Mission Unlikely

President Trump has tasked our military with taking out the drug cartels south of the border. He has designated cartels as "foreign terrorist organizations." This is no simple mission, it may not even be possible.

As cartels are well armed, this will be a violent intervention on foreign soil that includes Mexico, Venezuela, and possibly elsewhere south of the border. It will be interesting to see how these countries, some or all of which are corrupt, react to the announcement. 

Our collaboration with the locals will likely be fruitless as their governments are riddled with government employees on the take who would leak any joint plans to the cartel.

Latin American countries normally are touchy about their "sovereignty." A long history of US troop interventions in Mexico, Panama, Grenada, Haiti, and elsewhere gives them pause. 

It is possible Trump will seek permission to hunt cartels. If a country refuses, cut off US visas for citizens of that country and tariff their exports to us at 100%. But, infuriating the locals is a good way to get them to cozy up to the Chinese who already cooperate with the cartels, something not in our interest.

Any agreements permitting our troops will need to include the special wording which says any collateral damage will be settled by arbitration. Otherwise you can't ask our troops to commit what are criminal acts if done by non-LEOs in a foreign nation with which we are not at war.

Movin’

CBS News reports President Trump has revoked President Biden’s preferential treatment for refugees from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Some 532,000 came in under what was called the CHNV program.

The termination of their work permits and deportation protections under an immigration authority known as parole will take effect in late April, 30 days after March 25, according to a notice posted by the federal government.

The Department of Homeland Security said it will seek the arrest and deportation of those subject to the policy change if they fail to depart the U.S. in the next 30 days. Officials are urging migrants to use the newly repurposed CBP Home smartphone app to register for self-deportation.

Needless to say, this is another good thing Trump is doing. 

Keep movin’, movin’, movin’ 

Though they’re disapprovin’ 

Keep them dogies movin’ 

Rawhide

About Lawfare

So the judge on Trump's New York trial and conviction on 34 counts of inaccurate record keeping has passed sentence on DJT. Trump is sentenced to exactly nothing, no incarceration, no fine, only the unlovely title of "convicted felon." Trump is out his undoubtedly significant legal fees.

Another way to think about this is that in early November the American people served as a gigantic "appellate jury." Disagreeing with the New York jury, we found Trump not guilty and reelected him President by a 312 to 226 margin.

At the same time we also rendered a 'verdict' on the abuse of the legal system that has come to be known as "lawfare," a portmanteau of the words "law" and "warfare." The people abusing the system in this way are no better than what passes for politicians in a banana republic somewhere in the third world.

Paradoxically, bringing lawfare out in the open with no apologies makes the decent of our country into autocracy more likely. We have become more like Russia, Venezuela, or any number of African countries where leaders hang onto power by illegal means because the only way to die a free person is to die in office or in exile. 

Putin finds himself in this position now, and his choices for exile aren't great. It will be surprising if Trump can resist the impulse to try Biden for corruption, influence peddling, representing a foreign government without registering, and lying about it. All of which Biden did.

A Doomsday Forecast

Steve Hayward of Power Line follows the writing of a financial analyst Robert Stirling.  Stirling writes what well might ensue if Kamala Harris' food price controls are enacted and enforced. 

Hayward has posted what Stirling predicts, it's bad and it feels real. Its 13 steps are too long to post here, each is a paragraph. I've given you the edited topic sentence of each step.

1. The government announces that grocery retailers aren’t allowed to raise prices.

2. Grocery stores (snip) can’t survive if their suppliers raise prices. So the government announces that food producers (snip) also aren’t allowed to raise prices..

3. Because stores in lower-income areas aren’t able to cover overhead (snip), grocery chains start to shut them down.

4. Meanwhile, margins for food producers are also quickly eroding.

5. Grocery chains, which have finite shelf space, start to repurpose their stores (snip) to sell more non-price-controlled items. (I noted this yesterday)

6. Food producers stop making products with lower margins. Grocery chains start competing with each other to secure inventory.

7. Small grocery chains start to shut down entirely, or get sold to larger chains like Kroger.

8. Smaller food producers—which typically sell via distributors, rather than directly to grocery chains—start to go out of business.

9. As supply chains break down, lines start to form outside grocery stores every morning.

10. The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores.

11. The government announces that prices for all key food costs—corn, wheat, cattle, energy, etc.—are also now fixed.

12. Shockingly, the government struggles to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet.

13. Communism, mass starvation, and the end of America quickly ensue.

It starts to feel Soviet at about step 9. Events like these are why a substantial fraction of Venezuela's population has moved here as illegal aliens. Where in blazes can we go if this occurs? Let's not find out, do you agree?

