Posts Tagged ‘economics’

Behind the bank failures

Thursday, March 16th, 2023

I want to recommend a good piece at Conservative Tree House, which I read every day.

It is this post which connects a few dots.

This is where we need to keep the BRICS -vs- WEF dynamic in mind and consider that ideologically there is a conflict between the current agenda of the ‘western financial system’ (climate change) and the traditional energy developers. This conflict has been playing out not only in the energy sector, but also the dynamic of support for Russia (an OPEC+ member) against the western sanction regime. Ultimately supporting Russia’s battle against NATO encroachments.

The war in Ukraine, which probably would not have begun if Trump was president, led to a war of economic interests. The western democracies have invested their future in “climate change,” which used to be “global warming” before the failure to warm made that slogan obsolete. Climate change has evolved into a war on energy production. The Biden regime now has even gone after gas stoves. Since I just bought one, I have an interest. Now, they seem to be going after washing machines. Ours has failed recently so I had better be quick to replace it.

The recent Credit Suisse bank crisis is complicated by the refusal of its largest shareholder, the Saudis, to help with a bail out. Why would this be ? This brings up the topic of BRICS. This is a new financial combination made up of Russia, China, Brazil, India and South Africa.

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Russia invades Ukraine

Saturday, February 26th, 2022

I was surprised that Putin decided to invade. I expected he would get his way in eastern Ukraine, which is largely Russian speaking, by bluffing the Biden regime and Germany.

Here is an analysis of his thinking.

That fear informs the potential conflict brewing along the Ukrainian border, Maria Snegovaya, a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, told Vox via email.

“It looks like Putin is committed to preventing the deepening cooperation between Ukraine and the US/the West,” Snegovaya said, “which he views as Russia losing Ukraine.”

Snegovaya points to a 2021 essay by Putin, titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” as an example of his thinking.

In the essay, Putin called the two nations “essentially the same historical and spiritual space,” tracing his notion of a shared history back more than a thousand years. That assertion, though, elides a long history of differences between the two countries, and even more significantly, flies in the face of current Ukrainian attitudes, which favor membership in both NATO and the EU, (though neither is likely in the near future).

Here is another analysis.

Ukraine has been a satellite operation for the U.S. State Department for approximately 15 to 20 years. The U.S. has held control over Ukraine, and manipulated every political outcome inside Ukraine, for well over a decade. This reality is the source of Vladimir Putin’s angst toward the west for the same amount of time, and it’s the same reason why the EU, specifically Germany, is tenuous in any collaborative response.

The EU, writ large (including NATO), are less interested in Ukraine, because they know Ukraine is the U.S. playground in Europe. This truism explains why we see a conflict when it comes to responses and sanctions from the U.S. compared to the European NATO allies.

Yet more support for the role US has played.

Putin’s reputation until this moment has always been as a shrewd ex-KGB man who eschewed high-risk gambles in favor of sure things backed by the United States, like entering Syria and then escalating forces there. So why has he adopted exactly the opposite strategy here, and chosen the road of open high-risk confrontation with the American superpower?

Yes, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But the larger answer is that he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening. That’s because for nearly two decades, the U.S. national security establishment under both Democratic and Republican administrations has used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia, and specifically to target Putin.

The history of corruption in Ukraine benefitting US politicians including President Biden is a useful background as well. It is also interesting that Russia gnawed off chunks of its neighbors under Bush and Obama before. Putin made noise but took no action while Trump was president. There is a good argument that, under Trump, US oil production drove world oil prices down to $30 a barrel. Since Russia is dependent on oil and gas for most of its GDP, this limited Putin’s options. When Biden was inaugurated he reversed every Executive Order that Trump had used to make us energy independent. In addition, Trump had blocked funding for the Nord Stream II pipeline between Russia and Germany. This pipeline would increase the dependence of Europe on Russia since Germany had foolishly closed nuclear plants. The result of Biden’s actions was to raise world oil prices, now above $100 a barrel, and return the US to an oil importing nation. Our largest source of imported oil is Russia ! Biden has assured Putin that we have no intention of limiting or stopping those energy imports. An election is coming and gas prices and home heating prices are already double the level when Trump was in office.

Thus, a fair reading of the current situation in Europe is that the US enabled Putin by shutting down energy production while Joe Biden made empty threats of sanctions and the US funded Putin’s ambitions with oil money.

What is going on with China?

