap, I was \u201claying for them,\u201d as Mark Twain would say. I had been dogging these cases for the prior year, and I knew that federal bureaucrats were up to no good. Those cases epitomized the absurdity and injustice of US trade law.<\/p>\n

Prior to joining that line outside the Commerce press office, I submitted a draft piece on the steel dumping cases that the Wall Street Journal<\/em> editorial page planned to publish the following day. I assumed all the foreign companies would be found guilty \u2013 that was a foregone conclusion for those kangaroo courts. But I needed the details of how Commerce convicted the foreign companies.<\/p>\n

In the prior weeks, I had spent many hours in a file room in the Commerce Department basement going through the steel dumping case files. I knew the issues that the defense lawyers were disputing, and I knew that Commerce would clobber their clients regardless. I also spent hours on the phone with lawyers, getting fresh dirt and confirming my hunches.<\/p>\n

Three minutes after that door had opened, I was practically the only person left standing in the hallway \u2013 except for a Commerce junior bureaucrat who looked exhausted from passing out the press releases. He was a thirtyish guy with a dress shirt painfully stretched by a premature paunch. But he qualified for the Commerce Department\u2019s Fashion Elite because the seat of his pants didn\u2019t hang down to his knees.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere are the actual rulings?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuh?\u201d he replied. \u201cI gave you the press release already.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m looking for the detailed, specific rulings in each unfair trade case.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have them yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is this \u2013 Alice in Wonderland \u2013 verdicts first and evidence later?\u201d<\/p>\n

He stared at me as if I had just arrived from another solar system.<\/p>\n

I kept glaring at him and raised my arms sidewards in a \u201cWhat the frig?\u201d gesture.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll check with my boss,\u201d he shrugged and retreated into the press office.<\/p>\n

Five minutes later, he returned and announced that the rulings would be available at 1 p.m. Crap. Being the skunk at this garden party was going to take the whole damn day. I had been hammering Commerce on its dumping shenanigans for three years and the agency likely knew I was prepping to wallop them again. This wasn\u2019t the first roadblock I encountered at Commerce headquarters.<\/p>\n

When I returned at 1 p.m. with my Bovard News Service press pass flopping around my neck, I was told the rulings would be available at 4 p.m. Double damn. That was getting close to when the Wall Street Journal <\/em>would close up editing for the next day\u2019s articles. I called several of the lawyers who had defended foreign companies and got some details but not enough. I also haunted the pay phones to continually update my editor in New York.<\/p>\n

I showed up at 4 p.m. looking ever more ornery. When I asked for the rulings, a pasty-faced junior bureaucrat I hadn\u2019t seen before shrugged. \u201cWe are having trouble with our photocopiers. We hope to have the problem fixed by tomorrow. Can you come back then?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike hell!\u201d I replied. \u201cWhat are the damn rulings? Do you want me to write that Commerce violated the law by withholding them?\u201d<\/p>\n

A brief panic ensued amidst the GS-11s. Five minutes later, another clerk shuffled forward with a stack of hundreds of pages of rulings that covered 12 of the 19 nations hit by the new penalty tariffs. I have forgotten if I thanked him, but at least I refrained from getting arrested for breaking any of their furniture. Taking that Evelyn Woods Speed Reading course paid off handily as I raced on deadline.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the delay in issuing the actual rulings, journalists simply took the Commerce Department\u2019s word on the evidence of foreign guilt. Rewriting a federal agency press release or simply printing it almost verbatim (under a reporter\u2019s byline) was easier than investigating tangled trade cases. The Commerce Department\u2019s accusations were treated as if they were handed down from Mt. Sinai, instead of being pulled out of some bureaucrat\u2019s backside. A Washington Post<\/em> headline recited the press release: \u201cCommerce Finds Firms From 19 Countries Violated Trade Laws.\u201d A lengthy New York Times<\/em> article echoed the Commerce Department party line, stating that foreigners had been caught \u201cselling steel here for less than what they charge at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

