Obama delayed going to La. because he did not want
to disrupt the rescue but he criticized GW for not going
right away. Obama remains a fraud.
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Guests do not work. (See 1 below.)
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Prager U an answer to Leftist Professors who are filling the heads of students with hate America
ideas.
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Israel is way ahead when it comes to desalination and we are stuck with Obama who is all wet! (See 2 below.)
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Aleppo, another Obama orchestrated tragedy.
Does Obama even know what outcome he seeks in Syria and if so how to achieve this goal? (See 3 and 3a below.)
The Iran Deal, another Obama theory gone awry and the ominous consequences will befall the next president. (See 3b below.)
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The Clinton's have agreed if Hillary becomes president it would not be worthy of them to do what they did while she was Sec. of State. How gracious of them.
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Muslim funding of Western Universities and colleges is having an insidious, termite like effect. (See 4 below.)
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Yes, Trump is running to win but can he come from so far behind and do so? (See 5 below.)
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Can government be made agile again? If so, how? (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)
GERMAN ASYLUM SEEKERS REFUSE TO WORK: 'WE ARE MERKEL'S GUESTS'
By Christine Williams
Even in the midst of the Muslim migrant crisis in Germany, Mayor Bernd Pohlers of the eastern town of Saxony Waldenburg, where the asylum seekers refused to accept work, stated his concern about this latest piece of news playing “into the hands of those opposing the mass migration,” evincing yet again the all too familiar stench of political posturing and a cruel disregard for those who cast their votes in trust.
“German asylum seekers refuse to work insisting ‘We are Merkel’s GUESTS'”, by Siobhan McFadyen and Monika Pallenberg, UK Express, August 18, 2016:
ASYLUM seekers in Germany are refusing to undertake work to counteract boredom – using Chancellor Angela Merkel’s generous hospitality as an excuse.
According to mayor Bernd Pohlers of the eastern town of Saxony Waldenburg, the asylum seekers refused to accept the work that was offered to them after they arrived in the country.
The local council spent £600 arranging for the men to have uniforms but were stunned when they were told they would not complete it because they were “guests of Angela Merkel”.
While asylum seekers are not allowed to work under immigration rules within the EU, they are allowed to do voluntary work.
However officials in the district of Zwickau came up with a plan to help encourage those without employment to get back to work and to help them become more accepted within the local community.
In order to do this they created voluntary jobs which included a nominal payment of £18 for 20 hours work.
But all of the male residents of the local refugee accommodation who initially agreed to get involved in the charitable activities quit after discovering there was a minimum wage £7.30 (€8.50) in Germany.
The men had been picked up and offered transportation from their paid-for housing where they are also given food and then dropped home.
Mayor Pohlers said: “It was subsequently argued by these people that they are guests of Mrs. Merkel and guests do not have to work.
“Furthermore, they were of the opinion that there is a minimum wage (€8.50) in Germany, and that this had to be paid by the City Waldenburg.”
Despite attempts at mediation the asylum seekers refused to return to work.
Mayor Pohlers added: “In a specially convened meeting with an interpreter the authorities explained the rules again.
“Unfortunately, no agreement could be reached on the continuation of the measure.”
Now all seven of the jobs have been scrapped.
The mayor spoke out in a bid to highlight the issue of the asylum crisis in Germany.
He said he is aware his statements could play into the hands of those opposing the mass migration.
However after having raised money from the local community to help aid the asylum seeker’s transition into the community, he felt compelled to speak out…..
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2)
Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here
One of the driest countries on Earth now makes more freshwater than it needsJuly 19, 2016 — Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.“Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.
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DRIVEN TO DESPERATION
In 2008, Israel teetered on the edge of catastrophe. A decade-long drought had scorched the Fertile Crescent, and Israel’s largest source of freshwater, the Sea of Galilee, had dropped to within inches of the “black line” at which irreversible salt infiltration would flood the lake and ruin it forever. Water restrictions were imposed, and many farmers lost a year’s crops.Their counterparts in Syria fared much worse. As the drought intensified and the water table plunged, Syria’s farmers chased it, drilling wells 100, 200, then 500 meters (300, 700, then 1,600 feet) down in a literal race to the bottom. Eventually, the wells ran dry and Syria’s farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm. More than a million farmers joined massive shantytowns on the outskirts of Aleppo, Homs, Damascus and other cities in a futile attempt to find work and purpose.And that, according to the authors of “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was the tinder that burned Syria to the ground. “The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria,” they wrote, “marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.”Similar stories are playing out across the Middle East, where drought and agricultural collapse have produced a lost generation with no prospects and simmering resentments. Iran, Iraq and Jordan all face water catastrophes. Water is driving the entire region to desperate acts.MORE WATER THAN NEEDS
Except Israel. Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs. The turnaround started in 2007, when low-flow toilets and shower heads were installed nationwide and the national water authority built innovative water treatment systems that recapture 86 percent of the water that goes down the drain and use it for irrigation — vastly more than the second-most-efficient country in the world, Spain, which recycles 19 percent.But even with those measures, Israel still needed about 1.9 billion cubic meters (2.5 billion cubic yards) of freshwater per year and was getting just 1.4 billion cubic meters (1.8 billion cubic yards) from natural sources. That 500-million-cubic-meter (650-million-cubic-yard) shortfall was why the Sea of Galilee was draining like an unplugged tub and why the country was about to lose its farms.Enter desalination. The Ashkelon plant, in 2005, provided 127 million cubic meters (166 million cubic yards) of water. Hadera, in 2009, put out another 140 million cubic meters (183 million cubic yards). And now Sorek, 150 million cubic meters (196 million cubic yards). All told, desal plants can provide some 600 million cubic meters (785 million cubic yards) of water a year, and more are on the way.The Sea of Galilee is fuller. Israel’s farms are thriving. And the country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water?WATER DIPLOMACY
Inside Sorek, 50,000 membranes enclosed in vertical white cylinders, each 4 feet high and 16 inches wide, are whirring like jet engines. The whole thing feels like a throbbing spaceship about to blast off. The cylinders contain sheets of plastic membranes wrapped around a central pipe, and the membranes are stippled with pores less than a hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Water shoots into the cylinders at a pressure of 70 atmospheres and is pushed through the membranes, while the remaining brine is returned to the sea.Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).The International Desalination Association claims that 300 million people get water from desalination, and that number is quickly rising. IDE, the Israeli company that built Ashkelon, Hadera and Sorek, recently finished the Carlsbad desalination plant in Southern California, a close cousin of its Israel plants, and it has many more in the works. Worldwide, the equivalent of six additional Sorek plants are coming online every year. The desalination era is here.What excites Bar-Zeev the most is the opportunity for water diplomacy. Israel supplies the West Bank with water, as required by the 1995 Oslo II Accords, but the Palestinians still receive far less than they need. Water has been entangled with other negotiations in the ill-fated peace process, but now that more is at hand, many observers see the opportunity to depoliticize it. Bar-Zeev has ambitious plans for a Water Knows No Boundaries conference in 2018, which will bring together water scientists from Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for a meeting of the minds.Even more ambitious is the US$900 million Red Sea–Dead Sea Canal, a joint venture between Israel and Jordan to build a large desalination plant on the Red Sea, where they share a border, and divide the water among Israelis, Jordanians and the Palestinians. The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea, which has been dropping a meter per year since the two countries began diverting the only river that feeds it in the 1960s. By 2020, these old foes will be drinking from the same tap.On the far end of the Sorek plant, Bar-Zeev and I get to share a tap as well. Branching off from the main line where the Sorek water enters the Israeli grid is a simple spigot, a paper cup dispenser beside it. I open the tap and drink cup after cup of what was the Mediterranean Sea 40 minutes ago. It tastes cold, clear and miraculous.The contrasts couldn’t be starker. A few miles from here, water disappeared and civilization crumbled. Here, a galvanized civilization created water from nothingness. As Bar-Zeev and I drink deep, and the climate sizzles, I wonder which of these stories will be the exception, and which the rule.
