Why Foreign Aid Should be a Conservative Priority

It has always struck me that one of the constants of rural conservative anti-Washington beliefs has been foreign aid is wasted tax payer money and should be ended.

Yet, looking at the Year in Review pictures of 2015's events I was struck by the widespread sourcing of refugees on the move: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Central African Republic, miscellaneous other African countries, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Jamaica and no doubt I am missing some other significant sources.

Of course, what made America great is the movement of people in search of a better life and American welcoming them.  As the grandchild of 3 people born in Europe, 2 who migrated here as adults, I am very welcoming of anyone so courageous as to be willing to learn a new language and start over at the bottom in a new society with the belief that life here will be superior to life in the old country.

But as Europe has found out, there is a limit to how many people even a large society can absorb, and I know conservatives types will see a smaller number than I do as what that limit should be, but it cannot be zero unless the developed world uses diplomacy and foreign aid to help these source countries preserve a hope of economic opportunity in a peaceful setting.  If you don't have that, people will migrate from chaos to a rules based society.  That, after all, is the original purpose of religion.  Religion is how leaders 5000 years ago developed rules for society.  When there are no rules, chaos reigns and people want to live in a rules based society.  It is in our basic metaphoric DNA.

So, if you are a conservative person, and you want less rather than more human migration, you should be supporting more diplomacy and more foreign aid because that is how you will reduce human migration.  I realize, foreign aid can be wasted by corruption and that is why you cannot have an open check book for foreign aid; but borders cannot control millions of people who want to migrate with humane processes that respect the human condition if there is chaos where those people originate.

So, preventing chaos everywhere in this world should be a goal of developed world diplomacy and foreign aid.  That should be a basic tenant of any set of political beliefs.

Where is Reflection in the Republican Party? Global Warming, Islamic Jihad

I am an analyst by inner sense of self, education and career.  When I look at any issue, especially economic and political issues, I like to analyze the subject from all angles to decide what I think should be done.

So yesterday, while I enjoyed a Lobster Roll and beer for a holiday lunch in Manhattan after doing some shopping, I drifted into a contemplation of the state of the world.  I was in such deep thought, that the server asked me if I was OK.

What captivated my brain was the fact that 195 nations signed the Paris Global Warming Agreement. 195 nations are concerned about this phenomenon, and have a substantial agreement on the science linking CO2 to global warming.   This is not surprising as the English scientist, John Tyndall,  discovered in 1859 that CO2 in the atmosphere is the reason the earth can maintain an atmosphere by trapping infrared light and maintaining the temperature that allows life to exist on earth.  Scientists all over the world ever since have been verifying that basic fact of life and never disproving it.

Yet, hardcore Republicans call this junk science.  If this was junk science, would China agree with it?  Would India agree with it?  Would Bangladesh, Brazil, Iran, Russia, Germany and the rest of the 195 countries agree with it?  Wouldn't a large group of scientists somewhere in this world be broadcasting far and wide the error of this science?

Instead, in Donald Trump fashion, the hard core conservative wing of the GOP calls it junk science, slandering this 155 year old scientific discovery to preserve what?  The right to burn any fossil fuel without paying for the social costs in the future.  Creating economic opportunity from owning land at higher elevations. (For the record, while I am 42' above sea level, all the economic value from my home relies on economic activity at lower elevations).

While a century ago people did not think about what they were doing to future generations, they just wanted to survive, shouldn't our wealth and education give us a greater purpose in preserving this earth for future generations?  Isn't that the purpose of living?

Why does the political party of the religious not think this way?  I thought religion was supposed to make people reflective.

Instead, they want to do nothing about global warming, they want to send troops into situations that will only inspire thousands of have nots in the Islamic World to join Jihad so they can meet their virgins in heaven and take some of our troops with them.  I don't understand why so many jihadists, who are mainly young men with their life in front of them, want to commit suicide and kill Americans or other Muslims.

I think the language of Wahhabism is a primary cause.  I think RedStateVT is correct that violent video games, movies and words have motivational consequences that are a danger to society.  And I think that politicians who speak in violent disrespectful terms of their opponents run the risk of inspiring inappropriate and illegal behavior.  Yet, conservative talk radio is a leading source of violent political language in this country.  But changing that in the U.S. requires a Constitutional Amendment and that isn't going to happen.

And the result of that is Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are rallying the KKK/John Birch successors as their supporters.  This is similar to Prohibition when the country was divided in an similar fashion to the way it is today.  It took a depression and a world war to created liberals and conservatives in both parties, but that only lasted about 50 years.  Now while the Democrats still have liberals and conservatives, the GOP has only conservative purists and they are generally way over the deep end on many issues from my perspective.

I wish I knew some truly independent voters so I could understand what they are thinking, but I don't.  I have some conservative friends and then a bunch of friends who see the world the way I do.

In 10 months, and two weeks, this will be over, and I can only hope that the Democrats win a monster  victory to put an end to this insanity caused by a lack of reflection.  The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Ross Douthat Finds the Philosophical Fault Line in the GOP Primary Campaign

Well worth reading although I think he has too much faith in any of the candidates to have a philosophical core.  I think all the GOP candidates just pander to one of the GOP bases:  taxes, balanced budgets at the expense of useful government functions, defense, and KKK/John Birch elements.

Link to Ross Douthat column.

Religion is Never Simple

This is something I certainly forget, and it is certainly something that all politicians need to remember.

Ross Douthat's column today is an excellent reminder of that.

Link to Douthat column

And the GOP needs to remember that violent disrespectful language can breed violence.  Their disrespect for the President has had consequences that are now present in the primary campaign and there is no clear way to tone it down and that will certainly have different future consequences that I cannot predict.  But the history of my people tells me I am correct.

Here is a recap of the Crusades and how the Jews suffered from violence fermenting language.

Words can lead to killing

Charles Krauthammer Agrees With Me

Up to a point, because even though he is proposing that we should do more or less exactly what President Obama is doing, he blasts the President for his weak rhetoric.

But leaving that aside, Krauthammer, a former fairly moderate writer for The New Republic, who went over to the deeply conservative side and became a partisan mouthpiece for hardcore conservatism, such as it is today, does slam Donald Trump's worst instincts.

Krauthammer points out that the Kurds are Muslims, and the ban all foreign Muslims would not only capture Syrians, who just might lie when ask if they were Muslim, but also the Kurds, and our "allies" in the Gulf and other Arab countries.  People we need if we are to offset the siren call of ISIS.

Link to Krauthammer column


Which got me thinking about two things.

1.  Alienation is hard thing for society to combat but seems to be a common thread in what motivates terrorism, both domestic and jihadist.  While we need to combat armed terrorists in some manner to keep them contained and the Shiite government in Baghdad did not care to co-opt Sunnis and is now reaping what they sowed.  But so did the Dick Cheney wing of the GOP when then disbanded the Baathist Party, and now those former well trained soldiers/technicians are the core of ISIS's military effort and economic machine.

Technology has changed global society in many ways, and I don't have the answer, but I think we need to think about alienation and what we as a global society can do to reduce it.

It is a very complex process by which one can become alienated, and I doubt there is a 100% foolproof way to prevent it.  I don't own a gun so I cannot act upon this, nor do I want to, but the crazy irresponsible GOP positions alienate me so much that sometimes I fantasize about taking on a bunch of GOP crazies in the hope that they see the error of their ways.  And I am a rational human being with something to lose by doing that.  I can understand how someone who is less rational, with nothing to lose, would actually act out on such a fantasy.

How does society prevent that?  I wonder if there any psychologists out there who are thinking about that and could the political establishment which is failing so miserably at even thinking in this manner, actually listen to them and develop a set of policies that would reduce alienation.

2.  Sometimes I think Donald Trump is on a one man mission to destroy the Republican Party.  But then I remember he has been a birther since Day 1 of President Obama's administration, even though the Fiscal and Monetary stimulus implemented by both the Bush and Obama administrations saved not only the economy, but Donal Trump's wealth.  With the debt he employs in his real estate, he would have been bankrupted by a bankrupt credit allocation system, along with the rest of us.

