Monthly Archives: February 2016

Trump’s kitchen cabinet

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trump guiliani

Naturally not in the American press but from The Daily Mail Online: Rudy Giuliani says Trump is smarter than he looks as The Donald consults with former NYC mayor and other ‘kitchen cabinet’ advisers. Here are the sub-heads for your delectation:

  • Donald Trump is assembling a ‘kitchen cabinet’ advisers
  • Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, economists Art Laffer and Steve Moore rumored to be involved
  • Trump promised in South Carolina that he would soon unveil a foreign policy advisory team
  • ‘He has an exceptionally good understanding of how the economy affects our foreign policy,’ Giuliani said of Trump
  • ‘This idea that he’s only familiar with slogans, it’s not accurate at all’

And the opening paras of the story:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a handful of policy wonks are casually advising Donald Trump as the Republican front-runner prepares for the kind of scrutiny he has yet to face.

But Giuliani says The Donald is up to the task.

‘You know, he’s very good,’ Giuliani told The Washington Post on Sunday, when a reporter asked whether the Republican front-runner has a decent grasp of complicated public policy issues.

‘It’s clear that he has an exceptionally good understanding of how the economy affects our foreign policy,’ he said of Trump.

‘He understands what’s happening with China, how they could stop North Korea in a heartbeat. This idea that he’s only familiar with slogans, it’s not accurate at all.’

A kitchen cabinet that includes Giuliani, Bill Bennett, Art Laffer and Steve Moore! This is the Dream Team of conservative political economy. And he’s anti-PC, and he knows his way around politics. And he can beat Hillary Clinton in a way no one else can even come close to trying. If you don’t see Trump is the closest answer there is to the problems we now face then you should renew your subscriptions to The Age and New York Times and be done with it.

Mark Steyn Update: Steyn, presently in Australia, casts his eyes back home to the election. Here he explains the formidable problems facing any Republican and concludes:

Long term, two things have to happen: America has to restore the integrity of its borders, and conservatism has to get a piece of the action in the schools and the culture. Short term, the GOP has done a grand job of screwing itself out of electoral viability.

The problem has been that many on the right side of politics believe it has to win over the left, hence Malcolm Turnbull, PM. Being a veteran between-the-lines-reader as I am, Steyn is saying it is Trump or no one. Alas, no one on the respectable right is permitted to say a good word about Trump, so he doesn’t either. But if the article doesn’t manage to set out for you where things are and how dire it is, then just wait till the campaigns start for real.

Donald Trump and international trade

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A comment from the thread in this case dealing with Donald Trump on free trade:

Heads explode all over these days. Note the outrageous claims, lots of personal invective and total lack of balance. Lowenstein was (is?) in the employ of the ferociously anti-Trump Murdoch vehicle, the WSJ. The same outfit who love their cosy relationship with the current political apparatus, and who run bogus ‘agenda polls’ to undermine Trump. RL is a shock jock journo. So think of this:

‘As someone who lived 27 years in East Asia, I know what a rich seam Trump is tapping into as he focuses on America’s trade disaster. For two generations already, increasingly pathetic American trade officials have turned a blind eye to the blatant barriers facing American exports in key foreign markets. One result has been a tragic roll-call of factory closures in the American heartland. Another result, as Trump has insistently pointed out, is that other nations literally laugh at the United States. They think of the U.S. government as idiotic where it is not corrupt.

The problem with free trade is not just that other countries cheat but that they see no reason not to cheat. Cheating confers several key benefits that American officials and commentators consistently sweep under the rug: just the most obvious is that it forces the transfer of American production technology.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of how formidably the Japanese car market is protected has been the performance of the Korean auto industry. At last count the Koreans had less than 0.02 percent of the Japanese car market.

Even Hyundai, Korea’s largest auto maker, sold a mere 1,700 cars a year in Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Repeated efforts to surmount Japanese trade barriers yielded so little that in 2009 Hyundai shut down its Japanese car sales division.’

I post regularly on this subject since I check out each of DJT’s claims. Technology theft from the engine of innovation is extremely well documented as are the methods of coercion in US-China trade relations.

I suspect Trump knows a good deal more about the realities of business dealings national and international than virtually any of those who comment in the press.

Understanding the death of the West – READ THIS!

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This is an article of such uncommon sense that it amazes me that it could be published at all. The title says it all: How the Feminists’ “War against Boys” Paved the Way for Islam. You must open at the link and you must read it. I will add a quote here but again, you have to read it all. I have chosen the quote only to bring to your attention the writings of Phyllis Chesler:

American writer Phyllis Chesler has sharply criticized her sisters in books such as The Death of Feminism. She feels that too many feminists have abandoned their commitment to freedom and “become cowardly herd animals and grim totalitarian thinkers,” thus failing to confront Islamic terrorism. She paints a portrait of current U.S. University campuses as steeped in “a new and diabolical McCarthyism” spearheaded by leftist rhetoric.

