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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

City, Crime, Cruelty, Education, Ethnicity, Immigration, Local Government, Mendacity, Migrants, Police, Race, University, UW System

‘Do Deportations Lower Crime? Not According to the Data’

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Anna Flagg writes Do Deportations Lower Crime? Not According to the Data:

In one of Donald J. Trump’s earliest moves as president, days after his inauguration, he revived the deportation program known as Secure Communities. Proponents argue that it helps prevent crime and also increases the police’s ability to solve crime through collaboration with federal immigration enforcement. But a new study from the University of California, Davis, has cast doubt on the ability of Secure Communities to do either.

This story was published in collaboration with The New York Times’s Upshot. The program, involving cooperation between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local police departments, began under George W. Bush in 2008. President Obama expanded it drastically during his first term but in 2014 discontinued it.

Embedded below, in full, is a proper academic study, Immigrants’ Deportations, Local Crime and Police Effectiveness, from Annie Laurie Hines of the University of California, Davis and Giovanni Peri, University of California, Davis and IZA (Institute of Labor Economics).

Two points for Whitewater:

1. Local law enforcement’s repeated techniques to stop and to identify undocumented residents – kept out of the press by a leader more subtle than his needy predecessors ever were – are no less objectionable than their conduct was. A brief that begins with ‘don’t make a public fuss and embarrass us’ still leaves ample room for coddling revanchist subordinates.

2. Perhaps someone will send along to the UW-Whitewater Marketing and Communications group’s Assistant Vice Chancellor Sara Kuhl and Assistant Director Jeff Angileri a copy of the embedded study, so that they can see what a proper methodology requires.

These two have been on campus for years, and yet their own flacking of a counterfeit study on campus safety from a burglar-alarm dealer shows only their ignorance (or worse, their contempt) for the basic academic standards through which UW-Whitewater’s faculty and students have been successful. See The Marketing of Misinformation: UW-Whitewater’s Use of a Counterfeit ‘Campus Safety’ Study and For UW-Whitewater’s Administration, Talking Points Won’t Be Enough.

For today — Immigrants’ Deportations, Local Crime and Police Effectiveness —

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/dp12413.pdf” width=”66%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Education, Law, Open Government, Public Records, School District, Wisconsin

School Board Applicants’ Letters of Interest

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Last week, I posted on the applicant interviews with the Whitewater Unified School Board for a vacancy (following the resignation of board member Jean Linos). See School Board, 9.16.19: Applicant Interviews and Reporting. Seeing that the agenda for the meeting lacked key information, and a local newspaper’s reporting (Gazette; Beleckis) was deficient, I submitted a public records request to the district (for video of the meeting and the applicants’ letters of interest).

The district has promptly fulfilled my request: the video of the meeting is online and also embedded at this website; the letters of interest appear below. (The district – properly under law – submitted unedited letters of interest. I’ve chosen to redact contact information simply because it’s not relevant to the applicants’ substantive views which were the basis of their candidacies.)

There were four applicants (Andrew Crone, Maryann Zimmerman, Miguel Aranda, Nick Baldwin) and the board appointed Aranda for the remaining term to run to April 2020.

These are thoughtful letters of interest: they speak well of the applicants and of our community.

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/WUSD-Applicants-Letters-of-Interest-.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.23.19

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater, the first day of fall, will be sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:49 PM, for 12h 05m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 35.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Whitewater Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District Board at 7 PM. 

On this day in 1806,  the Lewis & Clark expedition (Corps of Discovery Expedition) arrives in St. Louis, ending their journey after two years, four months, and ten days.

Recommended for reading in full:

Seung Min Kim and Felicia Sonmez report Trump suggests he mentioned Biden in phone call with Ukrainian president:

President Trump appeared to confirm Sunday that he mentioned former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter in a phone call with the leader of Ukraine, as some senior Democrats revived talk of impeachment hearings over revelations that Trump had asked a foreign government to investigate one of his potential 2020 opponents.

The president and his close allies also escalated their attacks on Biden on Sunday, demanding probes into the former vice president and his son’s work in Ukraine, though no evidence has surfaced that Biden acted inappropriately and Trump’s allies did not provide any.