One Robin

I did a quick Internet search for articles claiming Latin America was going left politically, and found a dozen or more in the past year. Which makes Chile's rejection Sunday of a proposed new constitution with a very left bias all the more interesting. 

Perhaps there is some common sense in the region's politics after all. Some sense that Venezuela and Cuba aren't especially models to emulate in pursuit of a good life. 

One robin, they say, doesn't necessarily mean spring has arrived. Let's keep watching for other signs of political practicality in our neighbors to the South.

Chile Votes

Chile is one of the 4-5 countries to our south upon which I keep a weather eye. It has for 40+ years operated under a very business-friendly constitution which has enabled it to become perhaps the most successful economy in Central and South America. So reports the Washington Post, echoed by msn.com.

With success came inequality, and those left behind haven't been happy. In 2019 they voted to write a new constitution and to do so in a way that incorporated the views of the entire society.

Chileans are voting to accept or reject the proposed constitution as we write this. Polls suggest the ultra-leftist 388 article document may be defeated. One voter called the document “'indigenist' and 'in the style of Venezuela.'”

For Chile's sake, I hope they turn it down and write one which is more "Western," as one interviewee hoped. We should know in a few days.

Later ... It didn't take "a few days," more like a few hours. The polls were correct, the new constitution has been defeated. The Wall Street Journal has the outcome.

The national vote to write a new constitution is still Chilean law. So another assembly will be chosen and a second draft constitution prepared to be voted on. Opinion polling can help the second effort avoid the unpopular features included in the one just defeated.

Path to Perdition

With the Covid mess and pandemic fears as excuses, the 2020 election was run in somewhat peculiar ways. The outcome wasn’t to the Republican loser’s liking, and he cried “foul.” 

Now it begins to look like Democrats, having screwed up big, will lose big in 2022. They are already crying “foul,” blaming election manipulation and cheating.

All of this begins to have very much the feeling of third world politics, where losers never accept defeat. How many election cycles before we have tanks in the streets as the votes are counted? 

It feels like we have embarked on the trajectory followed by Argentina and Venezuela, among others? These once wealthy countries ended up with poverty, squalor, human rights abuses and thuggish politics.

I suggest we do not follow their well-worn “path to perdition.”

Bad News from Down South

BBC News reports leftist protest leader Gabriel Boric has won the Chilean presidential runoff election, defeating rightist José Antonio Kast. With just over half the votes counted, Boric was ahead 56% to 45% and Kast has conceded.

Economically strong Chile now begins on a path which leads to the same sort of economic meltdown formerly wealthy Venezuela has experienced under Chavez and Maduro. How far down the path they go remains to be seen.

Latin America has once again demonstrated its characteristic cultural weakness, snatching economic defeat from the jaws of victory. I hypothesize the fault arises in the shared Iberian colonial heritage.

Chile Votes

We don’t write about it every week, maybe not every month, but one of the issues COTTonLINE keeps an eye on is the state of our hemisphere. Today comes a good-news Associated Press report from Chile, which nation has mostly been a source of bad-news stories in recent years.

Two onetime outsiders hailing from opposite extremes of the political spectrum received the most votes Sunday in Chile’s presidential election but failed to garner enough support for an outright win, setting up a polarizing runoff in the region’s most advanced economy.

José Antonio Kast, a lawmaker who has a history of defending Chile’s military dictatorship, finished first with 28% of the vote compared to 26% for former student protest leader Gabriel Boric.

Kast, in a victory speech, doubled down on his far right rhetoric, framing the Dec. 19 runoff as a choice between “communism and liberty.” He blasted Boric as a puppet of Chile’s Communist Party — a member of the broad coalition supporting his candidacy — who would pardon “terrorists,” be soft on crime and promote instability in a country that has recently been wracked by protests laying bare deep social divisions.

AP didn’t consider this electoral outcome good news, that evaluation is mine. Interestingly, Chile faces some of the same problems we in the U.S. face.

Kast, 55, from the newly formed Republican Party, emerged from the far right fringe after having won less than 8% of the vote in 2017 as an independent. But he’s been steadily rising in the polls this time with a divisive discourse emphasizing conservative family values as well as attacking migrants — many from Haiti and Venezuela — he blames for crime.

Notice the AP’s bias, “far right fringe” and “divisive discourse” are loaded terms. Chile has intermittently demonstrated the ability to favor free markets and reject the far left, which Boric represents. When Chile has done so, its economy has boomed. 

