RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am not an economist, but it is clear that the path we are on leads to an unhappy place. It is determined by wishes and hopes, not reality and facts. I write about debt. And I write about interest rates that are set by government, not determined in the marketplace. Price fixing, whether by consortiums, monopolies or government and whether for goods, services, wages or money, is generally not wise. Hidden behind Islamic terrorists, the interminable presidential nominating process, corruption, and the hypocrisy of political correctness looms a debt crisis that has been abetted by artificially low interest rates. Approximately eight trillion dollars has been added to our national debt since the financial crisis and the “great recession” ended almost seven years ago.

To put what has happened in perspective: In 2000, U.S. Federal debt was $5.7 trillion. The Ten-year government bond yielded 6.6 percent. That debt and those rates supported a GDP of $10.3 trillion. At the end of 2015, U.S. Federal debt was $18.2 trillion; the Ten-year yielded 2.1%, while GDP was $17.9 trillion. In other words, while GDP expanded at a compounded annual rate of 3.8%, Federal debt grew at 8%, more than double that of economic growth. Despite debt tripling in those fifteen years, federal interest expenses remained about the same – thanks to a compliant (and not so independent) Federal Reserve. Shortly after his inauguration, President Obama caustically noted: “I found this national debt doubled, wrapped in a big bow, waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.” Mr. Obama has returned the favor with interest, pardoning the pun. Since 2009, GDP growth has slowed further, while Federal debt has persisted, increasing at double the rate of economic growth. The situation is untenable. If deficits are not reduced and interest rates not allowed to rise during recoveries, what happens when the next recession hits?

The problem is not limited to the Federal government. State and local municipalities, with tax receipts down, demands on resources up and interest rates low, have increased debt. Making things worse are structural problems within states: Infrastructure is crumbling. Entitlements are ballooning, with the gap between benefits promised and assets on hand nearing a trillion dollars, according to Pew Research. (The Cato Institute puts the federal government’s unfunded liabilities related to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at $70 trillion.) Corporate debt exceeds $29 trillion, with leverage at a 12-year high. Because of myriad government hindrances, corporate debt has not been used for investment, but for stock-buybacks, dividends and mergers. Consumer debt, at $12.12 trillion, is approaching the levels of 2008, despite mortgage debt being more than a trillion dollars below where it was at that time. Since the federal government took over student loan programs in 2009, student debt has increased from $700 billion to $1.2 trillion, with 43% of debt holders currently in arrears or in default. What will happen to local governments, businesses and individuals when interest rates rise, as is inevitable?

“I know these issues are sensitive, especially coming from an American President. Before 1959, some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption.” (U.S. President Barack Obama, March 22, Havana Cuba.)

“I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.” (U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Oct 24, 1963.)

It’s understandable that two U.S. Presidents should hail the resourcefulness and guile of American businessmen. But liberal Democrats aren’t exactly renown for that sort of thing. And read right, the above statements imply exactly such praise—if somewhat backhandedly. The (seemingly) apologetic statements also imply condescension for those poor, stupid, corrupt Cuban natives who were such easy marks for sharp Yankee robber barons.

You’d never guess this from the media, Hollywood or your professors (or speechwriters for Democratic presidents), but in 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. (and voluntarily returned to Cuba) than Americans in Cuba. Yes, pre-Castro Cubans found the U.S. “a nice place to visit, but they certainly wouldn’t want to live there.” All this despite the friendliness and quaint habits of the natives — and despite the ability to emigrate from Cuba virtually at will and obtain U.S. visas virtually for the asking. During the 1950s and based in Florida, Sheriff Joe Arpaio would have been lonelier than the Maytag repairman.

Obama and Kennedy were describing a nation (pre-Castro Cuba) with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western Hemisphere, the 13th lowest infant-mortality on earth and a huge influx of immigrants. Furthermore, in 1959 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 14 percent the island’s GNP, and. U.S.-owned companies employed only 7 per cent of Cuba’s workforce.

A BOOK THAT BELONGS IN EVERY LIBRARY, EVERY HIGH SCHOOL AND EVERY UNIVERSITY
Published by the London Center for Policy Research http://www.londoncenter.org/

Resurgent militant Islam is an international movement that affects every continent. Too often, it is brushed off as a minority movement with limited impact, active only in the Middle East, or as reaction to the “root causes” and false narrative of Arab/Moslem dislocation in Palestine. The Encyclopedia of Militant Islam is unique in describing with meticulous research and detail the leaders, the funding, the tangled web of alliances, and the deadly goals and agenda of forty four of the most active militant Islamic groups and their deadly global agenda.

Barack Obama has made some of the stranger foreign policy decisions in American history such as going into Libya even after the Iraq debacle and making the nuclear deal with (aka billion-dollar hand-out to) Iran. Now we know why. He simply doesn’t care about our national security. He practically said as much on Fox News Sunday this weekend.

