The Latest: Cost for California bullet train soars to $77B+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Democrats who hide behind their support of Farrakhan are being smoked out but the Democrats will do nothing. (See 1 below.)
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An Israeli's view of tariffs. (See 2 below.)
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Sent by a dear friend and fellow memo reader but have not checked it's authenticity. Am sure it is factual. (See 3 below.)
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If Hezbollah has chemical weaponry and employs it they will be fried. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Editorial: Farrakhan and the Left
A cozier relationship than you would think.
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“The powerful Jews are my enemy,” remarked Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at his organization’s annual “Saviours’ Day” celebration in Chicago in late February. That was just one of several choice anti-semitic tropes. Another one, oddly stated in the third person: “The FBI has been the worst enemy of black advancement. Can you prove that Farrakhan? You see, the Jews have control over those agencies of government.” With the exception of CNN’s Jake Tapper, hardly anyone in the mainstream media seemed to notice or care.
Farrakhan’s anti-Jewish rhetoric is well known and has a long history. In 1984, for instance, he said that “Hitler was a very great man”; and in 1985, “Don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever.” What’s far less known about Farrakhan is the warmth with which he’s embraced by some influential members of the American progressive movement.
Tamika Mallory, a co-leader of the Women’s March, was at the “Saviours Day” speech this year; two years before she posted a photo with Farrakhan to Instagram in which she offered him praise and birthday wishes. Linda Sarsour—the famed left-wing Palestinian-American activist and provocateur—commented on a photo of Farrakhan on the Instagram page of Carmen Perez, another Women’s March co-leader. “God bless him,” Sarsour said of Farrakhan.
How strange that self-proclaimed “intersectional” feminists such as Sarsour, Mallory, and Perez would support an openly misogynistic and racist demagogue like Farrakhan. Among his more recent offerings: “When a woman does not know how to cook and the right foods to cook, she's preparing death for herself, her husband and her children.” He’s also observed that “man is supposed to have rule, especially in his own house . . . and when she rules you, you become her child.” Directly to women he asserted: “You are a failure if you can’t keep a man, no profession can keep you happy!” One wonders what it is about him that these feminists find so alluring.
More troubling, perhaps, is the recently surfaced photo of a 2005 Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) meeting with Farrakhan. It featured then-senator Barack Obama posing for a photo with the Nation of Islam leader. The photographer, Askia Muhammad, now says the CBC asked him to suppress the image because it might have derailed Obama’s campaign. Nor is that the only time CBC members hobnobbed with Farrakhan: As Jeryl Bier pointed out in the Wall Street Journal in January, several of them can be seen shaking hands and hugging in a 2009 YouTube video.
We doubt the photo with Farrakhan would have hurt Obama, who easily weathered revelations of his long association with the similarly anti-semitic and anti-American Jeremiah Wright. These associations are troubling all the same, however the preponderance of mainstream journalists may wish to look the other way. We suspect that if a photo emerges some day of Donald Trump or George W. Bush grinning with Richard Spencer, the New York Times will make room for it on page 1A.
When asked about the CBC’s meeting and his relationship with Farrakhan, Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) defended his relationship with Farrakhan by remarking that “the world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question and his position on that and so forth.” That phrase, “the Jewish question”—where have we heard that before?
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2) TARIFFS AND TELL-OFFS: DONALD TRUMP AND THE BEAUTY OF TRADE WARS
By AMOTZ ASA-EL
Lumping together everyone and everything is absurd, but foul play indeed begs an American reply.
You can say they began in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry, flanked by 250 American sailors and one military band and facing 5,000 Samurai warriors, handed Japanese officials a letter from President Millard Fillmore to Emperor Komei, demanding that he open Japan to US trade.
You can also say they began 60 years earlier, when China’s Qianlong Emperor dismissed a British delegation’s similar demand, saying that China had no need for anything the outer world had to offer.
And you can also say they began in 1789, when the US Congress made it law “that duties be laid on goods, wares and merchandise.”
Whenever they started, modern trade wars were mostly tales of bravado, blackmail and bullying, where surrender was repeatedly followed by ironic twists of plots.
You can also say they began 60 years earlier, when China’s Qianlong Emperor dismissed a British delegation’s similar demand, saying that China had no need for anything the outer world had to offer.
And you can also say they began in 1789, when the US Congress made it law “that duties be laid on goods, wares and merchandise.”
Whenever they started, modern trade wars were mostly tales of bravado, blackmail and bullying, where surrender was repeatedly followed by ironic twists of plots.
For instance, the same US whose first major legislation after passing its Constitution was the Tariff of 1789 eventually became the global preacher of free trade. Even more ironically, the same Japan that Perry amused by giving its shoguns circular rides on a miniature train he built especially to impress them now has bullet trains of which Americans can only dream.