As a result of which it has, as even AP admits, “the region’s most advanced economy.” We can hope this is one of those times. Also note many of the Haitians at our southern border are repeat-offender economic refugees coming here from Chile.

A Curse on Both Houses

Articles at Quillette tend to be long, and this by Benjamin Kerstein is no exception. An American who lives in Israel, he writes about the polar forces trying to pull apart the country of his birth, as seen from a distance.

His article is, for these days, amazingly even-handed. It’s a plea for an activist center that seems mostly unenergized and inactive in our supposedly ‘United’ States. 

Kerstein sees the left jonesing to wander off into a faux-utopian mess like Venezuela or Cuba, while the right imagines an authoritarian strong man overcoming the self-perpetuating uniparty blob. He imagines some kind of Balkanization of city-vs-rural separation ending up in Somalia-like militias and warlordism.

Kerstein gives Joe Biden credit for a centrism of which I don’t see much evidence, and for lowering the presidential profile, which he certainly has done. It is a substantially insightful analysis. Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.

Afterthought … Another Benjamin - Franklin - is supposed to have answered a question about the nature of the embryonic new government the founders had just designed, describing it as “A republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin’s caveat seems particularly prescient in these fraught days.

Looking Beyond

RealClearWorld links to three articles today to which I’d draw your attention, each described briefly below.

First, Leonid Bershidsky writes for Bloomberg about why both the Soviets and the U.S. failed in Afghanistan. Here’s a key thought:

No matter what your values, no matter how much time you spend or how many soldiers you lose, no matter whether you’re on the winning or the losing side in geopolitical battles, what you’ll leave behind in Afghanistan is scenes of looting, a weak regime too dependent on your support and unlikely to hold out much longer, tough local fighters who feel vindicated for years of hardship, and gloating Pakistani generals across the border. Another constant: Afghanistan’s flourishing opiate industry, which neither the Soviets nor the Americans could undermine.

Second, Andres Oppenheimer writes for the Miami Herald about Peru’s new leftist President-elect Pedro Castillo. Some are saying Castillo wants to be another leftist autocrat like Venezuela's Chavez.

Castillo vows to call a referendum to convene a constitutional assembly — something that most constitutional lawyers say would be unconstitutional. People who have talked with Castillo’s close aides in recent days tell me that the referendum is one of the issues he considers non-negotiable, and that he is determined to carry it out. 

And third, George Friedman writes at Geopolitical Futures that we shouldn’t be surprised if a Chinese naval/missile base shows up in Cuba.

Our "World Number" at Risk

Writing at American Greatness, Christopher Roach surveys modern America and finds much about which to be sad. His base in Florida gives him a neighborly look at many third world countries. He sees many signs our great land is losing first world status and becoming a third world country.

So, what are the characteristics of a first world country, in the author's view?

• First world status comes from various political, social, and economic achievements. One of the more salient is low corruption.
• Low levels of corruption foster another distinct feature of America’s first world status: the dominance of the private sector and high degrees of entrepreneurialism.
• Another feature of American life has been low levels of crime and disorder.
• Political normality, compromise, and restraint are other features of first world societies.
• The American people were not just an assembly of economic units with nothing in common. They were a people.

And what are the characteristics of a third world country, again in Roach's view?

• The endemic corruption of the Third World both reflects and reinforces an extreme tribalism, which elevates the extended family above the public as a whole.
• Elections and parties reflect these ethnic divisions, and a winner-take-all spirit prevails.
• To the extent there is a private sector in the Third World, it is intertwined with and dependent on the political one.
• A related feature of the Third World is failing infrastructure.
• Yet another notable feature of the Third World is poverty, lawlessness, and disorder.
• A final feature of the Third World, now familiar at home, is high stakes politics.

Roach describes all of the foregoing, with examples of how we're becoming more like a third world country. And he concludes with this view of modern America.

This is not Norman Rockwell’s America. Indeed, it’s not even the America one might remember growing up in the 1980s and ’90s. It’s changed for the worse.

More important, the rules required to survive and thrive are quite different from those of the recent past. As in Venezuela or Iraq, politics and life are becoming “winner take all.” It’s important to know when compromise is not possible. And, under these circumstances, it pays to be a winner.

There are certainly substantial swathes of our nation where his description is increasingly accurate. His article is not fun, but it does point to our increasing national dysfunction, our inability to get done what needs doing.

Reminder

Out of 5000 delegates to the Democrat's convention, roughly 1/4 (over 1000) voted "No" on their platform, which passed anyway. You might ask if they did so because it was too radical, too far left? 

