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In the last memo, I posed who is Biden and gave one example related to the flood of narcotics entering our porous borders. How can Biden ignore and/or allow this and have an addicted son? The more I thought about this similar questions came to mind.
For instance, who is Biden if he allows border crossers to enter illegally? What kind of message does that send? The message I would get, were I an illegal border crosser is, America does not care about enforcing it's own laws. Is that the message we want to convey not only to immigrants but also to America's citizens? If not, it is the message an unprincipled Biden sponsors.
The same applies to those who come without masks and Covid Shots. Yet, the nation I am illegally invading imposes a different set of rules on it's own citizens.
Should illegals be concerned the nation they are illegally invading has a double standard which, for the moment, does not apply to them but could if they ever become citizens.
What president leaves citizens behind?
Biden and those who handle him are not dumb. They know what they are doing. It is dangerous , sadistic and devious. So how can they get away with this? Because, as my wife says: "so what, who cares, what difference does it make."
No wonder America is sinking. When citizens of a nation do not care about the value of citizenship that nation will soon find itself upon the history pile of dead nations.
Yes, POGO was right: "The Enemy Is Us."
And:
A Border Town’s Democratic Mayor Has Had Enough
Joseph Simonson
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Every person/prostitute/politician has a price. Munchin's Blibbitt is:
Joe Manchin gave topline number of $1.5T for reconciliation bill to Schumer
Callie Patteson
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Nancy Pelosi’s Hell Week
This week’s legislative agenda in the House of Representatives sounds like the to-do list of a madhouse.
By Daniel Henninger
Members of Congress know now what it’s like to swim through mud. Welcome to Nancy Pelosi’s hell week. It can still get worse.
Some seven years ago in this column, amid bureaucratic problems implementing Barack Obama’s sprawling Affordable Care Act, we wondered whether the U.S. government was becoming a black hole, siphoning everything near it into a deadly, inert mass.
It is in the interests of Speaker Pelosi and her fellow fork-carrier Sen. Chuck Schumer to narcotize the public and press with arcane process detail. But what we’re witnessing is the capital of a great nation on the verge of collapsing the country into a state of long-term misgovernance.
As it began, this week’s House agenda read like the to-do list of a madhouse: Vote on a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Vote on a $3.5 trillion spending reconciliation bill. Vote on a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown until they decide the “details” inside the 2,465 pages of the spending bill. Vote to increase the U.S. government’s debt ceiling, now at $28 trillion.
Keep in mind what the Byrd Rule governing reconciliation is, or was. Conceived in 1985 by Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, its purpose was to discipline the substance of spending and taxes inside a budget process that had been wrecked by the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. Chuck Schumer has made a mockery of Robert Byrd’s reform. Discipline is dead because it is in the way. The result is legislative chaos.
Last week, when Speaker Pelosi and Mr. Schumer said they and the White House had a “framework” for the revenue to pay for this spending, their Democratic colleagues Sens. Bernie Sanders and Mark Warner said they had “no idea” or “the foggiest” what the two were talking about.
The country’s president, Joe Biden, weighed in the next day with the assertion that his spending plans, by now heading north of $6 trillion, would “cost nothing.” Washington is in Fantasyland and Mr. Biden has become Jiminy Cricket in “Pinocchio,” crooning “When you wish upon a star . . . your dreams come true.”
This week’s political spectacle and this president are putting a necessary issue in front of the American people—the competence of government in our time. Or more precisely, misgovernance.
The issue of government’s managerial competence has already been brought forward by the evacuation from Kabul, the migrant mess at the border, and the decline of civil order in many U.S. cities. The $3.5 trillion spending plan is about the less-visible problem of designing public programs on paper that fall apart in the real world.
The prototype for this Biden-Pelosi overreach is public housing. Enacted with good intentions, public housing, as in New York City, has become immune to reform. The people who live in these failed projects protest, but to no effect. The Biden plan will spend $80 billion on public housing. The recipient city agencies, themselves unreformable, will waste most of that. Without irony, the Biden plan includes $3 billion to plant trees in these mismanaged neighborhoods as “equity.”
The Biden plan’s scope and trillions ensure that similar inefficiencies will be spread into the rest of the country. Most prominently, the plan will allow workers in child and elder care to unionize and bargain collectively. That will migrate the debilitating work rules and high costs of public-sector unions inside U.S. households.