The press release on the dumping margins was burnished with a declaration from Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown: \u201cInformation used in making our final determinations was verified and all interested parties \u2014 domestic and foreign alike \u2014 were accorded an opportunity to comment.\u201d But my WSJ article the following day<\/a>, headlined \u201cSteel Rulings Dump on America,\u201d proved that Ron Brown was lying.<\/p>\n

Commerce claimed, my piece noted, that \u201cthe dumping duties are necessary because its analyses showed that the US prices of foreign steel producers were unfairly low. But for most cases, Commerce relied at least in part on its own \u2018make-believe\u2019 prices\u201d and disregarded the actual foreign steel prices.<\/p>\n

Commerce calculated its penalty tariffs by \u201cinvoking the \u2018Best Information Available\u2019 [BIA] \u2014 often simply the allegations made by US steel producers in their complaints to Commerce. Even in cases where Commerce had verified most of the information submitted by foreign companies, US bureaucrats found pretexts to reject foreign submissions and instead simply treated the unsubstantiated accusations made by American companies as gospel truth.\u201d My piece groused, \u201cWhile Commerce announced the dumping margins for all 19 nations yesterday, it postponed the release of the official determinations for seven of them. Among the remaining 12, 10 of the punitive judgments were based at least in part on BIA. For most of the BIA determinations, Commerce did little or no verification of the allegations made by U.S. companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps inspired by the bureaucrats\u2019 \u201ccome back tomorrow\u201d charade, my piece concluded, \u201cThe Commerce Department apparently believes that fairness should have nothing to do with how it administers America\u2019s \u2018fair trade\u2019 laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost all the media coverage of the steel dumping cases ignored the depravity of the bureaucratic process that almost automatically condemned imports. Commerce can demand an almost unlimited amount of information from foreign companies, and any refusal to speedily comply is taken as a confession of guilt. A Swedish manufacturer provided 12 tons of documents, including more than four billion separate pieces of information on its sales. But Commerce bureaucrats found pretexts to reject the entire submission and banish the company from the US market with sky-high tariffs. Commerce sometimes used allegations by a US company against its foreign competition even when it recognized that the information was incorrect or false. Commerce\u2019s dumping investigations is akin to a criminal trial in which a judge announced that he discovered a few typos in a brief from a defense lawyer so he was accepting the unsubstantiated accusations of prosecutors as the \u201cbest information available.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dumping law is the equivalent of political-bureaucratic price controls on $500 billion of annual imports. I had exposed plenty of other Commerce dirty tricks in my investigations. Bureaucrats routinely made absurd comparisons to prove that foreigners were selling at unfairly low prices, thereby supposedly wronging domestic producers. Commerce compared the price of wilted imported flowers sold in the US with the price of fresh flowers in Amsterdam, thereby justifying penalty tariffs on Dutch florists. Commerce slammed Mazda with heavy tariffs after comparing the price of new Mazda minivans sold in Japan with the price of used Mazda minivans in the US. Commerce convicted New Zealand kiwi farmers of dumping after it compared the price of small kiwis sold in the US with larger kiwis from New Zealand sold to Japan. Commerce routinely convicted companies by comparing foreign retail prices with US wholesale prices. A federal judge concluded that the dumping law allowed American companies to conduct \u201ceconomic war\u201d against their Japanese competitors. And those bureaucrats wondered why I was cynical. I covered Commerce\u2019s dumping racketeering in my 1991 book, The Fair Trade Fraud<\/em><\/a>, and in pieces for the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, Newsweek<\/em>, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, \u201cbest information available\u201d is how the Washington media usually treats federal assertions on issues across the board.<\/strong> The same deference the Commerce Department received paved the way to invading Iraq. Before the war, almost all the broadcast news stories on Iraq originated with the federal government. PBS\u2019 Bill Moyers noted that \u201cof the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories<\/a> could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.\u201d The American media embedded itself in the Bush administration even before the war began. My efforts to sell articles attacking the rush to war were scorned by plenty of media outlets that had previously welcomed my pieces.<\/p>\n

