Local zoning saved from Obama HUD rule by Trump administration after five-year fight

By Rick Manning

In 2014, local zoning was slated for elimination by the Obama Department of Housing and Urban Development using a proposed rule known as “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” but something happened on the way to far left utopians taking over decisions on where housing should be placed in local communities – Americans for Limited Government stepped into the fray.

A June 5, 2014, press release titled, “Time to defund HUD racial zoning rule in appropriations vote” fired the first shot in a five and a half year battle to stop the federalization of local zoning.   Below is the original press statement,

Time to defund HUD racial zoning rule in appropriations vote

June 5, 2014, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Nathan Mehrens today issued the following statement urging the House of Representatives to defund implementation of the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule that will empower the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to condition eligibility for community development block grants on redrawing zoning maps to achieve racial and income integration:

“Starting in October, HUD is empowering itself to redraw zoning maps in any locality that accepts any portion of the $3.5 billion a year in community development block grants from the federal government in an attempt to create evenly distributed neighborhoods based on racial composition and income. This is a utopian pipe dream, and social engineering at its worst.

“Neighborhoods are constituted not based on racial quotas, but on economics. Housing discrimination based on race has been illegal for decades. There is no discrimination in people choosing for themselves where they want to live, and yet that is exactly what HUD is seeking to regulate.

“HUD has no place in local zoning decisions, and it is up to the House of Representatives to defund this dangerous rulemaking through a rider to the Transportation and HUD appropriations bill coming up next week before the regulation’s projected October implementation.”

One day later, Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) picked up the cause by introducing an amendment to the HUD appropriations bill defunding the implementation of AFFH which passed four days later in the House by a 240 – 181 margin.  However, Senate passage was much more problematic.

Over the course of the next three years, I had multiple meetings with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s staff facilitated by Erica Suares who is one of the unsung heroes in the Senate.  Those meetings always included at least five easy defunds that the Senate should pursue which were already in the House appropriations language.  The Gosar defund was always one of these.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) led the charge in the Senate with his legislation calling for ending the AFFH regulations, and his leadership helped keep the issue at the forefront in the appropriations defund battles.  Finally, on May 19, 2016, the Senate passed substitute language offered by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) which defunded the planning tools for AFFH implementation by an 87 – 9 margin.

However, even with the House and Senate passing different language trying to stop what became known as Obamazoning, it wasn’t until the massive spending Omnibus of 2017 when the Collins language prohibiting HUD from implementing AFFH became part of the spending bill, and with that you would think the story would have ended.

But noooo, because this is DC where bad ideas only go into hibernation but never truly die, some “conservative advocates” decided that the regulations revising AFFH should force local governments to change their zoning laws to cut red tape to enable more rapid housing development.  While the problem of local red tape delaying new home and other developments for years is real, Americans for Limited Government stayed philosophically consistent.  If the federal government dictating local zoning outcomes was wrong under the Obama administration, then it was still wrong under the Trump administration no matter the outcome goals.

Finally after meetings with HUD, a personal conversation with Secretary Carson, attending a HUD stakeholder meeting in Chicago, and multiple conversations throughout the Trump administration, the final AFFH rule was filed.

And we won.  It was amended to preserve local control over zoning laws.

Fighting for limited government is not an occasional venture, but an on-going, non-stop battle and last week, outside of the spotlight of the media, Americans for Limited Government won a huge victory.

Don’t expect any Fox News appearances or special reports, because the victory was about the guts of who makes decisions that impact each of our lives, and those who still believe that local government with all its faults, best reflects the will of its citizens than Washington, D.C., earned a hard fought victory against enormous odds.

As we enter the first week of the impeachment trial, it can seem that the world has been turned on its head, just know, that we can win.  It just takes a few great leaders and for each of us to keep in the fight and never give up.

Local zoning was saved, and a vast majority of Americans will never even know that it was threatened.

SOURCE 

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Beware Virginia’s mistakes or your state may be next

In recent years, Virginia has made a number of grave mistakes by electing out-of-touch liberal Democrats who are unfit for office. With the Democrats’ recent success at buying the state legislature with out-of-state contributions, Virginia residents can expect to soon begin paying dearly for those mistakes.

In 2017, Virginia elected Democrat Ralph Northam governor. During the election, Northam was endorsed by liberal newspapers even though he smeared his opponents portraying them as violent racists. Subsequently, voters learned that Northam had worn blackface, that his nickname was “Coonman” in college, and that he had a photo of someone dressed as a Klansman and someone in blackface on his page in his medical school yearbook. Although Northam initially admitted that he was in the photo in the yearbook, he reversed course the next day and denied it. Ridiculously, Northam claimed not to know how he acquired his racist nickname in college or how the racist photo wound up on his yearbook page. Embarrassed, members of his party and the media joined Republicans in calling for his resignation, but Northam refused. Before long, his party and the media embraced him once again.

Unfortunately, electing Northam was not the only poor choice Virginia made in 2017. It also elected Democrat Justin Fairfax lieutenant governor. After the election, voters learned that two women, who are both Democrats, accused him of forcible rape. Disgracefully, Democrats in the state legislature refused to support hearings to examine the allegations. Also in 2017, Virginia reelected Democrat Attorney General Mark Herring, who refused to do his job. In addition, Democrat Lee Carter, who is a proud Socialist, was elected to the House of Delegates.

Two years later, Virginia made more poor choices. In a special election last year, Northern Virginia voters elected Democrat Ibraheem Samirah, an anti-Semite, to the House of Delegates. Samirah had posted on social media that he thought it was “worse” to give money to Israel than to the Ku Klux Klan, and he has ties to Hamas. Samirah was then reelected in the 2019 general election. In that same election, Democrat Joe Morrissey, a statutory rapist and a disbarred attorney, was elected to the Virginia Senate. Morrissey previously served time in jail for having an illicit relationship with his 17-year-old secretary when he was 56 years old. In the wake of that scandal, Morrissey married the young woman; that was his first marriage despite the fact that he had fathered children with three other women. Furthermore, with their tidal wave of out-of-state cash, Democrats were able to flip a total of eight seats in the General Assembly in the general election giving them control of both chambers.

After seizing control of the state legislature, Democrats have wasted no time proposing one outrageous piece of legislation after another: infringing on gun owners’ rights, freeing violent felons, abolishing all safety regulations on abortion, expanding transgender rights, and banning spanking. As if that were not bad enough, Democrats have also proposed awarding Virginia’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of how Virginia votes, repealing Virginia’s Right to Work Law (which has been on the books for over 70 years), hiking the minimum wage, hiking taxes, hiking car fees, and allowing the use of speed cameras to more easily pick the pockets of motorists. To protect their fragile, new majorities, it is likely that Democrats will gerrymander districts next year so they can continue to drag Virginia down. The good news is that this assault on Virginia can be halted next year if Republicans put forward a strong gubernatorial candidate with a compelling agenda.

Nonetheless, at the moment, Virginia now serves as a warning to other states. Democrats simply cannot be trusted with power. They have little to no interest in pursuing the common good and will devote the vast majority of their energies to pursuing a narrow, divisive agenda to pander to special interest groups at the expense of everyone else. Voters elsewhere should take heed and reject the far-Left Democrat Party of today that embraces socialism and Bernie Sanders and despises faith, family, and free enterprise.

SOURCE 

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About those ‘Women for Trump’

“It would make me so excited to vote for a woman for president,” said Alice from Michigan. “I do think I will see one in my lifetime, and, as the mother of a daughter, it would especially thrill me.”

Yet Alice voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and expects to vote for him again in 2020. When I asked her why she didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, she said, “Hillary is an elitist Democrat who doesn’t care about women like me.” Alice wondered if liberal women would be willing to vote for female candidates like Nikki Haley, Ivanka Trump, or Condoleezza Rice.

What is in the minds of women who support Trump? This is a key question people ask me about the panel of 500 voters with whom I’ve interacted since 2016. They want to know how any woman can vote for a bully, whether they care that he has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, how they can support a president who puts children in cages, or why they would support someone who wants to take away the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Isn’t this a terrible model for their children?

To answer these questions, I took a deep dive with 50 women who support Trump. I found two overarching themes: first, that women valued Trump’s policies over anything else, and second, that they saw Trump as a refreshing change from those they perceive to be elitist candidates of either gender who failed to understand and respect the power and determination of conservative women.

Women could be the difference in the presidential election. According to the Pew Research Center, women tend to vote at higher rates than men. And numerous studies of voters in key swing states, like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, have found that white working-class women could determine the next president.

Policy — especially linked to the economy — matters deeply to women who voted for Trump, and to them it outweighs his coarse behavior. “In spite of all of the resistance, he has accomplished so much that is important to me,” said Dianne from New Hampshire. “Our economy is booming, unemployment is low, homeownership is up, our defenses are being reinforced, ISIS is weakened, and he is getting fairer trade deals.” Again and again, women stressed the health of their local economies: building booms, more jobs, and more people out shopping. And they credit the president for their prosperity.

The other big factor for female Trump voters is what they call his “respect” for them, a fundamental belief that Washington is run by people with multiple degrees from elite schools who look down upon them. They dwell on Barack Obama’s statement that they are bitter and clinging to their guns and religion and Hillary Clinton’s remarks about deplorables. Before Trump, they felt that they had no voice and no power. Said Anna from Iowa, “Donald Trump actually likes and respects people like me. He gets that the average citizen of the USA is not stupid, and the Democrats have not figured that out yet.”