So why has Donald Trump been so vocal on President Obama's birthplace, promoting the idea that somehow Hawaii doesn't keep records in the same reliable manner that the rest of the country does.  And why is he feeding all these other anti-American, anti-immigrant thoughts.  I cannot think of a better way to destroy the GOP on a national level and I wonder what Donald Trump's motivation is.  I mean Arab's and Chinese and Latino's are prime buyers of his real estate developments all across the U.S.

I am less baffled by Donald Trump's appeal to alienated white lower middle class voters, than I am completely baffled by Donald Trump's motivation.  He is reducing the value of his brand by insulting his buyers.  Perhaps he is has a strange loose screw in his brain, but you can't talk like he does and have dementia, so it is not that.  And why would he want to destroy the GOP, he is not a modern Democrat.

Ross Douthat Explains the GOP Challenge

on Immigration & Terrorism.

Link to Douthat column

Let's not be Stupid

168 dead 680 wounded.

ISIS attack, no Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing.

We didn't bomb Idaho or wherever he was from and there could certainly were more lone wolf's in the intervening 20 years as there have been another 53 mass killings that were random plus all the gang warfare that the website I consulted did not include.

I don't say this to discount ISIS.  Only to point out that the U.S. has a lot of home grown terrorists and two ISIS wanna be's who are now dead don't mean we have to get completely stupid in our response.

If the War on Terrorism, and ISIS is the personification of terrorism, is to be successful, it cannot become a War on Islam because we will never extricate ourselves from a War on Islam as within 1.6 billion Muslims, there will always be 100,000 who want to become martyr's if our 100,000 anti-terrorist force puts itself in a position to be shot at.

The War on Islamic Terrorism can only be defeated by Muslim forces, Western forces can assist, but they will always draw in more people willing to become martyr's for the chance to kill Americans, so we have to be smart about this.  And simply invading with our military might, when the Iraqi's, and the Iranians, and probably not even the Turk's want our troops on the ground there in significant numbers, is not being smart about this.

The GOP wanna be Dick Cheney's must not be allowed back into office.

Hosea

If you click on this post because you know who Hosea was, you are better student of religion than my sorry non-believing self.  But as with all great books, there is a certain amount of wisdom in The Bible.

What caused me to google Hosea was a columnist quoting him: "For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."  The columnist was referring to the GOP's failure to shut down Donald Trump and the Birther's when they were and are being so dishonestly disrespectful of President Obama.  Now this dishonesty is dominating the GOP Presidential campaign and the serious policy wonks cannot escape this morass to campaign on a set of ideas that might attract independent voters.

Anyone who thinks Ted Cruz can unite the ultra-conservatives and win a general election doesn't remember Barry Goldwater (I could be wrong about that which is why, as in sports you play the game, in politics you hold the election.)

Anyway, I googled Hosea and found out who he was.   He lived in about 800 B.C. and in the Old Testament as a Prophet.  What was striking to me was every historic painting portrayal of him showed him to be very dark in skin color.  Which got me thinking, were the original Jews way back when African American as evolution would still have taken some time and perhaps some interbreeding with lighter skin people of more northern climates.  In which case, the Jews and Palestinians are genetically related and the current tribal mess in the Middle East the equivalent of a family dust-up that is completely out of control.

Anyway, I thought the President gave a sound speech last night. We cannot alienate 1.6 billion people, we must co-opt them into our battle against their extremist religious brethren.  Not that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would do that and that is why I hope they go down into a terrible election defeat in 11 months.

All Gun Violence is Terrorism

Shooting innocent people is the definition of terrorism.  Motive is just an ancillary issue key to understanding why.

As for Republican tweets to pray for the dead, how about praying for the living and doing something about the 40% of gun sales that occur with no background checks and stopping the proliferation of automatic weapons being scattered amongst the population.

Of course these same Republicans pray for the unborn and then vote to cut access to health insurance for the living.

It is time to balance the budget, as well as raise interest rates

I know there are a lot of underemployed older people out there, but the fact of the matter, underemployment is still employment.  You adjust your spending to meet your income.

What is important from a macro-economic standpoint is moving the economic levers in such a manner that long term stability is maintained.  When you are approaching full employment, that means positive real interest rates, and with an inflation rate of @1.5%, that means short rates should be at least 1.75% and long term rates between 3% and 3.25%.  As for fiscal policy, you are supposed to have a budget surplus at full employment.  Instead we have a deficit of 2.5% or so, so you should raise some revenues and cut some spending to close that hole to zero.

Except sequestration and a failure to raise taxes to pay for infrastructure has short funded a lot of things and that is starting to show.  The Secret Service has been starved overworking the existing agents who are making mistakes.  Now I know certain GOP Congressmen might not care if the Secret Service fails right now, but they would if a GOP type were President and they really shouldn't be that mean and cynical.  And they are bankrupting road maintenance by not raising the gasoline tax in over 20 years, while inflation has driven construction costs higher.  Why the Congress is raiding the Federal Reserves profits owed to the banking system to pay for road construction is beyond me.  And then there is the disaster of corporate taxation, as well as abuse of the carried interest strategy.

Anyway, I know that is not coherent because I don't have a detailed grasp of the budget and that is really necessary to make good concrete proposals.  I just know at full employment, the budget should be in a small surplus.

A Challenging Path to Fix the Rat's Nest: i.e. Syria/Iraq, & Ted Cruz Personality

Thomas Friedman, who has studied the Middle East for at least 35 years, and written extensively on the subject played bare the challenges any policy must overcome to be successful at establishing a peaceful state of Iraq and Syria.  And the two are very much intertwined.

"But to sustainably destroy ISIS, you need to understand three things: 1) It is the product of two civil wars; one was between moderate and extremist Sunnis and the other was between Sunnis and Shiites. And they feed each other. 2) The only way to defeat ISIS is to minimize the struggle between Sunnis and Shiites and strengthen the fighting capacity of moderate Sunnis against extremist ones. And 3) the fight has to be led by Arabs and Muslims but strongly backed by America, the E.U. and, yes, Russia."

"To sustainably defeat ISIS you need a mutually reinforcing coalition. You need Saudi Arabia and the leading Sunni religious powers to aggressively delegitimize ISIS’s Islamist narrative. You need Arab, Kurdish and Turkish ground troops — backed by U.S. and NATO air power and special forces, with Russia’s constructive support — to uproot ISIS door to door."

"You need Iran to encourage the Shiite-led government in Baghdad to create a semiautonomous “Sunnistan” in the areas held by ISIS, giving moderate Iraqi Sunnis the same devolved powers as Kurds in Kurdistan so they have a political alternative to ISIS. And you need Iran to agree to a political transition in Syria that would eventually replace Assad."

"In short, you need either a power-sharing political solution that all the key players accept and will enforce, or an armed force to just crush ISIS and then sit on the region indefinitely, so ISIS doesn’t come back. Obama can’t secure the former, and doesn’t want to do the latter. Nor do the American people — nor Obama’s critics, despite what some of them might suggest."

Link to Freidman's column

Meanwhile, Frank Bruni today examined the strange case of Ted Cruz who somehow fails to make friends wherever he has spent considerable time.  Since getting along with people is a prime necessary condition of being a successful politician, at least historically, this is, to me, a strange tactic.

I hope my freshman year roommate with whom I did not develop any real relationship would think more highly of me than Ted Cruz's does of him.

"Anyone but Cruz: That’s the leitmotif of his life, stretching back to college at Princeton. His freshman roommate, Craig Mazin, told Patricia Murphy of The Daily Beast: “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”"

And I know my former co-workers think more highly of me than the following, witness my friendship with RedStateVt who encouraged me to write this blog.

"The political strategist Matthew Dowd, who worked for Bush back then, tweeted that “if truth serum was given to the staff of the 2000 Bush campaign,” an enormous percentage of them “would vote for Trump over Cruz.”"

