Tag Archives: political economy

All the more Reason

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The People’s Republic of China is continuing to manipulate the price of rare earths and of rare earth production and ore refinement. The nation is exploiting its current overwhelming monopoly of rare earths to hold those prices below the cost of their mining, production, and refinement elsewhere in the world, possibly below their own suite of costs.

That’s a security threat carefully aimed at the US and at Europe, since those rare earths are so critical to military equipment, computing equipment, and a host of other equipment throughout the general economy.

The US, Canada, regions in Europe, and the floor of the South China Sea each have ample supplies of the ores that, when exploited, would eliminate the PRC’s stranglehold on rare earths.

It’s time for the US and Europe, at the least, to suck up and go through the expense of developing our own rare earth resources and wrest that control away from our common enemy nation. It’s long past time to move to take back from the PRC the South China Sea, returning ownership of the islands to the nations with legitimate (if disputed among them) ownership and to return the waters to freely international status with their long-established economic zones which are held by non-PRC nations rimming the Sea. Regaining access to the Sea’s resources on and under the floor is one more critical reason for doing so.

A Campaign Platform

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I’ll be brief. The Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidate and current President Joe Biden, has a legislative and administrative history of

  • open to nonexistent borders, epitomized by his failed effort to codify the entry of 1.4 million or more illegal aliens per year (assessed at weekly intervals) before a President would be authorized to do anything toward closing our border
  • enormous inflation that’s only just abating, although the new price levels remain much higher than extant in the prior administration, with no sign those elevated price levels are abating
  • real wages falling relative to those extant in the prior administration as nominal wage increases, with some excursions to the topside, in the main have been smaller than price increase increases due to inflation
  • denigrating Israel as it fights for its survival against the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah—and against their masters, Iran—while moving to protect Hamas by demanding cease fires that only benefit Hamas
  • encouraging continued butchery in Ukraine by slow-walking and blocking weapons Ukraine needs while coddling the invader barbarian as sanctuary against serious counterattack by Ukraine
  • appeasing Iran in its desperation to get Iran to let this administration back into the failed Iran nuclear weapons development deal
  • appeasing the People’s Republic of China regarding that nation’s seizure and occupation of the South China Sea and its threats against the Republic of China
  • meekly accepting PRC military and spy bases in Cuba, elsewhere in the Caribbean, South American, in even more meek abrogation of our erstwhile long-standing Monroe Doctrine
  • active deprecation of our energy production and energy independence through constant attacks on and blocks of coal, oil, natural gas—even liquid natural gas export—in favor of unreliable wind and solar farms

Those are just the high points; the full list is quite extensive.

This is why Biden and Harris won’t run on policy and how their policies for the next term would benefit Americans. Instead, their campaign platform is personal; it’s focused against a man. They don’t even argue against his policies, past or future—only that the man himself is bad.

This lack of a coherent, reasoned platform is instructive of the capacity of the Progressive-Democratic Party to govern.

Yes, But It’s Not Enough

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Leon Panetta and Mike Gallagher are on the right track in sounding the alarm regarding our nation’s lagging behind our enemies in military strength and in the pace of scientific and weapon technology development.

They closed their op-ed, though, with this:

To prevent cold-war competition from devolving into a hot war, it’s time to innovate as if the free world depended on it. The path forward must be paved with investments in technology and undergirded by infrastructure built for innovative national-security research and education.

Innovate, certainly. Develop an infrastructure conducive to producing the scientists, engineers, and other researchers necessary for innovation, absolutely. That’s not enough, though. Panetta and Gallagher also emphasized that we are unlikely to adopt industrial policy or match our enemies in sheer production volume.

That’s the Critical Item remaining leg of our rebuilding: we have to produce the things we innovate, and we have to produce them in sufficient numbers that they can overcome the numerical superiority of our enemies’ production. That requires rebuilding the manufacturing facilities and building new such facilities that are necessary for us to produce our innovations. We can no longer expect our automobile manufacturers simply to adjust their assembly lines to produce tanks instead of trucks—both of those today are too complex and too different from each other.

The war(s) we fight against Russia and the People’s Republic of China will be fought with the men and equipment in being and on scene. The pace and weapons effectiveness of modern war will not allow much at all in the way of American reinforcements from overseas, and it will not allow any—zero—combat loss replenishments from our factories, whether extant or starting to be built when the first enemy bullet is fired at us.

