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Letter from Rappahannock: Rural Republicans Who Despise Biden More than Putin

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By Greg Rushford

July 16, 2022

Foreign affairs specialists will have seen various headlines in recent years suggesting that some American Republicans — Putin admirers like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson are usually the first national names to be mentioned — believe that Democrats like President Joe Biden are greater threats to U.S. national security than Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

And earlier this month, the Brookings Institution turned in an analysis of recent national polling data suggesting that more Democrats than Republicans are prepared to keep on providing military aid to help Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky defend his country from Putin’s bloody and unprovoked invasion.

We’ll get to that big-picture analysis. But first, a closer look at one small community in rural Virginia provides some insights into changing attitudes towards Russia that are playing out at grassroots levels of American politics.

Rappahannock County, Virginia, where I live, is nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains some 70 miles west of Washington, D.C. Our county is roughly the same size as Singapore, where the comparison ends. Singapore has skyscrapers and 5.7 million people. Rappahannock has idyllic country roads, lovely mountain views — and only about 7,400 residents, the majority of whom vote Republican.

This is Trump country. While the former president did not carry Virginia overall in 2020 in his losing re-election bid, he easily beat Joe Biden here in Rappahannock, 54-44 percent. In the 2016 presidential contest here, Trump thoroughly trounced Hillary Clinton, 59-40 percent. No Democratic presidential contender has carried Rappahannock in this century. Barack Obama came the closest in 2008, losing narrowly to Republican John McCain, 51-49.  

But when it comes to foreign affairs — notably concerning the importance of countering Vladimir Putin’s dreams to restore the Russian empire by force —  it appears that Rappahannock County Republicans are no longer the party of John McCain. McCain stood against authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin (and Donald Trump).

Our local Republican congressman has voted against providing military aid to help Ukraine defend itself from the Russian invaders. A Rappahannock lawyer has been flying the Russian flag —and the top Republican in the county won’t comment on whether Republicans should cheer or boo that. (Another local resident has been displaying a sign in his front yard that says F*ck Biden. Again, our local Republican chairman — who is also a Baptist deacon who teaches Bible classes — declines comment on whether Republicans should keep their mouths shut when faced with such indecency.) 

Even some prominent local Republicans who don’t admire Putin in the slightest — and consider him a dangerous threat — have said they believe that Joe Biden is the more immediate national security threat to America.

Still another current Republican candidate for Congress, a decorated Navy hero and a graduate of Annapolis, says that he is Joe Biden’s “worst nightmare” — but declines comment on whether he would be Putin’s.

That’s a mouthful. Let’s digest this more carefully, one grassroots bite at a time.

Waging culture wars on the Pentagon

Rep. Bob Good, the self-styled Biblical conservative who represents Rappahannock County in Virginia’s sprawling 5th congressional district, was one of 57 House Republicans who voted in May to deny the Biden administration’s request to provide an additional $40 billion in urgent military aid to Ukraine. Good was joined by such House members from the extreme-right wing of his party as Reps. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (GA), Lauren Boebert (CO), Matt Gaetz (FL), and Jim Jordan (OH). On the other side of the Hill, eleven Republican Senators from the nationalistic wing of the party also voted to pull the plug on Zelensky, including presidential wannabees Rand Paul (KY) and Josh Hawley (MO).

Good, an ardent America Firster, justified his anti-Ukraine vote by blaming “the Biden-Pelosi America-last agenda.” The Democrats, he said, “are ignoring the many crises plaguing our country, including family budget-busting inflation, supply chain shortages for baby formula and other essentials, surging violent crime in our cities, and millions of illegals trafficking across our Southern Border.”

Last week, Good voted — not for the first time — against the annual National Defense Authorization Act. NDAAs are at the core of congressional support for America’s national security fundamentals; without this legislation, the Defense Department could not function. The Pentagon could not support American troops and American weapons systems worldwide. This Fiscal 2023 NDAA bill that Good refused to support also authorizes more military support for Ukraine.

Good’s basic frame of reference when addressing U.S. national security priorities seems to be rooted in his enthusiasm for fighting America’s culture wars. He is outraged that U.S. military leaders keep insisting upon the importance of vaccinating “our men and women in uniform.” He also believes the top brass are intent upon brainwashing — there is no softer way to put it — American troops through misguided “woke indoctrination” on racial issues. And Good is further outraged over Defense Department analyses that point to climate change as a serious national security threat.