Across several networks Sunday, top administration officials, outside advisers and lawmakers close to Trump repeatedly raised the specter of impropriety on the part of Biden, whose younger son, Hunter, was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate, according to people familiar with the matter.

David Frum sees Trump’s attempt at diversion for what it is:


Rachael Bade and Josh Dawsey report ‘We’ve been very weak’: House Democrats decry their oversight of Trump, push Pelosi on impeachment:

Democrats’ frustration with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s unwillingness to impeach President Trump is reaching a fever pitch following reports that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate a political rival — a step the California Democrat declined to endorse Sunday.

An increasingly vocal group of pro-impeachment House Democrats are starting to dismiss their own oversight of Trump as feckless, even accusing their colleagues of emboldening the president by refusing to stand up to what they see as lawless behavior.

At the very least, these Democrats say, the House should be taking more aggressive action to break the unprecedented White House stonewalling, possibly even fining defiant Trump officials, an idea Pelosi dismissed this year.

The Rise of Solar Power:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.22.19

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:51 PM, for 12h 08m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 45.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862,  Pres. Lincoln issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, with the proclamation (Proclamation 95) to take effect on January 1, 1863.

Recommended for reading in full:

Tom Nichols writes If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is:

The president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately.

Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate.

Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation—a witch hunt, one might call it—of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.

As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

….

If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.

Lily Kuo reports Chinese journalists to be tested on loyalty to Xi Jinping (‘Exam will test journalists on president’s teachings on socialism and propaganda’):

The on-site, closed-book exam, to be administered by news organisations in early October, will be divided into five parts, including two on Xi Jinping’s teachings on socialism for the new era and Xi’s “important thoughts on propaganda”, according to Media Reform, a self-published news account on WeChat.

News of the test, first reported by the South China Morning Post and the research programme China Media Project, comes as Chinese media face increasing restrictions. China is considered one of the least free countries to operate as a journalist, ranked 177 out of 180 in 2019 by Reporters Without Borders, above Eritrea and North Korea.

Robert’s Got the Weirdest Fruit in Florida:

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, September 24th, 12:30 PM @ Seniors in the Park, The Upside

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This Tuesday, September 24th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The Upside @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:

Tuesday, September 24, 12:30 PM
(Comedy/Drama)
Rated PG-13; 2 hours, 6 minutes (2017).

The relationship between a wealthy quadriplegic man (Bryan Cranston) and an unemployed ex-convict (Kevin Hart) who is hired to help him. The film also features Nicole Kidman.

One can find more information about The Upside at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.21.19

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 6:53 PM, for 12h 11m 44s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1962, Janesville, Wisconsin’s oldest mill closes:

Janesville’s oldest manufacturer, Rock River Woolen Mills, ceased operation after 113 years….Started in 1849 as Monterey Water Power Mill, the mills initially produced fine yarns, flannels and cashmere.

Recommended for reading in full:

Benjamin Wittes writes The Witness and the Whistleblower: Some Thoughts:

If it is true that the president used the threat of withholding congressionally authorized funds to—in the Post’s words—“extort” a foreign leader into investigating a domestic political opponent and his family, that would be a very big deal indeed. That allegation, if true, would unambiguously constitute an impeachable offense, indeed an offense that positively demands impeachment from any Congress that wishes to be taken seriously. It would be impeachable for at least three separate reasons: first, because it would involve the extortion of a foreign leader for personal and political gain; second, because it would involve the solicitation of a foreign government’s involvement in a U.S. election; and third, because it would involve the solicitation of a foreign government’s investigation of a political opponent in a fashion that grossly violates the civil liberties of a U.S. person, namely Biden’s son.

….

Without getting into the question of whether Congress would ultimately prevail if it decided to lock horns with the executive branch over the production of the whistleblower’s complaint, I will say that there is little to no chance of Congress prevailing quickly in court. If this goes to litigation, it will mean a months-long stand-off. Congress will once again be deferring to an executive branch investigation (in this case, that of the inspector general) that will be conducted in secret. And the legislature will be waiting for the fruits of that investigation to show up at its door—asking the executive branch to share information for it to evaluate, rather than developing that information itself.

….