"Another Bush 2000 alumnus said to me: “Why do people take such an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? It just saves time.”"

Link to Frank Bruni's column

Some Good News in the Paper This Morning: Sheldon Silver Jail Bird, Federal Reserve Powers and NY Football

Sheldon Silver, the corrupt and obnoxious, Democratic Leader of the NY State Assembly was found guilty on all counts and will now have to resign his seat.  If Skelos, the Republican Senate Leader, is found guilty on all counts, he will be gone for good and maybe the legislatures of NY will clean house and figure out how to remain clean.  Then it will be up to the voters to elect people of intelligence to the Legislature, who will figure out how to reduce the state's debt, while growing the economy of upstate NY.

The Federal Reserve found a way to satisfy Dodd-Frank and maintain its lender of last resort function.  Although I don't expect them to have to use it in my remaining life time, as we saw in 2008, that function is critical to avoiding depressions when you have a credit crunch.  It is sound economic policy to have an institution with unfettered power to be the lender of last resort, as Milton Friedman wrote so well about.

The NY Giants offensive line is in a shambles health wise and they were not that good when they were healthy.  So I can just root for the Jets vs the Giants this weekend because a victory will do the better team more good, and maybe the Giant brain trust will figure out a way to rebuild the O and the D Line, neither of which are playing up the Big Blue standards.

2 Thanksgiving Hopes

Well, one hope and one nice quote.

1st the Hope,  Thomas Friedman visited Saudi Arabia and I am reminded how much I miss my being able to travel around the world.  Only by visiting countries and hearing what is going on there from people who live there do you really find out the truth and have insights into where things may be going.

Anyway, there are some good things going on in Saudi Arabia and maybe, just maybe, they will overwhelm the bad things coming out of Saudi Arabia feeding ISIS.

Link to Thomas Friedman's column from Saudi Arabia


Douglas North, a Noble Prize winning economist died.  His speciality was the interaction of society on the economy.  The key quote is:  “Economic history has taught us that the world is an evolving complex system, always changing,” he said. 

And my take away is that is why politicians cannot use rigid rule based policies as political economic policy.  Forces will change and policy must respond.

Something Saudi Arabia is hopefully learning. 

a Great Column by Robert Samuelson

Link to Column

Sunday Musings 11/22/15: Ross Douthat endorses Hillary sort of & 6 year Presidential Terms

Well, Ross Douthat complemented Hillary in a backhanded manner, while wising the GOP would find a rational anti-terrortist policy to run on.

His key line is:  "We don't face a single Soviet-style threat or a convenient "axis" of allied evils.  We can't defeat ISIS and contain Iran and push back Russia and contain China all at once.  So we need a President who can see the strategic chessboard whole, who can instill fear in our rivals but also negotiate boldly in situations where the opportunity presents itself."

Don't worry my right wing readers, he is really praising Richard Nixon and postulating that Hillary may possess some of Nixon's weaknesses, but being adamant that none of the GOP candidates offer a rational anti-terrorist policy.

Link to Ross Douthat column


Meanwhile Frank Bruni wrote a column about How ISIS is winning, while losing, and the need for a nuanced respectful political process.  He is disappointed that President Obama cannot try to unite the country on this front because it undermines the good that the President can do.  I refer people to my blog written sometime ago bemoaning his executive action on immigration because just as in Roe v Wade, some social issues are better decided by the legislative process because that finalizes them, while court decision/executive actions simple decide them and leave the anger festering with the hope of overturning that decision eventually.

Bruni's column got me thinking.  The last 2 years of a term limited Presidency have not turned out well since Eisenhower. Neither Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter or Bush I got there.  Reagan did and I don't have much memory of what happened there other than black Monday because I was a young father and it was a long time ago.  But Clinton had the Lewinsky incident and all that led to.  Bush II had the collapse of the financial system from the nonexistent regulation of the mortgage market.  And Obama is not getting much accomplished because I think he has lost the mental energy to negotiate with the GOP and fight back against the most liberal elements of the Democratic party.

For my right wing readers, remember that within the both the ACA and Dodd-Frank there were negotiations with the GOP and what came out of this was arguably GOP style policy.  Democrats would have instituted a Single Payer Medicare For All, and would have broken up the Big Banks, no matter how idiotic that would be. Instead, we got Heritage Foundation designed Health Insurance, and once must remember why the Heritage Foundation deemed it worthy to look at Health Insurance.  Heath Care costs had risen to 20% of GDP with no expectation of a decline in sight.

So I share some of Bruni's disappointment with President's Obama statements this past week, and wonder if the U.S. wouldn't be better off with one 6 year term, like Mexico does.  The experience of most of my life is year's 7 & 8 don't turn out too well.  Just a thought.

Link to Frank Bruni column

Hillary Connects the Dots of The Rat's Nest

At a speech yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary laid out her vision for a possible solution to Syria.  Only if you get Russia and Iran to agree to regime change and Assad leaves, will the Sunni's rise up and oppose Sunni ISIS.

So how do you get Russia and Iran to do that.  Russia is perhaps easier, although as she pointed out nothing is easy with Russia these days.  Russia is legitimately concerned about the prospect of Islamic terrorism hitting within Russia and wants to eliminate ISIS.  But they are playing tough with their support of Assad and probably want some concession in the Ukraine as the price for Assad.  But I remind you and I hope the U.S. government remembers, it was Putin's provision of the latest in anti-airplane technology that resulted in the Malaysian 747 civilian airliner being shot down.  Those boys in the Ukrainian separatist movement just couldn't resist firing off their toy.  And Putin is responsible for that and cannot be allowed to simply have his way in Eastern Ukraine.  Of which I last read, is suffering terrible economically because neither Russia nor the Ukraine is running the local government there and the bad boy separatists who are don't know how to manage an economy or apparently a military force either since I doubt they really wanted to kill a bunch of Dutch or Malaysians, but murder should have consequences, regardless of intentions.

Anyway, Hillary, unlike the GOP Presidential candidates, understands this is war on Islamic terrorists, not Islam.  If you make it the latter, Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia, India and numerous other countries who are not anti-American might well become anti-American.  After all, all the Paris Islamic terrorists have been either French or Belgian and could have flown right into the U.S. without a Visa.  And then they could have bought numerous guns without any background checks, legally.

And if the GOP thinks we can wall off the U.S. from 1.6 billion people without some economic consequence, they need to rethink this.   1.6 billion people is 25% of the world's population.  (I mean these are the same people who want to do nothing about Climate Change because of the perceived economic costs).   These same people want to deport 11 million people and reduce the U.S. labor force by 3% and our consumption by 3%.  How will trickle down economics work if there is shrinkage in demand?  That is a negative feed back loop.  Not to mention what is the cost of a National Police Force to find the undocumented workers in every nook and cranny of the U.S. including farms in the middle of no where coast to coast border to border because the Caucasian farmer children fled that work to live in cities.

Anyway, Hillary knows that it took Sunni's to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq and it will take Sunni's to end ISIS.  And the only path to ending Hezbollah and Hamas is getting Iran to end its messing around.  That is the most difficult path and requires a unified front including the E.U., Russia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Pakistan and the U.S.

And everyone tries to ignore the mess in Africa with Al Shabab and Boko Haram and who knows what they call themselves in Mali, but bad things keep happening in Africa.  The U.S. military cannot police the world everywhere, and these nations need to clean up their corrupt governments and bring some order to themselves.

Even one terrorist is too much, but the NRA doesn't agree

This insanity is based upon a hatred of our President who is trying to find the balance we need as a nation to prevent it from another failure to recognize good citizens arrive without regard to their race:  I refer of course to the U.S. sending Jews, fleeing Europe before WWII, back to Europe, the slow recognition that Japanese Americans were loyal to the U.S., the continuous delay in recognizing the lack of gun control has led to a war on all African Americans (there was a story today about 18 Santa Monica policeman showing up with guns drawn to investigate a Hispanic locksmith helping an African American Dartmouth M.B.A.  get into the apartment which she locked herself out of), and now this completely valid concern about terrorists morphing into an indictment of people fleeing that very same terrorism because they cannot stand living within it anymore.

