Killing schoolchildren is wrong. Let's start with that for today's comment on this war. (This is the first of a set of four comments on the US and Israeli war with Iran this week, looking at it from four different points of view: economic, political, constitutional and, today ... human. ) As the war began, children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School were already in the two story building dedicated to their education, a building in the town of Minab, one with walls painted with pink flowers. A missile slammed into that building midmorning, leaving rubble and dead bodies. Survivors of the first strike gathered in a hall, and there became victims of a second strike. In all there were apparently 175 people killed, 108 of them children. The first response of the President of the United States was, "In my opinion and based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. They're very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions." The secon...
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On the final day in March, Marine Le Pen, a Trump-style French politician and a Member of the European Parliament, was convicted along with eight other MEPs of misappropriating more than €4 million of the funds of the EP for the coffers of Le Pen's political party, known as the National Front. With luck, she has now been consigned to the dustbin of history. Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison and a five-year ban on running for political office. So unless she can reverse that she will not be in the running for France's next President in 2027. Wow. A country where you can NOT be President after being convicted of a felony. What a concept! I guess we cannot import that idea because ... the new US tariffs. Importing any damned thing is getting expensive!
In the long historical arc of the Soviet Union, from creation in 1917 to death in 1991, what was the peak? The high point of that arc? I'd like to suggest: 1959. At this time, the Soviet Union was literally leading the human race into outer space, sending out its satellites and in time human beings and daring the other World Power to catch up. Also at that time, it acquired a new ally island-nation just 90 miles away from the United States -- indeed, 90 miles away from the metropolis of Miami. Further, to all appearances there was a great communistic concord between the Soviet Union of this moment and the Peoples' Republic of China. If, in 1959, you were one of the privileged elite in either Moscow or Peking/Beijing, you would have known that this concord was less than perfect, but you would surely have gone along with that facade. The break did not become an open one until years later. Soviet control over the eastern half of Europe was unquestioned -- indeed, it had confir...
Our Masters don't want us to be able to buy and sell to each other without everything showing up in official centralized ledgers. They don't like ca sh. They don't like cryptocurrencies either, but they have learned from them. The new step in the War on Cash is the central bank digital currency (CBDC). This simulates a cryptocurrency, but of course the decentralized feature that has long been part of its appeal is gone. As James Rickards wrote recently on Zero Hedge , "[A] CBDC is not a new currency. It's just a new payment channel. A digital dollar is still a dollar. A digital euro is still a euro. It’s just that the currency never exists in physical form. It is always digital, and ownership is recorded on a ledger maintained by the central bank." You might well say: so what? a lot of dollar transactions are already digital in one way or another. I use a plastic card to change the digits in various databases. By swiping the card, an account that indicates...
The Supreme Court of the United States has vacated a stay by the 5th Circuit in the NETCHOICE case. This is important, but understanding its importance requires some explanation. So bear with me. Netchoice is a trade association that represents major social media platforms. It filed an action against a law that prohibits social media platforms from censoring their users. Suppose Hans tweets out, "There was no Holocaust -- Hitler was a great leader and the world needs more like him." The law means Twitter can not take that down. At some point in the life of this blog I have probably mentioned the shopping-mall cases of the early 1970s. The gist of them is that the Supreme Court does not recognize private corporations, even when they operate public spaces, as state actors. Hans has no right to hand out Nazi leaflets in the food court of a mall. Indeed, the mall's corporate owners (corporations are people) have their own free speech rights which entail the right to...
President Biden's pick to be the new administrator of the US Agency for International Development (AID) has received Senate confirmation, by a 68 - 26 vote. I'm assuming this means 6 (Republicans) did not vote so she received the votes of all Democrats plus 18 Republicans, with 6 Republicans NV and the others No. I can assume that without looking it up because this is my blog, dammit. At any rate, if she did receive a supportive vote of 18 Republicans, roughly 1/3d of the caucus, that is a remarkable show of bipartisan support as such things go in 2021. One neat fact about the now confirmed nominee, Samantha Power: she was a reporter for US News and World Report before she was either an academic or a civil servant. She was a war correspondent covering the Yugoslavian helter-skelter in the years '93 to '96. I went to the US AID website, in search of a simple explanation for what the AID does, and accordingly for what Power will now be responsible. I ca...
