Politics – Page 6 – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

Cruelty Paired with Environmental Havoc: Border Barriers Harming Wildlife

U.S. border wall – a looming crime against wildlife

Before getting to the matter of barbed wire fences in Europe, let’s address the never=ending saga of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico—which the Trump administration keeps alive despite budget-busting increases in defense spending and, not coincidentally, the cost of beefing up border security with police and ICE agents.

A wall substantial enough to keep out immigrants would also stop the comings-and-goings of animals across the U.S.-Mexico border: more environmental havoc by the Trump administration. Scientists have risen up in opposition, now having accumulated more than 2,500 signatures in support of a paper describing the damage to wildlife that the wall would entail. Read about it at: Wildlife-hostile border wall

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Trump Strong-Arms Ecuador – then Defers to Guess Who?

It’s not just asylum seekers’ children suffering from Trump policy; it’s kids in other hemispheres

Given everything we hear and see from the Trump administration, it’s evident that children’s well-being is low on their list of priorities.

Still, two headline-grabbing episodes have given extra dimensions to Trump anti-child bias.

The first, the separation of children from parents seeking asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border, made still more vile by failing to track which children belonged to which parents, vileness compounded yet again by the prospect of toddlers being ordered to appear in court alone for their own deportation proceedings.

Ugly— yet, there is still the flimsy rationale of “border security” used to justify such inhumane treatment. The border security narrative goes, who knows what Hispanic children, allowed to stay in the U.S., will go on to join an MS-13 gang and hack to death hapless white U.S. citizens on the street? Better to send them back to an early death in El Salvador, ensuring we need never fear them again. So it might be cruel, but at least it is not arbitrary.

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Gambling with Other People’s Money: Trump Trade Wars

How easy to win are trade wars?

~~Vainglorious boaster~~ President Trump, having declared trade war against much of the developed world, assured us that trade wars are easy to win.

?? Maybe, and maybe not. I’m no economist, but I have noticed that the majority of mainstream economists and many business leaders have opined that trade wars are bad for everyone. They are particularly bad when they slow down the global economy as a whole, in an age where the global economy is increasingly THE economy that really matters in the long run.

On the other hand, seasoned economist Irwin Stelzer proposed that Trump’s trade war “really might be easy to win.” Stelzer on trade war

The basis of Stelzer’s conjecture is that the U.S. economy dwarfs that of any one of its economic adversaries (euphemistically called “trading partners”), excepting China, and they need the U.S. market more than the U.S. needs theirs. Secondly, if foreign tariffs really were as relatively disadvantageous to us as Trump claims (and Stelzer seems to agree), greater parity could put those foreigners on the ropes. As Stelzer points out, a German auto industry’s proposal to eliminate tariffs is a sign that some foreign businesses are seeing trouble ahead with the status quo. The status quo is that EU tariffs on U.S. automobiles have been five times that of the America’s on theirs.

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Supreme Court Delivers Big for the Ruling Class

What do you get when you add 5 to 4 to 5 to 4 to 5 to 4?

(a) 27

(b) 5/9 + 5/9 + 5/9 = 15/9 = 1.6666666 . . .

The answer is all of the above, but (c) is the most important, if . . .

You take a look at three Supreme Court decisions made in May and June by the notorious 5 to 4 margin, it all adds up.

Foremost, in Janus v. AFSCME, decided in June, the Court eviscerated public sector unions by gifting nonmembers within a unionized workplace an exemption from paying “fair share” fees. Those are the fees charged to nonmembers who refuse to pay dues while still getting the workplace benefits obtained by the union. That is, a means by which to make free-riding by nonmembers a little less free. Now the Supreme Court says free-riding is A-OK in the disingenuous name of “right to work.”

That’s the short version. For the long version, see this excellent piece in Slate.com: Crushing effect of Janus vs AFSCME decision

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Climate of Fear: Short Term Effectiveness, Long Term Error

[Preface: since I wrote the comments below, Trump has, by executive order, changed the zero-tolerance anti-immigration policy to end—supposedly—the separation of parents from children. Done not on humanitarian grounds, but because of bad optics. But the optics won’t improve much any time soon, since the administration has no answer to the question of how to reunite the families already separated—records of who belongs with whom, and where they are, have evidently not been systematically kept. The prospect exists of some children never being reunited with their parents. There is also no answer as to how they are going to house the thousands of families who are not being separated. Callousness and inattention to human rights have become hallmarks of the Trump government, and now we can add incompetence to that list.]