Nicholas Krisfoff agrees:  "If Republican governors are concerned about security risks, maybe they should vet who can buy guns. People on terrorism watch lists are legally allowed to buy guns in the United States, and more than 2,000 have done so since 2004. The National Rifle Association has opposed legislation to rectify this."

I wish the GOP would listen to themselves once in a while and look to correct the many inconsistencies within what they say.

Book Review: World Order by Henry Kissinger

There can be no question that Henry Kissinger has a mind that is able to synthesize and explain coherently truisms that exist in the complex world of societal development through the centuries; and then extrapolate what is the best path for a nation to take today in its need to deal diplomatically with other countries.

The unfortunate truth that is understated in the book is that sometimes there are no good choices, there are only less bad choices, and sometimes a national leadership will make a poor choice with dire consequences for their citizens (i.e. Napoleon, Hitler, Mao) and people in nearby countries.

But what Kissinger presents better here than in any other book I have read is a comprehensive review of how nations have interacted with each other diplomatically since nation states were formed.  Kissinger believes that the 1st real event is the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 "because the elements set in place  were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping.  The state, not the empire, dynasty, or regions orientation, was affirmed as the building block of European order."

The book reviews the dynamics that alternately produced peace and war on the Europe continent for the next 300 years.  The one constant that was necessary for a lasting peace was diplomacy and an understanding of the need for balance so each countries' needs are met, when those needs are reasonable and universal.  Kissinger then analyzes the E.U.'s current position which has followed the global economy into an economic union that transcends the political construction and outlines the challenges that creates for the E.U.'s contribution to World Order.

Kissinger then moves onto the Middle East and illustrates how "Every form of domestic and international order has existed, and been rejected, at one time or the other and there is no settled concept of international order in the region."  As a result, the region will remain pulled alternately toward joining the world community and struggling against it."

Islam throughout history has use conquest as the means for expanding its dominance as a religion.  The only comparable conquest were the Huns, but they had no religion to leave behind as an influence.  Further complicating the Middle East was the Westphalian based establishment of colonization which combined Sunni Shia peoples and put European or Turkish military force on top of their disagreements, and then spun out independent countries when the military force was withdrawn.  These countries then became subject to the Cold War alignment between Russia and the U.S. and the complicated issues that have arisen since Russia's Communist leadership disbanded.

The issues present today for both Saudi and Iranian leadership are very complex.  Kissinger outlines them without presenting a solution.  Suffice it to say both countries have serious domestic issues which affect their international diplomacy both regionally and globally.  Kissinger important contribution to non-Middle Eastern policies is to remember "the American attitude toward Iran and Saudi Arabia cannot be simply a balance-of-power calculation or a democratization issue; it must be shaped in the context of what is above all a religious struggle, already lasting a millennium, between the two wings of Islam....There is a delicate latticework of relationships underpinning Saudi Arabia at its heart....and to Saudi Arabia, the conflict with Iran is existential, involving the survival of the monarchy, the legitimacy of the State and the future of Islam."

Needless to say in a book about World Order, Kissinger highlights the danger of states not being governed in their entirety and how technology and modern weapons make such lack of governance more dangerous to the rest of the World because criminal militarily inclined people take advantage of such a void to build a base to take their ambitions elsewhere.

I think, he says it in a fairly oblique manner, that Kissinger's answer for the state of Syria is to support Assad as the opposition to him has tilted in such an extreme direction, and then use diplomacy to bring Assad back from his association with Iran and Hezbollah.  The book predates the migration of 25% of Syria's population, so I don't know how that would effect his views.

The important thing to remember about the Middle East and our failure to construct a balanced Sunni/Shia/Kurdish political situation in Iraq, is that "Achieving an American style democracy through military occupation in a part of the world where they had no historical roots and to expect fundamental change in a politically relevant period of time - the standard set by many supporters and critics of the Iraq effort alike - proved beyond what the American public would support and what Iraqi society could accommodate."

Kissinger goes to review the history of Asia with its basis in alternately Confucianism and a"Sinocentric" tribute system.  This "organization of Asia is thus an inherent challenge for world order.  Major countries' perception and pursuit of their national interests, rather than the balance of power as a system, have shaped the mechanisms that have developed."  The important take away is not all the world sees the nature of the world in an identical manner and Asian culture has been developing longer that Western culture.

Kissinger than reviews how the United States has played a decisive role in shaping contemporary world order while at the same time professing great ambivalence about doing so.  We alternately attempt to spread our values in the believe that all other peoples aspire to replicate them vs recognizing that not every culture wants to replicate them.

The book has much interesting discussion of the influence of Woodrow Wilson on the U.S. framework for world order because he promoted the tradition of American exceptionalism which both the Republican and Democrats have adapted as their basic framework for foreign policy.
There is an extensive review of 20th Century history and U.S. foreign policy successes, failures and outcomes in-between.  

The book concludes with an amazing review of the issues for world order that technology presents.  Technology works in many different directions simultaneously.  And while technology has improved many things, it also opens the door to vigorous challenges to world order.  If the book was just this chapter, it would be well worth reading.

All societies face the need to find a balance between (i) achieving foreign policy goals that protect their society,  (ii) setting objectives that we will work towards , even if not  supported by a multilateral effort, (iii) setting objectives we will work towards only if supported by a multilateral effort and (iv) determining what we will not engage in even if urged to do so by a multilateral effort.  Societies need to define their values and how they will apply them internationally.

"For the United States, the quest of world order functions on two levels: the celebration of universal principles needs to be paired with a recognition of the reality of other regions' histories and cultures."

"America - as the modern world's decisive articulation of the human quest for freedom, and an indispensable geopolitical force for the vindication of humane values - must maintain its sense of direction."

Military Force and Religion are the Only Long Term Solutions

for Islamic Terrorism.  The key political issue is whose military force and in what form, and how do we convince Saudi Arabia and Iran and Turkey and Egypt and Pakistan to use Religion to defeat Jihadism.

As usual, David Brooks says it better than me, Link


And Michael Gerson dives into the discussion with similar thoughts.

Link to Gerson Column

A Thoughtful Piece that reinforces my view on Islamic Terrorism Responses

which is we need Iran, Saudi Arabia & Turkey to stop the Sunni Shia War and the funding of Terrorist Groups.

Link to Column by Counter Terrorist Expert

And Mitt Romney Agrees with me too.

Link to Mitt Romney Column

And just why did Mitt write this so quickly, is he thinking about running for President again?  All I know is after reading about how Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee willingly spoke at a conference promoted by and featuring a radical pastor who wants to exterminate gay people if they don't convert to Evangelical Christianity, Mitt would be a welcome alternative to them, Trump and Carson.

Terrorism

This is a complex topic with no easy answer.  I suppose it is good that most populations expect their government to protect them from terrorism even when it is an unrealistic expectation that a government can protect 100% of the people from 100% of the terrorism.  With that expectation, governments must work hard to achieve that and realize that there is a price to be paid for failure, and by working hard to achieve 100% they will achieve a higher percentage than they would have if they were not trying to achieve 100%.

But in a free society, how do you protect the people?  Well, for one thing, you have to access the best in technology to try and uncover communications that will lead you to hidden terrorists, whether they are home grown or externally grown.  I am not bothered that the NSA can access phone numbers I dial or emails I write or read this blog.  This is where I disagree with libertarian types who fear the government's access to this type of stuff.  If you are plotting something, you give up your right to privacy.

And the world has to have effective governments in every place so there is order in every place.  Bad things happen when there is disorder.  But maintaining order cannot be the sole responsibility of the U.S.A.  It is a responsibility of the U.S.A. and every other government.  So when there is an area of land that is ungoverned, every responsible government has an obligation to work diplomatically (and militarily if diplomacy fails) to insure that ungoverned land is governed, because only with governance do you get order.