The progressive model is to enact irreversible policies like these on the assumption that any mess can be cleaned up later—by them. The fixers are the administrative elites—lawyers or healthcare and social-welfare academics—who came up with the original ideas on paper. A cynic would say the Biden plans for social welfare and environmental mitigation should be understood primarily as permanent career and income subsidies for these planning elites. The misgovernance is built in. Then people wonder why their government “doesn’t work.”
These strategies have never been tried on this scale. Earlier generations of liberals, such as Congressmen Henry Waxman and John Dingell, understood the political utility of incremental change. Conceivably, they believed their expansions of programs like Medicare should have some chance of working.
The modern progressive mind condemns incremental liberal progress of the sort favored by Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as a sellout. Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota progressive, said this week, “We obviously didn’t envision having Republicans as part of our party.”
Nor do progressives assign any weight to the foreseeable problems inside their ideas. Their current decriminalization theories are damaging the fabric of inner-city life, as revealed this week in the FBI’s statistics on the unprecedented one-year spike in murders. They don’t care. Once a policy is in place, thinking stops.
What remains to be seen is whether the dissenting Democratic moderates are animated only by the topline spending number—a trillion here, a trillion there—or by the implications of this impossibly vast plan for public governance, or its absence, in American life.
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Biden turns America into Russia? Why?
Comptroller of the Economy
Biden’s nominee to regulate banks really, really hates . . . banks.
By The Editorial Board
President Biden checked off another progressive identity box last week by nominating Saule Omarova as Comptroller of the Currency. Some Trump appointees were ridiculed for having supported the elimination of their agencies. Ms. Omarova wants to eliminate the banks she’s being appointed to regulate.
The Cornell University law school professor’s radical ideas might make even Bernie Sanders blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.
“Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best,’” she tweeted in 2019. After Twitter users criticized her ignorance, she added a caveat: “I never claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every facet of Soviet life. But people’s salaries were set (by the state) in a gender-blind manner. And all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!”
Sure, there was a Gulag, and no private property, but maternity benefits!
Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.
In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She’d also like the U.S. to create a central bank digital currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’” she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong?
Ms. Omarova believes capital and credit should be directed by an unaccountable bureaucracy and intelligentsia. She has recommended a “National Investment Authority,” with members overseen by an advisory board of academics, to finance a “big and bold” climate agenda. Sounds like the green infrastructure bank the Senate rejected.
She’d also like a politically and structurally independent “Public Interest Council” of "highly paid” academics with broad subpoena power to supervise financial regulatory agencies, including the Fed. The Council, she explained, would not be subject to the “constraints and requirements of the administrative process.” Ivy League professors know best.
As comptroller, Ms. Omarova would supervise some 1,200 financial institutions. While she couldn’t enact her People’s Agenda without legislation, she would have sweeping powers to punish banks that don’t follow her diktats. Recall how financial regulators during the Obama Presidency pressured banks to cut off credit to pay-day lenders.
Our sources say the President nominated Ms. Omarova over the objections of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, to whom the comptroller reports. One theory for this bizarre nomination is that Mr. Biden is trying to appease progressives because he plans to reappoint Jerome Powell as Fed chairman. Democratic Senators have rubber-stamped all but a few of Mr. Biden’s nominees, but Ms. Omarova is the wrong nominee for the wrong industry in the wrong country in the wrong century.
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One of Trump's biggest mistakes, in terms of foreign policy , is taking America out of TPP and allowing China to gain a trade foothold in that region. China will become a dominant military force in the Pacific, is already gaining politically and if allowed to dictate commercially they will have accomplished a major victory:
The U.S. Has a Way Back on Pacific Trade
And if Washington doesn’t take it, the Indo-Pacific would likely become China’s for the taking.
By Tim Groser
It was February 2017 and President Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress. I was on the floor of the U.S. House as a guest of a pro-trade Republican congressman. As the president announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, I was thinking about a conversation I’d had with a particularly astute Asian ambassador. He’d suggested to me that if a book on the decline of American influence in Asia and the Indo-Pacific were ever written—and he hoped it never would be—its first chapter would be an account of the withdrawal of the U.S. from TPP.
