World Order Separating Before Trump Became President But He Is A Convenient Pole to Hang Any Flag On. Jane Fonda Rants.

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Celebrating my birthday in Louisville.                               Four Generations.
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David Smick believes the world was falling apart before Trump. (See 1 below.)
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California might divide itself into three states according to the upcoming ballot

 I believe they should split into four so they will have a home for their growing homeless population.

Meanwhile, Alex Baldwin thinks he could win the presidency.  His campaign strategy is to run on a ticket espousing hate for Trump. DeNero could be his VP and Maher his economic advisor.

Also, Jane Fonda is back on her anti-aircraft weapon of choice and is lending her voice to that of Alex Baldwin, Robert DeNiro, Bill Maher and other left wingers who fly off the handle from time to time because Trump has proven to be a serious threat to America and, along with Harvey Weinstein, to Hollywood. (See 2 below.)
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Tobin continues beating a dead camel. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Who Unraveled the New World Order?

It wasn’t Trump. The global economic consensus began falling apart years before he entered politics.

David M. Smick

European Council President Donald Tusk recently said that Donald Trump’s approach to trade, climate change and the Iran nuclear deal is undermining “the rules-based international order.” This is absurd. The global order began unraveling long before Mr. Trump’s debut on the world stage.

That was the beginning of the so-called Washington Consensus—a new global order based on deregulating market access, liberalizing capital and trade flows, encouraging domestic competition, fortifying the rule of law, and reducing taxes, debt and market subsidies. By 1995, the leaders of this new world order established the World Trade Organization, which China joined six years later.

Much of the world initially embraced the Washington Consensus. Countries became more productive, which lowered real wage costs globally. Global trade grew at more than twice the rate of global economic output. Soon an ocean of excess savings began to swirl around a newly liberalized international financial system, a lot of it directed to U.S. assets. Long-term U.S. interest rates dropped to abnormal lows. Financial risk became underpriced. Equity markets boomed.

Even the Asian crisis of the late 1990s failed to end the party. Indeed, many countries learned and grew from it. They tied their currencies to the U.S. dollar, eschewed consumption and refashioned their economies as large export platforms. The global ocean of excess savings grew larger.

But the story went downhill from there. Many members of this new order, including China, failed to deliver on their promises. They created obstacles, invented hardship scenarios and developed loopholes to avoid their commitments. In some cases, they engaged in outright intellectual-property theft, currency manipulation and cyberwarfare. The great vision suddenly blurred.

By 2007 the world-wide underpricing of financial risk, combined with reckless bank leveraging, helped set the stage for the financial crisis. In 2009 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared, “The old Washington Consensus is over.”

This global order still had created unprecedented wealth, helping to raise a billion people out of poverty. But it also had led to wealth inequality, flat real wages, and an international financial system hugely out of balance. Central banks injected tens of trillions of dollars of liquidity, trying to protect asset prices based on an order that no longer existed.

It eventually became clear that the original vision of a new global economic order was only a romanticized dream. Many nations took part in the global system—but not to liberalize their economies or make them more transparent and accessible. They came to game the system.

In response, the Trump administration has offered some one-off tariffs. But this is like a doctor writing out a prescription for an aggressive drug, with potentially negative side effects, without a long-term plan for the patient’s health.

The U.S. economy—the patient—has an amazing ability to innovate and reinvent. A long-term plan is necessary to preserve and protect these unique strengths in today’s increasingly lawless world. Especially since the values of free and open economies, fair play and the rule of law are increasingly out of fashion.

Tariffs are a poor substitute for strategic planning about the future of the global economy. Instead of tariffs, the U.S. should form a “values coalition of the willing.” This group of nations would agree to a tougher order that demands more transparency, accountability and fair play, along with fewer tariffs and other barriers to economic entry. This would be backed by the rule of law.

Not all economies would make the cut. Europe is a mixed bag. After the Brexit vote, German policy makers immediately feared that with Britain out of the European Union, Berlin would be isolated. It would have to fight off Brussels’ mercantilist, anti-free-market technocrats without another large country as an ally.

