Tag Archives: Ukraine

Once More Into the Chaos

Your parent’s Republican Party is dead.  The center-right politicians that used to be the leaders of the Republican Party are now called RINOs by the forces that staged a hostile takeover of the party.  And like many hostile takeovers, what is left is simply a brand name that is a shell of what it used to be.  If the Republican Party was a business, consumers would simply gradually realize that its product and services had declined and would eventually switch to competitors.  While the workers and customers of that company would suffer during the death spiral, it would have limited impact on the rest of us.

Unfortunately, a political party is not a company, and the death spiral of a political party can have significant impact on everyone.  And we are seeing that play out  in real time in Washington.

Once again, we are facing the inability of the Republican Party to be able to unite behind a leader.  In a functioning party, the choice of a leader is an internal party decision, and, when the time arrives for the whole House to confirm the majority party’s leader, the members of that party support its chosen leader.  Because the modern Republican Party is not really a political party and is instead a disjointed collection of individual attention seekers vying to be the most outrageous, it is almost impossible to get 218 Republicans on the same page. Continue Reading...

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International Issues

Historically, domestic issues have always mattered more than foreign relations.  But the willful ignorance of the rest of the world leads to a misleading view of domestic issues.  So three topics worthy of a closer look.

First, for the last week the pomp of the United Kingdom has been on display with the ceremonies connected with the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the succession of King Charles III.  We simply do not do pomp in this country that well.  What can’t be denied is that pomp has a role to play.  The formalities of politics emphasize continuity and the orderly rules of succession.  If you have ever watched coverage of a British general election, there is a whole formal ceremony connected with the declaration of the vote in each district.  And, at least for the early results (until they expand from a trickle to a flood), many of the declarations get live coverage.  By contrast, in the U.S., the media “declare” a winner long before the count becomes official, and the official declaration of the vote is simply a vote by a canvassing board covering multiple races and some signatures on the official documents with little or no public fanfare.  This low-key approach has, as we have seen, the consequence of depriving the final result of some of the finality and officialness which would make it harder to challenge.

Second, we are now dealing with a global economy.  National (and state and local) governments can impact things around the margin.  But we lack any recognizes statistics for measuring how well or poorly a particular country is doing.  How many Americans know that the United Kingdom with a Conservative government is looking at double digit inflation while the U.S. is doing about 5% better.  The reality is that so much of what is produced and consumed in this country (even if it stays entirely in the U.S.) is part of a global market.  The oil produced by U.S. wells may be refined in U.S. facilities and then sold at U.S. gas stations, but that is all done by private companies which only do so to the extent that they can make more money in the U.S. than in Mexico or Japan or Germany.  So if prices are going up in Germany, Americans will have to pay more if we want to keep the gas in the U.S.  Likewise, it is hard to have a growing economy if the rest of the world is in a recession and nobody abroad can buy the extra goods that you are producing.  But there is no official number for global inflation (pegged to value in the same currency) or global economic growth.  Thus, it takes a lot more effort than most voters are going to do to find out if the current government is doing as best a job as can be done to weather hard times in the global economy or is doing a lousy job to maximize gains when the global economy is doing well. Continue Reading...

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Running Government Like a Business

Conservatives often put out the mantra that we need to run government like a business.  The problem with that concept is that there are many different business models.   What it takes for a business to be successful depends to a large degree on the products that the business made and the structure of that business.  For the past several years, we have seen what happens when the government is run  like the Trump Organization, and it has not been pretty.

The business model of the Trump Organization had several major features.  First, and most importantly, it is a privately held organization in which Donald Trump is the primary owner.  In short, the Trump Organization was for over forty years the alter ego of Donald Trump.  He had complete control and did not answer to anybody.   Second, in the commercial real estate business, debt is not a bad thing.  It is not unusual for the purchase of a building to be financed with large loans (i.e. mortgages) that are refinanced when they come due (with very little payments made toward the principal and the debt only fully paid off when the building is sold).  Third, and pretty much unique to the Trump Organization, the far-flung nature of the holdings meant that the business rarely worked with other companies — beyond its bankers — on repeat occasions.  This lack of an on-going relationship with local contractors meant that Trump was able to break deals with the companies that he hired to work on his properties without having to worry about the need to make future deals with the same contractors.

Over the past several months, we have seen Trump repeatedly return to his practices from his time as a high risk real estate developer.  He has treated the U.S. government as if he were the sole owner making decisions for his personal benefit rather than the good of the country.  In particular, he has used his power to make the U.S.  government and foreign governments deal with the Trump Organization — rerouting government flights so that U.S. personnel have to stay at Trump properties while staying overseas and he has proposed holding international summits at Trump properties. Continue Reading...

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Putin-Trump 2016

No, I don’t think that Trump is actually running on a ticket with Vladimir Putin.  It’s just that sometimes, you just can’t tell for sure.  Throughout 2015,  the conventional wisdom was that, at some point, as the primaries approached, Republican voters would wake up from their flirtation with Donald Trump and realize that Trump is not a Republican, that he supports almost none of the traditional positions that the Republican Party has taken for the past fifty years.

Nowhere is Trump’s lack of respect for issues and principles clearer than when he stumbles into foreign policy.  The only discernable principle that Trump has demonstrated so far when it comes to foreign policy is some variation on mercantilism — that the only foreign policy interest that the U.S. has is what’s good for U.S. business, primarily what’s good for the Trump Organization.

The past week has seen several examples of this approach.  On NATO, forget the fact that the security guarantees that the U.S. has given eliminates any need for Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, etc., to develop their own nuclear weapons (and all could within months).  What matters is how much everyone is paying, as if the U.S. Army was 21st century mercenaries fighting on behalf of the highest bidder. Continue Reading...

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