Flying foreign flags

Driving along our country roads, one sees that Rappahannock County residents, as in many other rural communities across the United States, are displaying an impressive number of blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags. Such indications of support come from local Republicans and Democrats who are united in their opposition to Russian aggression.

But conspicuously, along one of our charming roads where three scenic rivers converge, one well-known Rappahannock lawyer has been flying a Russian flag.

Lawyer David Konick has been anything but shy about publicly supporting Putin’s reasoning on why Russia has waged war on Ukraine.  Hey, it’s a free country! Konick enjoys a reputation as a skilled advocate, and as a man who relishes taking no prisoners when debating with those who have differing views. Despite such acrimony, though, Konick brings a valuable insider’s perspective to the debate. (I enjoy reading his online postings, as they provoke thought, which is what free speech is supposed to do.)

Notwithstanding, the point here is that traditionally, the leaders of the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan would have been quick to take sharp issue with Americans who would fly the Russian flag.  

Not the Republican Party of Rappahannock County, it seems. It’s chairman, Terry Dixon, refused repeated requests to say which side he thinks good Republicans should be rooting for: Russia or Ukraine.

Dixon also ignored questions asking about the national security logic driving Rep. Good’s vote to deny that $40 billion in additional military aid to Ukraine.

Nor did the Baptist deacon respond to questions about the angry Rappahannock neighbor who has been displaying “F*ck Biden” and “Let’s Go Brandon” signs on a village thoroughfare close to several local churches, including his own. (The offensive signs, at least, do not appear to have been displayed on Sunday mornings.)

Who’s more dangerous to America, Putin or Biden?

Even more traditional prominent Rappahannock Republicans who clearly are no admirers of Vladimir Putin seem to have more important concerns.

“America has three extremely dangerous enemies: The Chinese Communist Party. Vladimir Putin, and Joe Biden,” according to an online posting by one of Rappahannock County’s most well-known Republican opinion leaders. But “right now, Joe Biden is doing the most damage to America and Americans,” she contends.

Those were the words of Demaris Miller, whose husband Jim served as Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. She holds a PhD in psychology — and clearly doesn’t think much of Joe Biden’s psychological makeup.

Miller and local lawyer David Konick — the neighbor who supports the Russian side of the security equation — have at times exchanged sharply differing views on Rappnet, our local online community discussion forum that is an excellent place to try to understand local Republican attitudes.

(I’ve been monitoring Rappnet, with the consent of its administrator, since shortly after the January 6, 2021, Trump riots on Capitol Hill. It can serve up some pretty raw local opinions from the backwoods, such as those from one conservative gentleman who dismissed Central American children desperately trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican southern border as “wetback slime kids.”)

Miller told me that despite the appearance of acrimony, she and lawyer Konick remain “very good friends” As for “the sparring between us,” she said in one e-mail, “it is not as acrimonious as it seems to those who do not really know us. There is no real rancor there.”

In Miller’s view, while Putin is a far greater danger to America, meanwhile President Biden has “gutted our National Defense while continuing the Obama policy of weaponizing the IRS and the Justice Department against those not loyal to the Democrat party.”

In another posting, Miller contended that “Joe Biden never cared about anyone except his own power, bank account, and the Biden Crime Syndicate that made it all possible.” Since Biden’s earliest days in the presidency, Miller has also voiced her opinion that the “senile” American president is controlled by “a secret cabal” in the White House. She stands behind those sentiments.

Hung Cao to the Rescue?

A retired U.S. Navy Captain named Hung Cao is running in the forthcoming November mid-term elections to become Rappahannock County’s next Republican congressman. (Thanks to redistricting aimed at eliminating the undemocratic consequences of Bob Good’s 5th District, where the odds have been heavily gerrymanderd in favor of Republican candidates, Rappahannock has been moved to Virginia’s 10th congressional district. The tenth district includes some heavily populated suburban areas now represented by a Democrat, Jennifer Wexton, who lives in one of those adjacent counties. It looks to be a tight race.)