Largely because of Japan’s courageous decision to proceed without the U.S., TPP survived. With some changes to a few of its provisions and a new moniker—Comprehensive and Progressive TPP, or CPTPP—it went ahead. Nothing would have been possible if Japan, by far the dominant remaining economy in the agreement, had decided differently.
China’s decision this month to apply for CPTPP membership should be a sharp reminder to Republicans and Democrats alike that if the U.S. is serious about competing with China in the Indo-Pacific it must confront a central reality: Having withdrawn from the TPP, the U.S. doesn’t yet have a trade strategy to back up its military posture in the region. China is the principal trading partner of many countries in the Indo-Pacific. The size of China’s economy, as well as its military and geostrategic ambition, means that Beijing will be at the center of the debate over every regional and global issue in the 21st century, from climate change to trade. Its ability to influence the outcomes of those issues will be determined by the degree—and effectiveness—of U.S. engagement.
We don’t yet know where the new policy script that the Chinese Communist Party is now writing will lead the world’s second-largest economy. When Deng Xiaoping 40 years ago shifted China toward growth and an open economy with his slogan “to be rich is glorious,” it was the beginning of the largest poverty-reduction program in human history. Hundreds of millions of Chinese were lifted out of destitution, and huge opportunities opened up for China’s trading partners. Things have been moving backward lately, in the direction of greater centralization and state control. One could even mount an elegant argument that China itself needs balance from the full engagement of the U.S. in the region.
The Chinese people have benefited enormously, not from “wolf warrior” diplomacy, but from Beijing’s positive engagement with the U.S.-designed liberal economic architecture. China’s future choices and trade strategies will be fundamentally different if they aren’t constrained by a muscular and successful U.S. economic strategy in the Indo-Pacific.
Intriguingly, the U.S. is putting in place the elements of regional re-engagement. No foreign policy (or trade policy) is politically sustainable without a solid domestic constituency behind it. Trade has long been a tortured issue in American politics, particularly for Democrats, because economic change creates anxiety for the middle class. When people are under severe economic pressure, trade is always a potential scapegoat.
In September 2020, the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace published a white paper titled “Making U.S. Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class.” Among the authors was Jake Sullivan, now President Biden’s national security adviser. The White House approach to assuaging traditional Democratic fears of trade-induced economic change seems clear: Shore up domestic policy before moving forward aggressively on any trade deals.
The recent establishment of the Aukus security arrangement among the U.S., the U.K. and Australia can leave no doubt that the Biden administration views the Indo-Pacific as the most important theater of strategic competition with China. Kurt Campbell, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, has made clear that U.S. strategy in the region must extend beyond a military plan to protect American allies from China’s expansionist ambitions. It needs an economic component.
In my view, the U.S. is unlikely to rectify the mistake of leaving TPP by asking to join CPTPP. Mr. Biden has said he would oppose joining the original deal without a renegotiation. That alone would make it difficult for the U.S. to waltz back in. But it’s also true that the strategic environment has evolved. Large parts of TPP, such as its provisions on trade and the environment, remain relevant, but the past five years have sharpened the policy world’s understanding of such key issues as digital trade and state-owned enterprises. Plus, there is a new kid on the TPP block: the U.K. The world’s sixth-largest economy, a major intelligence and defense partner of the U.S., wants to join the club. The U.K.’s post-Brexit desire to expand its horizons beyond geographical Europe was the political subtext of the trade deal announced this summer between London and Canberra.
Whatever next year’s congressional elections bring, active foreign-policy engagement always requires the involvement of both American political parties. The U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement, updating the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed easily with bipartisan support during the Trump administration. If the U.S. recommits to TPP, it should be rechristened the Indo-Pacific Economic Partnership Agreement. A new name might make it an easier sell politically.
The regional stakes were high even before China’s aggressive move on Hong Kong, its saber-rattling in Taiwan, and its ramped-up trade war with Australia. We now need to hear American leaders on both sides of the aisle talking about re-engaging in the region, not only on the political and military levels, but on the trade and economic architecture that will shape economic relations over the next decade and beyond. Only then will my friend the astute Asian ambassador be able to rest easy, secure in the knowledge that the decline of American influence in the Indo-Pacific is a book that will never be written.
Mr. Groser served as New Zealand’s trade minister (2008–15) and ambassador to the U.S. (2016–18).
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