The unfortunate truth is that anarchists/terrorists have some screw lose in their head that all they want to do is make a statement and murder people in order to make that statement.  And if they are determined and don't make a mistake, there is not one government out there that can protect 100% of its citizens 100% of the time.

Given the turmoil in this world and the anger in the fringe elements of so many societies including the U.S.A., I am pleasantly surprised that there is not more terrorism.

Now what can be done.

Well, domestically, the GOP types that feed on saying Democrats are evil and Democrats who feed on saying the GOP is evil, need to realize that we are all on the same side and just want to live in a free prosperous country.  ObamaCare is not socialism and robbing people of freedom.  It was designed by The Heritage Foundation.  Acknowledging the right of people to practice whatever religion they choose is the core of this nation, as is immigration, and managing issues surrounding that is what we have a Congress and a Judicial system to do.  Disagreement in an orderly civilized nation should not be a reason to commit violent acts or use language that incites violence.

Globally, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Kuwait, the U.A.E., and Egypt need to have a serious discussion about how they are going to clean up the mess they have made reigniting the Sunni/Shia discord that has been 1000 years in the making.  The U.S. cannot do that for them.  ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and Al Shabab cannot exist if some state is not funding them.  And Israel needs to be ready to accept an overture from those Islamic nations that if they curb their funding to Hezbollah and Hamas, if Israel will leave the West Bank and let the Palestinians govern themselves.

And the rest of the world including China, India, Japan, the E.U., Russia and the Americas need to keep the financial pressure on the Islamic Nations to find a solution for this mess.  The only issue these non-Democratic Arab nations understand is the power of the purse.  Their domestic agendas require enormous sums of money flowing from oil.  That is why Saudi Arabia is trying to bury the fracking and tar sand oil business by pushing the price of oil below their breakevens.  But the Developed World now has enough energy that we don't need the oil from the Middle East and now is the time to pressure those governments to cease funding and supporting these Islamic terrorist organizations.

The Developed World needs to unite and get on the same page.  Iran in particular is a master at exploiting division.  That will require diplomacy and not a knee jerk neoconservative let's just have the U.S. fix it.  For the U.S. to fix it, we would have to colonize the entire Islamic Middle East and govern it effectively until the Sunni and Shia's decided to get along.  And before they did that, they would unite to kill Americans soldiers.  The power of the purse is the only path to getting the Islamic Middle East to try and end the Sunni/Shia divide.

I know there is no evidence that my suggested path would work, but there has also not been a sustained real effort to move along such a path.

The 1st & 2nd of Many Reasons to not vote for the GOP: National Defense and Economic Policy

I am reading Henry Kissinger's book World Order and it is a staggering recitation of the base fact that building a Democratic Nation in the Islamic Middle East was doomed to failure, but he likes Bush II and refused to be even remotely critical of his Iraq choices preferring to highlight another base fact that the American electorate is conflicted between idealism and realism and swings between the two.

And that is why I am no longer a neoconservative.  While I believe in a strong national defense, we have to use it wisely and only when their is a clear path to a goal.  We cannot get caught in quagmires and put troops into places from which they cannot extricate themselves.  And we cannot be in a position of forcing them to determine which civilian is a civilian and which civilian is a terrorist or armed combatant.  That will inevitably lead to mistakes, turn the population further against us, and increase the instability and the violence our troops face.

So we while we need to contain Jihadists, we need to do it with the world and we need the Islamic World to be part of the solution.  And today I read that U.S. jets are bombing Syrian oil fields because ISIS is still exporting oil.  To whom?  Assad?  Turkey?  There are no other choices and why are they buying oil from ISIS.

But believe it or not I set out today to write about economic policy, so I will change the heading to 1st and 2nd.

If you deport 2% or 3% of the labor force you will send the economy into a recession.  Just as when you shrink the pool of capital, you create a recession.  This is because economic activity is the creation of capital and labor.  To grow, you need increasing capital, and at a minimum, growing productivity of labor, and if that is not happening, a growing pool of labor.  If you shrink the labor force by deporting 11 mm  people, you will shrink the labor force by at least 5 mm people.  There are 122 mm full time workers and I estimate another 20 mm part-time workers.  So deporting 5 mm workers shrinks the labor force by 3.5%.  And consumption will go down by 3.5% (11 mm/319 mm residents).

So if you shrink the labor force by 3.5% and consumption goes down by 3.5%, and millions of homes are suddenly vacant without rent being paid, you will create a negative economic feedback loop and a recession is guaranteed.

And meanwhile, the GOP conservatives all want to balance the budget and create a hard money anti-infaltionary central bank focus.  But they will cut taxes and government spending to balance the budget.  They ignore another basic economic fact, the way to prevent a recession from becoming a depression is fiscal stimulus and loose monetary policy because if there is no increase in demand, there is no inflation and there is no economic growth.

As far as I can tell, the GOP candidates want to emulate Herbert Hoover's policies and send the economy into a tail spin not seen since 1928.

And if you shrink the labor force, you reduce the income being taxed for Social Security and Medicare exacerbating their funding shortfalls and putting retirees income and well being at risk.  So the GOP are not proposing a set of polices that will enhance retiree entitlements.

So, both National Defense and Economic Policy are reasons to vote against the GOP and for whomever the Democrats nominate no matter what their flaws because this incoherent set of GOP policies must be stopped.

The GOP Presidential Campaign

I don't watch the debates, getting my information from the various newspapers on what happens at them, but I discern a trend.

Bush III, Kasich, and Christie are in danger of being labeled RINO's by the primary voters.  Now they certainly don't govern like even a conservative Democrat would, so they are not Democrats in my view, but they don't seem to have a sufficient home in the GOP to be a contender to be nominated and they are the only candidates left that have actually governed.

That means the GOP wants to nominate someone who has little to none experience in governing, and this after criticizing Obama for only being a Senator and attributing some of his shortfalls to that lack of experience in managing the government.

Anyway, Mark Shields and David Brooks don't seem all that worried if Marco Rubio is nominated, stating that he cares about the details of policy, but I have yet to see that side of him out there on the campaign trail, and I pretty much lump him in there with Cruz, Trump and Carson.

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush (Bush III) put forth his replacement plan for ObamaCare and basically says people with pre-exisitng conditions will be able to find affordable health insurance with competition, whole care payments, and tax credits.  That sounds like a plan that is put forth by someone who has never experienced pre-existing conditions and how the insurance companies run away from people like that if they can.

I am a Blue Dog Democrat

and I don't really have a political party that represents me because the centrist policies are gone.

While I would like to blame the Congressional Politicians, primary voters nominate people and voters  sent people to Washington.  So I have to blame the voters for not respecting balance views in the middle that acknowledge both parties have good points and, in their partisanship, horrible disastrous points.

Excessive income redistribution is just as bad as excessive tax cutting.

Excessive safety nets is just as bad as inadequate safety nets.

Excessive isolation is just as bad as excessive intervention.

I am not looking forward to next years election.  The stakes are too high and the campaigns are not going to be really discussing the issues.

Fred Thompson

Reading and listening to tributes I have come to a realization, running for President requires a level of drive that I know I do not have, and wonder if we should trust anyone with that level of drive.

By all accounts, Fred Thompson, a Tennessee Republican Senator, was a decent human being who believed in good government.  He ran for President in 2008 and fairly rapidly left the race with doubts about his drive to be a candidate.

His obituary cites that race as one where no matter what ever other qualities he had, doubts about that drive caused his failure as a candidate.

C'est la vie Fred, I loved you in Law & Order, respect your work on the Watergate Committee and salute you for being a decent human being.

My 2015 (for 2016) Health Insurance Experience

Well, thanks to the GOP not funding certain aspects of Medical Insurance Competition for the Co-op Insurance companies, I found out this weekend that not only is Health Republic Insurance Company of New York not going to be in business in 2016, they are not going to be in business in December of 2015.