Cao is a recently retired U.S. Navy captain who says he was motivated to get into politics after watching President Biden’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Cao certainly has a most admirable life story. His family escaped from South Vietnam shortly before the communist takeover in April 1975. Armed with nothing other than his native intelligence and a driven desire to succeed in his new country, Cao went on to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. A Navy diver, he served with distinction in special-forces operations during a 25-year career — earning a chest-full of combat ribbons. His is the classic American immigrant success story.

Healing divisions, or exploiting them?

Cao — who declined to be interviewed for this article — has said that if elected, he would work to heal America’s divisions, as his hero Ronald Reagan once did. But the shrill tone of Cao’s campaign literature suggests otherwise.

Basically, Cao has been running against imaginary Democrats who don’t love their country. “My father was on the Communist Party’s kill list, but America welcomed him with open arms,” Cao declared in one recent fundraising pitch. “I am forever in debt to America, and I won’t let the country I owe my life to go down the same path as the communist horror I left behind.”

Cao did not respond to my written questions concerning whether he agreed with congressional Republicans like Bob Good who have voted to pull the plug on additional military assistance to Ukraine.

The closest answer to that question I was able to find in an extensive public record search was this ambiguous statement Cao recently posted on Twitter: “Biden economic advisor says American families should continue suffering with high gas prices to protect the liberal world order. Are you kidding me?”

To be sure, rising inflation is nothing to kid about, especially here in rural America where it can cost workmen well over a hundred dollars just to fill the tanks of their trucks. And nobody denies that the higher energy costs that are driving that inflation are part of the price for American support of Ukraine’s defense.

So far, as Brookings analyst Shibley Telhami wrote on July 5, most Americans are willing to pay that price, if that’s what it takes to draw the line against Russian aggression against its European neighbors.

But Telhami pointed to recent national polling that indicates there is a growing political divide. “There are substantial differences in the degree of preparedness to pay a price for supporting Ukraine between Democrats and Republicans, and the gap between the two is slowly growing, with Democrats expressing much greater willingness to pay a price,” the Brookings scholar wrote.

“While 78 percent of Democrats are prepared to see higher energy costs, only 44 percent of Republicans say the same; while 72 percent of Democrats are prepared to pay with higher inflation, only 39 percent of Republicans say the same.”

Democrats who support Ukraine

For readers who will be wondering where the Democrats stand on supporting Ukraine, there isn’t much news to report. The incumbent Democratic congresswoman from the 10th district, Jennifer Wexton, has voted consistently to support military assistance for Ukraine.  Her stance does not seem to have been controversial in her district’s Democratic circles. (Despite Hung Cao’s fundraising appeals, Wexton does not hate America. Readers will just have to trust me on this!)

In the congressional district next door, Democrat Abagail Spanberger, a respected former CIA officer, is considered to be one of her party’s bright lights when it comes to national security.

The political problem for congressional moderates like Wexton and Spanberger is that the forthcoming congressional elections are hardly shaping up as favorable to socially liberal candidates who don’t offer red meat to angry constituents.

Back to the Political Future?

In the olden days before America became so bitterly divided, two of Rappahannock’s most well-known residents were James Kilpatrick and Eugene McCarthy. Republican Kilpatrick was a very conservative newspaper columnist. Democrat McCarthy was a very liberal U.S. senator from Minnesota who in the 1960s challenged President Lyndon Johnson for his (mis)conduct during the Vietnam War.

But the two political opposites became fast friends and drinking buddies who told war stories over whiskey. And each could write beautifully.

Those days of political civility, alas, are long gone.

Surely, from his desk in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin — a man who has spared no efforts to exploit divisions in American society as he plots to restore Russia’s lost empire — must be smiling.

Imports Are Good for American Workers

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by Greg Rushford (Milken Institute Review, April 21, 2017)

Recent polling by the Wall Street Journal suggests that Americans have become skeptics about international trade, with less than half believing that cross-border commerce is, on balance, beneficial. A vociferous third go further, agreeing with their new protectionist-in-chief that “our free trade has led to a lot of bad things happening.” And while President Trump’s trade agenda is yet to be fully shaped, the outline of what he wants is becoming clear: high tariff walls to curb competition from imports and more stringent Buy American laws for U.S. manufacturers — all in the name of protecting domestic jobs.

