Tag Archives: politics

“Intractable Problem”

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That’s how the news writers at The Wall Street Journal characterized Mexico’s drug and illegal alien trafficking (and sex trafficking, I add) cartel problem. Their lede:

President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on Mexico’s goods unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration risks setting the trade partners on a collision course over an intractable challenge for both countries.

Set aside, for this post, the fact that it isn’t “illegal migration;” it’s illegal alien trafficking. Those folks ceased to be migrants the moment they entered Mexico illegally under Mexican law, and those who skipped Mexico enroute to illegally entering our nation ceased to be migrants at the moment of their illegal entry here.

The news writers added this:

Ahead of the new trade negotiations, Mexico’s greatest weakness has been its historic inability to confront the powerful drug gangs that control about a third of the country. Mexico has had success stopping immigration over the past year, but ending drug smuggling might be an impossible ask, in part because of strong demand in the US.

This is just silly. Mexico’s greatest weakness has not been its historic inability to confront the drug cartels; the greatest weakness is its conscious decision to not confront the drug and trafficking cartels, it’s timidity in taking on the cartels and destroying them.

Then there’s the writers’ victim-blaming sewage: it’s the addict’s fault that he’s addicted. True, no one stuck a gun in any American’s ear and forced him to take the drugs. Too often, too, the addiction results from taking seemingly innocuous drugs that have been laced with the addictor for the explicit purpose of creating the addiction and so the market. But once addicted, the only truly effective way to break the addiction and bring it under that individual’s control is through withdrawal—and that is achieved by cutting off the supply.

That brings me back to the cartels and the Mexican government’s decision to accept them as a fact of Mexican life and of Mexican governance power. It’s straightforward enough, although difficult, to reverse that decision. Cut off the supply by sealing Mexico’s northern border against the cartels and by blocking the importation of drug precursors (vis., from the People’s Republic of China), and by destroying the cartels and their drug labs.

The problem is not intractable; that’s just a chicken’s copout. Hard, certainly, very much so. But hard means possible. All that’s necessary is for the men and women of the Mexican government to have the courage and the integrity to end their collaborationist relationships with the cartels and lead an effective, and necessarily deadly for cartel membership, campaign against them. And to seal their southern border and their ports against “migrants” along with sealing their northern border with us, instead of holding the doors open for the continued flow of drugs and illegal aliens into our nation—doors held open at the behest of those so-favored cartels.

Certainly that’ll be expensive for the Mexican government to do, but it’ll only become even more expensive for Mexican citizens as the government lets the nation continue to sag into a failed, gang-run geographical area. That’s a terrible price for a government to choose to inflict on its people.

The ICC and a Dream Defense Team

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Alan Dershowitz, a defense lawyer of some skill and renown, as well as a Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus, is assembling a dream team of defense lawyers to defend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant against the scurrilous charges of the International Court of Justice and associated ICC international arrest warrants.

The question is what would be the point. That Dershowitz’ team will make a strong—essentially irrefutable—legal case against the ICC is neither here nor there. The ICC has already arrived at its guilty verdict, as demonstrated by its continued use of a well-known Israel hater as the court’s lead prosecutor in this sham case.

This is why the case must be mounted anyway:

It will also be tried in the court of public opinion, both in the US and throughout the world.

However.

Even with resounding acquittal in that public court, the ICC’s guilty verdict will stand as the “official” outcome. This will necessitate physical protections for Netanyahu and Gallant against those arrest warrants, which will remain extant. The only way to get those undone is to disband the ICC, which has irretrievably poisoned itself, with those charges and arrest warrants, as a court of justice.

Why Would We Want To?

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Toyota Motor North America’s COO, Jack Hollis, has a plan for how Trump Can Get EVs Back on Track. The question is why would Trump, or any of us average Americans, want to? Hollis’ subheadline is promising:

Ditch the mandates and subsidies. Let consumer choice drive the market.

Then he goes off the rails.

Our approach provides consumers with many choices: hybrids, plug-in hybrids, fuel-cell electric, and battery-electric vehicles. We believe this is the best way to achieve meaningful emissions reductions while meeting customer needs.

