Monthly Archives: November 2018

Ukraine and Russia, Again

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The Wall Street Journal had an editorial on this earlier, but they’re selling the Ukraine situation short along with several others.

The [Russian] attack violated a 2003 treaty that designated the Azov Sea as shared territory between Russia and Ukraine.

Sadly, this accepts as fait accompli the existing invasion, partition, and occupation of Ukraine by Russia.

The attack, and that invasion, partition, and occupation, also violated, and violate, the Budapest Memorandum, which the Western signers (the US and UK) appear too timid to enforce—even though we’d be confronting a country whose economy is roughly akin to that of the Black P-Stone Nation, and whose morals are those of MS-13.

“We Need to Decide”

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So says President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China.

Speaking in Spain while enroute to the G-20 conference in Argentina, Xi said

I think we are at a crossroads. In economic terms we need to decide if we are going to follow the economic globalization and free market or if we are going to choose unilateralism and protectionism.

“Crossroads” may be a bit much.  Certainly, we’re at cross purposes on international trade matters, but I think “crossroads” overstates the case.  The current budding crisis will fade before it breaks, or we’ll recover after it breaks.  In either case, the situation is not at all irrecoverable.  Irrecoverability was a serious risk in WWII.  Irrecoverability was a serious risk during the global depression of the 1930s due to all the government interventions—interferences—into their domestic economies, which badly slowed those recoveries.  We’re not near that today.

The larger question, though, is the falseness of Xi’s remark about globalization vs unilateralism, free market vs protectionism.

We do need to follow free market tenets along with free trade principles and the degree of globalization that will ensue from those freedoms.  It would be good if the PRC followed those tenets and principles, too.  Instead, Xi’s government engages in theft of proprietary material, theft of intellectual property, extortion of those things as a price of doing business inside the PRC.  It requires government backdoors into the software used by companies doing business inside the PRC.

Xi’s government sets trade barriers including requirements to take on a PRC company as equal or majority partner as a condition of doing business inside the PRC (Xi talks of waiving that requirement in a couple of cases; neither of those waivers actually have occurred), heavily subsidizes domestic businesses, blocks economically useful mergers between international companies headquartered in other nations—other continents—for noneconomic reasons, routinely intervenes in its domestic stock “markets,” manipulating its currency value, and on and on.

Xi’s government tried to abuse its monopoly power in rare earth elements by limiting its exports to other nations below economic, free market demand levels.  Its occupation of the South China Sea and the islands—owned by other nations—is for the purpose of controlling the resources on/below the sea bed and the food supplies in the waters.

Xi’s government exports substandard—even dangerous—products like poisoned pet food, plywood sheets laced with formaldehyde, baby formula spiked with melamine powder.  The list goes on.

It would be good if the PRC did join the consensus for free and open trade.  To do that, though, the PRC would have to move away from its current business model, a model of theft and coercion rather than a model of honest markets and freely done international trade.

A Thought on Elitists and Common Sense

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Not mine; Thomas Sowell’s, from his The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy:

The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?

 

h/t Seawriter at Ricochet

Justice and Law

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An Indian, a Creek, stands accused of murdering a fellow tribesman.  He was arrested on the Creek’s Oklahoma reservation, and with that, he’s demanding that he be tried in Federal court rather than in an Oklahoma State court.  The matter of which court should have jurisdiction, which centers on the existence or absence of the Creek Nation reservation in Oklahoma, now is before the US Supreme Court.

The government’s lawyer, US Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler, declaimed

This would be a dramatic change from the way everyone has understood it for the past 100 years[.]

He continued:

[A]ny crime involving an Indian as a victim or a perpetrator would be subject to federal jurisdiction, not state jurisdiction, and there are not the FBI resources, the US attorney resources, the other resources.

With that he argued—with a straight face—that the government’s convenience is legitimate reason for denying justice.  On the contrary: if government agencies lack the resources to do their jobs, it’s Congress’ responsibility to get them the resources, not an individual’s responsibility to surrender his right to justice.