These factors outweighed Trump’s boorish behavior. “He is not a politician,” said Susan from Ohio. “I wouldn’t want my daughter to date him, but I wouldn’t want her to date Bill Clinton or JFK or any of the other predators who have been in the White House.”

Trump also appeals to women who feel that the women’s movement has left them behind. Katie from North Carolina described it this way: “You know, not all women are pro-choice, not all women obsess over the glass ceiling, and many women want smaller government and a continued good economy.” Added Cynthia from Massachusetts, “The women’s movement does not represent me. A Women’s March with no conservative women involved? A real women’s movement would embrace all of us. It would fight for equal pay, equal opportunity, personal safety, and assistance in raising future generations. But feminists of today detest people like me, so why would I want to support them?” A majority of these Trump supporters feel alienation from liberal women, whom they perceive to be “angry” and “fist-clenching.”

Some of these women are open to alternatives to Trump — so long as that alternative isn’t too radical. Said Chrissy from New Jersey, “I am embarrassed by his tweeting and his behavior, and I also believe that we need someone who is less divisive — but I don’t see a choice when the Democrats stand for giving everything away for free.”

For every woman like Chrissy, however, there are many others who will support Trump regardless of who runs against him. They sound like Brenda from Pennsylvania. “He is the most transparent president ever, and he follows through on his promises,” she said. “He loves and supports his family, and he respects my money, rather than wanting to squander it.”

Is there a way to win the hearts of these women? Unless another candidate comes along who they believe respects them and their pocketbooks, they won’t be buying the book “A Very Stable Genius.” Instead, they’ll vote to reelect the president.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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How Fragile Is Iran's Theocracy?

Spengler

Iran's people barely can scrape together enough calories to keep body and soul together in the big cities, while entire parts of rural Iran are emptying out as rivers and wells go dry. Things are so bad that the number of babies born in Iran has fallen by nearly 25% in the past five years. Only Venezuela is worse off -- but the wicked Maduro government remains in power. Regimes that are willing to shoot their people dead in the streets (as Iran shot 1,500 protesters last November) can cling to power even under desperate material circumstances.

As I wrote at Asia Times yesterday:

One average salary pays for a small apartment outside the center, utilities, enough calories to keep body and soul together, and bus fare, which is subsidized. Throw in cell phone service, clothing, fruits and vegetables, and one or two meat meals a month, and an Iranian couple will require two average salaries. According to official data, food price inflation was 28% year-on-year as of December.
Medicine is another matter. Some imported items, for example, insulin pens, can’t be found at pharmacies in some provinces, according to a Persian-language report by IRNA. The Chancellor of the University of Isfahan told the national news agency that imported medicine such as chemotherapy drugs was in short supply, but that most other medication was available.

Import controls to spare foreign exchange have put autos outside the range of most Iranians. A VW Golf costs the local-currency equivalent of $48,000, according to Numbeo, or about 14 years’ average pay.

Reduced consumption has taken a toll on Iranian family life. According to the Tehran Times, citing Mohammed Javad Mahmoudi, head of the committee on population studies of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. According to Mahmoudi, the number of babies born in Iran fell by nearly 25% between 2015 and 2019.

That short-term decline in absolute numbers of births is unprecedented outside of wartime. The number of Iranian women of child-bearing age increased slightly over the same period, so the collapsing birth rate clearly reflects decisions not to bear children.

As I have reported in the past, Iran faces a demographic crisis over the next two decades as its population ages rapidly. There are five prime-age Iranians supporting every Iranian over the age of 65, but by mid-century, the ratio will collapse to just 1.6 to one. Strangely, the Iranian authorities have reported an increase in the “total fertility rate,” namely the estimated number of children that the average woman will bear during her lifetime. The increase evidently is due to optimistic assumptions about the future rather than observed behavior in the present.

Iranians face desperate conditions,  if not actual hunger, due to the effect of economic sanctions. Add to this the long-term effects of mismanagement of the country’s scarce water resources. Afshin Shahi wrote recently in the Journal of Asian Affairs: “Approximately 97% of the country is experiencing drought conditions. Due to gross water mismanagement and its damaging impact on the country, Iran faces the worst situation in the water resources of any industrialized nation. Tens of thousands of villages have been deserted and most of the major urban centers have passed their limits to absorb new rural migrants. Some officials predict that in less than 25 years, 50 million Iranians would be displaced from their current homes because of the pressing ecological conditions.”

The comparison to Venezuela is sadly instructive. Desperation can strengthen a murderous regime rather than weaken it, as I explained last February after the Trump administration unwisely appointed Elliot "Export Democracy" Abrams as its point man for Venezuela.

Venezuela is following the ugly pattern of Latin American civil conflicts during the 20th century.... This is a depraved and wicked government of narco-socialists, but it will not be easy to dislodge.

Latin American revolutions as a rule result in prolonged, bloody wars of attrition. The civil war referred to as "La Violencia" in Colombia lasted from 1948 to 1959, killed about 300,000 people, almost three percent of the Colombian population, and displaced more than one million. Unspeakable atrocities including crucifixions were widespread. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920 killed one million of Mexico's 20 million population. The El Salvador civil war of 1980-1992 killed about two percent of the population but displaced a quarter of the people.

The grisly death toll in such conflicts is the result of a system of corruption that reaches into the capillaries of society. The regime buys the loyalty of soldiers and police, and causes them to commit atrocities against the general population; the part of the population excluded by the regime wreaks a terrible vengeance on the regime's supporters, most of whom fight to the death rather than be hanged from lampposts. Typically the conflict continues until both sides bleed out.
....In a starving country where the government controls all the food, the cost of bribing a key military cadre is relatively low. The regime's bribed stooges won't give in easily, because everyone knows who they are.

The obvious alternative to Iran's Revolutionary Guard is the regular army. One hears rumors about discontent in the officer corps, but no real information. The Obama administration destroyed America's intelligence assets on the ground through a combination of malfeasance and incompetence (Iran cracked the CIA's system of communicating with its agents and rolled up its network several years ago).

Anything we can do to undermine the wicked mullahs of Tehran, we should. But we should have no illusions that the job will be easy.

SOURCE 

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Trump Becomes First President to Attend March for Life

 
I am not a religious person but this toon made me weep.  They were persons who were aborted

President Donald Trump today becomes the first sitting president to attend and speak at the annual March for Life rally. Over its 47-year history, no Republican president (and obviously no Democrat) has made an appearance at the nation’s largest pro-life rally. Though George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did offer brief supportive remarks via phone and satellite to the marchers, they always maintained a degree of separation.

But Trump is unlike any previous Republican and is most in his element when speaking to a massive rally. While Trump’s checkered personal history and his past support of abortion cause some to question his commitment, his impressive presidential actions in support of life simply cannot be ignored or deemed insignificant. While he and the previous Republican Congress failed to defund Planned Parenthood, Trump has followed through on other promises — nominating pro-life judges, signing a bill allowing states to block Title X funding from going to “family planning” organizations that perform abortions, and reinstating a federal policy preventing foreign aid from being used to provide or endorse abortions.

Trump is now boldly enjoining himself to the pro-life movement in a manner avoided by prior Republican presidents. Of all the negative character flaws one can criticize Trump for, boldness to stand up for what he believes is not one of them. Trump’s decision is truly momentous in the history of the pro-life movement.

SOURCE 

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A GOP-led edge: Red states see less unemployment, more economic growth

Opinion polling isn’t everything. However, it often gives you a good barometer of the general shape of things, especially at the state level. As of mid-2019, every single one of the top 10 most popular governors in the country were Republicans, while eight of the 10 least popular were Democrats. Generally speaking, voters trust Republicans more than they trust Democrats to lead their states.

A deeper look at GOP-led states’ economic success explains why — but beyond the minutiae of simple policy, the bottom line is that electing a Republican often means increased growth and lower unemployment. An even stronger rule bears out the opposite when Democrats control the governor’s mansion.

Indeed, some correlations will always transcend state politics. But what becomes clear is that there is a strong statistical case that electing a Republican governor — even without a matching GOP statehouse — plays a significant role in states’ economic success. Look no further than the last election cycle paired with economic statistics, and this trend soon becomes clear.

State unemployment rates and GDP growth must be viewed relative to national averages. The average U.S. unemployment rate was 3.9 percent in 2018 and 3.7 percent in 2019. Strong employment growth at the state level is directly correlated with governorship. Among the 20 states with the lowest unemployment rates (three are tied for 20th, so there are 23 states ranking here), 17 had Republican governors prior to 2018. North Dakota, which has a 2.5 percent unemployment rate, prospers in large part because of its Republican leadership’s decision to embrace new hydraulic fracturing technology. As a result, nearly a third of job openings in the state remain unfilled longer than three months. And it’s not only high-skilled workers who benefit from strong job growth; fast-food workers in North Dakota earn multiples of the $7.25 federal minimum hourly wage, fetching as much as $20 per hour.