In China and other mercantilist economies, production bears no relation to market demand, the definition of the word “contract” is the beginning of negotiations, and cyberwarfare is simply part of business. Those countries should be treated separately as such.

The world has changed since 1989. The global order is gone. It is time to build a new one.

Mr. Smick is founder, chairman and CEO of the Washington global macroeconomic market advisory firm Johnson Smick International Inc.

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2)Jane Fonda Pushes for Government Overthrow

Anti-Trump actress Jane Fonda warned a crowd of celebrities of the “existential crisis” America is currently facing under President Trump, saying it's time to be “taking back our government.”

Breitbart reports:

After winning the Female EMA Lifetime Achievement Award at the Environmental Media Association (EMA) first Honors Benefit Gala, Fonda said that Democrats taking the House in the upcoming mid-terms elections was crucial to saving the country.

“This is an existential crisis that we’re in,” said the 80-year-old Grace and Frankie star. “We have to do everything we can to take back the house in November. If anything can save us, it’s gonna be taking back our government.”

Other actresses present at the ceremony included Elizabeth Olsen and Fonda’s Grace and Frankie co-star Lily Tomlin, who told The Hollywood Reporter: “[Trump] is dangerous — he’s unfortunately dangerous to the planet, if nothing else. If we could raise Trump’s consciousness, that would be helpful.”

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3) Obama’s Failures Created Trump’s New Middle East

In The New Yorker, an investigation of efforts by Israel and the Gulf state to outmaneuver Obama ignores why they succeeded.

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN

The search for explanations and scapegoats for the rejection of President Obama’s worldview in the 2016 election continues. In The New Yorker’s latest contribution to this genre — “Donald Trump’s New World Order: How the President, Israel, and the Gulf States plan to fight Iran and leave the Palestinians and the Obama years behind” — the author, Adam Entous, doesn’t label as collusion the efforts by Israel and the Gulf states to undermine Obama-administration policies and influence the Trump campaign. But the underlying theme of the massive report is that those efforts are disreputable, if not as shady as forms of intervention practiced by the Russians.

There is little here that is new or shocking about the fact that the Israelis felt President Obama treated them unfairly as he pushed for a peace deal with the Palestinians. The same is true about the anger of the Israelis, the Saudis, and the United Arab Emirates about Obama’s efforts to bring about a rapprochement with Iran. In particular, the open antagonism between the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration was much reported at the time, with the White House leaking juicy tidbits to pet journalists who were members of what deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes called their “echo chamber.”

Nor was it a secret that both the Israelis and their Gulf-state allies of convenience believed that relations with the United States would improve no matter who won the 2016 election. That they were trying to get a handle on a potential Trump administration, even if that was an outcome that few in the United States or elsewhere thought was likely, was also not kept quiet.

The frame of reference adopted by Entous is that of the Obama administration, whose alumni make up most of his sources. According to their retelling, President Obama was a good friend of Israel whose efforts for peace were frustrated by Netanyahu and his settlement policies. After eight years, they were fed up and orchestrated the passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned Israeli settlement building, including apartments constructed in the Jewish neighborhoods built in Jerusalem after its unification in 1967.

As Entous reports, that led to Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer’s reaching out to President-elect Trump’s team. Dermer was especially fearful that a settlements resolution would be followed by one that laid down the borders for a Palestinian state that would be essentially granted independence without first having to make peace with Israel. While Trump and his aides were willing to help try to prevent the passage of the settlements resolution, they were characteristically too disorganized to do much pre-inauguration collusion with the Israelis, and Obama’s effort to punish Netanyahu on his way out the door succeeded.

Whether that was a wrongful act that impinged on the right of Obama to conduct foreign policy while he remained in power or was merely a legitimate effort by an incoming administration to keep its hands from being tied by a predecessor is a matter of opinion. But either way, a second resolution didn’t follow, leaving Trump able to pursue his own approach without being hindered by Obama’s legacy. Yet, as Entous lays out in almost painful detail, the Israelis and the Gulf States had been trying for years to deal with a powerful American ally that was eagerly pursuing policies they considered dangerous to their vital interests, and they acted accordingly.