So onto the websites I went looking to see which plans include all my Doctors.  Interestingly, all my specialists are covered by everyone, but my Primary Care Physician is not and even when he is, he is not covered by every plan they offer and I might buy.  And when I went shopping for a new PCP, not every one is accepting new patients.  This is a hassle to say the least.

So what did I end up with.

A plan RedStateVT would love: $431 per month premium with a max-out-of-pocket/deductible of $5,900.  And this is called a Silver Plan.  The only good news is generic drugs have a zero co-pay.

But I don't blame ObamaCare for this.  All of this is better than paying Empire or Aetna $1,600 a month with zero deductible and some level of max out of pocket that I don't recall from before Obamacare.  And I am very glad that 10,000,000 uninsured have health insurance now.   You would have thought the co-op managements would have priced their product to survive on the funding they knew they would get, not what they hoped they would get.  They didn't cover their overhead sufficiently, as far as I can tell.

Ben Carson

My conclusion on Ben Carson is that he is definitely a nice guy and a living demonstration of the power of the family to uplift a young person.  But he is also untrustworthy because on the one hand he can say that his family survived in his youth because of food stamps, yet he advocates a policy that would end them for families like his in the future.

His mother worked two menial jobs while keeping control over her kids.  Yet, she still qualified and needed food stamps to feed them.  Where would Dr. Carson be today if he didn't have that nutrition?  Where would he be if he didn't have a public school with a counselor who took an interest in him and got him some glasses so he could see and be successful in school.

Probably not running for President nor a successful Dr.  And he would not have a platform for some of the other kooky things he says.

Amazing, 2/3's of GOP Legislators vote to Default

They did so by voting no on the 2016 debt ceiling/budget deal.

I cannot add anything to that raw statistic except to say that I hope the 2016 Democratic Presidential campaign uses that fact to show how untrustworthy the GOP are to be in the White House.  The No votes included every GOP Senator running for President except Lindsay Graham.

Sunday Musings 10/25/15: The Fed, Ross Perot, and Islamic Terrorists

There are some tea party types that would like to abolish the Federal Reserve.  I don't understand that.    Without an institution to perform the Lender of Last Resort function, an economy is subject to periodic depressions that wipe out the savings and employment of everyone except those fortunate enough to be in the right place and 20 years before the event when people enter the work force, no one has a clue what the right place will be.

Imagine the state of the world if Ross Perot had not run for President in 1992.  Bush I would likely have won reelection.  Some other Democrat, possibly Al Gore, would have won the 1996 and 2000 elections.  We would not have had Bush II and Cheney with their Iraq obsession, but would have had the obsession with Osama Bin Ladan.  So Sadam Hussein would still be in Baghdad and ISIS would not exist.

We would also have a very different Supreme Court and there would be no Citizens United.  And we can hope that there would have been better regulation of the mortgage market and there would have been no Great Recession and no Tea Party today.

But Ross Perot did run and we have a country seriously divided.  About 20% of the voting population  is adamantly conservative (no matter what inconsistencies exist within that framework) and 20% of the population is adamantly liberal.  And once again, the 60% in the middle are tossed about in the storm created when one of the 20% on the fringe get to dominate with their views.

You would think a Presidential candidate could run on the views of that middle but we see almost every Presidential wanna be catering to the 20% of the fringe in their party.

This is pitiful and does a disservice to the electorate because they are neither lead nor allowed to vote for or against a realistic set of policies.

I am reading Henry Kissinger's book World Order.  It has very complex thoughts and I will have more to say about it when finished.  I am currently in his review of the Islamic World.  The instincts that support terrorism have been part of Arab Islam since Mohammed founded the religion, and the developments that have allowed the rest of the world to develop economically and socially within a peaceful (more or less) manner the last 50 years are a dire threat to people who have those instincts and desires.  But the autocratic regimes that either we or the Arab Spring over threw reveal a population divided into 3 relatively equal groups:  Conservatives who support a radically conservative Islamic State, a secular military, and an educated middle class that wants democracy but can't get the votes to defeat the conservatives.  If this book had been written 20 years ago, perhaps Bush II and Cheney would have had second thoughts about their confidence in nation building.

Nation building in the Arab World can only be done by Muslims as there is an insufficient body of people with democratic instincts within those countries.  And the borders were a colonial convenience.  Redrawing borders would seem inevitable to me if there is to be coherent government in some of these countries.

Life Long Zionists Reach the Same Conclusion I Did

And unlike me, get to write about it in the Washington Post.

Link to column

Chris Christie

When politicians are down in the polls, they do desperate things to try and get attention.

However, other than Donald Trump and Ben Carson, such outlandish statements don't seem to do much good.

But for the record, yesterday, Chris Christie proposed that the U.S. arbitrarily set up a no-fly zone in Syria and promised to shoot down every Russian plane that violates that no-fly zone.  Do you possibly think that there might be consequences from such action?

It is no wonder that people who work for him thought it was a good idea to close down George Washington Bridge access to punish a Democratic Mayor for not supporting him.  Detailed thinking about consequences does not seem to a characteristic of Chris Christie or his staff.

He has now thoroughly convinced me that he is not qualified to be President.  And I thought he was one of the saner candidates of the "deep bench" that the GOP is sorting through to nominate a Presidential candidate.

We are now down to Bush and Kasich as the only sane GOP candidates and they don't get much more support than a dog catcher would.

Dear Israel,

I know you have to defend your population but you have to also think about reality.

When you prevent economic activity you cut off hope.   Without hope, you get either acquiesence or frustration.  A body of frustrated people will act out in desperation and harm those who they perceive as frustrating them.  They will not be peaceful.

This is why it is becoming ever more critical to Israel's survival as a democracy for all people who live within its borders that Israel arbitrarily create a State of Palestine so that the people have a government to focus their frustration on and Israel has a counterparty they can hold accountable for holding the peace.

And the West Bank Settlements have to go because you can't defend citizens who live in a foreign country and breed the frustration that is generating the storm of violence.

The reality is Israel cannot be a democracy and occupy the West Bank; confiscating property on a continuous basis.

How can you let 65 years of successfully dealing with threats and attacks make you so arrogant that you forget there is a reality of people living side by side and that a government cannot protect individual people from attacks by individual neighbors.  There has to be a division between potential combatants and a viable state to hold accountable for the actions of their people.

For better or worse (in many months) Hamas is accountable for Gaza.  Create the conditions so the PLO is accountable for the West Bank.  It is is critical to Israel's future as a democracy and a peaceful place to exist.

Sincerely,

An Individual of Hebrew Heritage

The Repeal of Glass Steagall Did NOT Cause the Financial Crisis (or income inequality)

In fact, it helped to alleviate it.

Let us review what Glass Steagall did.  It forbid deposit taking banks from trading securities in the United States.  But they could trade United States Treasuries, municipal bonds, foreign exchange, and gold.  So U.S. based banks traded other securities in foreign affiliates which were exempt from U.S. law, but not U.S. regulation for safety and soundness.  The investment banks, which were allowed to trade securities in the United States, were also lightly regulated for safety and soundness, but not as rigidly as the deposit taking banks.

So all the repeal of Glass Steagall did was allow U.S. based deposit taking banks to trade all securities in the United States entities.

So what happened in 2008?  Washington Mutual and Countrywide (mortgage banks) failed or were sold on the brink of failure.  Both were deposit taking banks that did not trade securities.  Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, both investment banks, failed causing a financial crisis in which liquidity was withdrawn from all banks.  One of the basic functions of the Federal Reserve, and every other Central Bank, is to be the Lender of Last Resort and provide liquidity to the banking system when there is a liquidity crunch.  That is what the Federal Reserve did in 2008.  But something else happened in the liquidity crunch.  Some institutions that did not have access to the Federal Reserve were having liquidity calls on derivative positions and did not have the cash to make those payments.  Merrill Lynch and AIG come into the picture here, neither a deposit taking bank.  And Goldman Sachs had too much exposure to AIG and would be seriously harmed and possibly fail as a result. Goldman Sachs is not a deposit taking bank.