As Obama explained to Chris Wallace regarding the contents of Hillary Clinton’s email currently under FBI investigation, “there’s classified and then there’s classified.” He further opined that all Hillary was guilty of was “carelessness.”

What a bizarre and lawless thing for a president to say while a federal investigation is being undertaken by over a hundred FBI agents. Put simply, the president of the United States is a security risk.

According to The Hill, this reckless approach to national security caught the eye of none other than Edward Snowden.

To advocates for government transparency, the remarks stunk of duplicity by suggesting that federal classification rules are arbitrary and don’t apply to the Democratic presidential front-runner.

“If only I had known,” tweeted Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who fled the country in 2013 before leaking reams of classified documents about global surveillance. Snowden is now facing multiple federal charges for his leaks.

Former FBI official Ron Hosko says in that same report from The Hill, “It leaves you with a sense that he [Obama] is reaching his thumb toward the scale. I think it is, as I said, unnecessary and, from an investigators’ point of view, not at all beneficial.”

So why is Obama putting his thumb on the scales of justice in this way? A retired prosecutor of my acquaintance wrote me that Obama deliberately went on Fox (something, as we know, he rarely does) to speak indirectly to FBI Director James Comey (something the president supposedly cannot do overtly or else he’d be guilty of interfering with an active case). The prosecutor thinks Obama was signaling to Comey, telling him to recommend an indictment for Hillary for negligence only, which is a misdemeanor — something for which she could pay a fine, act contrite, and then get elected president.

In an interview with FOX News aired on Sunday, April 10, President Barack Obama said that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. He added that intervening in Libya nevertheless had been “the right thing to do.”

The second part of Obama’s statement is incomprehensible. The intervention was a debacle. No less than Iraq, Libya would have been better off without the U.S. doing “the right thing.” The country has descended into Hobbesian mayhem. It is today a paradigmatic “failed state” ruled by competing militias. Today’s Libya is a safe haven for thousands of battle-hardened jihadists. According to General David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command, the current number of ISIS fighters in Libya is “around 4 to 6,000,” twice the group’s size estimated last year. The North African redoubt of the Islamic State—strongest by far outside Iraq and Syria—has prompted some of Obama’s advisors to press for a second American military intervention in Libya. The country is the greatest threat to the region’s stability—notably in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, in Nigeria (Boko Haram) and Mali—and it is the main point of departure for hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim migrants flooding into Europe.

Even more alarming is the possibility that the main architect of the Libyan disaster will be the next occupant of the White House. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last January that he thought then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “influence was pivotal in persuading the President to broaden the goal in Libya beyond just saving the people in Benghazi” from the alleged threat presented by Qaddafi’s army, and “essentially focusing more on regime change. The President told me that it was one of the closest decisions he’d ever made, sort of 51-49, and I’m not sure that he would’ve made that decision if Secretary Clinton hadn’t supported it.” Gates later recalled asking, “Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?” Colonel Qaddafi, he said, “was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.”

Since February 2013, Iran has received billions of dollars in sanctions relief as incentives to attend negotiations with the United States and others in Geneva. However, from March 2012, until January 2016, when the U.S. lifted the sanctions, Iranian banks were not connected to the Belgium-based SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system.
“Nobody could pay the Iranians via normal lines, not even in euros,” a European oil trader was quoted saying. Then how did the regime access the payments and the billions of dollars it was given?
Following Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s complaint that Iran’s banks are still under sanctions (due to its sponsorship of international terrorism), the Obama administration decided to circumvent U.S. anti-money laundering laws to help Iran’s economy.
Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has pointed out that the Obama administration’s plan, allowing Iran “access to U.S. dollars through offshore clearinghouses,” undermines U.S. and international anti-money laundering laws.” His Washington Post article last week argued the “U.S. must not aid and abet Iranian money laundering.”
But under the Obama administration, Americans have been witnessing, and many have accustomed to the president’s disregard to laws governing his own country.

I think comparing Trump’s antics and his cooing fans to Nazis or Stalin are wrong. Those mass killers are in a different and more vile league. He is more akin to Latin American tin pot dictators- those who were populists, promised great reforms, challenged the status quo, and corrupt governments, got elected by large margins and went on to ruin their nations’ hopes for change. I think of men like Venezuela’s late and unlamented Hugo Chavez.

In 1998, in a nation with a tanking economy in spite of one of the world’s great oil reserves, and a public distrust of government’s theft and repressions, Chavez began an unlikely quest for the presidency. His populist appeal resonated with a public distrustful of “inside politics” and corruption. By December 5, 1998 he won 56 percent of the votes.

As president he stacked his government with cronies, he abolished term limits, bypassed all existing restraints on presidential powers. He embarked on systematic appropriation of industry, communications, electric, and construction materials such as steel and cement. He nationalized all oil reserves and expropriated farms and woodland. He shut down opposition media and enacted laws making criticism or parody of his government a felony.