Among states whose unemployment rates increased the most last year, Democrats were most likely in charge. In states whose unemployment rates increased more than statistical noise (more than one-tenth of a percent), five of the eight have Democratic governors. Furthermore, among the eight states that saw the sharpest decrease in unemployment (0.5 percent or more) — Alabama, Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia — five have Republican governors. And only New Jersey had a Democrat in charge before 2018.

Meanwhile, U.S. GDP increased by 2.2 percent in 2017 and by 2.9 percent in 2018. During the first three quarters of 2019, the average was 2.4 percent. When ranking GDP growth by state, the correlation between economic success and Republican governors becomes even more clear. Among the top 10 growing states in the second quarter of 2019 (the most recent detailed numbers available), only two of the 10 had Democratic governors prior to the 2018 election cycle. Among the four states that had growth above 4 percent, Texas (leading with 4.7 percent), New Mexico and Wyoming had GOP executives; Alaska was run by an independent. In fact, these states’ growth represent almost 10 percent of all economic growth in the nation during this period.

In the 10 states with the slowest GDP growth, Democrats have more to celebrate: The same figures show that eight of the 10 worst-performing states in Q2 2019 had GOP governors in the prior election cycle.

Sounds like a good case for a split ballot. However, six of those slowest-growing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine and New Jersey) have since elected Democrats to the statehouse. Since Kentucky’s election occurred in November 2019, we can’t factor that in. However, among the other states, GDP growth collapsed in 2019 after electing Democratic governors. In 2018 these states grew on average by 2.24 percent. In Q2 2019 it was a measly 0.92 percent annualized rate — a drop of 59 percent! Michigan’s growth rate fell from 2.7 percent to 1.1 percent, Illinois’ from 2.1 percent to 1.1 percent, Wisconsin’s from 2.5 percent to 1.1 percent, and Maine’s from 1.9 percent to an embarrassing 0.6 percent. In New Jersey (whose election was in 2017), it’s been cut by two-thirds, from 2.0 percent to an anemic 0.7 percent.

So, electing a Republican governor seems to give your state a fair but imperfect shot at growth.

What about states that added a GOP governor last cycle? There’s only one case in point here: Alaska’s governor’s mansion went from independent to red in 2018 — and growth followed. The state’s economy changed from a -0.3 percent contraction in 2018 to the third highest in the nation, at 4.1 percent in Q2 2019.

Numbers only tell a part of the story. The total sum of opportunity costs borne by high-tax states with Democratic governors and legislatures include incalculable damage to the working and middle classes. The states’ economic health (or lack thereof) further accelerates the magnet for millions of families fleeing taxation and regulation in blue states for better economic prospects in red states.

In 2020, 11 governors’ seats are up for grabs — and considering that seven of these are currently Republican, the residents of these states should heed the stark lessons of catching the blue wave in 2018.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

NEEDED VISA OVERHAUL: U.S. imposes visa rules for pregnant women on "birth tourism" (AP)

RIGHT TO WORK: Union membership falls to record low of 10.3% — down 10% since 1983 (The Hill)

CHALLENGES STILL LOOM: Trump administration approves Keystone pipeline on U.S. land (Associated Press)

INDEFENSIBLE: Less than half of Americans know six million Jews killed in Holocaust (Washington Examiner)

WARPED PRIORITIES: San Antonio's Chick-fil-A fight has cost more than $300K so far (KENS 5)

MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH? Immune cell that kills most cancers discovered by accident by British scientists (The Telegraph)

POLICY: How the oil-production boom has benefited America (The Daily Signal)

POLICY: Counting the homeless, searching for solutions (RealClearPolicy)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Donald Trump a clear winner at World Economic Forum, despite best efforts of climate doomsayers

The theme for the World Economic forum in Davos this week is “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World”. It’s a noble aim but one that’s looking increasingly unlikely.

“Davos Man” — the pejorative shorthand for the rich liberal elite who catch up in the Swiss Alps each year — is still in control of the agenda of the world’s most elite conference. The vague nouns beloved of Davos men and women — inclusion, resilience, climate ­action, sustainability — peppered the program, which is in full swing this week with more than 3000 delegates in attendance.

But their political power is slipping away, starkly illustrated when the conference’s two highly unlikely protagonists — Donald Trump and Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg — were anything but cohesive on Wednesday.

Trump, the face of resurgent populist politics throughout the West and a conventional approach to business and economic growth, clashed with Thunberg, who shot to stardom as the frustrated face of “climate action” — a sort of Joan of Arc who demands an immediate end to fossil fuel use.

German economist Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971. A not-for-profit foundation, its mission is to “improve the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”.

No event attracts such a prestigious flock of political and business leaders. Apart from the US President, this year’s talkfest saw Prince Charles, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai rub shoulders.

For Trump, this year’s conference was a platform to rub his success in the noses of the world’s elite, who had largely written him off when he was running for the White House in 2016, then derided his early years as President — and now face his likely re-election before the next Davos meeting in January next year.

“The American dream is back, bigger, better and stronger than ever before … and no one is benefiting more than America’s middle-class,” Trump told the forum.

It’s a claim, however galling for the audience, that is becoming harder to refute. Wage growth in the US has picked up under his presidency, rising back above 3 per cent and bringing to an end a period of real income stagnation more than a decade long.

The US, with a freshly inked deal with China, appears to be winning the trade war. The stockmarket, Trump’s preferred measure of success, has continued to achieve new records. And the US economy is wallowing in the longest economic expansion in its history.

“ ‘America First’ does not mean America alone,” Trump memorably said in his first visit as President in 2018. He didn’t attend last year’s summit amid a partial US government shutdown. This year, the timing was particularly sweet given his impeachment trial was kicking off in the Senate back in Washington, DC, at the same time.

Trump was sending a message not only to the world but also to his Democratic foes. “We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty,” Trump said, in a none too veiled swipe at calls to stamp out fossil fuel use or impose taxes to curb carbon dioxide.

“Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism,” he said, calling on delegates to “reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse”.

Trump struck the wrong, upbeat tone at a conference convened on the premise of an urgent need for action to save the planet, revelling in the US’s new-found position as the world’s No 1 producer of oil and natural gas.

Enter Thunberg, the anti-Trump, who sat just behind Cormann as Trump spoke. Thunberg, who chided governments for “listening to her but not hearing” in her own speech, has become the chief prophet of doom since she burst on to the world stage last year.

“We don’t need to cut emissions, we need to stop emissions,” she urged, before going on to ­accuse leaders of “cheating and fiddling around with numbers” with talk of cutting emissions to “net zero” — which means emitting no more carbon than is absorbed by the planet — by 2050.

“Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fuelling the flames by the hour, and we are telling you to act as if you loved your children above all else,” she added, saying “planting trees” wasn’t enough.

Thunberg’s earnest pleas have sway in the world’s boardrooms, such as that of international financial consulting giant deVere.

Only last week global investment giant BlackRock announced it was to shift out of companies linked to fossil fuel.

If Davos has made anything clear, it’s that any revolution will be powered by fossil fuels. The views of the democratically elected Trump will overwhelm those of the technocrats.

While Thunberg won the latter crowd at Davos, it’s not clear she is helping the cause of furthering ­efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions among the broader public who ultimately pick our leaders.

She may be preaching to the converted, turning off those on the fence who might not think a teenager is the best authority on such matters, while making people who don’t believe in climate change even more ardent deniers.

“Despite the considerable investments, renewable energies, such as wind power and photovoltaics are still not capable of satisfying the growing global energy demand,” noted Eric Heymann, a top resource analyst at Deutsche Bank, in a recent analysis.

All the panels in the world can’t change that basic fact.

SOURCE 

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The Israel-U.S. Model Has Been a Resounding Success

Victor Davis Hanson
 
Whether by accident or by deliberate osmosis, Israel and the U.S. have adopted similar solutions to their existential problems.

Before 2002, during the various Palestinian intifadas, Israel suffered hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries from suicide bombers freely crossing from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel.

In response, Israel planned a vast border barrier. The international community was outraged. The Israeli left called the idea nothing short of “apartheid.”

However, after the completion of the 440-mile border barrier — part concrete well, part wire fencing — suicide bombings and terrorist incursions into Israel declined to almost nil.

The wall was not entirely responsible for enhanced Israeli security. But it freed up border manpower to patrol more vigorously. The barrier also was integrated with electronic surveillance and tougher laws against illegal immigration.

The wall also brought strategic and political clarity. Those who damned Israel but freely crossed its borders sounded incoherent when they became furious that the barrier prevented access to the hated Zionist entity.

The Trump administration is currently seeking funds to create new border walls and replace old, porous fencing in order to stem illegal immigration on the southern border.

The strategy seems similar: The wall will free up manpower for better border policing. It likewise provides a certain political clarity. The United States is often criticized by Mexico and other Latin American countries. It is now being taken to task for the effort to make it more difficult to illegally enter such a supposedly unwelcome and hostile landscape.

For years, Israel’s great weakness was its dependence on imported energy, while its neighboring enemies grew rich exporting oil and natural gas. Yet in the last decade, Israel has ramped up production to take advantage of its vast natural gas reserves — to the point that it is not just self-sufficient in fossil fuels but soon will become a major exporter.

Now, Israel cannot be threatened economically by either Iran or various Persian Gulf monarchies. Its economy is stronger than ever. Europeans suddenly are more accommodating, given that Israel may well become a natural gas exporter to a fuel-hungry Europe.