So what should Americans who reflexively cringe at the economic nationalism currently in vogue say to the skeptics? One option is to point to history: countries in the post-war era that have relied upon high protectionist tariffs and “buy domestic” import-substitution schemes — think India, Brazil and Argentina — lost their economic mojo and only began to recover their places in the sun when they opened their borders.

But there’s also an argument that doesn’t require historical perspective. Just look around at the most successful American manufacturers, and observe how access to global markets sustains their American workforces. Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. As David Autor of MIT reminds, trade produces losers as well as winners. But this reality can’t be allowed to block the American economy’s only plausible path toward ongoing prosperity.

Hogs and Drugs

Take Harley-Davidson, the motorcycle maker headquartered in Wisconsin that sells its iconic “hogs” in a zillion countries. The jobs of the men and women who make those Fat Boys growl depend upon imported components — transmissions from Japan, wheels from Australia, tires from Spain and Thailand. While Harley declines to reveal specifics, it’s a safe bet that, all told, about one-third of the value comes from outside the United States.

It’s a similar story for Merck, the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant that makes some of its lifesaving potions in Elkton, Va. (pop. 2,042). Because it operates there in a free-trade zone authorized by the federal government, Merck can save serious amounts by importing chemicals. But nobody has told Merck’s Elkton workers that free trade puts food on their tables.

Likewise for the venerable diesel-maker Cummins, which is based in Indianapolis. Cummins’s American workers could not make those engines as well or as cheaply without key imports including gaskets, bearings and cylinder heads.

Half of the goods the United States imports are inputs and raw materials that are necessary for U.S. companies to operate their domestic production. Those imports are absolutely essential to the health of American manufacturing.

“Half of the goods the United States imports are inputs and raw materials that are necessary for U.S. companies to operate their domestic production,” explains Scott Miller, a former Procter & Gamble executive who now edits TradeVistas, an economic research website for the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington. Those imports, Miller stresses, are “absolutely essential to the health of American manufacturing.”

True, Miller adds, the U.S. government could adopt the Indian-Brazilian-Argentine import-substitution model to force domestic manufacturers to bring their global supply chains back to American shores. But there would be consequences in the form of higher consumer prices, problematic quality resulting from undermining competition — and ultimately fewer American jobs.

Ironically, though, you aren’t likely to hear the CEOs of American export-oriented companies celebrating the role of imports in sustaining the jobs of their workforces. When I first started writing about the importance of imported components to domestic jobs in the 1990s, Harley-Davidson’s supply-chain managers freely acknowledged that they bought the best parts wherever they could be found. But these days the company is lying low, loath to offend customers who apparently assume their hogs were born and raised exclusively in Menomonee Falls and Kansas City. Cummins and Merck are hardly more communicative about their dependence on international trade, both for imported components and markets.

Ignorance Is Not Bliss

The explanation for the low profile of American corporations whose employees as well as profits depend on open trade is that few companies are prepared to stick their proverbial necks out when political leaders find it more convenient to pretend they never took Econ 101. Echoing Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes, Bill Clinton said he was for “free and fair trade” without specifying what the qualifier “fair” meant. Barack Obama was hardly better: his three favorite words, he often told audiences, were “Made in America.” Meanwhile, the populist from Mar-a-Lago — who does everything bigger — says that his four favorite words are “Made in the USA.”

Over the years, America’s corporate leaders have gotten the message: limit the anti-protectionist talk to only friends and family. There’s no good reason to spend goodwill on the topic, especially when corporate America has bigger fish to fry in the form of corporate tax reform and deregulation.

This see-no-evil approach has often translated into economic buffoonery when presidents and CEOs talk about trade to the American people. Obama, for instance, perfectly illustrated the point in a February 2012 speech to Boeing’s workforce in Everett, Washington. That’s where Boeing makes its newest commercial aircraft, the dazzling 787 Dreamliner. “Boeing has suppliers in all 50 states, providing goods and services like the airplane’s ground-breaking carbon fiber composite aircraft structure from Kansas, advanced jet engines from Ohio, wing components from Oklahoma, and revolutionary electrochromic windows from Alabama,” Obama boasted. American workers, he said, are the best in the world.