Chesler has a point. Judging from the rhetoric of many feminists, all the oppression in the world comes from Western men, who are oppressing both women and non-Western men. Muslim immigrants are “fellow victims” of this bias. At best, they may be patriarchal pigs, but no worse than Western men. Many Western universities have courses filled with hate against men that would be unthinkable the other way around. That’s why Scandinavian feminists don’t call for Scandinavian men to show a more traditional masculinity and protect them against aggression from Muslim men. Most Norwegian feminists are also passionate anti-racists who will oppose any steps to limit Muslim immigration as “racism and xenophobia.”

Now read it all. If this doesn’t scare you, you have not been paying attention, although many very unpleasant things will be brought to your attention in the very near future.

[Picked up at Instapundit]

So it’s all but settled then: Trump v Clinton

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trump portrait

With Donald Trump’s convincing win in South Carolina and Hillary Clinton’s win in Nevada, the dust has settled early this time on the respective party nominees. You must not think of this as carrying a great deal of satisfaction on my part in relation to Trump. He is the only candidate who had a chance to beat Hillary and even do some good if elected. More than ever do I see how the 2012 election was the one that mattered. But he remains a high risk candidate who will change the nature of politics in the US and across the world.

Perhaps to help us all see clear of what’s involved is an article by Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the right-side National Interest, on Trump Is Trampling Over the GOP’s Corpse. He has no more satisfaction in seeing this outcome than I do, but also has something else to say about how out of touch the Republican establishment had become. I might say that the comparison in my own mind has been to Andrew Jackson, which you’d have to know a bit about American history to see the parallel. This is his conclusion but there’s lots more at the link.

Militaristic unilateralism is fine for a conservative nationalist like Trump who displays a macho Jacksonian attitude about American honor—calling Iran’s seizure of American sailors an “absolute disgrace” that evinced a “lack of respect for our country and certainly our president.” But he’s also made it clear that he’s ready to give Russian president Vladimir Putin a free hand when it comes to Ukraine. And when it comes to Syria he’s cast doubt about the rebels by implicitly backing Bashar al-Assad — “we have no idea who these people [are] and what they’re going to be, and what they’re going to represent.” Trump’s intense repugnance for allies is deeply rooted in the GOP and in American history. Trump’s truculent stands prompted the historian Max Boot, an adviser to Rubio, to complain in the February Commentary that both Trump and Cruz are turning “their backs on decades of Republican foreign policy, which has been internationalist, pro-free trade, pro-immigration, pro-democracy, and pro-human rights.”

It’s not quite that simple—Republican foreign policy has veered between the pragmatism of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to the truculence of George W. Bush—but Boot is definitely onto something: like it or not, Trump and Cruz do represent a return to the party’s older traditions. Republican grandees are responding by trying to paint Trump as some kind of closet leftist for having the temerity to question the Bush war on terror. On Monday, Sen. Lindsey Graham called Trump “the Michael Moore of the Republican Party,” and poor Jeb Bush echoed him. “I don’t get it,” Jeb said.

You hear a lot of leading Republicans use that phrase nowadays: “I don’t get it.” That’s because they don’t get it. All Trump is doing is simply telling the truth as Trump sees it, and what he says is resonating because while it may be wrong at least it is new, and other Republicans are pretending the old bromides still work. All of which is why the GOP is becoming unmoored by his candidacy.

What worries me is that we will find, yet again, “Republicans” sitting the election out, or even worse voting for Hillary. I can only think that people don’t read the news or cannot see what’s happening with the borderless world that is being created. Trump says he will return us to a world of nation states and close the American border to all who cannot become Americans. I have no idea whether it can at this late stage be done, but I definitely want someone to try. But with Donald and Hillary selected, the big guns of the media will now turn on Trump. One of the parts about Romney that made a difference was that he was so clear of scandal that ultimately the only blemishes that could be found was that he had driven from Boston to Montreal with his dog on the roof, and when he was sixteen had been mean to some other kid at summer camp. Trump no doubt has much more scandal (but then so does Hillary in spades!), but on the other side, he will take none of this lying down, as the Pope himself recently discovered.

We shall see. I think it’s largely too late, but if there is anyway to ensure the collapse of the West, it is to elect Hillary Clinton president. Although I imagine no newspaper you will read between now and November will say so, Trump is the only one who might, just possibly, bring some order back into our world which is now disintegrating at every turn.

