Headlines

Sanders unveils proposal for massive overhaul of criminal justice system

Americans overwhelmingly support free trade as concern grows about Trump’s economy

Navy to build world’s largest robot warship ...

Violent ANTIFA protests break out in Portland

Islamic State claims bombing at Kabul wedding that kills 63

Kudlow says he doesn’t see a recession on the horizon, defends Trump’s trade war

11 earthquakes in 5 days hit one Kansas county ...

Defiant: Massive turnout at rainy Hong Kong protests

Court rejects Planned Parenthood bid to freeze Trump’s family planning rule

Amazon executives gave campaign contributions to the head of the Congressional antitrust probe two months before July hearing

Cape Cod’ new normal: Sharks everywhere ...

NAACP sues schools over Confederate names

Democrat Euphemisms

Women’s reproductive rights ... Translation: abortions

Voter suppression ... Translation: keeping dead people and illegal aliens from voting

Government investments ... Translation: fire-hose government spending

Sensible gun controls ... Translation: abolishing the 2nd Amendment

Government spending cuts ... Translation: reductions in the rate of spending growth

Compassionate immigration reform ... Translation: open borders

Free trade ... Translation: unfair trade

Trump Russian collusion ... Translation: Hillary lost

Prison reform ... Translation: cut ‘em loose

Working class ... Translation: welfare recipients

One man one vote ... Translation: voter fraud

Freedom of the press ... Translation: libel law avoidance

Sanctuary cities ... Translation: protecting criminal illegal aliens from deportation

White supremacists ... Translation: all Caucasian males

Shovel-ready jobs ... Translation: non-infrastructure spending

Western Naiveté

First Nixon, then all the West opened China to modernity. Their naive notion was that, if China embraced capitalism, it would create a wealthy middle class of hundreds of millions ... which would provide an enormously juicy market for our products and service. This was all under the rubric of "free trade."

Didn't happen. Instead, the U.S. and the rest of the world became customers for Chinese products while being shutout, with tariffs and autocratic restrictions, from freely entering Chinese markets ... or, even worse, being forced to cede trade secrets and technologies to their Chinese "partners."

It was not like this mercantilism was a secret. Ever since Bill Clinton opened the door to the World Trade Organization to China, American presidents and candidates have averted their eyes from this potentially fatal flaw in world trade ... except for Donald Trump ... who is willing to try to fix things while they still might be fixable.

A simple conclusion: capitalism under a democratic government is powerful ... but is quite dangerous when tightly managed by a totalitarian regime.

If Ptesident Trump will succeed in his trade war is any one's guess. But, for me, I give him great credit for trying. And, if he does win, somehow I doubt if China's Xi is going to embark on an apology tour ...

New New World Order

Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency under the banner that championed Nationalism over Globalism. This theme is now spreading around the world .. to the chagrin of the Davos billionaire elites. However, Trump's message carries much more ideology than just the supremacy of nation states over (an unelected) world government. Here are a number of the battles that also define Trump's message ... you decide what side Trump favors:

Open Borders vs. Sovereignty

Global Warming vs.Self-modulating Climate

Capitalism vs. Socialism

Economic growth vs. Stagnation ("New Normal")

Diversity vs. Homogeneity (a tough one)

Populism vs. Authoritarianism

AI vs. Human Cognition  (another toughie)

Freedom vs. Enslavement

Privacy vs. Personal data capture (evolving)

Free trade vs. Fair trade

An Alternative Reality

The Resistance's spittle-flecked silliness stems to derive mostly from a rabid reluctance to live in Trump's alternative reality ... a reality shared by much of the world's voiceless  majority. 

But a reality that stomps on many of the elite's sacrosanct lemmas (global warming, socialism, world government, open borders, diversity, "free" trade, China '25, inclusion, globalism, etc.) ... from which they have drawn much solace and pelf.  

This dissonance among much of the ruling class worldwide is either going to bring us down ... or introduce a new era of enlightenment and realignments ... a new New World Order.  I'm banking on the latter.

Popping Balloons

I have a new theory on why Trump was put on this Earth ... and that was to burst balloons. He is our Balloon Burster-in-Chief. The perfect example is this Steve Bannon affair. Bannon had a high opinion of himself ... as did many others ... including myself. But when, in collaboration with Michael Wolff, he tried to take down Trump and his family, Trump took out his pin and popped the Bannon balloon. He now calls him "Sloppy Steve" and claims Bannon cried when he got fired. Pop!

Does Bannon deserve this humiliation after what he tried to pull? Probably. And to varying degrees so did many of Trump's balloon victims ... Lil' Marco, Low IQ Mika, and certainly Crooked Hillary. Pop! Pop! Pop! (Although, Rubio probably didn't deserve this slight ... he was in Trump's way.)

But the really important balloons that Trump is pricking are things like the global-warming mania, Obama's legacy of appeasement, the Democrat's strategy of packing the voting booths with illegal immigrants, the notion that "free trade" is always fair trade, "diversity" and "inclusion" are automatic winners. "You didn't build that." Pop!  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! And there will be plenty more of these self-serving balloons that are pop-able. Those were the reasons he got elected and, likely, will get him tr-elected if he survives the balloon vendors vendettas.

TPP

Free trade is a tricky issue ... like most government policies, it is cloaked in demagoguery. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has become a political football in the current presidential campaign ... mostly engendering scorn from the right and from the left. Obviously, the tight secrecy under which it was constructed is part of the suspicion it invokes. But a classmate of mine, Mort Kondracke,  has written, along with the Dean of the Tuck School of Business, a thoughtful progressive piece on this proposed Eastern trade pact that is worth a read. Since accessing Wall Street Journal articles is tricky, this op-ed is reproduced in Dartblog ... see: Dartblog Repost.

My only addition to this discussion is as follows -- trade protectionism in the form of the Smoot-Hawley Tarriff act of 1930 has been blamed for causing the world's great economic depression of the 1930s. If this be the case, why have not the current equally onerous trade barriers erected by China, the world's second largest economy, also led to a similar depression?

Success!

When Obummer first took office, Rush Limbaugh issued that famous quote, "I hope he fails." Well, unfortunately, Rush was wrong ... and Obummer, over seven years, has experienced fairly wide-ranging successes with his objectives ... many, I am sure, we will hear about this Tuesday night.

He has pulled our troops out of Iraq. He has orchestrated a surge of troops in Afghanistan, "the good war." He has gotten his health care reform, Obamacare, passed and now implemented. He has opened our borders to many tens of thousands of "dreamers," or young illegal Mexican and Central American immigrants. He has also admitted tens of thousand of legal Muslim immigrants. Through the Muslim Brotherhood, he helped spawn the Arab Spring and all the changes it caused in the Middle East. He overthrew the Kadaffi government in Libya. ዕብያ።With the generous help of the Federal Reserve Bank , he has reduced the national unemployment rate to 5 %. He has drawn attention to possibly illegal police shootings throughout the country.  He has waged a relentless war on domestic "assault weapons." He has negotiated a nuclear limitation agreement with Iran. At the Paris Climate Conference he has focused world attention on global warming. He has gone a long way toward closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. He has championed a new free-trade pact with the Far East. He has gotten his most recent $1.1 trillion omnibus budget passed ... funding most of his residual objectives.

All this while enjoying himself immensely and playing hundreds of rounds of golf all around the United States.

Of course many of these successes have also had a dark side ... but we will leave them for another time.