Boeing executives on that stage beamed enigmatically — perhaps because they were aware that some 70 percent of the Dreamliner’s parts come from an atlas’ worth of countries. “The wings are produced in Japan, the engines in the United Kingdom and the United States, the flaps and ailerons in Canada and Australia, the fuselage in Japan, Italy and the United States, the horizontal stabilizers in Italy, the landing gear in France, and the doors in Sweden and France,” a study by the Swedish National Board of Trade concluded. “All in all, a Boeing airplane is not particularly American.”

Perhaps irony is less surprising in the case of Donald Trump — but it is still striking. The president’s private Boeing 757, famous for its silk-lined master bedroom and solid gold bathroom fixtures, is kept airborne by Rolls Royce 211 fanjets, the UK-made workhorse of an entire generation of Boeing aircraft. Somehow, as Trump campaigned in front of the plane railing against nefarious foreigners stealing our manufacturing jobs, nobody seemed to take note of the “RR” logo prominently displayed on the portside engine.

As for the new American president’s passion for slapping high tariffs on imports from Mexico, perhaps Trump might consider some awkward facts. The Dreamliner’s wiring comes from Mexico. And, in return, the Mexicans are among Boeing’s most enthusiastic customers for the big plane — Mexico’s president Enrique Pena Nieto proudly flies one. Boeing’s CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, who seems no more enthusiastic about throwing his weight behind open trade than the CEOs of Merck, Cummins and Harley-Davidson, did not respond to an invitation to say whether he thought that was a pretty good deal for his company and its nearly 150,000 U.S.-based workers.

Somebody (other than college professors and think-tank nerds) needs to get back in the game of explaining the benefits of trade to American audiences. The Geneva-based World Trade Organization is giving it a shot. In a recent speech, WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo appealed to a younger audience: “A jar of Nutella can contain hazelnuts from Turkey, palm oil from Malaysia, cocoa from Nigeria, sugar from Brazil and flavoring from China,” he noted. Meanwhile the company, which is headquartered in Italy, has a plant in Canada that brews up the chocolatey goodness sold by retailers across America.

* * *

It’s easy to dismiss the awkward silence of American corporate executives who know American jobs (and profits) depend on global supply chains simply as pragmatism-as-usual. But one indirect consequence, the sheer ignorance of American workers and politicians as to how their bread is buttered, is dangerously exposing the global economy to uncertainty. Is it too much to ask corporate America to explain that economic nationalism is a recipe for stagnation and joblessness?

Shrimp Wars

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by Greg Rushford

Aiming to peel back imports of America’s most popular seafood, the floundering United States shrimp industry launched a legal assault on six Asian and Latin American shrimp-exporting countries in 2003. After two years of maneuvering, the American shrimpers won the battle: federal regulators imposed tariffs ranging from 4 percent to more than 100 percent on imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil, Ecuador, China and India. But now, though the battle wages on, it is clear that the Americans are stuck in a holding action, with little or no hope of ultimate victory.

True, the tariffs have inflicted pain, and not just on the exporters they were aimed at. Importers’ supplies were disrupted until they established new supply chains. Predictably, some of those new sources were found in places like Indonesia and Mexico, where shrimp exporters who were not subject to the punitive United States duties have since enjoyed the windfalls from reduced competition. Thus, despite the tariffs, United States shrimp imports, which totaled around $3 billion a year before the litigation, now exceed $4 billion.

The American shrimp fishermen, who entered the 21st century unable to compete in the global marketplace, are still struggling. No real surprise there: the shrimp farms of Asia and Latin America can supply the product at lower cost in whatever quantities and sizes customers demand. What’s more, further Congressional action designed to protect the fisherman would almost certainly be subject to sanctions by the World Trade Organization. Thus to survive, shrimpers in the United States must serve niche customers who de- mand wild shrimp and are willing to put up with the vicissitudes of ocean catches.

The shrimp war deserves a closer look. In the course of covering it, I met intrepid entrepreneurs from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Thailand. Their economic fate is largely being driven by basic laws of competition. But these are not theoretical people, and their stories – particularly those of the Cajun shrimpers in the Louisiana bayous, who are being left behind for cultural as well as economic reasons – are compelling.