On January 13, 2020, the US Treasury Department de-listed the People's Republic of China as a currency manipulator. It is worth our while pausing a bit over this. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/u-s-treasury-removes-designation-of-china-as-currency-manipulator-idUSKBN1ZC2FV There are three obvious questions that come to mind: 1) why does the Treasury maintain a list of currency manipulators? 2) why was the PRC on the list? 3) why is the PRC now off the list? The most consequential currency manipulation on the planet of course is that of the United States, arranged jointly by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. The US dollar continues to serve, through a sort of institutional inertia, as the world's currency OF currencies. And plainly its value IS manipulated for a range of political purposes. But just as plainly the US doesn't want other countries challenging it for the title of master manipulator. And China, which aspired to have its yua...
The staff of the Federal Reserve recently concluded that President Trump's war on trade has not produced or created US jobs. Quite the contrary. Gee, you could've knocked me over with a feather when I saw this. Who predicted such a thing? Anyway, for the curious, here's a URL for the report: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2019086pap.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2C4oBHUEDstQXGV7kTkwvTftRoJ19ObYsmsU9vH6gS4sinFcxTIijs80g One quote, and I am done for this post: "We find that tariff increases enacted in 2018 are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices. In terms of manufacturing employment, rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs each contribute to the negative relationship, and the contribution from these channels more than offsets a small positive effect from import protection. For producer prices, the relative increases associated with tariffs are due solely to the rising input cost channe...
By any sane understanding of recent events, the US is now at war with Iraq. Of course, it is an unconstitutional war. All of them since 1945 have been. Big deal. What is odd is the way the commander-in-chief has been talking about this one. It is a manner of talking that stands out for its incoherence and malice (yes, those are mutually consistent facts) EVEN given the recent US history of acts of war initiated by unilateral C-in-C commands -- an altogether unlovely history, surely. One statement stands out. When Iran threatened retaliation, POTUS replied that Iran "has never won a war, but never lost a negotiation." Huh? I guess this means that since HE is the artist of the deal, they have finally met their match, because he can beat them at their one strong point. It is historical nonsense. Iran (fka Persia) has been winning wars at least since its conquest of Lydia in 546 BC. Yes, it was halted by the Athenians and Spartans working together a few years later, but...
Here’s a key point about trade. A bilateral trade deficit is NEVER by itself a policy issue. Consider a microeconomic parallel. I have a severe bilateral trade deficit with my barber. I’m a content provider for websites and my barber doesn’t even HAVE a website. He has no need for my services at all. But I regularly need my hair cut. So the trade between us is one way. I pay him cash, he provides a service to me. Is this alarming? No. Why not? First, because I do need the hair cuts and my barber does a good job of providing them. Second, because the price he charges is fair. If it weren’t fair, there would be other barbers in the world to whom I could turn. Third, because trying to cut my own hair would be an unproductive waste of my time — time better spent preparing content for websites. Likewise, there is nothing alarming if the US sells little to the People's Republic of China, and China sells a lot of stuff to us. In that case, China is the barber. Now, if I ...
What was the best novel, written by a US based author in English in the years 1980 to 2000, the final fifth of the 20th century? Someone asked me that question recently on an online forum and I came up with three quite offhand, but I'm open to suggestions: My off-the-cuff three: Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) . Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (1992). Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (1998).
There is no real reason for the policy makers of a nation to worry about bilateral trade deficits. After all, I have a gross trade deficit with my barber. I buy haircuts from him regularly and he never buys anything from me. I sell internet content. My barber has little reason to buy internet content. His website (if he even has one) would be a quite modest affair with no need for the product of my blood and sweat. Yet this deficit is sustainable -- there is no need for me to shed tears over it. What might be of concern is a global trade deficit. When what I sell to the world as a whole is of less value than what I buy from it, I am in an unsustainable position. The point, still, is that bilateral thinking doesn't help us address that situation. Just as some people make the mistake of worrying about bilateral trade deficits, others make the mistake that believing that such a deficit is a source of strength, of leverage. "I pay my barber a lot of money if we annual...
I was dining in a restaurant recently that seemed to have a mid-century ambience. Abstract expressionism on the walls, reminding me of the pre-Warhol New York art scene, and '50s jazz coming from the speakers. So through the forward chugging of my train of associations I ended up asking myself: who were the most prominent philosophers of the period? For purposes of precision let's define the period at issue by pop-culture landmarks that themselves seem self-evident: Catcher in the Rye (1951) and the Beatles's first hit single, "Love me do" (1962). The first names that occurred to me, while still eating that fine dinner, were: Skinner, Marcuse, Toynbee. But wasn't Skinner a psychologist? Well, I'm a Jamesian, so the distinction between psychology and philosophy isn't one I'm programmed to process. Was Toynbee a historian or a philosopher of history? Hmmm. When I got home I asked for help at a couple of websites and I've expanded t...