Tag Archives: politics

War, Inflation, and Biden’s Energy “Policy”

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President Joe Biden (D), having had his nose rubbed in the criticality of fossil fuels to our economy and those of all nations around the world by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s frequent use of oil and natural gas exports as weapons, now is begging other nations and consortia to produce more oil. And he’s insisting that our own oil and gas producers do more to produce while castigating them for being responsible for the present high and continuing inflation rates us Americans are experiencing.

An anonymous White House spokeswoman:

Mr Biden “wants to do everything possible and sensible to mitigate” the affect of high energy prices on American families.
“He’s been clear in recent remarks that oil and gas companies should help ensure that oil supply meets demand, and at the same time we need to advance clean energy options and decrease our reliance on fossil fuels[.]”

This is disingenuous, though. Biden and his advisors know full well that oil and gas producers cannot just turn on the wells and turn them off at will. It costs time and money to cap the wells in a safe, environmentally protective manner, and it costs time and money to uncap them in a safe, environmentally protective manner. It costs time and money to protect pipelines from the pressure reductions associated with significant production decreases, and it costs time and money to protect pipelines from the pressure increases associated with significant production increases. It costs time and money to reschedule and reallocate rail cars for oil transport.

It especially costs time and money to dig new wells, frack new wells, and lay additional pipelines to handle the increased production. That transport brings me to refineries—these cost time and money to to close and to open in order to handle refining decreases and increases. Natural gas-to-liquid natural gas facilities are even more expensive to close and reopen, and require even more money than simple refineries to build more of, which we need to do since we don’t have enough here, and potential customer nations don’t have enough of at the receiving end.

The time and cost problems don’t end there. It takes time—years—to recoup those costs, which run to billions of dollars per year. And yet, the current Progressive-Democrat political environment is one of zealously anti-fossil fuels regulation, drilling blockages, pipeline blockages.

Oil and gas producers are understandably and justifiably chary of spending that time and money to alter their production schedules. They can’t trust the Progressive-Democrats to let them produce long enough to recoup all those costs.

There’s just no reason to believe Biden and his advisors are serious about oil and gas or of high energy prices or of inflation generally.

Former President Donald Trump Has a Plan

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Former President Donald Trump (R) has a plan for recovering our nation from the ravages of Progressive-Democratic Party control over the last year and more, and that will continue to be inflicted over the next several months to three years. In the main, he’s on the right track; although I disagree with his constant harping on personalities, like his disparagement of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R). McConnell’s tactics, to take the particular case as illustrative, are not Trump’s but without McConnell’s skillful politics, there would be no Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch; we would have Merrick Garland inflicted on us. Without McConnell’s acumen, Trump would not have all those hundreds of conservative—which is to say, textualist—district and appellate court judges confirmed.

On policy, there’s also this Trump shortfall:

[T]he nation’s 45th president said his plan begins with recapturing GOP control of at least one chamber of Congress in November and creating a bulwark to stop the Biden agenda.

This is insufficiently specified. If Republicans succeed in gaining a majority in only one chamber of Congress, it must be the Senate. It’s in the Senate that the safety of the Supreme Court lies.

It’s in the Senate that treaties lie.

It’s in the Senate that Executive Branch nominations get confirmed or denied.

Even though the House of Representatives must originate revenue (i.e., taxing) bills and by tradition spending bills, it’s in the Senate where these live or die. It’s in the Senate (as well as the House) where budgets, allocations, and spending bills generally live or die.

It’s in the Senate that the safety of our republican democracy lies.

Senator Rick Scott Has a Plan

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No, in this article, I’m not referring to his 11 Point Plan to Rescue America; I’m writing about his urging American businesses to divest themselves of their investments and other business connections inside the People’s Republic of China.

Earlier this month, I wrote an open letter to American business leaders with a simple message: it’s time to cut ties with and decouple our supply chains from Communist China to realign US business with American values.

He went on.

We need a strategic economic decoupling from Communist China—that includes ending investment and partnerships with companies controlled by the CCP. This is something I have been calling for over a year. While decoupling must begin now, we know it’s not a process that will be completed overnight. Supply chains must readjust and be removed from the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party.

Scott is absolutely right. The PRC is an enemy nation, and business—any economic—ties with the nation are fraught with danger, not only for the individual business—the intellectual property and technology thefts Scott references—but for our national security—those intellectual property and technology thefts along with defense and diplomacy-related espionage and technology thefts. Every nation carries out such espionage, but that espionage by the PRC is strongly facilitated by the nature of the business ties PRC laws impose on companies doing business in, or with businesses in, the PRC.