He also said outrageous things:

At the UN in March 2007 Chávez compared President Bush to the devil…in his own lofty words: “The devil came here yesterday. Right here … it smells of sulphur still today. It was almost mild compared to his insult on September 2006 when he told the American President : “You are a donkey, Mr. Danger.” On Septembr 12th 2006, he announced that it was very likely that the United States was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Nonetheless, he got a pass from the media and his deluded fans.

In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted eleventh in the list of “Heroes of our time” and in 2006 he was Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year.”

Trump is not a criminal like Chavez, but he is an unprincipled megalomaniac, whose insatiable lust for power will make him a ruinous president with catastrophic and irreversible consequences.

Steve Chapman the writer and columnist for the Chicago Tribune warned in a column “History Repeating as Farce” in 2007:
“A phony revolution may nonetheless be a durable one. If the Venezuelans who go to the polls give Chávez what he wants, they are likely to discover a paradox: They can bring about dictatorship through democracy, but not the reverse.

Now there’s a sobering thought forTrump’s deluded supporters…..rsk

Claremont Review of Books

“No, Iran Isn’t Destabilizing the Middle East.” Paul Pillar’s article in The National Interest a month before the Iran nuclear deal was signed attacked critics of the negotiations. Pillar disputed the “badly mistaken myth” that Tehran is “‘destabilizing’ the Middle East or seeking to ‘dominate’ it or exercise ‘hegemony’ over it, or that it is ‘on the march’ to take over the region.” On the contrary, while we might dislike Iran’s conduct—bolstering the Assad regime in Syria, backing Hezbollah in Lebanon, nourishing Hamas in Gaza, dominating what’s left of Iraq, funding and training the Taliban in Afghanistan, and arming Islamist rebels in Yemen—Iran is simply reacting to its circumstances as any other state would. Iran’s distinctive ideological character and stated goals, in other words, are at best peripheral to understanding and evaluating its conduct.

Pillar spent nearly thirty years as a senior intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, and holds impeccable academic credentials. He can hardly be dismissed as a fringe figure. Indeed, the gist of his view—that we shouldn’t worry about Iran’s distinctive ideological character—informs the Obama administration’s approach to Iran. The Obama team acknowledges Iran’s pervasive violation of rights domestically, its wholesale backing of Islamist terrorism, and its ominous nuclear program. But these actions have little to do with one another, or with any larger strategic threat. Moreover, despite the weekly “death to America” chants (merely “rhetorical excess,” according to John Kerry) and the stated desire to wipe Israel off the map, Iran’s leaders supposedly care chiefly about “regime survival” and the economic aspirations of their citizens—as if a brutal theocracy, deep down, wants what’s best for its people. On the unstated premise that everyone in politics has a price, Obama has even suggested that the nuclear deal could entice Iran to improve its conduct while taking on its “rightful role” in the community of nations.

“Anti-Semitism is a light sleeper” from The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (1986)

O’Brien, known as “the Cruiser” was an Irish politician, diplomat, journalist and author. In 1982, as editor of “The Observer”, responding to the avalanche of anti Israel sentiment, he published a series of columns defending Israel and justifying the Lebanon War. In his columns he argued that the Israelis should never return the “Occupied Territories” to the Arabs because it would lead to Israel’s strategic demise, and he declared that many of Israel’s detractors were anti-Semites. He then decided to write a short book on the history of Israel, to give “‘a somewhat better idea of how Israel came to be what and where it is, and why it cannot be other than what it is’. The “short”book grew and became a 789 page history of Zionism, Jewish destiny, the Palestine Mandate, British betrayals, and a state in permanent siege.

The greatest praise I can give this excellent book is that “The London Review of Books” trashed it. They prefer the ahistorical libels of Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris.

Foreign Minister Zarif dismisses US counterpart’s suggestion of negotiations on ballistic rockets as ‘baseless’; defense minister calls plan ‘nonsense’.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Sunday rebuffed US Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposal Thursday to negotiate a “new arrangement” for Tehran’s ballistic missile program.

Speaking at a joint press conference in Tehran with Estonia’s foreign minister, Zarif said that Iran’s missile and defense programs are nonnegotiable, echoing similar statements by other Iranian officials over the weekend.

Washington has denounced Iran’s ballistic missiles program, including a March 9 test of two ballistic missiles, as a violation of a United Nations ban. Iran maintains they not covered by the UN ban, which is linked to last year’s landmark nuclear agreement.

Kerry said the US and its partners were telling Iran that they were “prepared to work on a new arrangement to find a peaceful solution,” but that Iran first had to “make it clear to everybody that they are prepared to cease these kinds of activities that raise questions about credibility and questions about intentions.”

Zarif retorted Sunday saying Kerry’s comments were “baseless.” He said that if the US were serious about the issue, it should stop selling weapons “which are used for killing innocent Yemenis or used by the Zionist regime against civilians,” the Iranian Students’ News Agency reported.