The Progressive-Democratic Party is rolling out a new plan of campaign for the 2018 elections. It’s a populist one, but what interests me is this. The Republicans have run, for the last several election cycles, on “take back our country.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), in endorsing her party’s new campaign plan, said
This is one step that Democrats are offering to take back our government[.]
What an instructive, illuminating difference.
Rather, a labor reform bill making its way (too slowly, IMHO) in the House. The bill has some interesting items in it:
What’s not to like?
What’s holding up the bill?
LtGen James Abrahamson, USAF (Ret) and Ambassador Henry Cooper, who were directors on President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, had some thoughts on this in their recent Wall Street Journal Letter to the Editor.
Brilliant Pebbles, the space-based interceptor we advocated, promised a high probability of kill (over 90%) of all of a “limited” strike of up to 200 attacking re-entry vehicles—the number then controlled by a Russian submarine commander. It’s better than anything we have today. It became the SDI era’s first formally approved ballistic-missile defense system, with a validated cost estimate of $10 billion in 1988 dollars (now $20 billion) for concept definition and validation, development, deployment and 20 years operation of that constellation of 1,000 Brilliant Pebbles. This isn’t expensive….
Such a thing is particularly inexpensive compared to the cost of those attacking re-entry vehicles getting through to their military and urban targets.
The best defense is a good offense: we should be orbiting offensive weapons, also. Keep in mind, too, that offensive weapons in orbit need not be nuclear in order to satisfactorily service targets: the energy released by impact after “falling” to earth from orbit compares very favorably with the energy released from nuclear warheads and with none of the radiation or fallout complications.
China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength—the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.
What happens when the People’s Republic of China starts reaching inside other nations to do this?
It’s already paying dividends for the EU in the form of potentially extensive free market reforms as the continent begins to compete with a freed Great Britain for commerce. Here are some doings in the competition for the financial industry currently centered in Great Britain.
France has promised changes to cut labor costs and Italy is changing its tax regime to make it less burdensome for bankers and other professionals. Spain’s markets regulator is trying to make Madrid more international by hiring native English speakers to revise and edit all communication the agency sends out in English.
It’s certainly true that some of these reforms already are in progress, but the Brits’ going out is adding an important impetus.