Like Israel, but unlike Europe, the U.S. was eager to frack and horizontally drill to tap vast new fossil fuel reserves. The change in U.S. strategic energy independence is similarly astounding.

America is now the largest producer of natural gas and oil in the world. Its output has increased world supply, dropped prices and hurt America’s oil-exporting enemies.

The relative power of Russia and Middle Eastern nations, such as Iran, over U.S. decision-making has radically diminished — along with the need to station huge numbers of American troops in the volatile Middle East.

As in Israel, opponents either argued that more drilling would ruin the environment or that it would not work. They seem to be wrong on both counts.

Israel’s foreign policy could be called Jacksonian. Israel allies with friends, neutrals and former enemies whenever they share particular strategic goals.

In the topsy-turvy Middle East, Israel is now sometimes a strategic partner with formerly hostile regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. They all share greater fears of theocratic Iran and its terrorist appendages in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Apparently, much of the Arab world is no longer as interested in the Palestinian desire to destroy Israel. Many Palestinian groups are allied with a despised Iran, while many Arabs believe that Israel’s strength can sometimes be strategically useful.

Current American realism is similar. The U.S. is neither isolationist nor an interventionist nation-builder. Its foreign-policy goals are to enhance its military, expand its already powerful economy, limit its strategic exposure, and bank its resulting hard and soft power to use only as a deterrent force against those who kill Americans or endanger U.S. interests.

Instead of cajoling allies to join us in expeditionary wars abroad, the U.S. increasingly appears reluctant to intervene, especially in the Middle East. As a result, former critics are now becoming suppliants requesting U.S. assistance.

As with Israel, the U.S. is less eager to apply political litmus tests to its occasional allies. It also seeks to avoid quagmires where its overwhelming conventional firepower can be neutralized by terrorists and urban guerrillas.

The promoters of these unconventional policies, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump, are both despised by their respective establishments and under constant threat of removal by their livid political opponents.

Yet they both have transformed their respective countries. Their policies remind us that it is sometimes preferable to be respected rather than just be liked — and that when a nation is strong and does not beg for help, it often finds more than it needs.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

A TALE OF TWO WHISTLEBLOWERS: Whistleblower who reported government waste, fraud, and abuse gets none of the protections the anti-Trump whistleblower received (RealClearPolitics)

VIOLATES FEDERAL LAW: Trump administration plans action against California over abortion-coverage requirement (The Wall Street Journal)

WARREN CORNERED: Father asks Elizabeth Warren if he's going to get his money back after paying for daughter's education (The Daily Wire)

VILLAGE ACADEMICS: Democrat professors outnumber Republicans 9:1 at top colleges (Washington Examiner)

VILLAGE ACADEMIC CURRICULUM: LGBTQ education is now mandatory in New Jersey schools (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

THE UGLINESS OF IDENTITY POLITICS: Miami PD suspends white officer who begins identifying as "black" (The American Mirror)

RIGHT TO LIFE: Tennessee governor announces fetal heartbeat bill, other abortion restrictions (National Review)

FOR THE RECORD: Toxic "forever chemicals" found in drinking water throughout the U.S. (USA Today)

POLICY: State Department is right to tackle "birth tourism" (The Heritage Foundation)

POLICY: Google is posing a serious threat to innovation (Issues & Insights)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Bloomberg’s Huge Spending Transforms 2020 Campaign

The other presidential hopefuls are so moronic that I think Bloomberg will surge through the primaries and get the nomination.  Both Trump and Jimmy Carter came from way behind so the precedent is there

The presidential election is 10 months away, but Michael Bloomberg’s long-shot campaign is running like it’s already late October.

The candidate has spent $217 million so far on television and digital advertising, mostly ignoring the Democratic primaries and squarely challenging President Trump. The total is roughly three-quarters of the amount spent by all other campaigns, including Mr. Trump’s, combined.

It’s the game plan the billionaire used in his campaign for mayor of New York City in 2001, when he outspent his competitor nearly 5 to 1. Big spending has also made his philanthropy a dominant force on climate change, gun control and other issues. And it is how he has managed his lucrative business, paying up to bring in talent.

The flow of cash—dubbed the Bloomberg effect by media-measurement firm Advertising Analytics LLC—has upended the financial dynamics of the election. Television ad rates jumped 45% in Houston after the Bloomberg campaign bought $1 million worth of ads in November, Advertising Analytics said. The campaign paid as much as double the going rate for staff and promised jobs to workers through November, whether or not Mr. Bloomberg stays in the race. The candidate, who is funding his run entirely by himself, now has 1,000 campaign staffers

It’s a big part of the reason roughly $20 billion is expected to be spent on political advertising this election cycle, dwarfing the previous record of $12 billion in 2016, according to media research firm, Borrell Associates. “Everything about what Bloomberg is doing is unprecedented,” said Rufus Gifford, former finance director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Mr. Bloomberg remains a long shot, Mr. Gifford said, “but when you have Donald Trump as president and one of the 10 richest people running for president, anything can happen.”

Kevin Sheekey, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign manager, said there’s more to Mr. Bloomberg’s candidacy than his spending, pointing to wealthy but politically inexperienced candidates such as Meg Whitman or Ross Perot who failed in the past. “Money won’t just determine elections,” he said. “You have to have a record and a message.”

Lots of rich people have run for office, lots of candidates have claimed excellent business credentials and many have claimed to have top-flight data operations, which Mr. Bloomberg emphasizes. What sets his campaign apart is his $55 billion checkbook.

‘Disruptive’

Mr. Bloomberg is No. 9 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, ahead of each of the Google founders, either Koch brother and the wealthiest members of the Walton family. A person familiar with the plans said he could spend $500 million on the primaries alone, and Mr. Bloomberg hasn’t ruled out spending $1 billion before November if needed.

“Certainly it’s going to be disruptive,” said Robert Wolf, former chairman and CEO of UBS Americas and a longtime Democratic donor. “We just don’t know how yet.”

Mr. Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013, is currently supported by 6% of voters, compared with 27% for former Vice President Joe Biden in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. More voters have a negative than a positive view of Mr. Bloomberg, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll from mid- December.

Mr. Bloomberg said he entered the race at a moment when polling data suggested voters placed less importance on ideology and more on finding a candidate who could beat Mr. Trump. His campaign believed Mr. Trump was winning the race and was going unchallenged in political ads in competitive states as Democratic candidates focused on the primary battle.

At the time, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was surging. Polls showed Mr. Biden beating Mr. Trump but within the margin of error. Ms. Warren’s policies, such as a wealth tax, would likely hurt Mr. Bloomberg, and she is generally disliked by his circle of wealthy New Yorkers, according to a longtime staff member. Mr. Bloomberg has said he will back whoever wins the nomination, even if it is Ms. Warren or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

To offset criticism that he was running out of his own self interest, Mr. Bloomberg pledged $15 million to $20 million to register 500,000 voters before the election. His attacks on Mr. Trump are part of that effort. “There’s a sense that Bloomberg is doing something that the party can’t do—going negative on Trump,” Mr. Gifford said. “It’s work that the party doesn’t have the money to do, and other candidates don’t have the ability to do.”

After Mr. Trump’s campaign said it had bought a 60-second TV spot during the Super Bowl on Feb. 2, the Bloomberg campaign bought a 60-second spot that will target the president. The Bloomberg campaign declined to disclose how much it was spending for the spot, but advertising tracker Kantar/ CMAG estimates it is worth $10 million.

Bloomberg spending has drawn Mr. Trump’s attention. When the campaign aired an ad saying the president had broken his promise of protecting those with pre-existing health conditions, Mr. Trump pushed back on Twitter and labeled Mr. Bloomberg “Mini Mike.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign said that because he started late, it is focusing on the Super Tuesday votes on March 3, rather than the early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. The plan plays to Mr. Bloomberg’s financial advantage and minimizes his weaknesses—shaking hands and making small talk with voters, and giving stump speeches. The Super Tuesday states, where 40% of delegates will be chosen, instead depend more on television and digital advertising.

In addition to huge TV spending—$193 million on ads since his campaign began—the campaign has spent heavily online. It spent $16.1 million on Google ads as of Jan. 11 and $6.8 million on Facebook as of the end of December according to Kantar/CMAG.

Mr. Trump has spent $6.5 million on digital ads, and Tom Steyer, the other billionaire Democratic candidate, has spent $5.6 million since Mr. Bloomberg entered the race in November, as of the end of last year.

The Bloomberg campaign is offering field organizers salaries of $6,000 a month. For state data directors, it’s between $10,000 and $12,000 a month, according to job postings.

The campaign’s 1,000-person payroll is more typical of an operation in the final months before Election Day. Mr. Biden has roughly 400 campaign staffers, while Mr. Sanders has built an 800-person staff.

The former mayor’s late entry into the race has forced the campaign to “create a sense of momentum and hope people will actually jump on,” said a person familiar with Mr. Bloomberg’s state operations.

Super Tuesday focus

Campaign veterans said money won’t necessarily bring in the best staff and said many experienced staffers want to work for people they support. Other campaigns, including Ms. Warren’s and Mr. Sanders’s, already have operations in Super Tuesday states and are ramping up hiring in later states.