Once Trump was in office, the Gulf States and the Israelis proceeded to follow up on their efforts of the previous year to persuade the new president to reject Obama’s path on both the Palestinians and Iran. In his reporting about Arab and Israeli efforts to build a relationship with and influence presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner in order to achieve their objective, Entous provides an interesting portrait of both their diplomacy and Kushner’s willingness to listen. But the truth is, no one in the new administration needed much persuasion to de-emphasize efforts to create a Palestinian state or reject the Iran nuclear deal.

While Obama’s hopes that the Iran nuclear deal would give Tehran a chance to “get right with the world” proved illusory, his one tangible contribution to Middle East peace was that he pushed Sunni Arab states into Israel’s arms. The Gulf Arabs are more fearful of Iran than they ever were of Israel. They now find the Jewish state to be a natural security partner along with a Trump administration that is determined to renegotiate a nuclear deal that only postponed the threat of an Iranian bomb while allowing the Islamist regime the freedom and the cash to fund terrorism and its adventure in Syria.

Nor was Trump’s shift on the Palestinians motivated solely by the desire of the new administration to reject all of its predecessors’ priorities. If, as Entous writes, the Palestinians are the big losers in Trump’s new Middle East, it’s not because the new president didn’t want to be the one to broker the “ultimate deal.” It’s because the Palestinians demonstrated that they were no more prepared to budge from their maximal demands with a less sympathetic Trump than they were with someone like Obama, who deeply sympathized with their ambitions.

The problem with Entous’s narrative is that Obama, obsessed with pressuring Israel into more concessions, ignored Palestinians’ behavior and their refusal to compromise. It was Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas who torpedoed Secretary of State John Kerry’s initiative in 2014, by choosing to make peace first with his Hamas rivals rather than with Israel and then making an end run around U.S. diplomacy by going to the U.N. to try to gain recognition of the Palestinians’ independence.

This account also failed to recognize the role that Abbas, though his official incitement of hate against Jews and his subsidies and pensions paid to terrorists and their families, had in discrediting the peace process among Israelis. Despite Obama’s repeated efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the Palestinians’ direction, they chose never even to try and meet him halfway. For all of the insults from the White House directed at Netanyahu, thanks to Abbas’s refusal to seriously negotiate, the Israeli prime minister was never put to the test, never forced to reject a peace deal, since the Palestinians never let things get that far. Abbas was always too mindful of his need to compete with the Hamas terrorists for popularity ever to allow himself to be put in a position where he would be forced to choose between peace and continuing the conflict.

Indeed, the lesson that Obama and his staff never learned was that by treating such issues as unimportant and instead focusing on trying to make Netanyahu make concessions on Jerusalem — a consensus issue inside Israel — they were only strengthening the prime minister’s already strong domestic political standing.

The same pattern has held since Trump took office. Despite Trump’s direct personal demands, Abbas has refused to stop the terror subsidies. And despite being warned about incitement, he has doubled down on it, spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric as well as Holocaust denial to add to his statements denying Jewish ties to Jerusalem.

That has not stopped the Trump team from working on a peace plan that may be unveiled this summer and for which they will likely have the approval of both the Saudis and the Israelis. But since the Palestinian state they will propose will be smaller than previous offers the Palestinians have rejected, Abbas has already told the Saudis the answer will again be “no.”

The Trump team characterizes this as a bad business decision comparable to a decision not to buy Google stock when it was cheap, or passing on a real-estate property before its price rises. The Palestinians are baffled by this and insist that their position is one of justice, even as they undermine their cause by denying Israel’s legitimacy and making it obvious they won’t end the conflict on any terms.

The focus of Trump and the Gulf State Arabs on Iran as well as the carnage in Syria have demonstrated that Obama’s belief that Palestinian grievances are the root cause of Middle East conflict is a myth. While the alumni of his administration are still fuming about the way the region has gotten behind Trump, they need to acknowledge that it was their failure to be realistic about the Palestinians and their hopes about Iran that set the stage for the rejection of their policies. If it’s now Trump’s “New Middle East,” that’s only because Obama’s vision has been so thoroughly debunked by events.

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