3)
What Will History Say About Aleppo?
If a humanitarian disaster doesn’t get shown on television, is it really happening? Perhaps that’s what the Obama administration is thinking as it ponders the unfolding catastrophe in Aleppo, Syria as the Assad government and its Russian allies pound the city into rubble while its people face potential starvation. Focused as it has always been on winning the news cycle against Republicans or helping the president’s designated successor against her incompetent opponent, the White House doesn’t appear to be that worried about the consequences of inaction as the siege of the city of roughly two million people continues. But for a man who seems to care a lot about his legacy, perhaps President Obama should be thinking today about what history will say about his willingness to give the Russians and their barbarous ally a green light to go on slaughtering so many people.
Objective observers must concede that there have never been many good options for the U.S. in the conflict in Syria. Moreover, once the president failed to act at the beginning of the civil war when bold leadership from the West might have averted the worst outcomes and then failed to back up his “red line” comment about Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people, it may be that America’s chance to have a positive impact had vanished. But even if we avoid recriminations about Obama’s past failures on the Syrian conflict, the president can’t get a pass for his current ineffectual stance. As it stands now, the administration is acknowledging that the situation is a disaster. But it can’t avoid responsibility for the current loss of life and the potential for an even greater catastrophe because the people who are carrying out these atrocities—Russia—are doing so under the assumption that the U.S. has handed off responsibility for the conflict to Putin and Assad. Though the Russians understand they must make some gestures—such as temporary halts to the bombing—to appease Obama, the U.S. protests about the siege aren’t doing much to alter the situation on the ground.
The fighting around Aleppo is confusing since Islamic State advances have helped to cut off the city. But the Russians and Assad forces are pounding neighborhoods that are controlled by rebels, not aligned with ISIS. The chaos there is enough to make even those Americans who bother to follow the story throw up their hands in disgust and hopelessness. And with no TV crews to film the devastation or to pluck the heartstrings of Western audiences—such as was the case when the international media was there in full force to cover Gaza when Hamas terrorists were fighting Israel in 2014—there is no public groundswell to force a cease-fire or to ensure that the people of Aleppo aren’t deprived of food or medical supplies.
The Russians have happily accepted the administration’s decision to punt on Syria since it essentially gives them free reign to, with the help of Iran and its Hezbollah auxiliaries, ensure Assad’s survival. They have also played along with Secretary of State John Kerry’s pathetic efforts to create a diplomatic solution secure in the knowledge that they will fail and leave them in charge as Vladimir Putin’s effort to resurrect the Soviet empire gains ground. Since President Obama wants to essentially withdraw America from the Middle East, leaving Russia and Iran in charge and Israel and moderate Arab states in peril, he has been prepared to stand by futilely while what is left of Syria and its population is ground into the dust. The fact that the Russians and Assad have prioritized the defeat of non-ISIS rebels only makes this deal with the devil even more of a loser for the U.S.
The president’s belief that letting the Russians have their way in Syria will help the war against ISIS is another mistake. The group will thrive so long as the current regime remains in power and it is seen as the defender of Sunnis against Assad’s Alawites and the Russians.
But this another moment when the geopolitical miscalculations must be put aside and the situation on the ground must be recognized for what it is. If the Russians and Assad are not stopped, the loss of life in Aleppo will be enormous. The Russians must be warned that the U.S. will not tolerate that happening and that it will rethink the cooperation it has been giving Moscow if they are not heeded. But history will judge Obama harshly if a few weak statements about the situation are the best he can do.
Past presidents, such as Bill Clinton, have regretted their failure to act to save lives when a massacre was about to happen as it did in Rwanda on his watch. But Clinton’s failure there will not be as egregious as Obama’s in Syria since the perpetrators are under the impression that they have tacit U.S. permission to do as they like. On Obama’s watch, hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions have been made refugees in Syria. If those totals grow even more in his last months of office, he will not be able to say that he was without guilt.
3a) What Outcome do we Seek in Syria?
Russian warplanes took off this week from Iran to hit targets in Syria. Russia has used Iranian bases for refueling and resupply in the past, but this is its first bombing mission from the Islamic Republic -- it is also the first foreign military operation to take place from Iranian soil since the 1979 revolution. Iran’s National Security chief said Iran and Russia “enjoy strategic cooperation in the fight against terrorism in Syria, and share their facilities and capacities to this end.”
Whether temporary or serving longer term Russian interests, the increasing breadth and capability of the Russian military in the region -- allied with the State Department’s number one designated state sponsor of terror -- presents problems for the United States. The Obama administration, however, appears oddly unconcerned.
- A State Department spokesperson said, “We have nothing to announce at this time. We speak regularly with Russian officials about ways to strengthen the Cessation of Hostilities, improve humanitarian access and bring about the conditions necessary to find a political solution to this conflict.”
- Another spokesperson called it, “unfortunate, but not surprising or unexpected.”
- From the Pentagon, “As we understand it, they hit three areas in Syria. One area had ISIS fighters in it, and we have hit there ourselves before. The other two areas do not have ISIS concentrations.”
The area that did not have ISIS fighters had anti-Assad rebels. Does the State Department think Russian bombing will help “find a political solution to the conflict”? What does the U.S. think a “political solution” should look like?