I believe there is room for sympathy for all parties in the rough and tumble of global markets – all, that is, except for politicians on Capitol Hill who follow the money, and the bureaucrats at the Department of Commerce and the Customs and Border Protection Agency who invent their own rules as they go along. The only wrongdoing of those who have been penalized for trafficking in foreign shrimp has been to bring affordable seafood to Americans’ dinner tables.

have been penalized for trafficking in foreign shrimp has been to bring affordable seafood to Americans’ dinner tables. But before ex- plaining the how’s and why’s, it is worth examining the conflict through the eyes of people who make a living (or would like to) in the shrimp business.

Capitalist Heroes

One of the heroines is Kim Chauvin, a determined entrepreneur from the bayous of southern Louisiana. I visited her at her home in the eponymic town of Chauvin, La. (pop. 3,075) in the summer of 2003. Kim’s husband David, a fourth-generation shrimp fisherman who, with his father, had built his own 73-

foot boat, the Mariah Jade, was threatened with bankruptcy by falling prices for wild- caught shrimp. Indeed, many of David’s peers had already given up and were looking for other jobs.

So Kim Chauvin got busy learning how to add value to the wild-caught shrimp through savvy marketing. A high school graduate and a mother of two, she took a 10-week class at a local university where she learned marketing, financial management and the fundamentals of business planning.

Chauvin started by selling fresh shrimp by the roadside. Four years of perseverance later, the Chauvins now own three boats and sell some 10,000 pounds of Louisiana shrimp a week via the Internet, as well as to restaurants as far away as Minnesota – niche markets that didn’t exist until the Mariah Jade Shrimp Co. created them.

Kim Chauvin likes foreign competition as much as Rush Limbaugh likes feminazis, and adamantly refuses to sell imports. But while she has supported the antidumping litigation, Chauvin spends less time complaining and more time developing market opportunities. She has learned that because wild-caught shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico taste better than farmed shrimp – the one fact that all parties seem to agree upon – there are more niche markets waiting to be developed by domestic entrepreneurs wielding Cajun spices.

Another heroine is Christine Ngo. Her family also became economic risk-takers be- cause life offered them few alternatives. In 1978, her father, Hua Ngo, piled her, her brother and mother into a boat and fled their native Vietnam. The Ngos made it to a refugee camp in Malaysia, and the family was re- located in San Francisco the next year. Hua Ngo, who never had had the opportunity for much schooling during the Vietnam War (in which he lost three brothers), worked as a $4.24 an hour laborer for a couple years, be- fore he started peddling fish on the streets of Chinatown.

Fast forward to 2007. Christine, a 34-year- old college graduate and Los Angeles resident, plays a key role in managing H&N Seafoods, which imports shrimp and other seafood from all over the world and last year generat- ed $250 million in revenues. The Ngos also buy domestic seafood, including some wild- caught shrimp from Louisiana. Coping with the various legal and financial uncertainties that came with the antidumping litigation was “a headache,” Christine relates. “But we worked around it.”

Or consider Choopong Luesukprasert, the managing director of Marine Gold Products Ltd. Seven years ago, Choopong’s mother began Marine Gold, located about a 45-minute drive south of Bangkok. At the time, Thailand was still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Choopong was 26 and not long out of college. “We didn’t know any- thing then,” he recalled, when I recently visit- ed his operation. “We almost went out of business after the first two years.” But the family persevered.

Now, Choopong is the managing director of Thailand’s ninth-largest seafood exporter. Marine Gold supplies shrimp to Japan, Eu- rope and Canada, as well as to major American retailers including Costco – more shrimp than the entire American shrimp industry could deliver. The bright-eyed young women I saw peeling and packaging shrimp at Marine Gold worked like demons in the sparkling clean modern plant, for roughly $300 a month. Choopong told me that next year, Marine Gold will employ at least 2,500 workers. Despite the headaches and expenses of litigation, Choopong said, the United States tariffs of 6 percent have only been a distrac- tion. “They have made me a better competitor,” he concluded.