Congress needs to think hard about how to raise the costs, both to the executive and to individual witnesses, of the sort of defiance it has seen—and to shorten the time frame for addressing defiance. One oft-discussed possibility is to revive the long-dormant inherent contempt power of Congress and to begin using it to coerce compliance by recalcitrant witnesses. Imposition of large and mounting daily fines could effectively force witnesses to bear the risk of delay and defiance, and it has the advantage of not depending on executive branch enforcement for a contempt citation. But it’s also a big risk. The power hasn’t been deployed in a long time, and it’s not 100 percent clear that courts would tolerate it.

(Whether the president has committed an underling, impeachable offense here is separate from the executive branch’s refusal to transmit the whistleblower’s complaint.  The subject of the complaint is the critical issue.)

Jupiter’s Moon Io Casts Large Shadow on Gas Giant Planet:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.20.19

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Good morning. Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 6:55 PM, for 12h 14m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 66.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, ends:

For three days, 58,000 Union troops had faced off against 66,000 Confederates in the war’s second-bloodiest battle. The battle left Union troops pinned inside Chattanooga, Tennessee, and temporarily halted their advance into the heart of the Confederacy. Nine Wisconsin regiments participated.

Recommended for reading in full:

Natasha Korecki reports Why it will be hard for Trump to win Wisconsin again:

Few expect the three key counties that surround the state’s largest city to vote Democratic next year. But they say the level of enthusiasm for Trump in Wisconsin’s so-called WOW counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — matters a great deal in a state where three of the past five presidential elections were decided by less than 1 percent. In the state’s political equation, they serve as a conservative counterweight to the big Democratic margins traditionally delivered by Milwaukee and Madison. Unless that suburban GOP engine delivers its own blowout win for Trump next year, it will be difficult for him to capture the state a second time. “For the president to win Wisconsin again, he’s not going to have the free ride he had last time. He’s not going to have Hillary Clinton sitting on her hands,” said Brandon Scholz, former executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party. “He’s going to have a completely engaged opposition party on the ground.” Clinton famously never made it to Wisconsin, where her failure to campaign is widely believed to have cost her a state that had not voted Republican for president since 1984 — less than 23,000 votes ultimately decided the contest. Democrats are determined not to make that tactical mistake again. The national party pointedly placed its nominating convention next summer in Milwaukee — where a 19 percent drop in African American turnout doomed Clinton’s chances in 2016.

(Indeed, Trump will not win Wisconsin again, and in this small town from which I write, he will lose by an even greater margin than he did in 2016.)

Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris, Greg Miller, and Carol D. Leonnig report Whistleblower complaint about President Trump involves Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter:

Two and a half weeks before the complaint was filed, Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer who was elected in a landslide in May.

That call is already under investigation by House Democrats who are examining whether Trump and his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani sought to manipulate the Ukrainian government into helping Trump’s reelection campaign. Lawmakers have demanded a full transcript and a list of participants on the call.

Charlie Goldberg explains Why Blaming Video Games for Violence is Wrong:

Assault Awareness & Prevention, City, Crime, Culture, Distraction, Newspapers, University, UW System, Wisconsin

Truth-Telling and Tale-Weaving

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In conditions of real injury, in which truth-telling is important, tale-weaving about irrelevant matters is worse than wasteful: it’s a misdirection from the significant to the insignificant. Three recent stories illustrate the critical difference between these approaches.

As a truth-telling story, Hope Kirwan of Wisconsin Public Radio reports ‘Students Deserve To Be Heard’: UW-La Crosse Student Shares New Details On Harassment Claim Response:

A University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student who accused a professor of sexual harassment says more students have come forward with similar complaints.

UW-La Crosse student Caycee Bean detailed the alleged harassment in a public Facebook post Sept. 4. She also voiced her frustrations with the university’s lack of communication about the investigation into her report.

In a new statement this week, Bean said she has heard from several students who had similar experiences with the same professor and one or more people have brought complaints to the university.

UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow confirmed with Wisconsin Public Radio that additional information about the professor’s conduct has been brought to the university by other people since Bean posted her experience on Facebook. A university spokesman said no formal complaints have been filed against the professor at this time. Gow declined a request from WPR to answer further questions.