There is no easy side for America to take -- if we take any. On one side is a war criminal, whose allies are Russia, Iran, and Hizb’allah (a U.S.-designated terrorist organization). On the other is the “opposition,” a collection of fighters including Jabhat al-Nusra -- until last week calling itself an arm of al Qaeda -- the Free Syrian Army, ISIS-affiliated rebels, and groups with acronyms previously unknown. Some will fight ISIS. Some are ISIS. Some will fight only Assad. Just about all are Sunni Islamists supported financially by America’s erstwhile allies in the Gulf plus Turkey. Among the Kurdish groups, some are Assad’s allies; some are America’s allies. All are the enemy of Turkey, a NATO member.
Our allies have their own agendas, as do our adversaries.
The Iran-Russia axis anchors the ends of the Shiite Crescent from Iran across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, ending in the Mediterranean. The Crescent is an Iranian goal that threatens a variety of countries on its periphery, including Israel and Turkey. Russia’s goals include 1) maintaining a friendly government in Damascus that will permit Russian bases at Tartus and Latakia, 2) broader military access to the region, and 3) status as “go to” power as the United States withdraws its influence. Partnership in the Shiite Crescent ensures all three.
Washington has been trying to find a way to cooperate with Russia in Syria without acknowledging that Russia’s goals, and Iran’s, are inimical to the president’s insistence that Assad has to go. The Washington Post reminded its readers this week of Mr. Obama’s words in 2012. “With allies and partners, we will keep increasing the pressure, with a diplomatic effort to further isolate Assad and his regime, so that those who stick with Assad know that they are making a losing bet.”
Has the president changed his mind? Does he now believe the Russians and Iranians together can impose some sort of brutal stability on the region, and their dominance would be in our interest?
The longer the fighting goes on, the more casualties there will be -- including civilian casualties. In a country where an estimated 470,000 people have already been killed, the numbers are horrific. The United Nations believes 1 in 10 Syrians have been killed or wounded since 2012; the American equivalent would be 32,400,000 people.
In 2014, President Obama snippily informed Israel that it must “do more to protect Gaza civilians,” while Hamas was using those civilians as shields for its fighters, weapons, and rocket launchers. But Syrians are dying at a horrific rate and by horrific means -- chemical weapons, barrel bombs, starvation and more -- while the United States tries to coordinate with Russia and Russia coordinates with Iran.
This is neither a call for the U.S. to send more troops to Syria nor support for any particular faction. But with more than 7,000 American troops already fighting there and in Iraq, it is past time for the United States to decide how to block Russian and Iranian neo-imperialism and secure the interests of our regional allies and ourselves.”
3b)
Why the Ayatollah Thinks He Won
The U.S. hoped that the nuclear deal would boost Iran’s moderates, but after more than a year, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his allies seem to be the big winners
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at a meeting with university students in Tehran, Iran, in a picture released by his office’s website on July 11, 2015. PHOTO: OFFICE OF THE IRANIAN SUPREME LEADER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Since the completion last year of a landmark deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has lashed out again and again at the U.S. for its supposed failure to live up to its end of the bargain. But a speech he gave on Aug. 1 in Tehran took his anti-American rhetoric to a new level. He accused the Obama administration of a “bullying policy” and of failing to lift sanctions in a way that benefited “the life of the people.” Mr. Khamenei ruled out cooperation with the U.S. in the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, telling his audience that Iran’s experience with the nuclear deal “showed us that we cannot speak to [the Americans] on any matter like a trustworthy party.” Many in the crowd chanted anti-U.S. slogans.
Is Iran preparing to walk away from the accord? It’s unlikely. Mr. Khamenei’s speech was classical political posturing intended to rally his hard-line followers. But more than that, his bluster conceals a deeper strategic calculus. For all his complaints about American treachery, Mr. Khamenei and his allies recognize that the nuclear deal has produced significant benefits for their hobbled theocracy and may serve to further entrench the regime brought to power in the 1979 revolution.
U.S. officials have always cautioned that it would take time for the salutary effects of engagement with Iran to take effect. They have even conceded that, in the short term, the agreement might energize hard-liners opposed to engagement with the West—and that, indeed, seems to be what is happening.President Barack Obama defined the nuclear deal primarily as an arms-control exercise, designed to constrain Tehran’s nuclear program for at least a decade and to keep the U.S. from becoming embroiled in yet another Middle East war. But the White House and its top diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry, also quietly suggested that the agreement might open the door to a broader rapprochement between Tehran and Washington and empower Iran’s moderate political forces, particularly its elected president, Hassan Rouhani.
Since the accord was announced last summer, Mr. Khamenei and his elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have moved to solidify their hold. As international sanctions against Iran have slackened, the ayatollah and his core allies have expanded the Iranian military and pursued new business opportunities for the companies and foundations that finance the regime’s key ideological cadres. Iran has continued to fund and arm its major regional allies, including the Assad regime in Syria, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Houthi rebels in Yemen—all of which are at war with America’s regional partners—and the regime has continued to test and develop ballistic missiles. The government has also stepped up arrests of opposition leaders and political activists.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (left) and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif during a meeting at U.N. headquarters, Sept. 26, 2015. PHOTO: CRAIG RUTTLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Khamenei has been deeply involved from the start with his country’s talks with the U.S. After the U.N. Security Council imposed tough sanctions on Iran in 2010, he became alarmed by the drain on Tehran’s finances. In 2012, he backed secret talks in hopes of relieving the crippling financial pressure. A collapse in global oil prices made Iran even more vulnerable. As the talks evolved into public negotiations with the U.S. and its partners, Mr. Khamenei instructed his representatives to ensure that Iran could keep the major infrastructure of its nuclear and military programs.
Today, the 77-year-old ayatollah—who reportedly suffers from cancer—is seeking to cement his legacy and to shape the political transition that will occur once he is gone. The nuclear agreement provides him with the building blocks to do that, and for now, at least, Mr. Khamenei and his allies look to be the deal’s big winners. The next U.S. administration is likely to face an unhappy choice: to continue to work with Iran or to challenge an increasingly entrenched supreme leader and his Revolutionary Guard.
For its part, the Obama administration says that the nuclear deal blocks Iran from all paths to develop an atomic bomb and that the agreement’s success doesn’t depend on political change taking root in Tehran. They note that the deal is still in its early stages and suggest that an opening of Iran’s economy could help reformists over time. They also insist that it has served the cause of peace in the region. “The president and I both had a sense that we were on an automatic pilot toward a potential conflict, because no one wanted to talk to anybody or find out what was possible,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview. “I have no doubt that we avoided a war. None.”