Mr. Bloomberg has spent in markets that haven’t been targeted by other Democrats. His campaign has plunked down $21.2 million on television advertising in Texas, where none of the leading Democrats have spent a penny. It has spent $8.4 million in Pennsylvania, which doesn’t hold its primary until April 28. It has even poured resources into smaller states that are typically not on the primary radar. In Idaho, it has spent $979,000 so far; in Utah, $1.6 million.

“He is going far, far ahead of where the rest of the guys are scrumming,” said Kip Cassino, executive vice president at Borrell Associates, the media research firm. “He is basically saying, ‘I’m not going to win in Iowa, and I am not going to get out there and kiss pigs. And I won’t win in New Hampshire, but I will win in the rest of the states, and I will get the states that most everyone didn’t care about before.’ ”

At the beginning of January, candidates had spent close to $540 million on political ads in the presidential race over the prior 12 months, about 10 times what would have been expected at this point in this election cycle, Mr. Cassino said. “We have never seen anything like this,” Mr. Cassino said, referring to Mr. Bloomberg’s spending. “We are only just starting to see how distorting this might be.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s potential handicaps among Democratic voters include his support for Republican candidates in the past, including former President George W. Bush. Other issues that could hurt are his support for charter schools in his education-reform efforts, and the stop-and-frisk policy he adopted as mayor, in which New York police had wide latitude to detain and search passersby for contraband. A federal judge eventually ruled the policy violated the constitutional rights of minorities. Mr. Bloomberg apologized for the stop-and-frisk policy before he kicked off his campaign.

Some Democrats fear Mr. Bloomberg could drag out the primary with his limitless budget, or use his money to try to influence the leading candidates, hoping to pull some of them to the political center, which he sees as the way to beat Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bloomberg’s team said the data operation he is building will benefit Democrats overall, which he said are far behind the Republicans on the gathering and use of voter data. His data firm, Hawkfish LLC, launched in the spring. It has hired Facebook’s former chief marketing officer and the former CEO of Foursquare, the location tracking firm.

Mr. Bloomberg has cited his research and spending on the 2018 midterm elections as evidence of his commitment to the party’s success. Democratic candidates won 21 of the 24 races in which he was involved. In most races, the spending focused on digital advertising early in the election cycle and TV advertising closer to election day, when ad reservations were more expensive and Republican groups could not as easily counter their message.

In an Oklahoma House of Representatives race, which appeared to be a long-shot for the Democrats, Mr. Bloomberg unleashed a wave of last-minute ads that attacked the Republican candidate. Democrat Kendra Horn won by a few thousand votes. “I supported 24 candidates who were good on guns and good on environment, and 21 of them won, and that flipped the House,” he said at a recent campaign stop in Philadelphia. “So if it wasn’t for that, you wouldn’t have [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi and you wouldn’t have impeachment.

SOURCE 

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Why progressives hate Trump so much explained

Progressives all have the same goal, even those who don’t know it outright.  The progressive goal is to destroy the American system and replace it with a utopian heaven on earth.  That’s it. 

This goal could be the entire American system as Obama wanted to fundamentally transform us.  Or it could be something like our health care system.  Either way, the progressive sets out to destroy the current American system to replace it with their version of a utopian heaven on earth, of which those of us who live in reality understand it’s never going to happen.

The United States of America is the most liberal and tolerant country in the world.  Americans are the most generous people as well.  It is literally built into our system to constantly improve the lives of those who were treated poorly in the past.

But when you fall for the Marxian ideals of a utopian heaven where everyone is equal, where no one wants for anything, and you really believe it could be achieved, then even a tolerant, liberal country like the United States is no match. That progressive religion truly is an opiate of the Marxists.

Under Obama progressives had a daily feeling of conquering where they defeated American system after system, and they built themselves up to really accept that it was possible to achieve that utopian heaven on earth.

Then Trump got elected and their entire world came crashing down on them big league.

SOURCE 

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UK: Employment hits new record as jobs market strengthens

After ten years of Conservative government (2010 to 2020) Britain's unemployment figures are similar to Trump's American figures

Record numbers of women in work have propelled the employment rate to a new all-time high, fuelling speculation the Bank of England will steer clear of an interest rate cut later this month.

A total of 32.9 million people were in work during the three months to November, with the employment rate standing at an unprecedented 76.3pc according to the Office for National Statistics.

The unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1974 at 3.8pc.

Wage growth held steady at 3.2pc, more than double the consumer prices index inflation rate of 1.3pc. This means families' pay packets are stretching further each month, boosting living standards.

Much of the growth was powered by a surge in women holding down a full-time job as fewer retire early or stay at home as full-time mothers.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

SYSTEMIC HATE: Another Bernie staffer allegedly promotes violence: Kill the rich, put Republicans in camps (The Daily Wire)

WARNINGS IGNORED: Hillary defends the Clintons' longtime association with Harvey Weinstein, and it does not go well at all (Red State)

"MALICIOUS INTENT": Tulsi Gabbard files defamation lawsuit against Hillary for dubbing her a "Russian asset" (The Daily Wire)

"MY GOAL IS TO UNVEIL THE TRUTH ABOUT ABORTION": New England Patriots tight end and pro-lifer Benjamin Watson producing abortion documentary (The Hollywood Reporter)

TAXPAYER-SOURCED FUNDING: Planned Parenthood's annual report shows Big Abortion needs Big Government (CNSNews.com)

POLICY: The lethal legal legacy of Roe v. Wade (Washington Examiner)

POLICY: When will the #MeToo movement address pornography? (Washington Examiner)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Davos: Trump opens door to ‘tremendous’ UK trade deal as Mnuchin delivers warning over digital tax

President Donald Trump delivered a defiant defence of his record while his powerful entourage had a sobering message for the absent British government in Davos: the UK will face retaliatory trade sanctions if it persists with plans for a digital tax on the US tech giants.

Steve Mnuchin, the US Treasury secretary, had barely set foot on Swiss soil before hurling his throw-away bombshell. The British and Italians must suspend their plans for this contentious levy or face the full wrath of the Trump White House.

“If not, they’ll find themselves faced with President Trump’s tariffs,” he said on the margins of the World Economic Forum. A comprehensive trade deal between the two countries after Brexit will be effectively impossible in such circumstances.

Mr Trump was more oblique in his triumphant address to the Davos fraternity. “We look forward to negotiating a tremendous new deal with the United Kingdom: they have a wonderful new PM who wants very much to make a deal,” he said.

There was then a slight hesitation, as if Mr Trump was hedging the signal. The praise for Boris Johnson was not quite as effusive as usual. China’s Xi Jinping got markedly warmer treatment. “We love each other,” he said.

Mr Mnuchin told the Wall Street Journal that Britain should heed the harsh lesson learned by France over its plans for a digital tax, which effectively singles out Facebook, Google, and the Silicon Valley names for discriminatory treatment. 

President Emmanuel Macron this week agreed under intense pressure – and faced with sanctions on Gallic symbols such as wine, cheese, and handbags – to suspend the measure until the end of the year as talks continue. Billed as a “truce” in Paris, it looks more like a humiliating climb-down to everybody else.

Mr Johnson included the digital services tax in the Conservative Manifesto despite warnings from his own Cabinet and an avalanche of criticism from both trade experts and free market analysts. “It is a bad idea based on dodgy economics and flimsy evidence,” said Julian Jessop from the Institute for Economic Affairs.

The tax is inherently discriminatory and would be almost impossible to collect. Mr Johnson pre-empted a joint OECD initiative, acting on behalf of 134 states, that is thrashing out a broader solution with Washington. This would go beyond the digital sphere to include a wider range of companies, levelling the playing field between Europe and the US.

Britain’s decision to push its own tax in defiance of the US at this pivotal juncture of the Brexit talks seems extraordinarily ill-judged. The Government has already ruled out trade concessions on agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and access to the National Health Services on terms already enjoyed by EU multinationals. This leaves little to talk about in US-UK trade discussions. The digital tax closes the door entirely. 

Mr Trump’s speech was a provocative romp through American exceptionalism, with a cunning focus on his “blue collar boom”, as if to reproach Davos Man and the pious liberal elites ensconced in their stunningly expensive sanctum sanctorum. “The American dream is back, bigger, better and stronger than ever before,” he said.

Unemployment is the lowest in half a century. The jobless rate for African-American youth is the “lowest in recorded history”. Ditto for disabled workers. “The poorest are making by far the largest gains,” he said.

“America’s thriving, America’s flourishing, and yes, America is winning again like never before,” he said. His listeners are sophisticated enough to know that a fiscal boom and a budget deficit of 5pc of the GDP at the top of the cycle will always buy you a boom, but still his words are unsettling for globalists sitting on a becalmed world economy. Then he twisted the knife.

“We are freeing our businesses and workers so they can thrive and flourish as never before. Today I urge other nations to follow our example and liberate your citizens from the crushing weight of bureaucracy,” he said.

Surely knowing that Greta Thunberg was in the audience, he could not resist a broadside against the “perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse". "They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers. I have them, you have them, we all have them,” he said.

“They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 90s. These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives. We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty,” he said.

This was at a summit dedicated almost entirely this year to saving the planet from climate change. The audience could only grit their teeth. But whatever the Davos tribe think of Mr Trump’s brand of “America First” they cannot deny the sheer unbridled dynamism of his country.