Let me change subject for a minute.  The economy is made up of Labor and Capital.  Together they equal GDP and are what keep the economy functioning and people employed.  If you shrink either one, you create a recession or a depression (which is a very serious recession).  When any company fails, debt and equity values are written off, they are made worthless.  That loss of value is a reduction in capital and directly results in a loss of GDP as employment is reduced.  

The thing about the the mortgage banks and the non-deposit taking investment banks is their balance sheets totaled into the hundreds of billions of dollars.  You cannot wipe out 5% to 10% of GDP and not cause a more serious recession than you are already in.  To be replenished, capital must come from income and that takes time to rebuild.  In the meantime, employment is reduced directly in the firms that fail and the firms that supplied services to those now unemployed people so that other firms harmed by this failure can rebuild from the remaining profitability.

But the thing to remember about these liquidity starved firms is that their failure was caused by the mark-to-market of their assets and fear.  Yes, they had some bad assets, but they also had equity.  Yet, lenders fled.

And who saw value in buying these institutions at cheap prices, the deposit taking banks who had not failed and had been supported by the lender of last resort.  So JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns for the value of their building, Bank of America overpaid for Merrill Lynch but has still made some money on it.  I don't know why these same banks rescued Washington Mutual and Countrywide, but I suspect the legal liability was underestimated and absent that the economics would have worked.

But the point is, both JPM and BAC were stronger because of the diversity of their revenues and that put them in a position to make timely acquisitions and stabilize the economy.  That is what you want to happen in a liquidity crisis.  You want to cutoff the panic because panic exacerbates the recession.

2008 happened because the mortgage industry was poorly regulated.  Too much credit was extended to people who could not pay it back and when those loans were written down, capital shrank and a recession occurred.  The financial crisis was caused by that, and if that hadn't happened, there wouldn't have been a financial crisis.  The mortgage industry didn't need Universal Banks like JPM, Citibank or BAC to do what they did.  They could have done it with just the mortgage banks and the investment banks.

That is why there must be regulation of all aspects of the lending system.

That is what Dodd Frank accomplishes.  And all reinstating Glass Steagall would do is reduce diversity of Big Bank earnings and their financial strength.

So Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, you were wrong last night to call for a reinstatement of Glass Steagall.  Glass Steagall or something like it will not solve income inequality.

GOP Incoherency

While over 50% of those willing to be polled and representing themselves as GOP Primary voters want a non-politician to run as their Presidential candidate, the blathering radio hosts and bloggers who represent themselves as the conscience of the GOP are having a field day ripping Paul Ryan as not being conservative enough for them.

What does Paul Ryan want?  Well he wants to turn Medicare into Obamacare for Seniors while wiping out Obamacare for everyone younger than 65.  He wants to reform the tax code while maintaining some revenues to pay for defense, the judiciary, and the criminal incarceration system and not much more.  He supports Supreme Court Justices along the lines of Scalia and Thomas.  And he doesn't want to deport 11 million people and turn every person who remembers their immigrant ancestors into an anti-GOP voter.

The incoherence is now so rampant in the House of Representatives, that even David Brooks agrees with me that the Freedom Caucus doesn't respect Democracy.

Link to David Brooks column

The Most Amazing Thing About the Freedom Caucus

They claim they want respect for their minority position, and are willing to shut down the government if they don't get their way.

Yet, they refuse to acknowledge the right of the Congressional Democrats, who are a larger minority legislatively speaking, to have any say.

And they refuse to acknowledge the right of the President to have a say in any policy they care about.

So, the only conclusion you can reach is one that is truly amazing:

The Freedom Caucus does not believe in democracy.

How do we get rid of these people?  They are a plague on society.

Homeland Security Policies and Gun Control

I had to fly to Atlanta and back this weekend.  As usual, I had to remove my shoes, put my small bottles of liquid medicine in a plastic bag, checked my bag because I brought a big tube of toothpaste and not purchased a bottle of water at somewhere cheap because I can't bring it through security.

All because someone somewhere thought of a way to make a bomb that they might have set off on a US airliner and these precautions protect passengers from someone else using the same technology to bring a bomb onto a US Airliner.  So thousands of passengers a day suffer inconvenience for their protection from something that has never happened.  And the GOP and many Republicans support and tolerate this.

Yet, over 30,000 people die every year by gun shots in the U.S.  It varies by year, but on average over 100 policeman, who are armed and trained to protect themselves, are killed by guns every year.  And yet, there can be no political discussion on hot to make the public safer from this real risk we face every single day of the year.

Why can everyone be inconvenienced to protect ourselves from possible Jihadist terrorists, but we can't even discuss some reasonable Second Amendment abiding controls that would limit the use of guns with the goal of reducing the 30,000 deaths a year?

And for the upteenth time, why police don't universally support better gun controls is beyond my comprehension.  More police are killed by guns where there is little gun control (Texas) than where there is more gun control.  And most of the police killed where there is more gun control are killed with straw man purchased guns in little gun control states.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi

I read the book, Guantanamo Diary, by this author a while back.  He is prisoner in Guantanamo and the U.S. Government after 7 years of George W. Bush and 7 years of Barack Obama cannot find anything to charge him with.  He wrote his book and describes what the government thought he did and describes why he didn't do what they thought he did.

Furthermore, a Federal Judge awarded Mohamdou his petition for habeous corpus and the U.S. Government is appealing that for no good reason.  And while they release other prisoners, this Mauritanian who willingly walked into a police station in Mauritania to be questioned and was basically kidnapped by the CIA from there remains a prisoner.

So I appeal to my readers to go to the website in the link below and sign the ACLU petition asking the U.S. Government to end their appeal and release Mohamedou to Mauritania.  They are within 1000 signers of their 50,000 goal to submit the petition.

Link to ACLU petition



There are bad people in Guantanamo and they should be in U.S. prisons so we can close Guantanamo.  But Mohamedou Ould Slahi is not one of those bad people.  He should be at home pursuing whatever life he can after 14 years in Guantanamo.

Donald Trump's Policies are Incoherent

I watched 60 Minutes tonight and saw Mr. Trump explain what he is going to do.  When listening to him, you have to remember that his gungho approach to his ideas is what generated his multiple bankruptcies.

If he did everything he says he wants to, he will drive the budget deficit higher and will not accomplish what he wants to as the Tea Party will crush him in the House of Representatives, and where they do not, the Democrats will not allow it to happen in the Senate.

And he will generate tons of ill will in the International Arena.

More Rational Observations on the State of the GOP and Why No One Should Trust Them to Govern

1st from Eric Cantor, who I never thought of as anything other than very conservative.

"But somewhere along the road, a number of voices on the right began demanding that the Republican Congress not only block Mr. Obama’s agenda but enact a reversal of his policies. They took to the airwaves and the Internet and pronounced that congressional Republicans could undo the president’s agenda — with him still in office, mind you — and enact into law a conservative vision for government, without compromise."

"Strangely, according to these voices, the only reason that was not occurring had nothing to do with the fact that the president was unlikely to repeal his own laws, or that under the Constitution, absent the assent of the president or two-thirds of both houses of Congress, you cannot make law. The problem was a lack of will on the part of congressional Republican leaders."

"Now we see that these same voices have turned to the threat of a government shutdown or a default on the debt as the means by which we can force President Obama to agree to their demands. I wonder what they would have said, if during the last two years of President Bush’s term, the Democratic congressional majority had tried something similar."

"The tragedy here is that these voices have not been honest with our fellow conservatives. They have not been honest about what can be accomplished when your party controls Congress, but not the White House. As a result we missed chances to achieve important policies for the good of the country."

2nd from Frank Bruni.


"Not so with Republicans, who have become the party of brinkmanship, the party of imminent credit defaults, the party of threatened shutdowns, the party that won’t pass a proper transportation bill, the party that is suddenly demonizing the Export-Import Bank, the party of “no,” the party of ire, the party that casts even someone as unquestionably conservative as John Boehner in the role of apostate, simply because he knows the difference between fights that can be won and those that can’t, between standing on principle and shooting yourself in the foot."