To understand Mr. Khamenei’s perspective on the negotiations and the resulting deal, the best place to start is Iran’s nuclear program. The agreement requires Iran to accept key limitations: Previously, the country had nearly 20,000 centrifuge machines producing nuclear fuel and was on the cusp of possessing weapons-grade uranium. A plutonium-producing reactor was also nearly onlineToday, only 5,000 centrifuges are spinning, the plutonium-making reactor has been made inoperable, and most of Iran’s enriched uranium has been shipped out of the country. Iran also agreed to grant greater access to its nuclear sites to inspectors from the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to prevent the country from diverting fissile materials to banned military purposes. “There are serious constraints on their nuclear program for 15 years,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an important player in the negotiations, said earlier this year. “Fifteen years, with serious verification measures, should give considerably more comfort to our allies in the region.”
Mr. Khamenei, however, doesn’t appear to share this view of the deal’s constraints. Just as Iran’s negotiators were agreeing to these terms in July 2014, the supreme leader delivered a speech about the nuclear program—without consulting his chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, according to U.S. and European officials. In the address, Mr. Khamenei said that his oil-rich country needed at least 100,000 centrifuges to power its civilian nuclear program in the coming decades. This was more than 20 times what the Obama administration envisaged. Western diplomats wondered whether Iran’s diplomats really spoke for the supreme leader.
Workers in front of Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, south of Tehran, Oct. 26, 2010. PHOTO: MEHR NEWS AGENCY/REUTERS
Over the next year, the U.S. and its partners brought the Iranians back down to a capacity of just 5,000 machines. Washington hailed this as a major negotiating victory, but there was a twist: After a decade, the international community would go along with Mr. Khamenei’s vision of an Iran that could develop an industrial-scale, civilian nuclear program without checks on the number or capacity of the centrifuges spinning. The U.S. had won only a short-term pause in the expansion of the Iranian program, and the supreme leader had gained international approval for his longer-term plan.
Indeed, in recent weeks, Iranian officials have talked of their preparations to build 10 new nuclear reactors with Russian help. This will require a steady supply of nuclear fuel from centrifuges that will be allowed to go online in a decade. “The agreement gives us time, provided Iran implements it. But it’s limited,” said Mark Hibbs, a Berlin-based expert on nuclear programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The Revolutionary Guard controls the program, and there’s a risk that in 10 or 15 years, they might decide to restart their [weaponization] activities.”
Mr. Khamenei also came away from the talks with much of what he wanted for reviving Iran’s economy—a longstanding anxiety for the regime. Before the nuclear deal, Iran had been on the financial ropes, especially after the Obama administration ratcheted up international sanctions. The deal relieved that pressure.
The U.S.-led international sanctions campaign against Iran raised alarm bells in the supreme leader’s office in 2013, according to Iranian officials. In just over a year, Iran’s oil exports had been cut by more than half, and its banks were almost completely shut off from the international financial system. Iran’s currency, the rial, fell by two-thirds against the dollar, spurring massive inflation and unemployment. This gave the U.S. an opportunity to extract new concessions from Tehran.
The more moderate Mr. Rouhani was elected president that year with a mandate to improve Iran’s economy and ease the sanctions. His aides say that Mr. Rouhani convinced Mr. Khamenei that sanctions posed an existential threat to the government.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani waved to reporters after a press conference in Tehran Saturday, Aug. 29, 2015.PHOTO: EBRAHIM NOROOZI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Rouhani got many of the U.S.-imposed penalties lifted under last year’s nuclear agreement. The impact on Iran’s economy has been mixed so far, stoking charges from Iranian leaders that the U.S. hasn’t lived up to its commitments. Iran’s oil exports have largely returned to their pre-2012 levels, and the World Bank projects that Iran will see nearly 5% growth in its gross domestic product next year. But European and Asian banks remain skittish of financing projects in Iran, and the U.S. Treasury Department maintains its ban on dollar transactions with Iran.
This path of modest growth has worked to Mr. Khamenei’s advantage, Iran analysts say. Far from hoping for a flood of foreign investment, the supreme leader has repeatedly warned his people that Western culture and business could undermine the revolution and its values.
Mr. Khamenei says that Iran must remain economically self-sufficient and independent of the West, running a “resistance economy” fueled by domestic production and capacity. “With its calm appearance, and with the soft and glib tongue of its officials, America is damaging us from behind the scenes,” Mr. Khamenei said in his speech earlier this month.
Mr. Khamenei is managing the economy the way that he wants it—with enough money to avoid a financial crisis but not so much that it might threaten his system. The supreme leader’s “system wants technology, and he wants access to imports,” said a political adviser to President Rouhani. “But his ‘resistance economy’ is a way to keep the West out of Iran.”
In an apparent effort to ward off foreign influence, the Revolutionary Guard has stepped up arrests of dual nationals from the U.S., Europe and Canada over the past year. One of the detained Americans, Siamak Namazi, is an oil-industry executive who has written and spoken about the need for Iran to embrace economic and political reforms. Friends and family of Mr. Namazi say that his arrest was a warning to Iranian expatriates not to return home to pursue business dealings. Many Iranian-Americans have heeded the message. The economy is now dominated by the Revolutionary Guard, which controls many of Iran’s largest companies.
As for conventional military capabilities, the deal didn’t do much to curtail Iran’s ambitions. The supreme leader demanded a provision weakening a U.N. Security Council resolution that prohibits Tehran’s ballistic-missile development—and got it. He wanted the U.N. embargo lifted on Iran’s ability to buy or export conventional arms—and got it, in five years. He wanted to retain Iran’s ability to export arms—and the deal does nothing to interfere with that.
“Ayatollah Khamenei has emerged as the single most powerful man in the Middle East,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “It will take years to assess the full impact of the nuclear deal on the Middle East and in Iran internally, but the hope that the deal would weaken Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards so far hasn’t been borne out.”
Finally, the nuclear deal also seems to have boosted Mr. Khamenei’s ability to influence the region. In the ornate former palaces and six-star hotels where the nuclear talks took place in Austria and Switzerland last year, U.S. and European officials talked optimistically about using the deal to stabilize a roiling Middle East. They hoped that Iran, the region’s great Shiite power, might play a constructive role in ending conflicts in Yemen, Iraq and, above all, Syria.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in July PHOTO:HO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
It hasn’t worked out that way. Even as the talks continued, Mr. Khamenei and his generals were plotting a much broader military campaign in Syria in partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to European, Arab and Iranian officials. Starting in January 2015, the supreme leader’s top aides began a series of visits to the Kremlin to chart out a plan to bolster the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The result was a highly coordinated operation in Syria that began just weeks after the nuclear deal was completed. Mr. Putin’s air force has pounded Syrian rebels, bombing not just Sunni jihadists associated with Islamic State or al Qaeda but also U.S.-backed fighters. At the same time, Mr. Khamenei’s Revolutionary Guard mobilized thousands of soldiers and Shiite militiamen to launch a ground offensive, with Iranian troops fighting alongside militants from Hezbollah and other Shiite militias. The joint Iranian-Russian operation drove back Syrian rebels who had been advancing on the Assad regime’s stronghold on the Mediterranean coast, according to Arab and U.S. officials, and allowed the minority regime to retake large swaths of territory. The Kremlin announced this week that it has started launching airstrikes in Syria from Iranian territory.