And that is also how the same Western civilization that in 1793 begged access to the Chinese economy – and later also bombed Canton in order to forcefully open China’s economic gates – now decries a globalized Chinese economy’s sway.
It follows, then, that Donald Trump’s declaration of commercial war last week is nothing original, much the way his war’s outcomes are unpredictable, just as his insight that “trade wars are good” is as convincing as his jovial assurance that they are “easy to win.
Having said all this, on this one he has a case.
TRADE WARS are not good.
Had the US not forced its way into Japan’s economy, Japan might never have industrialized as efficiently as it later did, and if Japan had not been commercially brutalized, it might not have later molested its neighbors, including the US.
And trade wars are certainly not easy to win, as the Arab League can attest.
What began with decades of banishing Israeli goods and threatening whoever planned to do business with Israel sparked a hyperactivity that made Israel’s besieged economy a success it might otherwise have never become.
The 1970s’ oil embargo was even worse for its masterminds, as the Western economies that were that trade war’s targets turned to conservation, new prospecting, and finally to fracking, all of which decimated oil’s price and emptied it of the financial dynamite that once made of it a political weapon.
Yes, trade wars are bad, and they are not at all easy to win, but that does not mean they should not be fought, provided you are not the one who wages them but the one they were designed to defeat.
THE CASES of 19th-century Japan and China are morally tricky; if a country insists on being an economic recluse, it isn’t clearly fair to forcibly open it up.
The case of the 2018 US is not tricky. The US has been bamboozled, and it has all the right to respond.
Following World War II the Western powers engineered an economic era of good feeling.
Open, fair and vibrant trade, they rightly said, will prevent war. They therefore set out to lift barriers wherever they could.
That is how French and German workers began crossing their mutual border to work in their former enemies’ factories; that is how the US, Canada and Mexico freed their trilateral trade; and that is why Richard Nixon persuaded China to open its doors to American manufacturers.
Alas, what began in 1979 with a Coca Cola plant in Shanghai evolved into a mass migration of American assembly lines, while US manufacturing jobs shrank within 30 years by 30%. Yes, some of this shrinkage resulted from automation, but much of it was about China’s unfair play.
Beijing imposed high tariffs on US imports while US imports remained low, and Beijing undervalued its currency, effectively subsidizing its exporters and taxing its importers. This was, in effect, a mixture of the Qianlong Emperor’s isolationism and Victorian Britain’s commercial aggression.
Yes, Trump has foolishly lumped together America’s fair and unfair trade partners, and now realizes he should exempt Canada and Mexico from the tariffs he is out to impose on imported steel and aluminum.
Trump has shot from the hip not only in choosing his targets but also in choosing his ammunition, which should not be raw materials but finished goods, such as the refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and laundry machines that Americans no longer make, because their governments effectively exported their assembly lines to a foul-playing competitor.
Recent days’ headlines about Trump having waged a trade war distort the facts.
Trump did not wage this war. China did.
And meeting it in the battlefield it chose to enter is imperative in every respect: diplomatically, commercially and, above all, socially.
The US lost its manufacturing jobs not only because of market forces and industrial change, but also because of political decisions – belligerent decisions in Beijing and defeatist decisions in Washington.
The social results of this political imbalance are profound. Middle Americans lost not only their jobs but also their trust in the entire postwar economy that, in their parents’ days, made the working class feel its employment, income, savings and status were secure.
Trump’s election may or may not have been helped by Russian spooks, but it certainly was helped by what China did to the American blue-collar worker.
Just how fast and to what extent fighting back would repair this damage is impossible to predict, though it is instructive to recall that Japan’s industrial success was also initially helped by high duties, until American pressure made Tokyo cut them to a nearly minimal 2.5%.
What can be said already now is that demanding justice for the dislocated American worker is exactly what Trump was elected to do.
And so, in the spirit of the historic trade wars’ many ironies, Trump can invert what the Qianlong Emperor told British diplomat George Macartney, by telling now his own Chinese interlocutors: Play fair, or you’ll see that there’s nothing made in China that American workers will not do themselves.
TRADE WARS are not good.
Had the US not forced its way into Japan’s economy, Japan might never have industrialized as efficiently as it later did, and if Japan had not been commercially brutalized, it might not have later molested its neighbors, including the US.
And trade wars are certainly not easy to win, as the Arab League can attest.
What began with decades of banishing Israeli goods and threatening whoever planned to do business with Israel sparked a hyperactivity that made Israel’s besieged economy a success it might otherwise have never become.