Tuesday, May 12th, 2020

China was admitted into the World Trade Organization in 2001 with the understanding that they would participate in free trade and to international norms.

Until the 1970s, China’s economy was managed by the communist government and was kept closed from other economies. Together with political reforms, China in the early 1980s began to open its economy and signed a number of regional trade agreements. China gained observer status with GATT and from 1986, began working towards joining that organization. China aimed to be included as a WTO founding member (which would validate it as a world economic power) but this attempt was thwarted because the United States, European countries, and Japan requested that China first reform various tariff policies, including tariff reductions, open markets and industrial policies.

That has not happened. China has followed a mercantilist trade policy, stealing intellectual property, requiring companies selling to the Chinese to share ownership wioth often corrupt entities owned by the Peoples Liberation Army and relative of regime principals.

Mercantilism is a policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. It promotes imperialism, tariffs and subsidies on traded goods to achieve that goal. These policies aim to reduce a possible current account deficit or reach a current account surplus. Mercantilism includes an economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves through a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies frequently led to war and also motivated colonial expansion.[1] Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time.

America has been largely passive in tolerating this behavior until Donald Trump became president. Some of this passivity may reflect Chinese influence with US politicians.

While it may seem politics as usual in Washington today, some are alarmed.

“Nobody in the 1980s would have represented the Russian government. And now you find so many lobbying for the Chinese government,” said Frank Wolf, a retired U.S. representative from Virginia who long served as the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. “I served in Congress for 34 years. I find it shocking.”

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The Corona Virus Timeline.

Wednesday, April 1st, 2020

It is now becoming a theme on the left that Trump was not quick enough to recognize the coming epidemic.

For that reason, I think it valuable to keep a record of the time line.

Here is the January 12, 2020 WHO report on the virus epidemic in China.

The evidence is highly suggestive that the outbreak is associated with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan. The market was closed on 1 January 2020. At this stage, there is no infection among healthcare workers, and no clear evidence of human to human transmission. The Chinese authorities continue their work of intensive surveillance and follow up measures, as well as further epidemiological investigations.

Here is the January 30, 2020 report by WHO on the epidemic in China.

The Committee believes that it is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts, and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk. It is important to note that as the situation continues to evolve, so will the strategic goals and measures to prevent and reduce spread of the infection. The Committee agreed that the outbreak now meets the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and proposed the following advice to be issued as Temporary Recommendations.

The Committee emphasized that the declaration of a PHEIC should be seen in the spirit of support and appreciation for China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the frontlines of this outbreak, with transparency, and, it is to be hoped, with success.

Trump stopped incoming flights from China on January 31, 2020.

At this point, sharply curtailing air travel to and from China is more of an emotional or political reaction, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“The cow’s already out of the barn,” he said, ”and we’re now talking about shutting the barn door.”

A Minnesota epidemiologist’s opinion.

Nancy Pelosi tours Chinatown on February 24, 2020.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a point of taking a walk through San Francisco’s Chinatown on Monday to show that it is safe, after some merchants have seen a 50% drop in business as some fear they could be exposed to the coronavirus.

As her visit began, a large portion of Chinatown had lost power. That didn’t deter the Speaker from walking along Ross Alley and Grant Avenue.

“I’m here,” she said. “We feel safe and sound with so many of us coming here. It’s not only to say it’s safe but to say thank you for being Chinatown.”

On March 16, 2020, Mayor de Blasio was still enouraging people to attend crowded events.

For most of last week, as Mayor Bill de Blasio continued to urge New Yorkers to mostly go about their daily lives — sending their children to school, frequenting the city’s businesses — some of his top aides were furiously trying to change the mayor’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak.

There had been arguments and shouting matches between the mayor and some of his advisers; some top health officials had even threatened to resign if he refused to accept the need to close schools and businesses, according to several people familiar with the internal discussions.

So much for the urgency in dealing with the epidemic.

It is time to start the economy again.

Saturday, March 21st, 2020

UPDATE: Here is a pretty good discussion of the economy right now.

I have previously described the COVID 19 virus, which is also referred to as Wuhan virus, to the annoyance of the China friendly US Media. The consequences for the US economy have been severe. The most affected states, New York, California, Illinois and Washington, have virtually shut down their population. Arizona is less affected with 78 positives cases as of today, and no deaths.