Choopong also pointed out that Marine Gold, like virtually every other shrimp pro- cessor in the world, buys peeling and cooking equipment from Laitram Machinery Inc. Laitram manufactures both at its Louisiana head- quarters and at a subsidiary in Denmark. Choopong said that he could understand why the United States government would want to help American shrimpers. But what would happen to other American companies like Laitram, he asked, if Washington put their customers out of business?

Troubled Shrimp Waters and Cultural Icons

When I visited isolated Terrebonne Parish, some 70 miles south of New Orleans, in 2003, it quickly became evident that Cajun fisher men in the bayous of southern Louisiana had been happily oblivious to the march of technology and globalization. “This is not just an industry, this is a culture,” Bobby Bergeron, the parish president, explained at a meeting of shrimpers. “It’s where I come from. It’s who I am.” Bergeron was rightly proud of his gentle and tolerant Cajun culture and its people.

“I sit back, turn on the music, and steer with my toes, feeling happy,” one of the Cajun cultural icons added the next day, while demonstrating at dockside how he does just that. This is a Bubba Gump lifestyle that shrimpers learned from their daddies, most of whom never had much opportunity for, or interest in, book learning.

I met a 25-year-old shrimper named Benji and his girlfriend, who was pregnant. Benji, who said he had left school after the eighth grade, knew he was in trouble. “I’ve been trolling a week and a half, and I’ve only made $400 so far,” he said. “Trolling is fun. All I ask is bring the price back where it used to be,” Benji declared – not realizing that the laws of supply and demand will never allow that to happen.

I also visited a dock used by Vietnamese- American shrimpers, former “boat people” who fled to the bayous after the fall of Saigon in 1975. A pleasant-looking white man, who happened to be leaving the dock as I arrived, smiled and waved. I learned later that he was from a Texas bank, looking to seize a boat from one of the many owners who had fallen into arrears on loans.

But these Vietnamese-Americans are not likely to share the fate of their Cajun counter-parts. A man who introduced himself as Captain Nguyen explained that two of his children were in college, one of whom plans to be a physician. Despite the difficult shrimp economics, at the end of the day the Vietnamese exile community is going to make it, one way or the other.

Lagniappe from Senator Byrd

The one competitive advantage that the American shrimpers have enjoyed in recent years was a gift from Senator Robert Byrd. In October 2000, the venerable senior senator from West Virginia slipped a rider into an agricultural appropriation. Known as the Byrd Amendment, the law makes domestic petitioners (rather than the U.S. Treasury) the recipients of tariffs collected in antidumping litigation. The idea was to tax the foreigners twice – first by making them pay the tariffs, and second by handing their money to their American competitors.

There had been no public hearings, and no opportunity for more objective heads to point out that the measure would likely run afoul of U.S. obligations as a member of the World Trade Organization. This is, in fact, what a WTO dispute-resolution panel determined in 2003. Congress eventually voted to scrap the measure, but delayed the date until October 2007 – giving antidumping petitioners an extra four years in which they could keep the fruits of their legal efforts.

The idea of the Byrd Amendment was to tax the foreigners twice — first by making them pay the tariffs, and second by handing their money to their American competitors.

Who’s Dumping on Whom?

Last year, U.S. Customs handed over $101 million in Byrd Amendment cash to the do- mestic shrimp industry. Kim Chauvin, who says that her share amounted to around $72,000, told me that she couldn’t understand why people regarded the Byrd Amendment as double taxation. Since the foreigners’ “unfair” shrimp dumping had hurt shrimpers like her, Chauvin reasoned, it was only fair that injured Americans should be compensated for their losses. That, however, doesn’t square with the reality of how the American anti- dumping laws are administered.

For openers, U.S. trade laws create economic rules for foreigners that don’t apply to their domestic counterparts. Consider the loss leaders often prominently displayed in supermarket aisles, or for that matter all the cars sold by Detroit at prices that may cover the costs of materials but not the companies’ considerable overhead. As this discounting is not part of a predatory pricing scheme to put rivals out of business, ruthless price-cutting – Coke versus Pepsi, Wal-Mart versus Target, for example – is regarded as a sign of healthy competition. Within domestic borders, pricing according to demand in various places and segments of the market is entirely legal, even when it doesn’t cover the full costs of production. But when goods come from other countries, price discrimination is called dumping and subject to punitive duties calculated by hostile paper-pushers.