The 1970s’ oil embargo was even worse for its masterminds, as the Western economies that were that trade war’s targets turned to conservation, new prospecting, and finally to fracking, all of which decimated oil’s price and emptied it of the financial dynamite that once made of it a political weapon.
Yes, trade wars are bad, and they are not at all easy to win, but that does not mean they should not be fought, provided you are not the one who wages them but the one they were designed to defeat.
THE CASES of 19th-century Japan and China are morally tricky; if a country insists on being an economic recluse, it isn’t clearly fair to forcibly open it up.
The case of the 2018 US is not tricky. The US has been bamboozled, and it has all the right to respond.
Following World War II the Western powers engineered an economic era of good feeling.
Open, fair and vibrant trade, they rightly said, will prevent war. They therefore set out to lift barriers wherever they could.
That is how French and German workers began crossing their mutual border to work in their former enemies’ factories; that is how the US, Canada and Mexico freed their trilateral trade; and that is why Richard Nixon persuaded China to open its doors to American manufacturers.
Alas, what began in 1979 with a Coca Cola plant in Shanghai evolved into a mass migration of American assembly lines, while US manufacturing jobs shrank within 30 years by 30%. Yes, some of this shrinkage resulted from automation, but much of it was about China’s unfair play.
Beijing imposed high tariffs on US imports while US imports remained low, and Beijing undervalued its currency, effectively subsidizing its exporters and taxing its importers. This was, in effect, a mixture of the Qianlong Emperor’s isolationism and Victorian Britain’s commercial aggression.
Yes, Trump has foolishly lumped together America’s fair and unfair trade partners, and now realizes he should exempt Canada and Mexico from the tariffs he is out to impose on imported steel and aluminum.
Trump has shot from the hip not only in choosing his targets but also in choosing his ammunition, which should not be raw materials but finished goods, such as the refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and laundry machines that Americans no longer make, because their governments effectively exported their assembly lines to a foul-playing competitor.
Recent days’ headlines about Trump having waged a trade war distort the facts.
Trump did not wage this war. China did.
And meeting it in the battlefield it chose to enter is imperative in every respect: diplomatically, commercially and, above all, socially.
The US lost its manufacturing jobs not only because of market forces and industrial change, but also because of political decisions – belligerent decisions in Beijing and defeatist decisions in Washington.
The social results of this political imbalance are profound. Middle Americans lost not only their jobs but also their trust in the entire postwar economy that, in their parents’ days, made the working class feel its employment, income, savings and status were secure.
Trump’s election may or may not have been helped by Russian spooks, but it certainly was helped by what China did to the American blue-collar worker.
Just how fast and to what extent fighting back would repair this damage is impossible to predict, though it is instructive to recall that Japan’s industrial success was also initially helped by high duties, until American pressure made Tokyo cut them to a nearly minimal 2.5%.
What can be said already now is that demanding justice for the dislocated American worker is exactly what Trump was elected to do.
And so, in the spirit of the historic trade wars’ many ironies, Trump can invert what the Qianlong Emperor told British diplomat George Macartney, by telling now his own Chinese interlocutors: Play fair, or you’ll see that there’s nothing made in China that American workers will not do themselves.
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3)EINSTEINS OF HOLLYWOOD
Ever look up the education credentials of Hollywood and New York Liberals? Most of them rely on knowledge clouds drifting across the Pacific, perhaps from an Asian mystic who wears lots of colorful beads. The mystic has brought them deep understanding of economics, governance, military affairs and especially science. It inspires bold words on most topics.
LEONARDO DeCAPRIO's self-declared climate expertise enables him to speak on the world's environmental issues with a GED high-school education. He never took a college biology, chemistry, physics or climatology course, yet he “knows" more than most scientists. He proved that by addressing climate change before a full gathering of the UN.
SEAN PENN's quick takes on everything put him at the lofty level of an Einstein. He visited Iraq once and became an expert on that country. The same for Iran He also became buddies with the brutal Venezuelan communist Hugo Chavez and consistently lauded that murderous thug.. Now that Chavez is gone and Venezuelans are raiding dumpsters for food scraps, Penn is having a rare silent moment. Penn deserves some credit for becoming a world-affairs genius based on two years of auto mechanics classes at Santa Monica College .
KATY PERRY's passion about politics and economics freed her to quit high school at 15 without compromising her expert status. Asked the square root of 64, the name given the Constitution's first 10 amendments and to explain PE ratio, her answer might be, "Republicans are for the rich." She recently demonstrated wizardry by making an anti-Trump video. It suggested the new president would commit acts similar to forced World War II lockups of loyal Japanese-Americans. Perry probably did not know the internment plan was developed and executed by DEMOCRAT President Roosevelt.