Italy and China have had the most deaths. There are a number of factors that probably affect these cases. China is notorious for air pollution and smoking, especially men smoking. There has been a dearth, so far, of listing comorbidities but age has been a major one.

One study lists mortality at age 80+ at 15%. The overall death rate in China was listed at 2.3%, which may reflect smoking and air pollution. South Korea, which has had a big spike as testing progressed much more rapidly than in the US, has a case mortality of less than 1%

South Korea has the dubious distinction of suffering the second-highest number of Covid-19 infections after China – but can also boast the lowest death ratio among countries with significant numbers of cases.

According to the WHO on March 6, the crude mortality ratio for Covid-19 – that is, the number of reported deaths divided by the number of reported cases – is between 3-4%. In Korea, as of March 9, that figure was a mere 0.7%.

AS US testing finally gets going, after the FDA and CDC delayed matters for a month, we will see a big spike in number of cases but, I am convinced, a big drop in mortality rate.

Telephone consulting services, drive-through test centers and thermal cameras – which, set up in buildings and public places to detect fever, swiftly came online. South Korea has undertaken approximately 190,000 tests thus far, according to KCDC Deputy Director General Kwon Jun-wook, and has the capacity to undertake 20,000 per day. Turnaround times are six-24 hours.

Tests are highly affordable. “The test kit is about $130, and about half is covered by insurance the other half by individual,” Kwon said. Those who test positive get the test free, “So there is no reason for suspected cases to hide their symptoms,” he said.

We should be doing the same.

At the same time, we are risking severe economic damage to the country by shutting down business activity. I believe that much of the drastic steps taken by governors, especially in New York and California, is unnecessary. High density cities like New York City and Chicago may have more reason to fear spread of the virus. Most of the country, a source of annoyance to left wing politicians, is of low population density.

Another failure of the US response is the absence of masks, which may play a role in limiting transmission in densely populated areas, as in Asia cities. There are reports that China has controlled most of the manufacturing and resists export.

China made half the world’s masks before the coronavirus emerged there, and it has expanded production nearly 12-fold since then. But it has claimed mask factory output for itself. Purchases and donations also brought China a big chunk of the world’s supply from elsewhere.

Now, worries about mask supplies are rising. As the virus’s global spread escalates, governments around the world are restricting exports of protective gear, which experts say could worsen the pandemic.

Also, there is now evidence that treatment of the infected may not require new drugs but be available with known drugs like chloroquine and its analog, hydroxychloroquine

Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva is donating millions of doses of a malaria drug that is believed to be effective in fighting the symptoms of the coronavirus.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the six million doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate will be shipped to US hospitals started March 31. By the end of next month, 10 million will be shipped.

It is uncertain how effective the malaria treatment will be against coronavirus, but research is currently ongoing.

In fact, there is good evidence that it is effective.

The in vitro antiviral activity of chloroquine has been identified since the late 1960’s (Inglot, 1969; Miller and Lenard, 1981; Shimizu et al., 1972) and the growth of many different viruses can be inhibited in cell culture by both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, including the SARS coronavirus (Keyaerts et al., 2004). Some evidence for activity in mice has been found for a variety of viruses, including human coronavirus OC43 (Keyaerts et al., 2009), enterovirus EV-A71 (Tan et al., 2018), Zika virus (Li et al., 2017) and influenza A H5N1 (Yan et al., 2013). However, chloroquine did not prevent influenza infection in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial (Paton et al., 2011), and had no effect on dengue-infecteds patient in a randomized controlled trial in Vietnam.

I had speculated that they might be effective in Influenza but this appears to not be the case.

Clinical trials have already shown effectiveness.

According to Sun, patients treated with chloroquine demonstrated a better drop in fever, improvement of lung CT images, and required a shorter time to recover compared to parallel groups.

The percentage of patients with negative viral nucleic acid tests was also higher with the anti-malarial drug.

Chloroquine has so far showed no obvious serious adverse reactions in the more than 100 participants in the trials.

The first case report using remdesivir was dramatic.

The drug is now in clinical trial but the chloroquine evidence reduces the urgency of the study.

What do we do now ?

My wife and I are at high risk but it is easy for us to self isolate. The mortality rate for those under age 50 is about equal to that of influenza. For those between 50 and 70, only those with pre-existing morbidities have a serious risk.

It is time to reopen the economy certainly by next week. The damage done by unemployment and bankruptcy will far exceed that of the disease.

How the Conservative Party has sold out Britain in BREXIT.