Fear here, there, and everywhere

Donald Trump has fear working for him on both sides of the Mexican border: he galvanizes his base with fear of immigrant hoodlums, and scares refugees with the prospect of separating children from parents, and sending asylum-seekers back to the horrors from which they fled

The U.S. “will not be a migrant camp,” asserted the President in defense of the zero-tolerance policy that has resulted in more than 2,400 children, many of them toddlers and some infants, being separated from their parents, beginning in April. He added he would not let migrants “infest” America.

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Vladimir Putin Sitting Pretty

The gift that keeps on giving: Trump presidency

Vladimir Putin must be rubbing his hands with glee* over any and all of the events precipitated by, or connected with, the United States, since January 2017.

For starters, his man in the White House continues to keep the U.S. domestic political scene in turmoil, with each day’s opening tweets sowing discord and confusion among lawmakers, media, foreign governments, entertainers, and the public. Trump has done much to thwart the effort by intelligence services and the Department of Justice to investigate and counter Russian influence on our elections, by portraying it as a Deep State plot to undermine his presidency.

For seconds, Trump has refused to implement the strict sanctions on Russia passed by Congress in summer 2017. (Regardless, he continues to claim that “no one has been tougher on Russia than I have.”)

For thirds, Trump continues to dismay foreign allies on four fronts:
(1) pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords;
(2) pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal;
(3) imposing trade sanctions such as tariffs on aluminum and steel imported from Canada, Mexico, and Europe as well as such traditional trade foes as China.
(4) leaving it to other nations to deal with massive refugee crises in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, while the Trump administration strengthens barriers against refugees from anywhere trying to find asylum in the U.S.

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Watch out for the other GAO! Another Weapon of Science Denial

Surprise! More sneaky public relations by Big Fossil.

When you hear “GAO,” don’t you think the Government Accountability Office—the federal watchdog group that is tasked with keeping government officials honest?

I do. Or at least I did, until I read about The Other GAO—the “Government Accountability and Oversight” non-governmental organization. The IRS has given public charity status to this group that is “promising to publish documents about the people and groups behind ongoing court cases against the energy industry and its impact on the global climate.”

Thanks to DeSmog Blog, we hear that part-founder of “GAO,” and Competitive Enterprise Institute lawyer, Chris Horner, announced that the bogus GAO isn’t “going to get into the science debate and other arguments. . . . ” Instead, they are going to lift the veil off those treacherous, subversive environmental groups, lawyers, and climate scientists who are suing the fossil fuel industry.

See: DeSmog Blog exposes the “GAO”

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Expecting Iran to Break Is a Risky Bet: Lessons from the Iran-Iraq War

Can bullying succeed against fanatics?

President Trump has bet that pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Iran will force Iran to come to accept major changes in the deal or go under economically. Furthermore, he has gone beyond invoking crippling sanctions to make an implied threat of military action if Iran continues its outlaw ways in the Middle East. Does Trump think Iran is trembling in fear of a U.S. attack?

I wonder. I just took a backward look at the Iran-Iraq War, that lasted from 1980-1988 and cost Iran more than 150,000 lives.* The minimum age for military service in Iran is 15; estimates put the fraction of fatalities aged 15-19 at one third (50 thousand). Iran also sent even younger children into battle. Although Iraq attacked first, Iran pushed the offensive for most of that time. As a fraction of the 1980 population of Iran (38.67 million), it is about 1 out of every 258 Iranians. A proportional loss inflicted on the U.S. today would cost 1,163,000 lives—more than twice the number of U.S. military killed in WWII (405,400), and close to twice the number killed in our Civil War (618,000). Given such past sacrifices, I expect that Iran is ready to let its people starve rather than yield to the U.S. After all, the North Koreans have been doing so for a long time, and Iran has far greater resources, and more friends, than North Korea.

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Swaggering Swamp Creatures?

AMERICA FIRST. AMERICA FIRST. AMERICA ÜBER ALLES

Nominee for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he intends to “put the swagger back into the State Department.” But just who swaggers? Bullies and braggarts, for two, plus others who want you to believe there’s more to them than meets the eye when usually there’s less. Look up “swagger” in any dictionary and you’re hard put to find anything positive about swaggering. Here’s definition #1 from Webster’s 11th: “To conduct oneself in an arrogant and superciliously pompous manner; esp: to walk with an air of overbearing self-confidence.”

That having a tone-deaf person take over the State Department actually looks like an improvement over the do-nothing leadership of Rex Tillerson, shows us the depths to which we’ve sunk in the Trump administration.

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