The attacks on Archbishop Pell are the terrible symptoms of a much worse disease

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I am with Andrew Bolt on this, Defend justice. Oppose this lynching of Pell. But for as much as I deplore every bit of it, this is now par for the course. The very essence of left ideology is an anti-Christian socialism. Pell is the latest focus for this hatred. Our latter-day Voltaires, who think they are écrasezing l’infâme, are just the handmaidens of a national socialist future across the West.

As a kind of measure of where we are, we went to see the film Trumbo last night [Rotten Tomatoes: critics 73% – audience 80%; IMDb: 73%]. Here is the dialogue that mattered, right at the start:

“Are you a communist?”

“Yes.”

A communist, Trumbo explains to his daughter, is someone who would share their lunch with another student who didn’t have a lunch of their own. There was no need to hide his communist past or beliefs although they were naturally distorted to keep the narrative free of any complications that might have arisen by knowing any of the facts. The producers were perfectly sure that in the world the film was being projected into, someone who was a communist while Stalin was still alive, would not be seen in a bad light by virtually anyone.

This is a war on our institutions and our traditional values waged by approximately half of our own population, the kind of people who need a trigger warning before being told that Stalin murdered thirty million people as part of his attempt to introduce socialism in one country.

If they are so worried about Hillary why don’t they start being positive about Trump

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It is not hard to see that our Republican elites are unable to accept that Donald Trump could win the nomination. The highest risk candidate imaginable, but also the only one who, if elected, could make a genuine difference in the right direction. Here is Paul Miringoff at Powerline, FOX NEWS POLL HAS SANDERS AHEAD OF CLINTON NATIONALLY, AND BOTH AHEAD OF TRUMP. About this, he concludes:

Anyone frightened by the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton or a President Bernie Sanders should also be frightened by the prospect of Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

Trump is not impossibly behind in any of these polls and others have him ahead. But the extreme negativity about Trump’s policies among establishment Republicans will end up settling the issue in Hillary’s favour. If you are really worried about a Democrat win, why don’t you start looking for some of the virtues in Donald Trump as president. It is the lack of imagination on the right side, who looks for a kind of French polish on its candidates, rather than the rough and tumble fighters that we truly need, that is going to pull the West into oblivion.

These people are charlatans

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Having looked at how out to lunch The Economist is I picked up The AFR over lunch and found this: OECD blasts reform fatigue, downgrades growth and calls for more rate cuts. They called for more than that, and this being the OECD, is the collective economic wisdom of the West. It is no wonder we are heading so deeply into recession.

Warning that global growth is faltering so fast there now needs to be a fresh wave of budget spending and interest rate cuts, the OECD demanded governments spend more money on investments and infrastructure, and get serious about productivity-boosting reform.

Officials at the Paris-based organisation also described the risk of another financial mishap on global markets as “substantial”. . . .

In the absence of fresh economic reform momentum, the OECD acknowledged there was now an urgent need to raising government spending on investments such as infrastructure, which they said would generate a strong growth dividend.

“Quality infrastructure projects would help to support future growth, making up for the shortfall in investment following the cuts imposed across advanced countries in recent years.

“A commitment to raising public investment collectively would boost demand while remaining on a fiscally sustainable path, the OECD said, pointing out that governments in many countries can borrow for long periods at very low interest rates.

“Many countries have room for fiscal expansion to strengthen demand.” . . .

“A recovery in private sector investment and wage growth is needed for global economic activity to accelerate.”

Anyone educated in economic theory before 1936 would think such advice was insane. Today it is mainstream and almost unquestioned anywhere in policy circles. And if this were still 2009, there might be some reason to experiment with a Keynesian stimulus. But now, after what we have seen, how can they keep pushing economic policies that have unmistakably failed! It’s the supply side, and only the supply side, that will bring recovery, which means recovery must be private-sector driven with no handouts to business of any kind by governments.

MR RUSTY AND HIS LIBERTY LINE OF APPAREL: The things you find when you go into the comments! The image is part of a T-shirt made with just the right sentiments for our stressed economic times. No one should be without one. Here is where you can order:

keynes wrong

Which comes with the text:

Author of the second worst economics textbook of all time and Chief wrongologist John Maynard Keynes has sadly influenced many Treasurers, economists and politicians who have adopted Keynesian economics in the mistaken belief it will grow economies.

And might I say, I can only hope this becomes a prime example of how supply [which must always come first] is able to create demand [which then follows someone’s putting some good or service up for sale].