I'm No Fan of John Boehner, but

I think it is particular foolish to try and predict, which many pundits are trying to do, whether his resignation from Congress produces anything of satisfaction to any political wing, or participant.  The fact is John Boehner was very conservative as the Speaker of the House.  He didn't give the House Democrats an inch, and he only gave in to the President and the Senate when necessary for the government to actually function.  And I suspect the next Speaker will do the same thing and the Tea Party will still be unhappy.

The fact is that as long as there are more than 41 Democratic Senators and a Democratic President, the House GOP will have little power to dictate the legislative agenda.

And I hope if the GOP insists on continuing to fail to govern, they kill any chance of the GOP winning the White House in the 2016 election.  However, shutting down the government in 2013 didn't have any effect on the 2014 election for the GOP, so at this point, there is absolutely no reason to expect legislative chaos to have any effect on the 2016 election.

For that, we have to hope for continued chaos in the GOP Presidential contenders.

More Evidence As to the Necessity of Regulations

I do admit you can over regulate, so there has to be a balance.

But you cannot do without regulation as I have stated before and Paul Krugman summarizes as follows:

"Item: The C.E.O. of Volkswagen has resigned after revelations that his company committed fraud on an epic scale, installing software on its diesel cars that detected when their emissions were being tested, and produced deceptively low results."

"Item: The former president of a peanut company has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowingly shipping tainted products that later killed nine people and sickened 700."

"Item: Rights to a drug used to treat parasitic infections were acquired by Turing Pharmaceuticals, which specializes not in developing new drugs but in buying existing drugs and jacking up their prices. In this case, the price went from $13.50 a tablet to $750".

"In other words, it has been a good few days for connoisseurs of business predators."

"No doubt I, like anyone who points out ethical lapses on the part of some companies, will be accused of demonizing business. But I’m not claiming that all businesspeople are demons, just that some of them aren’t angels."

A Heartfelt Reason to have no hard and fast time limit on abortions

click on the link below to see the column


link to column

Compassion vs War Mongering

I cannot do this justice in the time I have to frame my thoughts.

This writing was stimulated by a former Kosovo refugee who pointed out that the E.U. migration wave has its base in the desire to survive.

The comments on the Washington Post article were driven by the fear that terrorists could be hiding in the migration wave.  But we have terrorists in our mix who are homegrown, and never migrated anywhere.  How does that fear overwhelm compassion?

These migrants are largely educated, have skills, and are driven by an overwhelming desire for the safety of their family and a desire to have a better life than the one they had wherever they are coming from.  How can we not have compassion for that?

I suspect many of those who lack this compassion, letting fear overwhelm it, are people who in general tend to vote for the GOP.  This lack of caring for the living and our ability to do something for them (how many of these believers say people like this should pick themselves up by the bootstrap and get motivated to earn a living) is similar to the desire to limit abortions.  They don't want to help the children once they are born if there is any need for public support, but they oppose abortion.

But all these migrants want is a chance to pick themselves up by the bootstraps.  Why wouldn't the U.S. support that as a matter of policy?

When we start a war and destabilize something, we do have an obligation to fix it.  We can debate how we do that considering the costs, but we should have some compassion for the people who are victims of that destabilization.


Link to Wash Post column

Hillary Clinton's Accomplishments

Link to Politico Story


I am glad for the recap to counter the GOP slander.  Hillary has accomplishments as a Lawyer Politician, strategist, legislator and Secretary of State.  Which is more than you can say about a lot of the GOP candidates, who "make up a strong bench" according to some GOP pundit.

I still want Joe to run because the email B.S. doesn't play well in key states because it was a poor decision, even if bad publicity is the only bad thing to come out of it.

Run Joe Run

Rather Than Watch the GOP Debate

I decided to watch baseball and ponder whether my latest effort to make a little money by offering Financial Planning to people is a fool's effort.

After reaching no conclusion about that, but looking up why Pedro Alverez isn't playing (it appears the manager is tired of his not playing the field well and striking out too much, which means Pedro should probably be a DH in the American League), I decided to check in on the Washington Post website and see what was what.

Lo & behold the debate is full of insults.  Which leads me to wonder, why did the GOP let Donald Trump on the ballot.  He is a despicable human being and the personification of the dangers arising from the cult of personality.  That is what led Germany to Hitler, and while I don't believe Trump would be a Hitler, I am Caucasian and not Hispanic and my view might be different if I was Hispanic.

But I chose to write this blog because a WashPo writer pointed out that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump believe they must pander to the elderly and state that Social Security does not need any alteration.  To those of us who do believe in Simpson Bowles, another bi-partisan effort sunk by the partisan animosity in D.C., this is far from the truth.

But you would never know it from the support these two clowns get, although it really isn't fair to include Bernie in the Clown category.  He is sometime outrageously wrong, but his issues are real and it is just his solutions are wrong.

Anyway, when the GOP panders to its base, and its leaders refuse to tell the base the truth that some things are just the way they are (as the Democrats say to theirs about gun control, even tho we disagree with it), you end up with the situation the GOP faces today.

The base is so angry that over 50% of support non-politicians.  So what did that pandering and non-leadership get the Congressional GOP?  Nothing.

So, I am Mad and Not GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE.  I will not write another blog until I have something sensible to say.

And for the record, Run Joe Run.

Who Knew Promoting Democracy Would be a Disaster for Millions of People?

I certainly didn't.  I thought getting rid of tyrants was a good idea.

But in the process, because we and other countries insisted on maintaining colonial borders, we created an abyss which gangs, covering up their real intentions by claiming to be jihadists, took over thousands of square miles and created chaos.

Now, just to be clear, this policy of promoting Democracy is an old one practiced by Presidents of both parties.  The Marshall Plan had this as a basis. So did the Vietnam War, our invasion of Panama, our support of Israel, many things the Clinton administration tried to do, the War in Iraq, and of course our support for the Arab Spring.

What we all overlooked, even if we knew it was a problem in the back of our brains, is what Thomas Friedman wrote today, and while I feel the non-Tea Party GOP gets this better than liberal Democrats do, the GOP slavishness toward raising revenues to pay for wars prevents them from having a convincing policy that their way is better than the Democrat's way.

"That is because the three largest forces on the planet — Mother Nature (climate change, biodiversity loss and population growth in developing countries), Moore’s law (the steady doubling in the power of microchips and, more broadly, of technology) and the market (globalization tying the world ever more tightly together) — are all in simultaneous, rapid acceleration."

"This combination is stressing strong countries and blowing up weak ones. And the ones disintegrating first are those that are the most artificial: their borders are mostly straight lines that correspond to no ethnic, tribal or religious realities and their leaders, rather than creating citizens with equal rights, wasted the last 60 years by plundering their national resources. So when their iron fists come off (in Libya and Iraq with our help), there is nothing to hold these unnatural polygons together."

....

"Historically we’ve counted on empires, like the Ottomans, colonial powers, like Britain and France, and autocratic strongmen, such as kings and colonels, to hold artificial states together and provide order in these regions. But we’re now in a post-imperial, post-colonial and, soon, I believe, post-authoritarian world, in which no one will be able to control these disorderly regions with an iron fist while the world of order goes about its business as best it can with occasional reminders of the nasty disarray on its frontiers."

.....

"If we’re honest, we have only two ways to halt this refugee flood, and we don’t want to choose either: build a wall and isolate these regions of disorder, or occupy them with boots on the ground, crush the bad guys and build a new order based on real citizenship, a vast project that would take two generations. We fool ourselves that there is a sustainable, easy third way: just keep taking more refugees or create “no-fly zones” here or there."

"Will the ends, will the means. And right now no one wants to will the means, because all you win is a bill. So the world of disorder keeps spilling over into the world of order. And beware: The market, Mother Nature and Moore’s law are just revving their engines. You haven’t seen this play before, which is why we have some hard new thinking and hard choices ahead."