Saturday, September 7th, 2019

King George III and Lord North have been blamed for botching negotiations with the American colonies. Now, the same Conservative Party seems determined to botch another negotiation; with the EU. In both cases, the party and negotiators were determined to keep the relationship intact, no matter how unequal.
An excellent piece in the Claremont Review explains.

Many statesmen warned from the outset that British ideas of liberty would not survive a merger with the E.U. The most eloquent early diagnoses came from the Labour Party, not the Tories. That is because the fundamental disposition of the E.U. is to favor technocratic expertise over representative government, and the Tories have not generally been the British party that placed the highest priority on the passions of the masses. In 1962, as Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was eying EEC membership, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell warned, “[I]t does mean the end of Britain as an independent nation state…. It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say ‘Let it end’ but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought.”

Interesting that Labour saw the danger first. In the US, the party of the Administrative State is the Democrats although both parties are heavily invested as Angelo Codevilla has pointed out.

Eventually even the reliably anti-Brexit Economist came to see that some of Britain’s major problems had arisen from constitutional meddling. David Cameron’s 2011 Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, in particular, made it much more difficult to call the general elections that would ordinarily have been provoked by the resounding repudiation of Theresa May’s withdrawal package. Blair and Cameron, the magazine noted, “came to power when history was said to have come to an end. They saw no need to take particular care of the constitution.” E.U. membership hid these problems—if Britain wasn’t paying attention to its constitution at the time, it was partly because it had been using someone else’s.

I had not realized that “Judicial Review” of laws was an American phenomenon. John Marshall has reached far into the future with his ruling in Marbury vs Madison.

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The agriculture war.

Saturday, May 11th, 2019

We are entering a period when the tariff controversy with China is getting serious.

The Wall Street Journal is worried.

A failure to break an impasse in talks in Washington on Friday opened a new phase in the trade fight after more than five months of back-and-forth negotiations. This time, some economists and analysts said, Beijing is taking stock of potential economic damage from higher tariffs.

The U.S. raised punitive tariffs to 25%, from 10%, for $200 billion in goods leaving China on Friday and thereafter. President Trump also ordered staff to begin the paperwork to impose levies on the more than $300 billion worth of everything else China sells to the U.S.

While Beijing has met previous volleys of tariffs from the U.S. by raising duties on American goods—and the government has promised to retaliate—it held its fire. Though China has more limited tariff options, since it imports fewer products from the U.S. than the other way around, the Chinese leadership is also constrained by an economy that is in a shaky recovery from a sharp slowdown.

There is talk of China boycotting US farm products. They tried it a year ago.

The world’s biggest oilseed processor just confirmed one of the soybean market’s biggest fears: China has essentially stopped buying U.S. supplies amid the brewing trade war.

“Whatever they’re buying is non-U.S.,” Bunge Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Soren Schroder said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They’re buying beans in Canada, in Brazil, mostly Brazil, but very deliberately not buying anything from the U.S.”

In a move that caught many in U.S. agriculture by surprise, China last month announced planned tariffs on American shipments of soybeans.

The boycott failed.

“China has to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans,” Oil World said in its latest newsletter. “The South American supply shortage will make it necessary for China, in our opinion, to import 15 million tonnes of U.S. soybeans in October 2018/March 2019, even if the current trade war is not resolved.”

China may not be in good shape to handle a trade war.

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A Year in New Hampshire

Thursday, December 13th, 2018

In 1994, after my back surgery and the prolonged recovery, I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. The young man who I had taken in as a partner before my surgery, did not want me to continue in the surgery practice as a non-operating member. I had offered to see patients in the office and to help keep the referring doctors sending patients. I still had a fair sized breast practice which includes quite a bit of office work. He was not interested. That was a bad decision on his part but I had sold him the practice before my surgery and he was free to do as he chose.

I had been interested in the area of peer review in Medicine for some years and had served on the Board of Directors of California Medical Review, Inc. This was an outgrowth of a new federal policy called “Professional Standards Review Organizations. or PSRO. It was supposed to be about quality but it was always about cost. CMRI was founded in about 1986 and is now defunct. It was useful in trying to figure out how to measure quality but go into trouble later for exaggerating their case load.