A Major Defense Contractor…

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…and powerful defense lobbyist…skates?

Boeing, whose pair of 737 MAX software-related crashes and a range of aircraft manufacture/assembly failures have cost or endangered lives, is being allowed to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to defraud the US.

In truth, many of the assembly failures being laid off on Boeing in the rush of negative publicity are maintenance failures by the airline companies that own the aircraft involved. And, the manufacture/assembly failures are not factors (at least officially) in the plea agreement in progress—that’s limited to the MAX software-related crashes.

It’s also the case that the second MAX crash was more pilot error than it was a Boeing failure, though Boeing’s handling of the software failure involved in both MAX failures figured in the pilot screwup.

Those notwithstanding though, the plea—offered by the government, not by Boeing—seems a wrist slap.

[P]rosecutors have asked the company to pay a second $244 million criminal fine and spend $455 million over the next three years to improve its compliance and safety programs. Boeing also must hire an independent monitor for three years to oversee those improvements.

On the other hand,

The deal also does not cover any current or former Boeing officials, only the corporation.

The wrist slap in the present case compares to a 2021 “settlement” between Boeing and the government over the same MAX software question in which Boeing was fined a similar $243.6 million and paid an additional $2.5 billion to settle the case.

This, too:

Pleading guilty creates business challenges for Boeing. Companies with felony convictions can be suspended or barred as defense contractors. Boeing is expected to seek a waiver from that consequence. The company was awarded Defense Department contracts last year valued at $22.8 billion, according to federal data.

Getting the whole case boiled down to a single felony count, combined with the small fine and the pro forma business about compliance and being monitored, make it much easier for Boeing to get the waiver. The magnitude of the just signed defense contracts—who would the government get to replace Boeing on the tasks contracted?—also give Boeing leverage in getting the waiver.

Finland Soft-pedals on Ukraine

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President Alexander Stubb is partially correct, as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal:

China holds the key to ending the war in Ukraine, urging Beijing to use its sway over Moscow while also calling on the US to lower growing tensions with China.

Stubb is correct to the extent that the People’s Republic of China is a key player in Russia’s war of destruction against Ukraine, but it’s not the key player. On the other hand, US-PRC tensions are irrelevant to the barbarian’s war except to the extent PRC President Xi Jinping chooses to use the war to poke a PRC stick in our eye.

Stubb’s soft-pedaling also comes from a basic misunderstanding of the situation vis-à-vis the barbarian’s invasion, which is done with a view to erasing Ukraine as a sovereign entity and absorbing it into the fabric of Russia. Here he is, exposing the depth of that misunderstanding:

President Xi Jinping holds the keys to a peaceful solution to this conflict because he’s in such a position of power. We in the West, not even the United States, cannot do that. All we can do is to provide arms to Ukraine to make sure it doesn’t lose its war.

There can be no peaceful solution with a barbarian that deliberately butchers women and children, bombs hospitals and schools, destroys power distribution nodes with a view to freezing Ukrainians in winter, and rapes women and children in barbarian occupied cities.

It’s utterly immoral to the point of outright evil, too, for the US and Europe to limit themselves to provid[ing] arms to Ukraine to make sure it doesn’t lose its war. That just keeps Ukrainian soldiers dying or being maimed while fighting to not lose. That just keeps Ukrainian women and children exposed to and dying from continued Russian atrocities. That just keeps the dwindling populations in barbarian occupied cities exposed to privation and continued atrocities. Fighting to not lose only increases Ukrainian losses.

It’s necessary that Ukraine win its war for survival outright, and that requires—demands—that the US and Europe stop supplying only enough arms for Ukraine to “not lose.” It requires—demands—that the US and Europe supply Ukraine, promptly and in numbers, with the weapons it needs to win its war for survival.

Another Stubb misunderstanding: Ukraine has been crystalline in its terms for ending the war: the barbarian’s withdrawal from all of occupied Ukraine. The PRC’s true key role is this: stop supplying Russia with arms, ammunition, technology, and money. Buy its oil and natural gas from sources other than Russia. Anything less is a dilution of its role to the point of meaningless virtue signaling. And poking with a stick.