Mr. Khamenei has sworn off any collaboration with the U.S. in the Middle East, even against shared regional enemies like Islamic State. Instead, he has continued Iran’s campaign to control the oil-rich Persian Gulf and weaken the influence of the U.S., Israel and its Sunni Arab allies across the region. U.S. military commanders say that they have seen no tapering off of Revolutionary Guard support for its allies in Yemen, Iraq or the Palestinian territories.
Either way, it is Mr. Khamenei, not his more moderate rivals, who are acting as if they have been strengthened by the nuclear deal. “Our problems with American and the likes of America…on regional matters and on various other matters are not solved through negotiations,” Mr. Khamenei said in his Aug. 1 speech. “We ourselves should choose a path and then take it. You should make the enemy…run after you.”Mr. Khamenei cannot know how the U.S. will respond to his uncompromising stance, especially with a new administration soon to take office. But he may figure that he wins either way. If the deal falls apart, he could call it proof that the Americans never could be trusted and figure that another round of biting U.N. sanctions will prove too difficult to assemble. If the deal survives, he will have his military continue to develop missiles and conventional arms to position Iran to become a latent nuclear weapons power in 10 years.
Mr. Solomon is chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Journal. His new book, “The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals That Reshaped the Middle East,” will be published next week by Random House
by Denis MacEoin
The Gatestone Institute
The Gatestone Institute
Excerpt of a June 26 article originally titled "Western Universities: The Best Indoctrination Money Can Buy."
Oxford's Middle East Centre "has received substantial sums of money from sources in the Middle East ... there is a clear risk that donors will seek to influence the output and activities of the MEC." – Robin Simcox, A Degree of Influence, 2009.
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[T]here is a growing threat to Western leadership around the world. The threat is not Islamic terrorism (although that is a real and growing threat, especially in Europe, but increasingly in the United States). The threat is not about growing Muslim demographics (although this is taking its toll in Europe, too). The threat is not even from the rise in influence of Islam across the globe. Those are genuine issues; Western leaders have so far failed adequately to respond to the threats they represent.
The clear and present danger here eclipses all the others: it is to the values of the Enlightenment. If not curtailed, this risk could usher in the abandonment of the very intellectual freedoms on which our wider freedoms rest. It is our complicity in the rapid and so far unstoppable growth of direct Islamic (and indeed Islamist) control over whole departments and centers in a burgeoning number of Western universities in Europe and the USA.
...
Do a handful of donations from Muslim governments to a number of European and American universities merit an entire article that starts out with claims that Western civilization is under threat? As a matter of fact, the scale of the donations is far beyond a handful, the universities involved are among the top academies in the world, the money involved is hundreds of billions of dollars, and the targets of Islamic finance are, for the most part, specific and form part of a distinct agenda. Some money may be given to business schools or science departments, but the overwhelming majority goes to support or create large departments and academic centers for Middle East, Islamic, or Arabic Studies.
The academic targets of Islamic finance are specific and form part of a distinct agenda.
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There is a seeming logic in this – aren't extremely rich Muslim states entitled to further the study of their own societies, history, and religion?Shouldn't they have an interest in creating a corps of knowledgeable men and women with the requisite language skills and close familiarity with the subjects they first study then teach, or with which they engage as government advisors, civil servants with governments, the UN or international NGOs, think tank members, public experts, media analysts and perhaps politicians? Well, if they observed complete neutrality and left academics to their own counsel, their input would pass as simple generosity or as a contribution to good relations within the international community. What could be nicer? Isn't the Islamic world badly misunderstood in the West, and wouldn't more teaching and research on it and its beliefs be a real boon? And how can someone like myself, who has spent a lifetime studying, teaching and writing about Islamic and Middle Eastern subject think badly of such an endeavour?
One obvious criticism is the sheer scale of the operation, meaning that fundamentalist Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar now effectively exercise a swathe of influence over the way in which Islam and Middle East Studies are taught in key Western universities. The dilemma for the universities is a harbinger of crises to come. Even fairly rich universities such as Harvard and Oxford experience financial difficulties. State funds are often hard or impossible to obtain; academics have to scramble to find funding for their projects, their jobs or their departments.
Universities have responded in a number of ways. One has been to bring in more and more students from abroad, including extremely high numbers from Islamic countries (where the standard of education is almost uniformly poor). ICEF Monitor reports:
At its inception in 2005, there were just over 3,000 Saudi students in the US, a country that has been the primary destination for KASP-funded students in the years since and that saw its Saudi enrolment swell to just under 60,000 students in 2014/15 (for a nearly 2,000% increase over the last ten years). For the past five years in a row, Saudi Arabia has been the fourth-largest sending country for the US.
There are also large numbers of Saudi students in Canada and the UK.
The number of Saudi students in the US increased 2,000 percent from 2005 to 2015.
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A second response for a small number of universities has been to open satellite campuses in foreign countries, several in the Gulf. For example, University College London, Heriot-Watt University, New York University and Ireland's Royal College of Surgeons run programs, respectively, in Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Bahrain.
Unsurprisingly, these campuses are far from free from external supervision.According to Professor Stephen F. Eisenman of Northwestern University (which has a branch in Qatar), "The ethics of establishing a campus in an authoritarian country are murky, especially when it inhibits free expression, and counts among its allies several oppressive regimes or groups."
Problematic as all this is, it is eclipsed by the impact on the study of the Islamic world in Western universities at home. Starting with the UK alone, Arab News reports:
Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has been the largest source of donations from Islamic states and royal families to British universities, much of which is devoted to the study of Islam, the Middle East and Arabic literature. A large share of this money went toward establishing Islamic study centers. In 2008, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal donated £8 million (SR 48.5 million) each to Cambridge and Edinburgh for this purpose, Al-Eqtisadiah business daily reported yesterday. Oxford has been the largest British beneficiary of Saudi support. In 2005, Prince Sultan, the late crown prince, gave £2 million (SR 12 million) to the Ashmolean Museum. In 2001, the King Abdul Aziz Foundation gave £1 million (SR 6.1 million) to the Middle East Center. There are many other donors. Oxford's £75 million (SR 454.6 million) Islamic Studies Center was supported by 12 Muslim countries. Ruler of Oman, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, gave £3.1 million (SR 18.8 million) to Cambridge to fund two posts, including a chair of Arabic. Ruler of Sharjah, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al-Qassimi, has supported Exeter's Islamic studies center with more than £5 million (SR 30 million) since 2001. Trinity Saint David, part of the University of Wales, has received donations from the ruler of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.