Anyway, I was interested and knew that Dartmouth Medical School had a program called “Evaluative Clinical Sciences. The Director was a well known epidemiologist named Jack Wennberg who had become famous for his study of variation in medical treatment. His original study had been of tonsillectomy in Vermont where he was state health officer. He found that the incidence of tonsillectomy varied by town but not by medical indications. IT was a function of local medical “culture.” Eventually, his work resulted in The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care.

I talked to him and then applied for the Fall Semester. In September, I leased my house and moved to New Hampshire for a year. I leased a house in the Hanover area and moved in.

New Hampshire - 3 of 9

New Hampshire - 9 of 9

The house was pretty and situated on 5 acres of land. It had a barn that served as a garage and I had my car winterized as New Hampshire is cold in Winter. It was 26 below zero Thanksgiving morning.

The house was about 6 miles north of the medical school, up this highway.

New Hampshire - 4 of 9

I had my dog and a cat that some neighbor children had brought over the first day I was moving in.

SunnyBillFood

The cat and the dog got on very well and even ate from the same dish, although Sunny, the dog, ate faster and I eventually had to put Bill’s food in the basement to keep Sunny from eating it all.

Winter came quickly and the first snow was less than a month after I moved in.The house was comfortable although expensive to heat.

The land had a small stream running through it and there was a pond in front of the house.

New Hampshire - 6 of 9

That its a small bridge over the stream and the stream itself was frozen a good part of the winter.

New Hampshire - 5 of 9

The interior was nice. Here is the living room with Christmas decorations for the kids as they came to spend the holiday with me.

New Hampshire - 1 of 9

Being California kids, they had fun playing in the snow.

New Hampshire - 4 of 4

That was across the road from the junction of Grant Road and Lyme Road from the medical school.

Spring eventually came after “mud season,” which is the fifth season of New England. Graduation was fun as the older kids were there and Bill Clinton handed me my diploma.

My research project was on dialysis access surgery and I had thoughts of further study but we never got the grant I applied for. I returned to California and spent several years trying to use the same methods to analyze care of the elderly and of care of the poor, but I got no cooperation from the necessary authorities and eventually gave up on research on medical quality.

Here is the house I leased in 1994-95.

15 grant road,.

Obviously the photo was taken in summer.

My next door neighbor was a guy named Baxter Prescott and he had at least as large a property with lots of maple trees. Next to Baxter’s was his son, Tom’s, who had a home business making musical instruments, specifically recorders. He had an Apple computer connected top a milling machine and built the instruments, many using precious woods. I got to know Tom and his family while I was there. Baxter was a very interesting guy. He and his wife, Emily I think, had a nice home which was heated by a wood stove at the lowest level. The wood stove also heated their hot water, which circulated in copper tubing behind it. They had a Nigerian exchange student, enrolled at Dartmouth, living with them. He was a nice kid and worked nights in the 24 hour Dining Hall for extra money and at night so he could study.

In the Spring I helped (mostly watched) Baxter make maple syrup from his trees. He also had a pond, which in summer was a swimming hole and in winter a skating pond. He had a little gazebo for summer, which had removable walls to enclose it as a warming hut in winter. My kids were there in winter and got quite a bit of use with it. Baxter had a sort of Zamboni machine which would smooth out the ice.

They were very pleasant neighbors and I enjoyed knowing them.

The “Third Place”

Thursday, November 8th, 2018

Saloon

I am reading, by listening to the audio, a book called “The Revolt of the Elites,” which was written in 1996 but I just discovered it.

The theme, which is quite timely, is that there are two worlds in this country; that of the elites and that of everyone else. From a review on Amazon:

Lasch was most active in the late twentieth century yet it would seem he was seeing into the future with this book and his equally (or more) famous book, The Culture of Narcissism. In Revolt of the Elites he posits that the degeneration of Western Democracy has been caused by the abandonment by the wealthy and educated elites of their responsibilities to support culture, education, the building of public facilities, etc. in these societies. The rich and educated in Western Liberal, Capitalist, Democracies have, since the 1970s, increasingly abandoned society, keeping all of their earnings to themselves and have adopted a listless transient existence forgoing any significant commitments to community.

He makes the point that we are no longer one nation with even the well off participating in the community. We lead separate lives.

One example of this he calls the “Third Place,” a place where the community gets together. One place is work and another is home. The Third Place used to be a gathering place where all classes could mingle and get to know each other. In my own life it was the neighborhood tavern. My father was in the Juke Box business when I was a child and he spent quite a bit of time in taverns as that was where his business was. Two taverns that I remember quite well were owned by good friends of my father’s. One served as an answering service for service calls from other taverns. Both were neighborhood places which had many customers from nearly all classes. The very rich tended not to be there but I remember quite successful businessmen and their wives who attended parties and barbecues. The tavern would have softball teams for younger customers. One of them had a private ball field across the street that was owned by the tavern owner.