What needs to be understood here, though, and I’m not sure even Scott fully understands the matter, is that every business in the PRC is under the thumb of the Communist Party of China. The PRC’s 2017 National Intelligence Law makes them so: every PRC company must answer all of that nation’s intelligence community requests for information regarding the company’s internal affairs, the company’s business dealings with other businesses, and the company’s information gleaned from its customers, whether individual or business. And if the company doesn’t have that information, it’s required to try to get it.

Empty Words

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, through one of his representatives, is claiming to be reducing military activity in the vicinity of Kyiv and Chernihiv because “peace talks” are making progress. Chernihiv is on Russia’s secondary invasion corridor aimed at Kyiv, on the east side of the Dnieper River. Putin’s Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Formin:

Due to the fact that negotiations on the preparation of an agreement on the neutrality and non-nuclear status of Ukraine, as well as on the provision of security guarantees to Ukraine, are moving into practice, taking into account the principles discussed during today’s meeting, by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing on the signing of the above agreement, a decision was made to radically, at times, reduce military activity in the Kiev and Chernihiv direction.

Sure. What Putin, through Formin, is ignoring is the fact that Russian ground activity on those axes has largely stalled, and the Ukrainian military has been achieving some success at pushing the Russians back a ways and regaining control of/liberating from Russian occupation some villages along those axes. It’s also the case that Russia, already having stopped and dug in defensively, may simply be pausing to refit, refresh, and deliver combat loss replacements before renewing its assault.

[P]rovision of security guarantees to Ukraine? On what basis can Putin be trusted with any of this? Recall his invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas and Crimea and his occupation of a significant fraction of the former and all of the latter, in abrogation of his Budapest Memorandum commitment. Recall his continuation of that in the face of his Minsk Accord “commitment” and his pretended negotiation of Minsk II. Recall his claim that the Donbas actually consisted of two newly sovereign nations and are not part of Ukraine.

Nothing Putin says can be trusted. And he is ignoring the terms Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has offered through Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia:

…their key demands included guarantees for Ukraine’s security from the US, the UK, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Poland, and Israel. “This is the system we would like to build the future of Ukraine on[.]”
…
“We want an international mechanism of security guarantees where guarantor countries will act in a similar way to NATO’s article number five[.]”

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak added [as cited by The Wall Street Journal at the link just above] that the arrangement would be subject to a referendum of the Ukrainian people, as well as the approval of the guarantor countries.

Notice that. Zelenskyy wants security guarantees secured by countries not aligned, even tangentially, with Russia. And he will not accept a deal before Russia has left Ukraine.

Zelenskyy has a very good understanding of Putin’s trustworthiness and of the uselessness of anything Putin says.

Despite that recognized untrustworthiness, and in a major concession,

Mr Podolyak said that Ukraine had offered Russia a 15-year period of negotiations on the status of Crimea, which Russia annexed by force in 2014.

This shouldn’t even be a matter of discussion. Crimea is Ukrainian. Full stop.

Micromanaging

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A State government is reaching into the business decisions of private enterprise, presuming to dictate to State-domiciled businesses what their business decisions must be in an otherwise competitive labor market. Here’s Pennsylvania House of Representative Jennifer O’Mara (D, Delaware):

The Healthy Employee and Healthy Workplace Act will help Pennsylvania’s families by requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to their employees. Workers would be able to use paid sick leave to seek treatment for an illness or a family member’s illness, in addition to treatment related to domestic violence or sexual assault.

Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation offers one reason this is a counterproductive, if not outright idiotic, idea.

The real question is how to help the small percentage of workers that don’t have this benefit. The answer is more flexibility, not more regulation. For example, the federal Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employers to give hourly workers the choice of accumulating “comp time” in lieu of overtime pay[.]

The Progressive-Democrat O’Mara and her cohorts don’t care about such trivia. For Progressive-Democrats, it’s not about individual choice—us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with making our own choices.

I offer another, more general objection, to the principle so plainly underlying O’Mara’s proposal. It’s about accruing personal and Party power in government and the ego trip of controlling other people’s lives and businesses.

There’s no need for this bill. That competitive labor market I mentioned will solve the matter. Just like “dental” and then health insurance became, in the competition for labor, a standard benefit and not a perk for the few.

Just like paid vacation became, in the competition for labor, a standard part of the worker’s pay package, and then grew from a few days to a week, to two weeks, and more. With accrual from year to year.

Just like paid sick leave became standard….

Now paid vacation and paid sick leave rapidly are becoming simply paid time off—adding the two original time blocks into a single time block with the same number of days that the two pay components separately had—with the worker no longer having to differentiate between the two because employers, if not Progressive-Democrats, trust their employees’ decisions.