The don’t get it, they really don’t get it

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From The Economist, Out of Ammo. The replacement of “despite” with “because of” is, of course, my own editorial intervention:

Despite Because of central banks’ efforts, recoveries are still weak and inflation is low. Faith in monetary policy is wavering. As often as they inspire confidence, central bankers sow fear. Negative interest rates in Europe and Japan make investors worry about bank earnings, sending share prices lower. Quantitative easing (QE, the printing of money to buy bonds) has led to a build-up of emerging-market debt that is now threatening to unwind. For all the cheap money, the growth in bank credit has been dismal. Pay deals reflect expectations of endlessly low inflation, which favours that very outcome. Investors fret that the world economy is being drawn into another downturn, and that policymakers seeking to keep recession at bay have run out of ammunition.

And if you don’t think these people are completely beyond reality, try this advice out from the same story:

The time has come for politicians to join the fight alongside central bankers. The most radical policy ideas fuse fiscal and monetary policy. One such option is to finance public spending (or tax cuts) directly by printing money—known as a “helicopter drop”. Unlike QE, a helicopter drop bypasses banks and financial markets, and puts freshly printed cash straight into people’s pockets. The sheer recklessness of this would, in theory, encourage people to spend the windfall, not save it.

And if you don’t like that, you can try this:

Elsewhere, governments can make use of a less risky tool: fiscal policy [Do these people never ever learn from experience?!?!?!]. Too many countries with room to borrow more, notably Germany, have held back. Such Swabian frugality is deeply harmful. Borrowing has never been cheaper. Yields on more than $7 trillion of government bonds worldwide are now negative. Bond markets and ratings agencies will look more kindly on the increase in public debt if there are fresh and productive assets on the other side of the balance-sheet. Above all, such assets should involve infrastructure. The case for locking in long-term funding to finance a multi-year programme to rebuild and improve tatty public roads and buildings has never been more powerful.

As an afterthought, they mention deregulation of various markets, which is the only sensible idea in the piece. Economics has been a pseudo-science since the 1930s with this the latest example of just how far gone it is.

The Democrats could still win

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Meaning, no matter who the Republicans put up, the Democrats, even with Hillary and Bernie, might actually win. It’s the 12-13% still unaccounted for who will now decide the fate of the American Republic and much else.

Against Hillary:

Trump wins 45% to 43%.
Cruz wins 45-44
Rubio wins 46-42

Against Bernie:

Trump wins 44% to 43%.
Cruz loses 42-44
Rubio wins 46-42

The question remains, who would be the best president, although to be the best president you also have to be the winner of the election. Meanwhile, you have this kind of nonsense from The Wall Street Journal to contend with: Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican party. And when we are talking about voting Democrat, we are talking about putting either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders into the White House, not some anonymous person unknown. So you tell me what sense there is in this?

The Trump phenomenon offers a moral challenge not only to evangelicals, but to the entire Republican leadership. Nine months ago I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Mr. Trump would receive his party’s nomination and go on to win the presidency. Now I can. If he wins in South Carolina, conscientious Republicans will have to ask themselves whether they can be complicit in a course of events that hands the Oval Office to a man so manifestly unfit for the presidency. It is hard to decide which is a greater threat to the republic — Donald Trump’s pervasive ignorance or his deep-seated character flaws.

Some leading Republicans have quietly told me that they would break ranks if Mr. Trump wins their party’s nomination. A few have said so publicly. Unless a viable alternative emerges soon, every Republican will face the same dilemma.

The same kind of idiocy that found itself walking away from Romney in 2012. I cannot think of two more extreme possible representatives of the Republican Party than Trump and Romney, businessmen though they both may be. I will merely add this comment from The Australian thread following the article:

It seems clear to me that Trump’s critics have got him completely wrong.

Many Americans are looking for the one man they believe can fix the problems created under Barack Obama. They know it’s Donald Trump.

Trump’s supporters already know what he plans to do as President. They know what he will do, why he will do it, how he will do it, and how he will pay for it. It’s all set out in Trump’s two books “Time To Get Tough: Making America #1 Again” and “Crippled America: How To Make America Great Again”.

Trump’s critics haven’t bothered to find out his plans … they prefer to pander to the tabloid sound-bites.

If Trump can win South Carolina, it will send shock waves through the republican party. You see, while New Hampshire has produced the republican nomination 15 out of 17 occasions, South Caroline has a perfect record in picking the eventual republican nomination.

Anyone who thinks that it ought to be a toss up between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump should never be allowed to comment on politics again. You may not think he is the best among the Republicans, but if you vote Democrat because Trump is the nominee then you are too stupid for words.