Tag Archives: foreign policy

Warren’s Assault on Hydrocarbons

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) want so ban new leases for oil and gas drilling offshore and on Federal lands, and she wants to ban fracking altogether. This assault on our national energy underpinnings would have far-reaching negative outcomes.

  • domestic natural-gas prices would jump to somewhere between $9 and $15 per million BTUs from last Friday’s $2.32
  • oil would rise to the $80-to-$85 range and could run to $150 during market shocks from last Friday’s $53.78
  • entire oil-field service companies would become obsolete
  • pipeline owners would suffer without replenishment, as existing wells peter out

Think how such price increases for basic transportation and such job losses would hammer “the little guy” that Warren pretends to so want to protect from Evil Big Business.

And some far-reaching positive outcomes: for Canada, Russia, and OPEC.

  • Canadian shale drillers
  • big global operators for which higher energy prices would offset losses on US assets.
  • Russia: our ability to free our friends and allies from dependence on Russian oil and gas
  • Russia and OPEC: the potential for political and economic dominance by these two from their enhanced ability to commit energy blackmail (both of which have demonstrated histories of engaging in such blackmail)—sources of market shocks

Here is a core part of Warren’s foreign policy.

Threat

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Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan is telling us and Europe to sit down and shut up about his invasion of Kurdish Syria, or he’ll loose millions of Syrian refugees on Europe. He especially objects to the way the EU is characterization his invasion:

Hey EU, get your act together. If you try to describe our current operation as an occupation, our task will be simple. We will open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way.

The irony here is simple. If Europe actually respected Union and national borders, this would be a toothless threat.

Of course, the irony will be lost on our Progressive-Democrats.

Courage Under Fire

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Republic of China’s President Tsai Ing-wen, against the background of the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s abuse of Hong Kong citizens through his Hong Kong police, his functional abrogation of the solemnly agreed treaty with Great Britain governing the handover of Hong Kong to the PRC, and his parallel functional reneging on his government’s “one country, two systems” pretense vis-à-vis that city, has spoken against the PRC’s pretense of that toward her nation.

That framework, she noted, has brought Hong Kong to the brink of disorder.

Speaking from the presidential office building in the center of Taipei, Tsai accused China of using that same program to threaten Taiwan’s “regional peace and stability.”

Tsai went on:

We must stand up in defense. Rejection of “one country, two systems” is the biggest consensus among Taiwan’s 23 million people across parties and positions.
Over 70 years, we’ve endured all sorts of severe challenges, and not only do none of these challenges knock us down, they make us stronger and more resolute. One offensive after another, they’ve not made Taiwanese people yield.

This comes in the face of increasing international isolation inflicted on the RoC by the PRC.

Would that some American athletes and athletic associations had the same courage, especially given their far greater relative power and their complete safety from PRC actions.

“Rioting”

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Recall the teenage protestor in the Hong Kong protests earlier this week, the one who was shot in the chest at point blank range by a Hong Kong cop who thought he was being threatened by the boy.

A Hong Kong court charged 18-year-old student, Tsang (Tony) Chi-Kin, with rioting, a charge carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Tsang was among seven people charged with rioting on Thursday.
The secondary school student also faces two additional counts of attacking two police officers, punishable by up to six months in prison.

Riotous bastard dared to interfere with the cop’s bullet.  Nor were the cops in any great hurry to get the boy treatment or to let any protestors help him.  Despite that, he’s in stable condition in a Hong Kong hospital.

This is the kind of despotic tyranny that People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping intends to impose on Hong Kong.  And on the Republic of China later.

A Price for Stability

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Global tax reform is a path to a stable international economic regime??

[T]he potential global tax overhaul would force many companies to pay more to governments, not less. But this may be a small price to pay for a stable international framework.

After all,

Existing global tax rules allow companies to transfer those profits, often to a low-tax jurisdiction.

Never mind that an even smaller price—indeed, a net positive gain in prosperity—would be lowering national taxes to the level of the lowest rates imposed by any nation. This would eliminate tax competition, reduce compliance costs as multinational companies no longer had to maneuver the way they realize their incomes and taxes owed, lead to lower end-user prices by reducing taxes as a multinational’s cost center to be covered by the price of its goods.

But no—the globalists want to raise the tax rates to a common high level. They don’t seem to care about actual global prosperity—just getting more of our money for the sake of the chimera of…stability.

I’m minded of Benjamin Franklin in a slightly different milieu:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.