Separately, Glenn Youngkin from the Carlyle Group said the US economy’s share of world output has amazingly risen from 23pc to 25pc over the last decade. “If you had predicted that 10 years ago, nobody would have believed you,” he said.

The last word goes to Mr Trump, who told listeners: “America’s newfound prosperity is undeniable, unprecedented and unmatched anywhere in the world.” Touché.

SOURCE 

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The media’s progressive bias has a propaganda guide — The AP Stylebook

Jon Caldara

Journalists have no idea how their work is perceived by a very sizable percentage of Americans.

At a recent wedding reception, I ran into a lady I’ve known for about 15 years. In her mid-60s she is the sweetest, most proper lady in the world. Never once have I heard a harsh word slip through her lips. When the conversation turned to the media, without prodding she simply asserted a loud, unambiguous, “(expletive) the media.”

When Trump points to the reporter pool in the back of one of his rallies and states, “They are the enemy,” he is singing to people like this. It’s one of the major reasons he became president.

It is fascinating how the built-up frustration to the main-stream media carried Trump to victory. It’s more fascinating that the media has shown absolutely no introspection into their role in the phenomenon. They really think most Americans see them as they see themselves — brave warriors of truth, not torchbearers for progressive ideology.

One only has to listen to NPR reporters and their pee-your-pants excitement at covering Trump’s impeachment to conclude they still have no idea so much of America considers them the enemy.

I have been around the media since the mid-80s as a cartoonist, columnist, talk show host, and of course through my years of political work. I love reporters. Almost universally they are engaging, caring, smart and riotously funny. And almost every one of them I have ever known feels called to journalism.

And not a single one of them recognizes how monolithically progressive the main-stream media is. Few of them will admit their profession is dominated by people with a left-of-center philosophy. And none, I mean none, see that what they pump out is serving the progressive agenda.

Talking to a reporter about how left the media is like talking to an alcoholic about his drinking. He honestly can’t see the issue and will angerly suggest you are the one with the problem.

But instead to turning to AA for an example of how to admit their problem, reporters turn to the AP, the Associated Press, to encourage it. The AP codifies reporters’ progressively loaded language with the AP Stylebook. This yearly updated, dictionary-like guide for reporters and editors is meant to make their work consistent.

What it actually does is cement terminology to promote political conclusions. It declares the winners and losers in political debates.

For reporters, it recommends avoiding terms like illegal alien: “use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person.” The AP instead suggests using terms like “undocumented.” While this is just fine with reporters, because most of them agree, it promotes a side on the immigration debate.

The first rule in winning any political battle is winning the language used to define the issue. In this, the media plays judge and jury.

The AP has updated its style to say that gender is no longer binary and thus declared a winner in this divisive debate. They ruled that, “Not all people fall under one of two categories for sex and gender.”

It’s admirable that reporters want to be compassionate to transgender individuals and those transitioning, as we all should be. But AP reporters first have a duty to the truth, or so they say. There are only two sexes, identified by an XX or XY chromosome. That is the very definition of binary. The AP ruling it isn’t so doesn’t change science. It’s a premeditative attempt to change culture and policy. It’s activism.

The AP, once the guardian of grammar and proper word usage, now allows “they/them/their” as a “singular and/or gender-neutral pronoun.” So, the Associated Press is happy to change the plain grammatical meaning of words to promote an agenda. “They” is singular and up is down.

The terms defined in the Stylebook take at most a phrase or short sentence to describe. “Race-related coverage” takes more than four pages to bob-and-weave through political correctness. No wonder the country can’t have a coherent conversation about race. We’re not allowed to use words.

Even with all the latitude the Stylebook gives reporters to steer left, they still consistently violate AP standards to push their views further.

The AP asserts, “Often, (race) is an irrelevant factor and drawing unnecessary attention to someone’s race or ethnicity can be interpreted as bigotry.” If that is true, the media’s preoccupation with identity politics makes them worse than the KKK.

The AP declares “Music added to AP productions must not have an editorial effect, such as evoking sympathy.” Note to my friends on TV and at NPR: news with sound effects and music, your mainstay product, is commentary, not reporting. So just respect us enough to admit it.

The AP is so brazen as to state, “AP resists being used as a conduit for speech or images that espouse hate or spread propaganda.”

The AP is the conduit for propaganda. If they don’t own up to it and try to change it, they may help re-elect the president they loathe.

SOURCE 

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Saying that there are only two sexes is the unforgiveable sin

The excellent article on the media above produced a reaction.  Its author was fired.  By firing him, the newspaper confirmed all he said

A columnist at The Denver Post claimed on Friday that he was fired for recognizing only two sexes.

“What seemed to be the last straw for my column was my insistence that there are only two sexes and my frustration that to be inclusive of the transgendered (even that word isn’t allowed) we must lose our right to free speech,” wrote columnist Jon Caldara, the president of a libertarian think tank known as the Independence Institute, in a Facebook post announcing his departure from the paper.

“I don’t care who uses whose bathroom, what you wear, or how you identify. People from this community have rights which we must protect,” Caldara went on, “But to force us to use inaccurate pronouns, to force us to teach our kids that there are more than two sexes, to call what is plainly a man in a dress, well, not a man in a dress violates our right of speech.”

The paper’s editorial editor, Megan Schrader, wrote to the Washington Free Beacon acknowledging Caldara had left the paper, but did not indicate whether he was fired for the reason he claims.

“I am writing a job description as we speak to fill his position,” Schrader said. “I hope that conservative Colorado writers will apply knowing that we value conservative voices on our pages and don’t have a litmus test for their opinions.”

Caldara had published a weekly column for The Denver Post since 2016. The column touched on a variety of conservative and libertarian topics.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

FLIMSY CHARGES: McConnell proposes swift impeachment trial with long days (AP)

FINANCIAL AID IN THE CROSSHAIRS: Supreme Court takes up church-state separation in Christian schools case (NBC News)

INDIVIDUAL MANDATE PUNTED: Supreme Court won't rule on ObamaCare before Election Day, declines to fast track (NBC News)

AMBIGUOUS FUNDRAISING NUMBERS: Trump outraises individual Democrats but is behind the pack (The Resurgent)

FOR THE RECORD: Illegal border crossings fall a staggering 90% in Arizona following Trump policy change (The Daily Wire)

AND WHAT DOES SANDERS WANT? Sanders floats "moratorium on 99%" of deportations, demolition of border wall (National Review)

FAILED "REFORMS": Mexico murders rise to record 34,582 in AMLO's first year in office (Bloomberg)

POLICY: Yes, Trump deserves credit on black unemployment (Washington Examiner)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Some more interesting comments on Scruton

DANIEL HANNAN

I asked him what he saw as the role of a conservative thinker in the modern world.

His answer was an almost perfect encapsulation of his approach to politics. “The role of a conservative thinker,” he replied, in his charmingly hesitant manner, “is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true”.

That brilliant Burkeian adage animated the whole of my subsequent career in politics, up to and through the Brexit referendum. These days, of course, “prejudice” has come to mean something like “being nasty to minorities”. But Roger was using the word in its literal sense, to mean prejudging new events on the basis of past experience. He understood that life would be impossible if we approached each new situation from first principles, ignoring what Burke had called “the wisdom of our ancestors”.

Roger was a conservative in the truest sense. He put is faith in the natural, the evolved, the organic. He preferred the tried to the abstract. He understood that we are curators of a vast and growing work, far more complex than any single generation could create on its own. As he was to put it many years later:

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.”

In truth, though, Scruton’s conservatism had no place for hatred. He was, as he would often say, motivated, not by indignation, but by love: love for our institutions, our laws, our nation.

Conservatism, as he saw it, was attitudinal rather than doctrinal. It resided in a series of instincts and manners, not in documents.

SOURCE 

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The Coming Fall of the Meritocracy

By economic historian, Martin Hutchinson

The last five years have been marked in most Western societies by a populist revolt against the values of a leftist university-educated elite. That elite had appeared invulnerable, and increasingly separated from the rest of us, as Charles Murray described in his 2012 study “Coming Apart.” There are thus two questions to be answered: how did the elite become so cut-off and misguided, and will its rule survive the populist revolt?

The problems of a society dominated, not by inherited status or money, but by an academically-selected intellectual elite were first explored in the British sociologist Michael Young’s 1958 classic “The Rise of the Meritocracy.” Young’s satire accurately forecast many features of today’s intellectual elite-dominated society. He foresaw that children from disadvantaged backgrounds would generally fail the academic tests in their schooldays, and therefore be barred from the meritocratic elite, which would become largely closed and hereditary, though remaining convinced it had achieved its position through superior merit and hard work, not by accident of birth. Murray’s “Coming Apart” confirms the inbred, self-satisfied and self-perpetuating nature of the elite, as Young had predicted.

Young’s book was intended as a biting attack on the society-closing tendencies which he already saw emerging in the Britain of 1958, which he believed quite contrary to the open egalitarianism for which he had fought when writing the election manifesto for Clement Attlee’s 1945-51 Labour government. In later life, Young, by then Lord Young of Dartington, expressed shock that Tony Blair’s Labour government of 1997-2007, which he supported, appeared to welcome the meritocratic society that had arisen, rather than condemning its socially closed and intellectually rigid nature.