ROBERT DeNIRO must also be a quick learner. He acquired amazing scientific knowledge before dropping out of high school. He knows so much about geology that he joined Artists Against Fracking. (All the producing wells in his native Manhattan must have provided first-hand experience.) He's also an expert on pediatric medicine, enabling him to speak often against vaccinating infants and children.
HARRY BELAFONTE is another multiple-subject whiz who needed little formal education. Some people might think this talented singer might limit his words to songs since his IQ is so low. Don't worry. Despite advancing age, he remains expert on most things. When black people of greater intelligence (that's most black people) say something moderate or conservative, he hurls the N word at them. Decades ago, he loudly denounced Reagan's elimination of CETA, the Comprehensive Employment Training Act. It was one of the most wasteful federal programs ever -- many vanished dollars, few jobs. Belafonte tore into Reagan during an interview Finally, the interviewer asked Belafonte what CETA stood for. Belafonte had no clue. He knew almost nothing about the act.
ROSIE O'DONNELL was my personal favorite long before her hateful remark that Trump's 10-year-old son looked autistic. Her coarse philosophy must be that if you say something loudly, it need not be correct. Her bombast probably created lots of turmoil with both the women she "married." She also must have skipped chemistry during high-school education and her short stints at Dickinson and Boston Univer
AL SHARPTON would be America 's greatest at-large criminal, if not for Hillary's tens of millions swapped for influence and favors. Sharpton owes nearly $5 million in delinquent taxes to IRS and New York state. Makes you wonder why NBC/MSNBC would ever hire him. Sharpton accumulated vast theological knowledge by age 9, when he was "ordained" as a preacher. He didn't need more than two years at New York’s BrooklynCollege to keep marching forward. His most successful class must have been Using Others’ Money. Despite one scandal after another, his 2004 run for president stands out. The Federal Election Commission forced him to return $100,000 in taxpayer money provided by FEC. One of many abuses was his $145,146 charge for "Campaign letter preparation -- Kinko's." Later, FEC fined Sharpton $285,000.
JULIA ROBERTS proves that physical beauty does not ensure a beautiful brain. She had a fling at Georgia State University be
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN could have been No. 1 on this list. He squabbled with nuns when in Catholic school. Transferring to a public school, he thought so little of the education experience that he skipped graduation. Had he gone to college, he might have majored in Hate 101. That's what we hear when he's not singing. He claims Trump is a "moron" who advocates "white nationalism." Springsteen demonstrates the analytical skills' void of most show-biz folk when he laments America 's industrialization decline Somebody please whisper to Springsteen that his party's business-crunching regulations and world-leading corporate tax rate compels U.S. manufacturers to go elsewhere.
Finally, two others are outside the entertainment world, disqualifying them from winning an Oscar, Emmy or Grammy.
NANCY PELOSI and MAXINE WATERS compete for the Rock Head of the Year trophy each time they speak. Pelosi frequently wins with comments like needing to pass a bill "so we can find out what's in it."
Waters has already locked up the 2017 trophy for suggesting a Trump impeachment over his campaign antics. Listen closely, Maxine. Presidents can be impeached only for what they do in office.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++4) Does Hezbollah Possess Chemical Weapons?, HONEST REPORTING, Pesach Benson
“Iran is building and testing short- to medium-range missiles armed with chemical warheads in Syria, former Syrian general Zuhair al-Saqit told [The Jerusalem Post’s sister publication] Maariv. Al-Saqit, who heads the Center for the Detection and Monitoring of the Use of Chemical Weapons in Belgium, also said that Iran’s Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah is in possession of chemical weapons, mostly handed to it by the Assad regime in order to hide their existence from international monitors.
In an interview in Paris, al-Saqit said that a large part of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, which were hidden from international inspection bodies, were transferred to Hezbollah.
Turns out there’s a private Facebook group featuring anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying posts, plus plenty of conspiracy theories about Israel. But the group, “Palestine Live” is in the news because quite a few of its members are high profile people. The Daily Telegraph picked up on research by blogger David Collier, who infiltrated the group, called “Palestine Live.” It included members like UK Labour chief Jeremy Corbyn, other Labour personalities, BBC reporter Yolanda Knell, Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, Tikun Olam’s Richard Silverstein, Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rebecca Vilkomerson and Baroness Jenny Tonge, among others.
One of Collier’s major findings regards the Mavi Marmara affair of 2010. Greta Berlin, a co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement, told the private Facebook group that she blamed another pro-Palestinian activist, Ken O’Keefe, for starting the violence aboard the Mavi Marmara by attacking and disarming an Israeli soldier. It contradicts Free Gaza’s claims that the Israelis fired first.
There’s no evidence (so far) that Corbyn or Knell personally posted anything that would be deemed anti-Semitic. Labour party officials launched a probe.
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