No, they voted against it because it wasn't radical enough. It didn't include enough of Bernie Sanders' "free stuff," wasn't sufficiently anti-capitalist, pro-socialist.

These are bad people, who should be encouraged to emigrate to Cuba or Venezuela.

SOTU ‘Engineered’ by Trump

Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff reprints a portion of a column by David Von Drehle, who Mirengoff calls “The Washington Post’s most insightful liberal columnist.” The original is behind the WaPo paywall; I’ve reproduced here the portion Mirengoff quotes, with apologies to purists who insist on citation to original sources.

[Trump’s] State of the Union speech was a lethally effective exploitation of the presidential bully pulpit. Did he overstate his accomplishments? Yes. Did he understate the record of his predecessor? Yes. Is that unusual in a campaign-year State of the Union? No.

But no previous address so cunningly adapted the ancient ritual of a formal speech to the visceral medium of television. A former TV star himself, Trump understands that people don’t just listen to what the president says. They also watch the reactions of the people in the room. He engineered the speech to force his opponents to react in potentially self-defeating ways.

Some examples. Rather than give the usual conservative lip service to school choice, Trump illustrated the issue by introducing a young African American girl in the gallery and announcing that she was getting a scholarship to attend her preferred school. What would House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats do, applaud for the happy child and risk offending their public-school-teacher base or sit on their hands and look like a bunch of Scrooges?

Rather than deliver the Republican boilerplate on abortion, Trump introduced a pro-life mom and her 2-year-old daughter, who was born barely halfway to term. Advances in extreme neonatology kept her alive. How would Democrats react to this cute little darling whose existence blurs the distinction between life in and out of the womb?

Rather than poke the usual verbiage at the wing of the Democratic Party that embraces the label of “democratic socialism,” Trump introduced Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, whose quest to unseat his country’s socialist government had the entire Congress on its bipartisan feet. Now Democrats are left to explain why ousting socialists is good policy for Venezuela while electing them — the democratic variety, anyway — is right for the United States.

Viewers were left to wonder: Why wouldn’t Pelosi applaud money for historically black colleges and universities? What’s her beef with a serviceman who returns from deployment to hug his kids? Where’s her feeling for the brother of a man killed by an undocumented criminal? All of these visuals could be explained in policy terms, but as Ronald Reagan once confided to his diary, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Scott Adams calls Trump a “master persuader,” it appears Von Drehle has reached the same conclusion. My favorite anecdote concerning Trump-the-persuader is reports of him asking to review video of his TV interviews with the audio off, scoping the optics, ignoring the content.

The Democrat Dilemma

Joe Biden is the favorite candidate of African-Americans. Bernie Sanders is the favorite candidate of the young snowflakes. Pete Buttigieg is the favorite candidate of white upper middle class adults. Only one of these can be the nominee, assuming Bloomberg doesn’t “buy” the nomination.

The question for Democrats is whether any of these can motivate all of the party faithful to turn out and vote for him. Each has weaknesses.

Biden isn’t much of a campaigner, and sometimes seems to be losing it. Sanders turns off people who understand that socialism is a recipe for economic disaster a la Venezuela. Buttigieg turns off the young and blacks, not certain why. As mayor Bloomberg favored the stop and frisk policing blacks hate, plus short candidates like him almost always lose.

A betting person would conclude that, ceteris paribus, Donald J. Trump is likely to win.

Bolivian Prez, VP Step Down

United Press International reports Bolivian President Evo Morales, one of Latin America's small group of hard leftists, has resigned in the face of widespread demonstrations against apparent reelection irregularities on his behalf. This is good news.

Morales said on national television he was stepping down "for the good of the country." Morales, 60, has been Bolivia's president for nearly 14 years and is the longest-serving leader in Latin America.

Morales made much of being indigenous (Aymara), unusual ancestry for a Latin American politician. When the military at long last turned against him, he knew it was time to bug out. The Miami Herald, the unofficial "paper of record" for Latin America, writes of Morales:

Morales, a charismatic indigenous leader, rose to power last decade along with the likes of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador and was considered one of the leading proponents of South America’s unique brand of populism and socialism.

But he was also accused of adopting increasingly authoritarian tactics and trampling the constitution in order to dismantle term limits and stay in power.

Fudging term limits to stay in power indefinitely is a mainstay of nearly every leftist autocrat in Latin America. They are known for it, think Castro, Chavez, Correa, and Ortega. It will be interesting to see if leftist AMLO in Mexico goes quietly when his term is done.

Rumination on California

I’m a native of California. Though I no longer call it “home,” I still spend a few months there every year. And for sure I take a backseat to nobody in bashing what passes for a state government in Sacramento, it is a very bad joke.