Young’s satire took the form of an imaginary PhD thesis written in 2033; we have not yet reached that date, but the last five years are indicating that the reaction to Young’s Meritocracy has already begun. There are several intellectual tenets that the Meritocracy devoutly believes, but which tend to its perpetuation and the enrichment of its members, rather than to the good of society as a whole. These fallacies are increasingly being questioned by electorates, and their overthrow may well result in the demise of the Meritocracy itself.

One devoutly believed fallacy central to the Meritocracy is the importance of university education. This is an essential prop to the Meritocracy’s survival: if university education, and in particular elite university education, ceased to be overwhelmingly important, barriers to entry into the Meritocracy would collapse and their earnings, wealth and social position would be devastated. The Meritocracy’s belief in university education has resulted in a relentless increase in the percentage of young people who attempt four-year college degrees, a relentless increase in the costs of those college degrees (because their perceived importance is increasing, allowing their providers to gold-plate facilities and bloat staffing) and a relentless increase in the pressure on university students to conform to Meritocracy beliefs and values.

The rising cost of college and the increasing diversity of the workforce may be changing this, however. Recent data suggests that there is no longer any wealth premium for college graduation for people born in the 1980s, though earlier cohorts still enjoy such a premium. That is largely a result of the increasing cost of college; the 1980s cohort incurred hugely more college debt than earlier cohorts, and so its progress to financial stability has been correspondingly hampered. As college becomes a less economically rational decision, young people are looking more closely at alternatives, such as vocational training for jobs that often pay considerably better than standard college-graduate jobs, while employers are looking more closely at applicants who acquired their skills outside the college arena.

Technology affects this further. For a diligent, self-motivated student, it is now possible to obtain the knowledge that previously required a college degree through online courses, at far lower cost than a college degree, and without the obnoxious political indoctrination. Conversely, the political indoctrination and “dumbing down” of college courses has now gone so far that a college graduate in many humanities subjects is far less educated and far less ready to contribute usefully to the world than was his grandparent graduating from the same college. The revolt against college education is only just beginning; it has much further to go and there is an enormous shakeout of the college sector to come, devastating existing institutions and further devaluing their economically worthless degrees. The Meritocracy does not know it yet, but college education, the central bastion of its power, is due for serious erosion.

A second core Meritocracy belief is in the superiority of Meritocracy-oriented careers. This results in legislation being passed to ensure that such activities remain highly paid, and that the vulgarities of the free market do not apply to them. For example, whereas any foreign graduate in computer science (not generally a Meritocracy-favored profession) can get a programming job in the United States via an H1B visa, foreign lawyers are much more strictly regulated; they must graduate from a U.S. law school and pass a local bar examination, and there are no H1B visas held open for them. Hence the starting salary of a U.S. graduate lawyer is about three times that of the equivalent computer science graduate.

This belief has also manifested itself in the discussion of how Britain should go about negotiating a trade deal with the EU once the initial Brexit has been achieved – a task that must be completed in a mere 11 months. The “quality” media, dominated and consumed by Meritocrats, are unanimous that the key need is to obtain access to the EU market for British banks, while the “old-fashioned” industry of fishing can easily be sacrificed. Yet politically and economically, such an approach would be madness. The best British banks, the merchant banks, were slaughtered by the Financial Services Act of 1986, and none of the remaining “clearing” banks have shown themselves capable of making decent money in EU domestic markets, in over 30 years of trying. Furthermore, banking income merely makes the overstuffed salons of London even more overstuffed, and its property market even more unaffordable, neither of them significant benefits for Britons as a whole.

Conversely, fishing is a very important British activity, naturally so for an island surrounded by an immense quantity of shallow fish-friendly water. A sensible trade deal would therefore hold rock-solid against any encroachment of foreign fishing boats into British territorial waters, thus enabling the British fishing industry to manage this immensely valuable and sustainable resource in an optimal fashion. It is not insignificant that the most important British fishing centers are in Northern cities like Great Grimsby, captured by the Conservatives in 2019 with a magnificent “swing” of 14.7%. The inhabitants of Great Grimsby are natural Conservatives, but for Boris Johnson’s government they must be nurtured so their new-found Conservative voting becomes a habit. London bankers, on the other hand, Meritocrats and EU Remainers to a man, are often foreign and even if not, vote Liberal Democrat or Labour – the fine old crusted Tories of the merchant banks (Lord Bicester, where are you now that we need you!) having been forced into extinction.

A third area of devout Meritocrat belief is in the desirability of high levels of immigration and the joys of a “diverse” society. The Meritocracy gets all the benefits of immigration — it provides cheap baby-sitters, maids and landscapers – while suffering none of the costs, since most Meritocrat jobs are protected from foreign competition. Diversity is also a positive; Meritocrats get to interact with other well-educated Meritocrats from different cultures, and the restaurant choices available have expanded immeasurably since their childhood. For non-Meritocrats, on the other hand, immigration means more competition for low-wage jobs, higher costs for housing, less availability of schools and medical facilities and a more unpleasant, crime-ridden environment, since the homogenous trusting society of a well-defined local culture breaks down when outsiders enter.

Finally, while Meritocrats often believe in theory in a free market, they find its openness to non-Meritocrats highly unpleasant, and therefore seek ways to control it through regulation. An overriding anxiety such as global warming is ideal for this purpose; it allows the Meritocrats to design regulations for the entire economy and ensure that activity is steered into areas where Meritocrats, being expert in their new regulations, have an excellent chance of success. If a Gosplan central planning system worked at all, they would support it, but a heavily regulated economy with agreed “ESG” societal goals on climate change, corporate governance and social engineering is an excellent second-best for them.

The European Union, therefore, was and is a quintessential Meritocrat project; it adds complex Meritocrat-designed regulations, provides innumerable well-paid jobs requiring advanced degrees, involves mixing with numerous different cultures, and quells the free market in an uncountable number of ways.

Technological change is undermining the Meritocracy’s elite university educations. Democracy is undermining the Meritocracy’s belief in promoting Meritocrat economic activities and in flooding their countries with immigrants. The lack of noticeable global warming will eventually undermine their belief in regulation to prevent climate change (though they may well find another environmentalist shibboleth to replace it). The sheer economic dysfunction of the EU will eventually cause its miserable inhabitants to rebel, as many are already doing. For all these reasons, Meritocracy is therefore doomed.

We should rejoice; Young’s 2033 was a very unattractive dystopia, and the collapse of Meritocracy will lead to greater freedom for all of us, even those lucky enough to be good at passing examinations.

SOURCE 

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Good News: President Trump to Take on Birth Tourism and Anchor Baby Crisis in America

There are some 33,000 births in the US to foreign nationals each year. Another 39,000 babies are born to foreign students, guest workers and other long-term temporary visa holders. And, an additional 300,000 babies are born to illegal aliens each year in the United States.

According to Axios — President Trump is going to focus on this crisis in the coming weeks. And Democrats will no doubt fight him on this too:

The Trump administration has a new target on the immigration front — pregnant women visiting from other countries — with plans as early as this week to roll out a new rule cracking down on “birth tourism,” three administration officials told Axios.

Why it matters: Trump has threatened to end birthright citizenship and railed against immigrant “anchor babies.” The new rule would be one of the first tangible steps to test how much legal authority the administration has to prevent foreigners from taking advantage of the 14th Amendment’s protection of citizenship for anyone born in the U.S.

“This change is intended to address the national security and law enforcement risks associated with birth tourism, including criminal activity associated with the birth tourism industry,” a State Department official told Axios.
The regulation is also part of the administration’s broader efforts to intensify the vetting process for visas, according to another senior administration official.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Trump Signs China Trade Deal, Pausing Sticky Economic Conflict

Note: Trump did NOT start a trade war.  He simply started fighting back

Pact Is a Turning Point in U.S. Trade Policy

President Trump signed an initial trade deal with China on Wednesday, bringing the first chapter of a protracted and economically damaging fight with one of the world’s largest economies to a close.

The pact is intended to open Chinese markets to more American companies, increase farm and energy exports and provide greater protection for American technology and trade secrets. China has committed to buying an additional $200 billion worth of American goods and services by 2021 and is expected to ease some of the tariffs it has placed on American products.

But the agreement preserves the bulk of the tariffs that Mr. Trump has placed on $360 billion worth of Chinese goods, and it maintains the threat of additional punishment if Beijing does not live up to the terms of the deal. “Today we take a momentous step, one that has never been taken before with China toward a future of fair and reciprocal trade with China,” Mr. Trump said at a ceremony at the White House. “Together we are righting the wrongs of the past.”

The deal caps more than two years of tense negotiations and escalating threats that at times seemed destined to plunge the United States and China into a permanent economic war. Mr. Trump, who campaigned for president in 2016 on a promise to get tough on China, pushed his negotiators to rewrite trade terms that he said had destroyed American industry and jobs, and he imposed record tariffs on Chinese goods in a gamble to get Beijing to accede to his demands.

“As a candidate for president, I vowed strong action,” Mr. Trump said. “Unlike those who came before me, I kept my promise.” The agreement is a significant turning point in American trade policy and the types of free-trade agreements that the United States has typically supported. Rather than lowering tariffs to allow for the flow of goods and services to meet market demand, this deal leaves a record level of tariffs in place and forces China to buy $200 billion worth of specific products within two years.

