Monthly Archives: May 2017

Mike Flynn Demurs

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Regarding ex-NSA chief Lt Gen Michael Flynn’s (USA, Ret) refusal to “cooperate with” Congress’ subpoena to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee and to provide subpoenaed documents to it: he says he’ll invoke his 5th Amendment right not to testify against himself.

It’s certainly his right to invoke his right not to testify against himself, and no conclusion regarding his guilt or innocence of any crime can be drawn from that.  Nor should one be.

However, he has no right not to appear before the committee and testify.  The committee should send the capital police to get him and bring him before the committee to testify, even if against his will: his will has no bearing here; the subpoena has not been quashed.  Then, the committee members should put their questions to him, one by each, putting each question onto the record and thereby putting each of his 5th Amendment invocations similarly on the record.  The committee also should ask for those documents, one by each or by category, requiring him to invoke the 5th each time there.

The committee also should obtain and execute a search warrant to get those documents.

No more delays.  No more stalling.

Progressive Education

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The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last Sunday in which it extolled Los Angeles voters for elected a majority to the Los Angeles Unified School District school board that openly favored charter schools and the independence of those charters.  The WSJ also described the hysteria with which the teachers unions and the ousted school board vilified these folks who so favored actually educating the city’s children over being a jobs factory for disinterested teachers and piggy bank for union coffers.

Last month the [now ousted] board voted to support three bills before the state legislature in Sacramento that aim to limit autonomy for charter schools. One would prevent charters from appealing rejections by local school boards to county and state boards. The appeals process is one reason charters in Los Angeles have been able to expand despite school-board resistance.

And

Unions tried to vilify pro-charter candidates Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez by portraying them as tools of Donald Trump, though both were endorsed by President Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the state’s progressive former Senator Barbara Boxer.

The approbation of the one and the opprobrium of the other are well deserved.  However, the paper’s editors exhibited one misapprehension in the last sentence of their piece.

There’s nothing progressive about failing low-income minority kids.

On the contrary, this is completely progressive: it feeds the Progressive-Democratic Party position of nearly 100 years that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

It is through their form of education that the Progressive-Democratic Party seeks to produce Americans who are so deficient.

Not Entirely

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Jay Solomon, commenting in The Wall Street Journal on the recently concluded re-election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president, has missed the mark.

The landslide re-election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani threatens to put the Trump administration on a collision course with Europe over future policy toward Tehran.

No, what it does do is “threaten” to put Europe on a collision course with the Trump administration over future policy regarding Iran.  This is because Europe, more importantly, has missed the mark:

European officials hailed the news of Mr Rouhani’s win as heralding a more moderate path for Iran over the next four years.

And

Many European governments hope he will use his next four years to moderate Tehran’s overseas policies….

Aside from the simple fact that hope is not a policy, not a strategy, nor even a useful tactic, there has been nothing moderate about the Rouhani administration’s push for a nuclear weapons deal that codified Iran’s “right” to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, nor has there been any semblance of moderacy in the Rouhani administration’s open support for butchery in Syria or for terrorism against Israel or for arming and controlling Shiite “militias” in Iraq, whose purpose is to serve as tools for manipulating the Iraqi government.

Hailing Hoping for a change from that to a more moderate path in this administration’s second term is…foolish.

Hindsight

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…and learning from it for better anticipations.

Federal Reserve officials grappling with the legacy of expansive stimulus would find it difficult to return to the central bank’s precrisis role on the sidelines of financial markets, analysts and central-bank watchers say.

Well, NSS.  Frankly, these worthies should have known the outcomes likely from their intervention before they intervened.

Aside from the magnitude of the necessary rollback and its attendant difficulty—the Fed’s balance sheet has expanded four and a half times, from $1 trillion to $4.5 trillion since right before the Panic of 2008—there’s the human engineering aspect of personal political power:

The Fed has become “like an octopus,” said Jeffrey Cleveland, chief economist at Payden & Rygel, a Los Angeles money manager.  “Once you get the power and you are influencing all these markets, do you really want to retreat from all that?”

Well,…

New York Fed President William Dudley told an audience this month the portfolio isn’t likely to return to its precrisis size. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams said this month the portfolio would be “significantly smaller” than it is today, but likely above $2 trillion in assets.

Still twice the original size of the Fed’s balance sheet.  Oops.

Now the rationalization, summarized in the subheadline of the article at the link:

Pulling out of newest central-bank innovations risks market disruptions

A definite possibility, but there’s not much concern for the underlying economy in that remark.  And the economy is what’s important.

We’ll see whether these guys are worth their taxpayer-funded paychecks by how well they learn from hindsight and their mistake.  It doesn’t look promising.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Isn’t Dead

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The remaining 11 nations of the erstwhile TPP have made it clear that they intend to press on with the agreement, US participation or not, but that the US would be welcome back in, and other nations who could “meet the high standards in the TPP agreement” would be welcome, as well.

Todd McClay, New Zealand Trade Minister:

It’s clear that each country is having to consider both economic values and strategic importance of this agreement, but in the end, there is a lot of unity among all of the countries and a great desire to work together to come up with an agreement among 11 that…delivers for all of our economies and the people of our countries….

This is entirely appropriate.  The same principles the led to our initial attempts to form the 12-nation TPP—enhanced mutual economic and political security—apply to the remaining 11 nations.