The new statement from Bean also provided further details about her experience and UW-La Crosse’s response.Bean, who plans to graduate this spring, said she made a report to university officials in March about an incident of sexual harassment by a professor that happened during her freshman year in spring 2015. 

By contrast, two recent tale-weaving stories from the Janesville Gazette (Beleckis, Jonah as reporter; Schwartz, Sid as editor) about Whitewater focus on the trivial.

In Night walks, masks and navigating new spaces: Meet UW-Whitewater’s new chancellor, the Gazette tells a pretty tale about UW-Whitewater’s new chancellor, Dwight Watson, but in about 500 words of story-telling, it’s biography, not issues, that appear on the page:

Dwight Watson likes to walk at night.

Sometimes when he’s restless, he’ll go out at midnight or 1 a.m.

It’s therapeutic for him.

Watson is new to the area—he started this month as UW-Whitewater’s 17th chancellor.

(In an accompanying – and edited – brief six-minute video, the Gazette‘s reporter asks only one follow-up question (and that’s about someone’s name, not a substantive issue). If other follow up questions were asked, then they didn’t make the online version. Instead, when the chancellor makes declarative statements, the reporter leaves them unquestioned. See Gazette interview with UW-Whitewater Chancellor Dwight Watson.)

In UW-Whitewater’s police chief heads up a task force on crime statistics, the same Gazette reporter never asks Chief Kiederlen about the wide gap between a claim of crime-statistics expertise and UW-Whitewater’s use – on the main page of its website – of a counterfeit study to claim it’s the safest campus in Wisconsin. See The Marketing of Misinformation: UW-Whitewater’s Use of a Counterfeit ‘Campus Safety’ Study. Either these men think the study is legitimate (in which case they’re experts only in third-tier public relations), or they know it’s junk, in which case they’re ineffectual in the face of others’ third-tier public relations.

Whitewater needs more truth-telling and less tale-weaving: the earned path to light tales runs through serious truths.

Assault Awareness & Prevention, Crime, Ethics, Law

‘Keeping Harvey Weinstein’s Secrets’

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Harvey Weinstein is responsible – directly and personally – for his actions. Others, however, assisted him in concealing his violent coercion. Astonishingly, as the New York Times reports, some of those who aided Weinstein were – of all people – attorneys who made public careers as victims’ rights advocates. The two podcasts embedded below detail their audacity. A corrupt influence corrodes in places and ways that are almost unimaginable.

Last week, our colleagues Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published a book documenting their investigation of Harvey Weinstein. In writing it, they discovered information about two feminist icons — Gloria Allred and her daughter, Lisa Bloom — that raises questions about their legacies and the legal system in which they’ve worked. Today, we look at the role of Ms. Bloom, a lawyer who represented Mr. Weinstein. 

Guests: Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, investigative reporters for The New York Times and the authors of “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.” For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. 

In Part 2, we look at the role of Ms. Bloom’s mother, the women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred.  Guests: Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, investigative reporters for The New York Times and the authors of “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.” For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.19.19

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers  with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 6:57 PM, for 12h 17m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 75.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1832, the Sauk and Fox cede their Iowa lands:

On this date Sauk and Fox Indians signed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War. The treaty demanded that the Sauk cede some six million acres of land that ran the length of the eastern boundary of modern-day Iowa. The Sauk and Fox were given until June 1, 1833 to leave the area and never return to the surrendered lands. Some sources place the date as September 21.

Recommended for reading in full:

Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Shane Harris report Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress, former officials say:

The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call.

In a tweet from yesterday, one reads of courage and principle of the deepest measure:

The Swiss Art of Papercutting:

Newspapers, Open Government, Public Records, School District

School Board, 9.16.19: Applicant Interviews and Reporting

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On Monday night, the Whitewater Unified School District’s board met to interview four applicants for a vacancy on the board (following the resignation of board member Jean Linos). The agenda for the meeting, although posted online, listed none of the applicants: not by total number, let alone by name or with their accompanying letters of interest.

Board members must have seen the agenda beforehand; they should have known that it was a paltry one.