Here, as well, is a summary of moneys given to U.S. universities, dating back as far as 1976:
The story of the Saudi donations in the United States dates back to 1976, when Riyadh transferred one million dollars to the University of Southern California.
In 1979, Saudi Aramco World magazine published a list of Middle Eastern gifts, including $200,000 from the Saudis to Duke University for a program in Islamic and Arabian development studies; $750,000 from the Libyan government for a chair of Arab culture at Georgetown University; and $250,000 from the United Arab Emirates for a visiting professorship of Arab history, also at Georgetown.
Until that time, Ryadh spent one hundred billion dollars to spread Wahhabism, the most anti-Semitic and extremist version of Islam.
Leading the list of "beneficiaries" is Harvard, with about $30 million. The jewel of the Ivy League received $20 million in 2005 alone.
20 million dollars were donated to the Middle East Studies Center at the University of Arkansas; $5 million to the Center for Middle East Studies at Berkeley, in California; $11 million to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and a half million dollars to Texas University (the seventh university, in order of size, in the United States); $1 million to Princeton; $5 million dollars to Rutgers University....
Oxford has a research center funded by the Iranian regime, while at Cambridge the funds come from Saudi Arabia, Oman and Iran.
Scholarships and degree programs are the favorite and easiest weapons of the Islamist regimes to influence the Western academies and their freedoms. Eight universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 233.5 million pounds sterling from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995. The total sum, revealed by Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, amounts to the largest source of external funding to UK universities.
Universities that have accepted donations from Saudi royals and other Arab sources include Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, University College London, the London School of Economics, Exeter, Dundee and City.
In a 2009 study of the funding of strategically important subjects in UK universities, Robin Simcox, then a Research Fellow for the Centre for Social Cohesion, provides detailed tables and longer commentaries on the provision of funds to Arabic and Islamic Studies. A Degree of Influence[4]looks at eleven universities, including some with major centers for Islamic and Middle East Studies, such as Oxford (22 entries), Cambridge, London's School of Oriental and African Studies, Edinburgh, Durham and Exeter. Some of his observations are pertinent. Writing of Oxford's heavily-endowed Middle East Centre, he notes that
The MEC has received substantial sums of money from sources in the Middle East. The way in which this money has been used means there is a clear risk that donors will seek to influence the output and activities of the MEC. In addition, many large donations to the MEC have been anonymous, creating a lack of transparency. In many cases, Oxford has knowingly accepted money from undemocratic states with poor human rights records.... Several agreements made between the MEC and donors appear to indicate that funders have sought to influence the centre's output and activities.[5]
Of Cambridge, he writes:
Cambridge University is an example of how funding has had a significant impact upon how the university is run. Recent donations have been attached with conditions that could lead to donors gaining oversight via university Management Committees. While the principal donor's intentions seem honourable, a precedent appears to have been set where wealthy donors can influence the running of an independent academic institution.[6]
What does this unprecedented influence from countries and individuals with low expectations for academic freedom bring to our most revered institutions of learning? There are some positives. The money can allow genuine scholars to lecture or carry out valuable research, to teach languages such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish or Urdu (although not, of course, Hebrew), and to hold conferences open to a wide array of colleagues. All that is to the good, provided academics steer clear of controversy and subjects that upset their donors. In truth, academic freedom is at risk.
Countries and individuals with low expectations for academic freedom have unprecedented influence in our most revered institutions of learning.
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What so many fail or prefer not to grasp is that the subventions from Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular are part of a much wider pattern. The Saudis for decades have disbursed hundreds of billions of dollars in order to propagate their puritan form of Islam, Wahhabism, across the globe, while building hundreds of mosques, schools, libraries, and Islamic centres, and sending out streams of hardline preachers trained in their seminaries and Islamic universities, to spread their message to Muslims everywhere, creating and financing bodies for Islamic missionary work, recruiting young Muslims to commit to an extreme form of their faith – all to the end of making the Saudi state the key player in the world of Islam and a leader in the propagation of Islam in the West. That is the nature of the doctrine. Deep pockets for academic study in Europe and North America are stitched tightly against their pockets that fund the missionary work and the enforcement of the most fundamentalist form of the Islamic faith.
Another way of looking at it is that earlier this year, Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti, Shaykh Abd al-'Aziz bin-Abdullah al-Shaykh, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims to play chess. He is far from the first to do so. He justifies the ban by saying, "The game of chess is a waste of time and an opportunity to squander money. It causes enmity and hatred between people". On February 3, 2016, a young Saudi cleric, Shaykh Sa'ad al-'Atiq, appeared on a fatwa advice programme onal-Ahwaz TV, and stated that if people publish pictures on social media sites, someone else may copy them and apply sorcery to them, which will result in the original poster becoming ill with cancer and other diseases. He even says he knows many cases of this. Over the past several years, several people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia on charges of witchcraft and sorcery.
Saudi Grand Mufti Shaykh Abd al-'Aziz bin Abdullah al-Shaykh recently issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims to play chess.
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In May 2016, I read that another Saudi shaykh, Salih bin Fawzan Al Fawzan, a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, said that, "taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity — not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything". This, of course, is in direct line with the ancient ban on images of living creatures that has had such a marked effect on Islamic art. It is not hard to see that, if this is the height of scholarship in Saudi Arabia, their motives in financing academic study in Western universities may not be as noble as some would like to believe.
The Saudi antipathy to critical, rational, and secular scholarship is surely a warning. More than one Saudi shaykh, including the notorious Grand Mufti Bin Baz, have declared that the earth is stationary and that the sun revolves around it. Some are still doing so. Of course, better educated Saudis and others will find this laughable; but the fatwa declaring it has become the basis for intense debate among the highly religious.
The moment Western scholarship infringes the sensitivities of the Saudis, Qataris, Kuwaitis, Bahrainis and others, the barriers go up. Academics are denied visas to attend conferences, criticism of Gulf states is toned down, debate is shifted away from the Gulf monarchies themselves, and, compared to study of other Arab regions, rigorous critiques on subjects in the Gulf, such as political reform, human rights and suppression of dissent are largely excluded. According to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen of Rice University's Baker Institute, "Almost every centre of Middle East studies in the UK is linked somehow to a Gulf backer. It's created dilemmas, especially over the last few years as the threshold for self-tolerance of any dissenting view has got lower."