All of that said, CA is still in so many ways the nicest year-round physical environment in these 50 states and several territories. Much of it is warm, but not humid, and gets lots of sunshine. Take your pick of the seashore or the mountains, or farm the great Central Valley and coastal flood plains, ski the Sierras while never slipping on ice and snow in your driveway.

People are claiming wildfires are something new, and disasters just a recent thing. Nope. Not the case at all. Paradise burning in the Camp fire was very bad, San Francisco burning after the earthquake over 100 years ago was worse.

Forest fires? Nothing new. I’m old and, too many decades ago as a kid in SoCal, I would watch forest fires burn off the national forest mountainsides above Ojai every second or third autumn. People persist in building out into the CA foothills close to nature, and “nature” turns around and bites them occasionally.

Our distant friends would call and ask, “Is your house in danger? We hear Ojai is burning.” We’d answer, “No, we’re fine, it never gets within miles of our house. The valley is fine.”

Tell me the Midwest and south don’t get awful killer tornadoes - basically unknown in CA. Or the southeast and its giant hurricanes, none in CA. Or blizzards, only up in the Sierras around Lake Tahoe, not tying up our cities like much of the country. And mind-sapping humidity, common every summer nearly everywhere east of the Rockies, not in CA.

What’s wrong with CA is bad politics, the same problem blessed-by-nature Argentina has. CA has the “blue state blues,” which seems an incurable malady. Once contracted, the ‘patient’s’ prognosis is poor.

In Venezuela, which has a terminal case, the only solution available to the individual resident is to leave. Ironically, those with the gumption to leave make the situation worse for those who remain.

Rioting in Ecuador

These are tough times in Ecuador, there is much political violence and the government has evacuated the capital, Quito, and moved to coastal Guayaquil to be safe. Apparently the troubles are leftist-organized and carried out. See an article in The Guardian (U.K.) for details, hat tip to Drudge Report for the link.

The article hints at conflict between the “indigenous” or native peoples and others, likely mestizos whose culture is more European. Such conflict is also a major issue in Bolivia, and Peru to a lesser extent. It is even an issue in Venezuela, where Chavez, and then Maduro have posed as protectors of the indigenous poor.

Warning

Have you saved for your retirement? Put money in an IRA or 401k or the like? Have a stock portfolio? Any or all of them are at risk in an Elizabeth Warren (or Bernie Sanders) presidency. She favors taxing wealth, and despite what she says now, that means whatever you've saved. If not immediately, eventually.

Why do you suppose almost all the big estates in the U.K. (think Downton Abbey) are owned by the National Trust? Do you think Earl This and Duke That wanted to give them up? No way. The U.K. which has socialized medicine and free university had to tax wealth to pay for them. The big houses and estates were sold for taxes.

You think it couldn't happen here? Democrats are already scheming on your savings. I'm worried that the CA government will grab my CalPERS pension contributions, imagine what mischief the Federals can get up to, with the help of a Democrat-controlled Congress.

The money you saved you earned, it's yours. The government shouldn't 'steal' it with taxes.

Why should the government have a policy that says you were a sucker to save money? That those who didn't save a red cent were the smart ones because they've nothing to lose? Who will be rewarded with free stuff for being spendthrifts during their working years.

Down that miserable road lies a fate like Venezuela and Cuba. Let's be sure we take a different path.

Venezuelan Bishops Get No Papal Help

Writing for the Miami Herald, the unofficial 'paper of record' for Latin America, Andres Oppenheimer takes the Pope to task for not supporting Venezuela's Conference of Bishops who have issued a demand for Maduro to leave. Here's what the bishops wrote:

Facing an illegitimate and failed government, Venezuela craves for a change. That change requires the departure of who holds power in an illegitimate way, and the election as soon as possible of a new president.

In order for (the election) to be truly free and reflect the people’s sovereign will, it requires some essential conditions, such as a new and impartial National Electoral Council, an updated electoral registry and the supervision of international organizations such as the United Nations, the Organization of American States and the European Union.

What did the Pope add to this? Oppenheimer reports:

Instead of echoing their demand that Maduro leave office, Pope Francis made an incredibly bland statement in his July 14 homily asking God to “inspire and illuminate both sides” so that they can “reach an agreement” to solve the Venezuelan crisis.

It isn't difficult to spot Pope Francis' pro-Maduro bias, here on open display. Given Francis' long history as a supporter of leftist liberation theology in Latin America, sadly one would expect little else from him. He wasn't a great choice to lead the world's 1.2 billion Catholics.