Yesterday, I submitted a public records request under Wisconsin law to the district for a video recording, information on the vote tally for the applicants, and the letters of interest the applicants submitted. The video is now online (see above); the district has replied that responses to the two other items in the request are pending.

These applicants – Andrew Crone, Maryann Zimmerman, Miguel Aranda, and Nick Baldwin – presented well, and one wishes successful applicant Miguel Aranda the best during his term on the board (a term running to April 2020). (In the final round between applicants, the board selected between Aranda and Zimmerman, on a 5-1 vote for Aranda.)

There were two questions for each applicant:

  1. Tell about yourself and why you are interested in serving the students, families, and staff of the Whitewater School District.
  2. Please share what skills, characteristics, and experience that would enhance your service on the school board.

Anyone watching the video will see that this was a strong group of applicants. Whitewater should know their names, see their letters of interest, and know how current board members voted for the applicants. There’s so much talk about celebrating successes, and yet a genuine success – having a good group of applicants – was not, so to speak, celebrated enough (with good information).

After this meeting, a reporter (Beleckis, Jonah) for the Janesville Gazette wrote a brief and low-information story about the meeting. See Whitewater School Board’s newest member says he can be a liaison for Latino community. His newspaper uses the motto ‘Local Matters,’ but Whitewater’s local didn’t matter much to the reporter: he didn’t take the time to list all the applicants’ names, the questions they answered, or even tell which two applicants made it to the final round.

For this reporter and the paper’s editor (Schwartz, Sid) this was a shallow and forgettable effort. A single theme worked into a headline, but less information than one would expect from a high-school newspaper. This looks like the work of those who do not respect their readers: men who doubt the ability of readers to follow facts about Whitewater and instead think that the title is all that matters to a story. Readers in Whitewater – and everywhere else – are sharper than that, and deserve more than that. (What would be worse: if the Gazette’s editor doesn’t read what goes in his own paper, or if he does and still approves?)

It’s admirable for a board member to want to be a liaison to a community; a proper newspaper story would be able to convey that message while still stating key facts about an interview.

It should be needless to say that the selection of an applicant deserves more than a few words accompanying a treacly photograph.

Again, and again: the best record is a recording.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.18.19

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 6:58 PM, for 12h 20m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets at 5 PM.

On this day in 1793, President Washington presides over the laying of the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol in the building’s southeast corner.

Recommended for reading in full:

Bruce Murphy writes Bradley Foundation Works to Kill Food Aid:

The Trump administration has proposed a plan to slash food benefits for many Americans who now get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits. An estimated 18 percent of recipients or 3.6 million people could lose the food assistance, including as many as 63,000 in Wisconsin.

The Trump administration says this will close a “loophole” that allows too many people to get the aid. “But proponents of the current system say it helps low-income families who work but have huge child care, housing and other expenses that leave them with insufficient money to buy food,” as NPR has reported.

Where did the idea for this change come from? A bland sounding group called the Foundation for Government Accountability has been instrumental in pushing the idea.

….

“In December, the Foundation for Government Accountability hosted public officials from across the country in Orlando. The scene: Walt Disney World’s Swan and Dolphin Resort, an ocean-themed oasis with palatial fountains next to a lake lined with palm trees.

Tory Newmyer writes Trump says a big China deal could come ‘maybe soon.’ That’s unlikely:

President Trump on Tuesday warned the Chinese not to wait until after the 2020 election to strike a trade deal. But the two sides remain far apart on key issues, and the possibility of a breakthrough this year remains remote.

That’s the candid assessment of three people close to the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide me their unvarnished views of the state of play between the world’s two largest economies. In short, these people agreed, the two sides still have miles to go to resolve U.S. demands for major, structural change in how the Chinese government manages its economy.

And for the time being, with the Chinese economy showing signs of stress, Trump appears to feel no urgency to forge anything the administration would tout as a comprehensive agreement.

“I think there’ll be a deal maybe soon, maybe before the election, or one day after the election,” Trump said yesterday. “And if it’s after the election, it’ll be a deal like you’ve never seen, it’ll be the greatest deal ever and China knows that.” Trump said he told Chinese leaders: “If it’s after the election, it’s going to be far worse than what it is right now.”

(Emphasis in original.)

The History of the United States Capitol: