Tag Archives: politics

Speeding Up

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John Kerry, the guy presently sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair, is in the Middle East, talking about speeding up the talking about what to do about al-Assad and the Daesh.

The goal is to accelerate everything.

Everything helps move everything else. If we can get a cease-fire, if we can get a political process, that greatly facilitates what we can then talk to Russians and others about in terms of coordination to go after Daesh[.]

An aside: why on earth would we want a cease fire with murderous thugs, whether Bashar al-Assad, as Kerry is going on about above, or with the Daesh?

Here’s the meat of the thing, though:

He said efforts to speed up the diplomacy and military action already were under way before coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday, claimed by Islamic State, killed 130 people.

“Are we all talking about things that might be able to augment it, move faster? You better believe it,” Mr Kerry said.

This is nonsense. The way to move things faster is to do the things promptly. We should talk to those we want to join us in the actions to destroy al-Assad and the Daesh and lay out what those actions need to be. We should give those we want to join us a reasonable, brief period of time to understand those actions and determine their capacity to take part—a capacity we already know because, of course, we have alert embassies in those nations.

And then we should act. Those others can join us or not, but it’s…suboptimal…to wait on those others and their dithering. Al-Assad and the Daesh only benefit from delay.

Again: the way to move things faster is to move them faster, and with less intervening talk. Full stop.

Political Commitments

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Presidential candidate Donald Trump, early in his campaign, refused to rule out running as an Independent, saying he didn’t want to give up the leverage.

Then he very publicly signed a pledge not to run as a third party candidate and to support the Republican nominee.

Now he’s renewing his threat.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump suggested Sunday that he would be open to running for president as an independent if he concludes Republicans aren’t treating him “fairly.”

With this demonstration of the value of his word, in what way is Trump distinguishable from the Democrats against whom he purports to be running—as a Republican or as an Independent?

A Thought on Immigration

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Greg Ip has a piece on demographics in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal.

Next year, the world’s advanced economies will reach a critical milestone. For the first time since 1950, their combined working-age population will decline…and by 2050 it will shrink 5%. The ranks of workers will also fall in key emerging markets, such as China and Russia. At the same time the share of these countries’ population over 65 will skyrocket.

There are two competing factors that dominate those statistics: people are living longer, in particular in retirement, and women are bearing fewer children over their lifetimes. As Ip put it,

[C]ompanies are running out of workers, customers, or both. In either case, economic growth suffers.

The solution to this, of course, is immigration. Blocking immigration because—pick a reason—means we won’t have the labor force we need for, among other things, saving our retirement safety net in substantially its current form or privatizing it.

We’ll have to get our immigration kit in order promptly, though, and be prepared actively to compete for them, much as our private enterprises already have to compete for employees.

By 2050, the world’s population will have grown 32%, but the working-age population (15 to 64 years old) will expand just 26%.

The competition will sharpen:

Among advanced countries, the working-age population will shrink 26% in South Korea, 28% in Japan, and 23% in both Germany and Italy….

That competition cannot be based on how many goodies our government can hand out; our existing and unaffordable Progressive/Democrat welfare state is the outcome of that. No, our competitive advantage is, and must be, centered as it always has been, on our individual liberties and the opportunities our freedoms create.

This is a national security matter, too. Absent a growing, vibrant labor force, we won’t have the economic wherewithal to fund a capable military establishment, much less equip it with the technology required to stay globally dominant—or even strong enough to defend us.

Certainly, we need to secure our borders, and we need to do an efficient, prompt job of vetting those we let in. And those we let in do need to either be satisfied with green cards/work permits, or they need to assimilate into American culture as part of their gaining citizenship.

But we must have those immigrants, just as we’ve needed—and gained—them at critical junctures throughout our history.

SEC Dishonesty

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I’ve written before about the SEC’s internal administrative judge stacked deck system.

Judge Brenda Murray explained to [eight] brokers that the commissioners who run the SEC and approve all the civil charges filed by the agency don’t want its judges second-guessing them.

“So for me to say I am wiping it out,” Ms Murray said at the [motion to dismiss] hearing last year, “it looks like I am saying to these presidential appointee commissioners, I am reversing you. And they don’t like that.”

It doesn’t get any more blatant than that.

And yet, there’s this:

In another glimpse inside the SEC’s court, [Judge Cameron] Elliot told the defendants during settlement discussions on a case they should be aware he had never ruled against the agency’s enforcement division, said a person who was there. The judge said the defendants might therefore want to do a deal with the agency rather than fight their case at a hearing before him[.]

No extortion here. Mm, mm.

Whether this is dishonesty or rank cowardice isn’t material here. What is material is that these performances by SEC administrative judges are, by themselves, reason to do away with the SEC’s administrative judge system altogether and refer cases the SEC brings to Federal—or State—courts, where the defendants can get an actual fair trial.

These sham performances also should prompt a Congressional review of all administrative judge systems, Federal government wide, with a requirement that each entity having such a system prove it needs it and that the Federal and State court systems cannot handle the cases.

Moving in the Right Direction

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For 13 years the countries of Southeast Asia have tried building a framework with China to resolve their territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

That plan has been eclipsed in part, officials at high-level talks in Malaysia this weekend acknowledged, in favor of a blunter strategy for dealing with China: strengthening alliances between countries anxious about Beijing’s increasingly assertive behavior.

This also runs counter to the People’s Republic of China’s strongly stated and often repeated preference for dealing with each of the South China Sea nations in strictly bilateral talks—one-on-one talks that the PRC could easily dominate.

Events like Vietnam and the Republic of the Philippines moving outside ASEAN to deal directly with each other and with other interested parties are intended to give those with disputes with the PRC’s sea grab a more powerful position from which to answer the PRC’s aggressions.

These budding arrangements also surround the signing of a new US-ASEAN strategic partnership, an arrangement that is intended to guide interactions between the two over the next five years and to

deepen the relationship as well as priority areas for cooperation not just between the two sides, but also on regional, global and transnational issues.

Whatever that means.

It’s good that the South China Sea nations are beginning to band together in order to better address the PRC’s acquisitiveness. That their moves don’t involve the US, despite President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” is…instructive.