One of those "dilemmas" is the influence by teachers across the United States on impressionable students who organize Israel Apartheid Weeks. The students join with assorted anti-Semitic demonstrators, condemn Israel for every sin under the sun, and use intimidation against Jewish and Zionist colleagues, but are never told any historical, legal, or political facts by their equally biased faculties. America's Campus Watch monitoring organization keeps a close eye on this sort of abuse by identifying teachers and researchers who go far outside the boundaries of balanced academic discourse to mislead, indoctrinate, and validate student extremists. It exposes professors who make exaggerated claims about Islamophobia or who offer support to terrorist entities such as Hamas. Its steady record of news associated with Middle East Studies provides ample evidence of the distortions now hawked as balanced scholarship.
But for the clearest evidence that Gulf backers cannot be entrusted with the support of Western university studies of Islam and the Middle East, we need not look further than one of the earliest cases of Saudi investment in the field. In 1981, the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education paid for a lectureship at Britain's Newcastle University, to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies.[7] The appointee, a non-Muslim British teacher with a solid research record, embarked on an ambitious range of topics designed to give students a wide background in Islamic history and doctrine. Five years later, funding for his post was abruptly ended. The reason was that he included among his courses lectures on Sufism and Shi'ism – vital subject for any study of Islam, yet, to the Wahhabis, both anathema.
This was bad enough – academics at neighbouring Durham University's Centre for Middle East and Islamic Studies were vociferous in condemning the action and the reason given for it but the Saudis went further. They appointed (unilaterally, without any involvement with an interview by a university board) a Saudi teacher with no qualifications whatsoever in Islamic Studies (his PhD was in English Literature). The department and the university, eager to receive more money, allowed this amateur to teach and examine their students for several years more, after which the post fell by the wayside.
This is one of the most remarkable academic stories of recent history. A dismissal and an appointment based solely upon religious doctrine. But it had its effect. Other academics in the field, receiving or hoping to receive Saudi funding, now had their eyes open: There are topics, however important within the subject, that anyone who wants to keep his job must steer clear of. There are teachers who have research and publication interests in those topics who should not be appointed to Saudi-financed posts. In 1981, the Saudis were dipping their toes in the water. Now they are offshore, swimming in the strong currents.
Fundamentalist Islam, backed by vast monetary power, is corrupting our dearest Enlightenment values. This May, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Muslim body likened to the United Nations, prohibited eleven gay and transgender organizations from attending a conference at the UN on research to end the AIDS epidemic.
Egypt wrote on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to the 193-member general assembly about its decision without citing a reason. Clearly, protecting individuals most affected by the epidemic – trans people globally are 49 times more likely to be living with HIV than the general population – is not on the agenda.
It has to be assumed that the real reason for this was the deep-seated homophobia within the Muslim world. Potentially life-saving medical advances were blocked because Islam proscribes homosexuality (Qur'an: 77: 80-84).
We cannot continue to live like this. We cannot let hardline Muslims and Muslim states elbow aside their reform-minded brethren and trample on our most essential freedoms. Without the example and standards set up by Western nations, the Muslim world itself will fall into even greater decline, and that will lead to greater violence everywhere. If we owe it to ourselves to resist this onslaught on our values, we also owe it to the Muslim world to protect it from its own resistance to and fear of change.
Dr. Denis MacEoin, a senior editor at Middle East Quarterly, is a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
[4] Robin Simcox, A Degree of Influence: The funding of strategically important subjects in UK universities, Centre for Social Cohesion, London, 2009.
[5] A Degree of Influence, p. 35.
[6] Ibid, p. 64
[7] See Daniel Easterman. New Jerusalems, London, 1992, pp.92-93.
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Last Night Was the Turning Point in Trump's Campaign
Donald Trump in Charlotte, N.C. Thursday, Aug. 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Donald Trump cleared up one thing in his speech in Charlotte, North Carolina, last night: he is running to win.
Throughout this very odd election cycle, some pundits have periodically suggested that Trump wasn't serious in his run for the presidency. First, it was said that he got into the race simply to garner publicity, to burnish his "brand." He himself, it was said, was surprised that he did so well in the primaries.
When it became clear that he was poised to win the nomination, the story changed slightly. Now, he was said to be playing the buffoon because he didn't really want the job. The same line was repeated and amplified post-convention whenever Trump went off-message or waved The National Enquirer about. Anything having to do with Ted Cruz really seemed to set him off. And off he went, as his plummeting poll numbers showed.
But these last couple of weeks have shown the world a new, more disciplined Donald Trump.
To employ a phrase that Trump himself favors: Believe me, he's in it to win.
Last night's speech was significant for several reasons. Substantively, it hammered home a truth that is as uncomfortable as it necessary to acknowledge: the dreadful plight of black Americans is largely the creation of Democrats.
Aside: in a rare obeisance to political correctness, Trump consistently referred to "African-Americans." Perhaps that is politically expedient -- but I believe it is patronizing.
As Teddy Roosevelt observed, "hyphenated-Americans" are a threat to the integrity of the country. We are not Irish-Americans or German-American or African-Americans (a term that is especially bizarre because it is applied indiscriminately to certain dark-skinned people: Jamaica, for example, is not part of Africa). We are simply Americans whose ancestors happen to be from Ireland, Germany, Kenya, or wherever.
But back to that perhaps startling claim -- to the media and Democrats, anyway -- about Democrats being largely responsible for the plight of black Americans. Donald Trump is quite correct:
Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party have taken African-American votes totally for granted.
Until now, anyway, the black vote has run according to the Democratic script. What is that script? Lyndon Johnson articulated it in its purest -- as well as its crassest -- form when in 1964 he remarked to two like-minded Democratic governors that, with his Great Society programs:
I’ll have those n*****s voting Democratic for the next 200 years.
It hasn't been 200 years yet. But for the last 50? As patronizing Democratic programs stifled freedom and individual initiative, and erected an increasingly burdensome (and expensive) governmental cocoon around their minority charges?
The black vote has been largely in the pocket of its new plantation owners.
The "Great Society" did not abolish poverty. That was never the intention. It institutionalized poverty.
Along the way, it created an engorging bureaucracy that was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.
As Trump pointed out in his speech in Milwaukee earlier this week, all of the nation's failed cities -- Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland, Memphis, Milwaukee itself -- have been under Democratic control for decades.
Milwaukee, for example, has been Democratic since 1908. Do you suppose that there is a connection between the disasters -- the poverty, the crime, the corruption -- that have engulfed these cities, and the political complexion of their leadership? Or is it merely fortuitous?
To ask the question is to answer it.
Regular readers know that I have found find a lot to criticize about Donald Trump. I stand by those criticisms. But I also acknowledge a new note in Trump's campaign.