The other tavern was not far away and among its regular customers were a wealthy heiress and her husband who had been a professional golfer. Every Sunday after Mass, there was a group that would always congregate there for an hour or two before going home. Most of the regulars did not visit each other at home, but did their socializing at the tavern.

When I was a medical student, we visited New York City in August 1965 and the friends whose apartment where we stayed, were regular customers of the local tavern. One our one visit to the tavern, the friend pointed out all the men there without women. The wives and children were all at the “shore” for the hot month of August.

The VFW and the Elks Club and Fraternal Order of Moose served the same purpose for many. My father was an Elk. There is a scene in the Clint Eastwood movie, “Gran Torino” that shows him socializing with the friends at the VFW. (Has it been the years since that movie ?)

Those third places are pretty much gone. The country club and even the yacht club, where I spent a lot of time socializing, are not the same. There is an economic issue although yacht clubs are full of crew members who are not members of the club but are welcome.

The divisiveness and tribalism we see in the elections and in the national politics are probably consequences of the lack such mixing bowls of democracy.

Corruption at all levels.

Friday, October 20th, 2017

UPDATE: More on the Clinton Russian scandal.


J. Michael Waller, writing in the Daily Caller, says that new FBI information about corruption in a Clinton-approved uranium deal with Russia raises questions about Clinton’s actions after the FBI broke up a deep-cover Russian spy ring in 2010. The FBI ran an elaborate and highly successful operation called Ghost Stories to monitor and rip apart a deep-cover Russian agent network. It tracked a ring of Russian spies who lived between Boston and Washington, D.C. under false identities.

In 2010, thanks to the Ghost Stories operation, the FBI arrested 10 spies. According to Waller, “Secretary of State Clinton worked feverishly to return the Russian agents to Moscow in a hastily arranged, lopsided deal with Putin.”

If this is true, why did Clinton do so? Waller ties her actions to the Russia uranium deal:

For the Clintons, the FBI’s biggest counterintelligence bust in history couldn’t have come at a worse time. . .It all happened as the uranium deal was in play: An arrangement to provide Moscow’s state Rosatom nuclear agency with 20 percent of American uranium capacity, with $145,000,000 to pour into the Clinton Family Foundation and its projects.

There are many examples of the corruption of our government. A serious commenter at All Althouse said this’

Blogger buwaya said…
Another difference between the US, the greatest banana republic that has ever been, and your garden-variety banana republic, is that the economic interests that run it are of a vastly different kind.

Your usual banana republic was and is run by people who make money by making things, and mining things, and growing things, and selling them abroad or to local consumers. They may be assholes, they may employ thugs, they can and do cheat and collude and corrupt governments, but their source of wealth is production and there are significant interests shared with the common people, much more than one would think.

In the US though the big money has nearly no interests in common with the commoners. Their wealth rests on exploitation of laws and regulations, paper assets. The people are extraneous and irrelevant.

I have thought for some time that we are being dominated by billionaires that don’t make useful things. Most of it, like Facebook and Google, is vaporware. Some other techie will come along and build a better mousetrap and those entities will disappear.

They don’t make things. Much of the wealth in this country is now created by handling money. It is an old ironic comments that”Even the handling of money can be profitable.”

Now, we are seeing the gigantic scandal that may or may not become apparent. The Democrats are trying to keep the lid on it and Republicans are not a great deal more trustworthy. The story is explained here.

To read the headlines, a poor, beleaguered opposition-research firm was humiliated and constitutionally abused this week by partisan Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Fusion’s lawyers sent a 17-page letter to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, accusing him of misdeeds, declaring his subpoenas invalid, and invoking a supposed First Amendment right to silence. Yet the firm’s founders, the story went, were hauled in nonetheless and forced to plead the Fifth. “No American should experience the indignity that occurred today,” Fusion’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, declared.

Fusion is known as a ruthless firm that excels in smear jobs, but few have noticed the operation it’s conducting against the lawmakers investigating it. The false accusations against Mr. Nunes—that he’s acting unethically and extralegally, that he’s sabotaging the Russia probe—are classic.

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