Cutting to the chase, United States anti-dumping laws have nothing to do with free-market economics and everything to do with interest-group politics. Indeed, the laws have deliberately been crafted to give federal officials sufficient discretion to find almost every foreigner at fault. The antidumping case for shrimp was typical: the Commerce Department rounded up the usual suspects and pronounced them guilty of unfair pricing.

Consider how American officials “investigated” Vietnam and China. The Commerce Department categorized both as “non-market” communist economies that are not disciplined by market forces. And this non-reality allowed the department to determine the cost of foreign production from comparable free-market economies, rather than from the actual accounts of the foreign producers who were charged with dumping.

Was the price of water used by Chinese shrimp farmers “fair” or “unfair” in 2003? The Commerce Department looked up the average price of water in four cities in India in a 1997 edition of the Asian Development Bank’s Water Utilities Data Book. For Vietnam, the officials looked at the six-year-old published rates for water in two cities in Bangladesh. Commerce played the same pretend game to find “fair” prices for ice, electricity, factory overhead costs and so on. They found that a tariff of 112 percent was needed to bring Chinese shrimp prices up to real costs. For Vietnam, the tariff was calculated at 93 percent.

When pressed in formal legal proceedings, U.S. officials finally conceded that the 21 Vietnamese and 24 Chinese shrimp exporters charged with dumping did, in fact, operate in “market driven” environments Still, it was de- cided that, market or no market, all were sell- ing below cost, a decision that puzzles Choopong, the Thai exporter. “Why would I be in business to lose money?” he asks. The duties were recalculated at 16 percent and 49-98 percent for the Vietnamese and Chinese, respectively.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

In the case of Ecuador, the bureaucrats used an outrageous methodology called “zeroing,” in which the numbers-crunchers eliminated high-priced imports in calculating the aver- age price of imports in order to justify a 4 percent antidumping tariff. But zeroing has been declared a violation of World Trade Organization protocols. And Washington is being pressed to drop the tariffs on Ecuador.

That, however, doesn’t exhaust the protectionists’ bag of dirty tricks. U.S. Customs officials who collected the tariffs came up with a creative accounting idea for increasing the amount of money an importer must deposit as a contingency against tariffs and other fees collected at the border. When the National Fisheries Institute took Customs to court over the issue, Judge Timothy Stanceu of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that the agency had been motivated “by domestic political pressures to take action directed against the shrimp-importing industry.” As one Cus- toms memo that was never supposed to see the light of day candidly put it, “The domestic petitioners in this case are from South and South- eastern states that have Congressional representation” on key committees. “The importers are not as geographically concentrated.”

Beating the System

Fatima Satya, who runs a California-based importing firm called Pacific Supreme Company, has learned a thing or two about coping with such dirty tricks. Pacific Supreme’s survival was imperiled when its major supplier in China was hit with nearly 100 percent antidumping duties on shrimp. So Ms. Satya (and many other importers at risk) went “tariff shopping,” shifting to suppliers from countries yet to be targeted by domestic shrimpers. Last year, shrimp imports from Indonesia rose by 15 percent, from Bangladesh by 30 percent, and from Malaysia by 17 percent. And that more than made up for the decline in imports from India and Vietnam.

The lessons for the struggling American shrimp industry seem clear: Instead of resist- ing globalization, embrace it. Don’t resent the success of Thai entrepreneurs like Marine Gold’s Choopong; emulate it. There is a lot of money to be made by Cajuns who can add value to imported shrimp with Louisiana-style cooking and recipes. Learn more about the smart marketing of tasty wild American shrimp into niche markets, following the lead of entrepreneurs like Louisiana’s Kim Chauvin. And learn from Vietnamese-Americans like Captain Nguyen in Louisiana, whose daugh- ter is in medical school. Learn, too from Hua Ngo, who refused to be defeated when life dealt him a wretched hand.

In seafood markets – for that matter, in virtually every global market – the winners are those who learn to swim faster.

GREG RUSHFORD edits the Rushford Report (www.rushfordreport.com), an online newsletter that analyzes the politics of international trade and finance.