Partisan media frenzies sometimes canonize dubious bureaucratic assertions as \u201cbest information available.\u201d<\/strong> After fired FBI director James Comey leaked memos to the New York Times <\/em>in 2017, the press corps decided that Comey was the incarnation of virtue and treated his criticisms of Trump as holy writ. Comey\u2019s failures<\/a> and falsehoods<\/a> as FBI chief<\/a> (which I documented in multiple pieces<\/a> for USA Today<\/em><\/a>) became irrelevant in the stampede to topple Trump.<\/p>\n

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden and many governors were able to seize vast arbitrary power in part thanks to the media\u2019s reverential treatment<\/a> of Chief Covid Fearmonger Tony Fauci, who portrayed all of his critics as enemies of \u201cscience.\u201d Rather than spotlighting Fauci\u2019s endless flip-flops, most of the media coverage instead demonized anyone who protested lockdowns or opposed vaccine mandates. When emails surfaced showing that Fauci and others had suppressed evidence<\/a> that Covid-19 may have leaked from a Chinese government lab<\/a>, the vast majority of the media ignored the smoking guns and assured that Fauci\u2019s machinations would be a non-story. Perhaps confirming Fauci\u2019s job title \u2013 director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President \u2013 was the only fact-checking needed.<\/p>\n

Relying on government sources has long provided absolution for American journalists.<\/strong> In 1932, the New York Times\u2019<\/em> Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on how Stalin was revolutionizing the Soviet Union with his push for collective farms. Duranty pooh-poohed Stalin\u2019s promise to \u201cliquidate\u201d five million of the least impoverished peasant farmers as a rhetorical flourish. Duranty glorified policies that paved the way for the terror famine that killed millions of Ukrainians (which Duranty denied occurred). When critics demanded in 2003 that the Pulitzer award be revoked, the New York Times <\/em>explained that \u201cDuranty\u2019s analyses relied on official sources<\/a> as his primary source of information.\u201d Stalin was the worst tyrant in the world at that point. But as long as Duranty\u2019s sources (primarily Stalin) were \u201cofficial,\u201d he was credible \u2013 at least to his editors and the Pulitzer judges. Other reporters vividly captured the horrors of Stalin\u2019s collectivization catastrophe but they didn\u2019t rely on official sources and didn\u2019t win prizes.<\/p>\n

Despite perennial pratfalls, the media still often chooses to trumpet official lies instead of exposing them. Inside the Beltway, being a lap dog is easier and more profitable than being an attack dog. The old saying, \u201cNever assume something is true until the government denies it,\u201d goes a bit too far. But Americans need their own \u201cbest information available\u201d axiom to automatically reject assertions from media outlets that shamelessly kowtow to politicians and government agencies.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Institute for Economic Research, February 19, 2022 D.C.\u2019s \u201cBest Information Available\u201d Charade James Bovard On a sweltering June morning in 1993, I loitered in a long line of people stretched down a football-field length hallway on the third floor of the headquarters of the US Commerce Department. The queue started outside the entrance of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17146,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3044,2363,2787,2349,1400,2552,47,1381,1073,3184,3185,3187,27,1025,1285,494,233,910,1818,3186],"class_list":["post-17145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-antidumping","tag-bill-moyers","tag-commerce-department","tag-covid","tag-dumping","tag-fauci","tag-fbi","tag-iraq-war","tag-james-comey","tag-kafka","tag-kiwi","tag-lap-dog","tag-lying","tag-pentagon","tag-propaganda","tag-protectionism","tag-soviet-union","tag-stalin","tag-trade","tag-walter-duranty"],"yoast_head":"\nD.C.'s "Best Information Available" Charade - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Americans need their own \u201cbest information available\u201d axiom to automatically reject media kowtowing to politicians and government agencies.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/19\/d-c-s-best-information-available-charade\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"D.C.'s "Best Information Available" Charade - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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