His speeches of the last two weeks have outlined with clarity and conviction that he is serious about bringing about significant change. Not just the word "change": the country has staggered under that ruse for nearly eight years now. No, Trump is promising to bring real change to all Americans, but especially to American cities and the materially disenfranchised denizens who have spent the last several decades suffering from the hypocritical benevolence of the corrupt Democratic bureaucracy.
Some polls crow that Trump has "zero percent" support among blacks. After his speech in Milwaukee, that changed, with at least one poll reporting a 10-point jump
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I suspect that after his speech in North Carolina, we'll see much more movement in the polls -- and not just among minorities.
Last night's speech was notable for its focus, its discipline, and its hard-hitting criticism of Hillary Clinton. It was also notable for its humanity. There are some who say that the "J." in Donald Trump's name is for "Jester." Certainly, crass braggadocio has shadowed him throughout his public career.
In a few brief sentences last night, Trump acknowledged ... and apologized(!) for that:
Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.
I suspect that a future historian, commenting on the surprising Trump victory in the election of 2016, will settle on the quartet of speeches Trump delivered in the middle of August 2016 as the turning point in a campaign the media had already written off as moribund.
And if pressed, I suspect that a future historian will point to last night's speech, to Trump's candid appeal for black votes and to black self-interest, as the pivotal moment.
Beyond that, I'll wager that our future scribe will put his finger on Trump's admission of error and expression of regret as the humanizing moment when people said:
Well, all right then, let's give him another look.
Doubtless, Hillary Clinton and her surrogates are even now plotting to bait him, to lure him off target and to trick him into flailing against some irrelevant charge. If he is canny, he will ignore all these distractions and concentrate like a laser beam on his main issues: the economy, immigration, national security, and social comity.
His target is not a Constitution-waving Democratic shill, but Hillary Clinton. Her ostentatious corruption and incompetence, and the failed policies she has inherited and which she has pledged to continue and exacerbate.
Trump said early on in his speech:
Our campaign is about representing the great majority of Americans -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Conservatives and Liberals -- who read the newspaper, or turn on the TV, and don’t hear anyone speaking for them. All they hear are insiders fighting for insiders.
That's what the mainstream media hears, too, but since they are themselves on the inside, it is a song whose melody they like. If Trump continues on the tack he has taken these last couple of weeks, there is a good chance he will win.
He needs to do two things. On the positive side, he needs to stay on message, repeating his ideas for tax reform, economic revitalization, control of our borders, defeating Islamic terrorism, replacing Obamacare, and enhancing America's position in the world.
On the polemical side, he needs to be relentless in calling attention to the prosperity-killing and freedom-blighting program that is the Democratic platform (read it: it makes the Port Huron Statement seem sane).
He also needs to call attention to Hillary's decades-long career of pay-to-play corruption and her callous incompetence as secretary of State.
Two weeks ago, it looked as if Donald Trump's campaign was on life support. At the moment it looks as if the patient has made a miraculous recovery.
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6)How to make big government agile again
By Ryan Cooper
President Obama has passed many huge expansions of federal government authority, like ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, but getting such laws actually implemented was a tremendous struggle. The Volcker Rule, which prohibits certain forms of speculation by commercial banks, took nearly four years to be finalized, and hasn't taken full effect yet — and banks just asked for another five-year grace period before they have to comply. Elsewhere, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently delayed regulation of cross-border derivative contracts for an entire year.
We may well hit the next financial crisis before the regulatory response to the last one is fully implemented. Why? Legal scholars finger a culprit called "regulatory ossification," referring to the grinding slowness of today's federal rule-writing apparatus — largely because regulatory agencies are strangled by endless paperwork and frivolous lawsuits.
Fully tackling this problem will probably require congressional action. Luckily, there are many things a president can do to partially alleviate the problem. Since she's looking increasingly likely to take the White House, Hillary Clinton would be well advised to start taking this problem seriously.
One of the finest pieces of policy journalism ever written is "He Who Makes the Rules," by Haley Sweetland Edwards. It's an in-depth look at the bureaucratic trench warfare that causes the years-long delays in rulemaking. Laws like Dodd-Frank generally don't contain specific regulations saying what must happen; instead they instruct federal agencies to write rules within specific parameters, with the overall process governed by the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act.
Edwards' article goes well with work by Thomas McGarity, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. In a Duke Law Review article andtestimony before Congress, he explains where things went wrong. The APA process was supposed to allow for public comment and participation in rule-writing, while maintaining an efficient federal bureaucracy. But over time, as rule-writing got new requirements for economic justification, environmental impact studies, and the adoption of the legal "hard look doctrine" (making it easier to challenge regulations on procedural grounds), it has become tremendously burdensome for agencies.
Fulfilling those requirements, which require mountains of expert work, "takes an enormous amount of resources," McGarity told The Week. When Republicans control Congress, and hence most agencies are constantly half-starved for funds, it's even harder. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for example, has been all but hamstrung in the Obama years.
To be sure, many minor rules are written and issued with little fanfare or delay. But ones that affect the operations and profits of big institutions — the ones that really matter — suffer from all-out legal and procedural attacks. That's how some centerpiece parts of Dodd-Frank can be still on hold after over six years.
Removing some of these obstacles, like the special regulatory review panelfor small business established by Congress in the '90s (that has since beencaptured by big business) will require new laws be passed.
But the president can do quite a lot. Many requirements for onerous studies could be repealed by executive orders, says McGarity. More importantly, key positions overseeing the regulatory bureaucracy could be filled by someone sympathetic to the agency perspective, rather than the industries they regulate.
President Obama did an abysmal job of this during his first term, appointing economist Cass Sunstein as the chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the regulatory apparatus. The administration did issue many important rules during his tenure, but it also spent a vastly disproportionate amount of time meeting with industry representatives, and effectively slow-walked many critical regulations — particularly EPA ones. For someone concerned with timely action on big finance or climate change, Sunstein was a manifest failure.
At root, this is an ideological problem. Sunstein is a 1970s neoliberal who thinks that regulation is usually an economic drag, and should only be implemented after you prove in 19 different ways that it won't be an undue burden. And four years out of government, he's still peddling proposals for cutting "red tape" which involve forcing agencies to carry out even moreexpensive, complex studies, and writing into law other requirements that are currently executive orders — making the problem worse.
As Elizabeth Warren pointed out in a recent speech, what is needed is someone with the opposite view — that regulations are a huge net benefit that are absolutely critical to protecting the American economy and citizenry. Slow-walking regulation of finance or climate change with onerous cost-benefit nitpicking when Wall Street just obliterated the economy and American cities are suffering clockwork weather disasters is completely idiotic.
So given that Republicans stand a good chance of hanging onto Congress, if Hillary Clinton wants to achieve anything during her presidency, appointing people who believe in quality government to key regulatory posts might be the single smartest and easiest step she could take.
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