What about the emissions from mining, transporting, smelting, transporting, transforming into relevant parts, transporting, assembling into the final vehicle that occur in the production of lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper—and all that oil that’s used for plastic materials production?

What about the other forms of pollution—from mining to spent battery disposal: all those tailings, the handling of those intrinsically toxic metals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, even copper), the pollution of landfills by all that lithium, cobalt, nickel in those spent batteries?

What about the false claim that atmospheric CO2—plant food—is a pollutant in the first place? That’s never addressed except via the pseudo-science of an erstwhile head of the EPA; this is an underlying assumption that is made only tacitly and conclusorily?

All of these are blithely elided by the pushers of EVs and the punishers of internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.

I haven’t even gotten to the need to expand our electric grid to support the demands a sound EV market would impose. We need to expand, upgrade, and harden our electric grid, along with our electricity production capabilities, for a whole host of reasons beyond just supporting battery-charging.

That brings me back to my opening question: why would we want to put EVs on any sort of track, much less on Hollis’ original one? Ditch the mandates and subsidies, and let consumer choice drive the market, indeed. Add into the free market decision that heretofore omitted information regarding the intrinsically destructive nature of EV production and disposal.

The Left loves to talk about externalities and the need for pricing them into the final product—except when that’s inconvenient to their demands on the rest of us.

DNC Vice Chair is Unhappy

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Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Ken Martin is upset that his Progressive-Democratic Party lost the just concluded (mostly—California is still trying to figure out the votes Party needs in two districts, and an Iowa district is in the same delaying boat) national elections. Martin in an interview with Jake Tapper:

For the first time, the majority of Americans believe that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party represents the interests of the wealthy and the elite.

Tellingly, though, he added this, as summarized by Just the News at the above link:

He told Tapper that the current Democratic Party needs to prioritize “every race in every zip code.”

This is how deeply embedded racism is in Party. Perhaps they should prioritize every voter in every ZIP code instead. The rest of America—us average Americans, us working class and poor Americans—have moved on from this elitist Party’s tacitly racist identity politics of segregation.

Tariffs as Foreign Policy Tools

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President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury, Scott Bessent, understands the nature of properly done tariffs. In a recent speech, he noted, as cited by The Wall Street Journal,

…Bessent argued for increasing tariffs on national-security grounds and for inducing other countries to lower trade barriers with the US. He criticized trade policy with China for enriching Wall Street, weakening domestic industrial might, and failing to lead to Chinese economic overhauls.
Bessent called for tariffs to resemble the Treasury Department’s sanctions program as a tool to promote US interests abroad. He was open to removing tariffs from countries that undertake structural overhauls and voiced support for a fair-trade block for allies with common security interests and reciprocal approaches to tariffs.
“President Trump is right that actual free trade is desirable,” Bessent said in prepared remarks at the time. “It might seem counterintuitive from a free market perspective, but he is also right that in order to actually create a freer and more extensive trading system over the long term, we need a more activist approach internationally.”

Yewbetcha, to coin a phrase. Bessent, and Trump, are among the few who understand that international trade is not only about economics—in fact it has little to do with economics—and is mostly about foreign policy.

Even protectionist tariffs—when not done solely for mercantilist reasons—have their foreign policy uses: that removing tariffs from countries that undertake structural overhauls and voiced support for a fair-trade block for allies bit, for instance.

Bessent has serious weaknesses, though, and I did not support his open, public campaigning for the position. That politicking, his penchant for speaking out of turn, is the sort of behavior that was so counterproductive in Trump’s first term. Hopefully, he’ll curb his tongue once installed (if he’s confirmed).

Still, I look forward to his reopening Trump’s proposal to the G-7, made during his first term, of a no-tariff-at-all free-trade agreement.

“No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be. And no subsidies. I even said, ‘no tariffs’,” the US president said, describing his meetings with fellow Group of Seven leaders as positive “on the need to have fair and reciprocal trade[.]”

That offer was wholly ignored at the time, except by the executives of the German car industry.

We’ll see.