It gets worse, from no less a light than Justice Brett Kavanaugh, especially in light of the fact that Congress has not—ever—abolished the Creek reservation, even as it has, step by step, removed critical aspects of Creek Nation sovereignty on that reservation:

Stability is a critical value in judicial decision-making, and we would be departing from that and creating a great deal of turmoil [if we rule the Creek reservation continues to exist]. Why shouldn’t the historical practice, the contemporaneous understanding, the 100 years, all the practical implications say leave well enough alone here?

That’s a breathtakingly Brandeis-ian view of justice from an avowed textualist.  It’s better, opined Brandeis—and now Kavanaugh—that the law be settled than that it be settled right.  Wow.

Here’s the depth of the injustice that’s being argued should be maintained:

In treaties dating from the 1830s, the US pledged to “secure a country and permanent home to the whole Creek nation of Indians,” yet in following decades it took official and practical steps that stripped them of both power and property.

And, with no hint of irony whatsoever,

[G]overnment lawyers sought to persuade the court that the US decided to betray its promises completely, rather than only in large part. Since Congress never expressly voted to abolish the reservation, attorney Lisa Blatt, representing Oklahoma, pointed to a series of steps that she said effectively did the same thing—abolishing tribal courts, canceling tribal taxes, making tribal law unenforceable, compelling the tribe to sell its property.

And the governments’ lawyers argued further that correcting this long-standing injustice would present chaos to the State and to the Federal governments: that lack of resources mentioned at the outset and, given the size of the Creek reservation compared to the size of Oklahoma, to the manner in which the State would have to enforce its laws.

But this is a cynical distortion of the matter.  The chaos already exists in the loss of access to justice for all those decades of years. Certainly, there would be some disruption were the governments involved required to correct their ancient error, but on the other side of that disruption would be the greater stability of true adherence to the law, a stability that would replace the instability of an arbitrary breakage of it.

That an injustice has existed for 100 years means only that it is a 100-year-old injustice; its hoary age in no way legitimizes the matter.

Another Betrayal

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Recall Russia’s latest provocation (which amounts to an act of war), consisting of ships of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet ramming a Ukrainian tugboat and firing on and seizing the Ukrainian three-ship flotilla of which that tug was a part along with the “detention” of the crews of the three ships.

Germany—Chancellor Angela Merkel—has magnanimously offered to mediate the matter.

The German chancellor phoned [Russian President] Vladimir Putin on Monday evening to emphasize the “necessity for de-escalation and dialog,” government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement. For his part, the Russian president condemned Ukraine’s “provocative behavior” and said he hoped Berlin could “influence” Ukraine into refraining from such actions in the future.
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The tentative solution hashed out by Merkel and Putin, Seibert reported, was “an analysis of the incident with the participation of Russian and Ukrainian border-security experts.”

The “provocative behavior” was the flotilla’s sailing past Ukraine’s Russian-partitioned and -occupied Crimea oblast on its way from Odesa to Mariupol—or its intent to do so at the time it was attacked and captured.  Russia claims that the flotilla violated Russian territorial waters during the sailing and that the “provocation” was compounded by the presence of Ukrainian intelligence officers aboard the flotilla.

Merkel has meekly cynically accepted that premise, even though she knows it to be false.  It isn’t possible for Ukrainian shipping—military or civilian—to violate Ukraine’s territorial waters.  The only Russian waters in the Black Sea are well east of the Kerch Strait, roughly between Anapa and Sochi; that would be a ludicrous route for this flotilla to have taken.

This amounts to another German betrayal of Ukraine, following as it does Germany’s walk-away from the Budapest Memorandum (which Germany, a non-nuclear nation, avoided signing in the first place), wherein Russia (among others) guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and national independence if it gave up its nuclear arsenal (which it did), in favor of the Minsk II “accord,” wherein France and Germany (remember this EU axis?) urged Russia and Ukraine to play nice, accepting the fact of Russian occupation, along with pro-Russia rebels, of two of Ukraine’s eastern oblasts and that Russian seizure of Crimea.

Some friend.

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has got to be having second thoughts about the benefits of joining the European Union or NATO.  He plainly can’t count on either later with the EU axis (and key NATO members) selling his country out now.  Ukraine would be better off in free-trade zone consisting of eastern European nations, the UK, and the US, and membership in a similarly constituted mutual defense arrangement.  It’s never too late to negotiate such arrangements.