To Mr. Trump and other supporters, the approach corrects for past trade deals that enabled corporate outsourcing and led to lost jobs and industries. To critics, it is the type of managed trade approach that the United States has long criticized, especially with regard to China and its control over its economy.

While other presidents have tried to change China’s economic approach, Mr. Trump has leaned into it. The agreement stipulates that “China shall ensure” that its purchases meet the $200 billion figure by 2021, all but guaranteeing an export boom as Mr. Trump heads into the 2020 election.

“Although the administration claims it wants to enhance market forces in China, the purchase commitments hailed by the president will only strengthen the role of the state in the economy,” said Daniel Price, a former George W. Bush administration official and the managing director of Rock Creek Global Advisors.

The president’s approach may pay off politically. He will head into a re-election campaign with a commitment from China to strengthen its intellectual-property protections, make large purchases of American products and pursue other economic changes that will benefit American business.

At a lavish White House ceremony crowded with cabinet members, lawmakers and executives from America’s biggest companies, Mr. Trump seized on the signing as a counterweight to impeachment proceedings that were taking place across town, where lawmakers were about to vote to approve House prosecutors for a Senate trial.

“They have a hoax going on over there — let’s take care of it,” he said.

But the agreement has plenty of critics in both parties, who say that Mr. Trump’s tactics have been economically damaging and that the deal leaves many important economic issues unresolved.

Those include cybersecurity and China’s tight controls over how companies handle data and cloud computing. China rejected demands that the text include promises to refrain from hacking American companies, insisting it was not a trade issue.

And the deal does little to resolve more pernicious structural issues surrounding China’s approach, particularly its pattern of subsidizing and supporting crucial industries that compete with American companies, like solar energy and steel. American businesses blame those economic practices for allowing cheap Chinese goods to flood the United States.

“A ceremony at the White House can’t hide the stark truth about the ‘Phase 1’ China trade deal: The deal does absolutely nothing to curtail China’s subsidies to its manufacturers,” Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, which includes manufacturers and the United Steelworkers union, said in a tweet. “All those ‘forgotten men and women’ in U.S. factories have, once again, been forgotten.” The administration has said it will address some of these changes in Phase 2 of the negotiations and is keeping tariffs in place in part to maintain leverage for the next round of talks. Mr. Trump said he would remove all tariffs if the two sides reach agreement on the next phase.

“I will agree to take those tariffs off if we’re able to do Phase 2,” he said.

But Mr. Trump has already kicked the deadline for another agreement past the November election, and there is deep skepticism that the two countries will reach another deal anytime soon.

As part of the deal, Mr. Trump agreed to reduce the rate on tariffs imposed in September and forgo additional import taxes in the future.

But the United States will continue to maintain tariffs covering 65 percent of American imports from China, according to tracking by Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics. That leaves the United States with an overall tariff rate higher than that of any other advanced nation, as well as China, India and Turkey.

China will still tax 57 percent of imports from the United States in retaliation, according to Mr. Bown, though it’s possible some of those levies may be waived in the weeks to come.

The two sides did not immediately distribute copies of the agreement in Chinese, raising the question of whether translation issues had been fully resolved and whether the final text would be as demanding of the Beijing government in the Chinese version as in the English version.

“We also need to be sure that the wording of the agreement is the same in both the Chinese and English versions — history has shown that mismatches become easily exploited loopholes,” said Ker Gibbs, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.

While updates about the trade war transfixed investors for much of the last two years, the official signing of the deal was greeted with something of a shrug. The S&P 500 rose roughly 0.2 percent.

A gauge of semiconductor companies, which have been particularly sensitive to the trade war, fell more than 1 percent.

The deal came under fire from top Democrats, including Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who criticized the agreement for failing to address China’s stateowned enterprises and industrial subsidies. He suggested that President Xi Jinping of China was privately laughing at the United States and that China has “taken President Trump to the cleaners.” “This Phase 1 deal is an extreme disappointment to me and to millions and millions of Americans who want to see us make China play fair,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor.

Wendy Cutler, a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute who negotiated trade pacts for the Obama administration, called the gains “meaningful, but modest.” “Because the United States was willing to compromise with China and not press them on the most difficult issues, they were able to reach positive ground,” she said.

The trade deal contains a variety of victories for American industry, including opening up markets for biotechnology, beef and poultry.

Banks, insurers, drug companies and the energy industry are also big beneficiaries.

China has also agreed not to force American companies to hand over their technology as a condition of doing business there, under penalty of further tariffs.

And it will refrain from directing its companies to obtain sensitive foreign technology through acquisitions.

The agreement also includes a pledge by both countries not to devalue their currencies to gain an advantage in export markets.

The president trumpeted many of China’s concessions during the signing ceremony, singling out audience members who will benefit.

He called out a litany of Wall Street executives, many of whom have been pressing for greater access to China’s financial services market, including Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the private equity firm the Blackstone Group and Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel. He also mentioned the chiefs of Boeing, Citibank, Visa and the American International Group, and the chip makers Micron and Qualcomm.

Referring to the energy purchases in the agreement, Mr. Trump told Senator Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican, who was in attendance: “You got ethanol, so you can’t be complaining.” But those victories have come at a heavy price. The uncertainty created by Mr. Trump’s tariff threats and approach to trade has weighed on the economy, raising prices for businesses and consumers, delaying corporate investments and slowing growth around the globe. Businesses with exposure to China, like Deere & Company and Caterpillar, have laid off some workers and lowered revenue expectations, in part citing the trade war.

And other sources of tension remain in the United States-China relationship. The Trump administration has taken a tougher approach to scrutinizing Chinese investments and technology purchases for national security threats, including blacklisting Chinese companies like Huawei, the telecom firm.

“I think it’s maybe a useful pause in the downward spiral of U.S.-China relations,” Susan Shirk, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, said of the trade deal.

SOURCE 

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Bernie Supporters Plan to Boycott Election if Biden Is Nominee

What a great idea!

Bernie Sanders supporters are known for their steadfast loyalty to the socialist Vermont Senator, and some are promising to sit at home on Election Day if Joe Biden becomes the party’s nominee. These supporters warn that nominating another establishment candidate will ensure Trump’s reelection because they’ll sit it out.

Sanders’ supporters feel he “isn't getting his due though he's proven to have staying power in public opinion and fundraising, even after suffering a heart attack last October,” reports the Washington Examiner. “As of last week, he leads a tight four-horse race in Iowa ahead of the first-in-the-nation caucuses on Feb. 3, raising a record figure of $34.5 million in the final financial quarter of 2019 for a total of $96 million.” Despite his strengths in the primary, they feel he’s being ignored and underestimated, and the possibility of nominating a socialist-lite candidate, they say, will dampen the enthusiasm of the grassroots.

More HERE 

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Even without Jeremy Corbyn, The British Labour party are doomed – for this very simple reason

Crazy Leftists in Britain too

Soon enough, Jeremy Corbyn will be Labour leader no more. But this doesn’t automatically mean the party’s prospects will improve. Because, for all his many faults, Labour’s biggest problem isn’t Mr Corbyn.

It’s his supporters.

The supporters who put him there, and kept him there, and will choose his replacement. They’re the problem. In Tim Shipman’s book All Out War, published in 2016, there’s a quote from a despairing Labour MP who wisely requested to remain anonymous. “There are always going to be 500,000 people in this country who are off-the-page nuts,” the MP sighed. “The problem we’ve got is that they have all joined the Labour party to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.”

Thanks to that mass pro-Corbyn influx in the summer of 2015, Labour has a bigger membership than any other party in Europe. But that isn’t a strength. It’s a weakness. Because those pro-Corbyn members have so little in common with the wider electorate. Which means it’s become near-impossible for Labour to appeal to both. Try to win over the one, and immediately alienate the other.

So the party’s stuck. Stuck in the clutches of people who seem to spend more time attacking the last Labour government than attacking the current Conservative one. Increasingly it’s not even clear that they want Labour to form a government at all. Many of them instead obsess about forming “a mass movement”, whatever that means. If they actually wanted to achieve anything, there’s only one mass movement they’d care about. The mass movement of voters from Labour to the Tories, as seen on December 12.

Even though their idol is stepping down, the Corbynistas are unlikely to become any less fanatical. This week Momentum, the official Corbyn fan club, asked its members which leadership candidate they wished to endorse. Well, I say “asked”. The online ballot form featured only one name: that of Mr Corbyn’s close ally, Rebecca Long-Bailey.

Many of Mr Corbyn’s supporters probably don’t even think he should go. Before the election I covered a Labour rally in Northampton. A journalist from the Guardian asked Mr Corbyn, “If you lose the election, will you resign?”

The response from his supporters was immediate. “Why should he?” they blurted, in scandalised bewilderment. “Why should he?”

Obviously none of the leadership contenders can afford to say it, but Labour won’t get anywhere near office again until it rids itself of the Corbynistas. The quickest way to achieve this would be to make Jess Phillips leader. Most Corbynistas hate her so much that they would quit the party on the spot in disgust.

But, of course, she hasn’t a hope of becoming leader. Because the Corbynistas are still there to stop her.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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