SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE NEAR FUTURE

The Trump administration has been in office for 88 days as I write this.

---Declining Support

The persistent incompetence of  Trump personally and his administration generally will get no better. But their continuous exposure to the realities of governing and their inability to assuage interest groups with empty promises as they could during the campaign will become more and more obvious.

It is one thing during a campaign to denounce China as a currency manipulator when the people you are talking to both don't know any better, and you don't care whether what you are saying is true or not.

It is quite another to talk to President Xi who, I suspect came here in part because the yuan is tanking against the dollar.  It has fallen from 6.2 to the dollar a year ago, which it had been at for many years, to 7 today, a decline of 13%.  Chinese investors are the same indifferent-to-patriotism whores as American investor-whores are, so they are moving their money out of China as fast as they can before the yuan falls any further.

Xi apparently does not have the command economy authority to forbid such transfers as his predecessors had, so he has to deal with the currency markets.   One thing he came here for, I suspect, was to ask Trump to ask Janet Yellen, chairman of the Federal Reserve, to increase the money supply in the US.  Which would reduce the upward pressure on the dollar against the yuan and other currencies.

My guess is that this came as a complete surprise to Trump, who seems to know only what he sees on television, and does not read his briefing papers.   After the Xi visit, Trump announced that China was not a currency manipulator.

One can only imagine the look on Trump's face when he had gotten himself all worked up about how he was going to demand that Xi revalue the yuan, demand it right to his face, and then found out that Xi had come here to ask him for help to do just that.  Trump also announced that the dollar had "gotten too strong", i.e. is too high against the yuan.  Conversely, one can only imagine how hard Xi had to work to show no expression when he realized what an ignorant putz the American president is.

So Trump has now admitted that Obama was born in the US, and that China is not a currency manipulator.  It seems to be the consensus of both Republicans and Democrats that the less said about the wall on the Mexican border, the better.  Obamacare remains in place.  He has not prosecuted Hillary Clinton.  If China is not a currency manipulator then those "good-paying factory jobs" are not coming back when Trump forces the Chinese to revalue the yuan.  Trump was going to defeat ISIS and then get us out of the Middle East. But he just bombed an Assad airbase and the siege of Mosul grinds on as before, so those campaign promises are gone too.

While it is the general opinion of Democrats that Trump supporters are opaque to facts, I think that is an over-simplification.  A small hard core of Trump supporters are, but I think a majority of those who voted for him are not immune to facts.  Many are already experiencing buyer's remorse as one Trump issue after another withers and vanishes.  I think that has a great deal to do with his rapidly declining public approval ratings.

Further, the White House will continue to stumble from incompetence to corruption to incompetence again, in a constant drip drip drip of bad news.  The press, whom Trump has gone out of his way to alienate, will be merciless in pounding away, making sure none of the stories goes away.  Trump's support will continue to erode, a percent a month.


---Democrats will win the House in 2018

Which at last brings us to the near future.  Extrapolating Trump's declining popularity, currently 37%, into the future, it should be under 20% by the mid-term elections, 18 months from now.  Republican congressmen who screamed their lungs out for him during the campaign last year, will claim not to have heard of him.

The Democrats will crush them with footage of the Republican congressman in a 'Make America Great' cap, smiling and waving next to the one he claims to have never met.  My guess is that the Democrats will win majority control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

BUT they will actually fall further behind in the Senate.  Not because anyone has any love for Republican senators, but because far more Democratic senatorial seats are up for election than Republican seats.  When everyone hates the government, incumbents do not fare well so one can expect some turnover.  23 Democratic seats are up for election in 2018, and only 9 Republican seats.


---Investigations

With the House of Representatives in Democratic hands, the gloves will come off in the Russia investigations.  There will be damning revelation after damning revelation.  There will be other scandals from the two years of the corporate hogs feeding at the government trough that we are seeing now.

Attorney-General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions will stonewall demands for indictments of various high government officials and corrupt businessmen in spite of overwhelming evidence.   That will feed the general sense of anger and resentment against the government generally, and against the White House in particular.   Trump's approval ratings will fall to the same levels as Congress' are now, low teens or high single digits.


--Impeachment in the House

Sometime in 2019 or 2020, the then-Democratic House will vote articles of impeachment against Trump, based on the results of the investigations.

Which will present a problem for the then-still-Republican Senate.   They will be facing the reverse of the 2018 situation.  In 2020, 22 Republican seats will be contested, but only 11 Democratic ones.

The Republican senators in those seats, almost half of all current Republican senators, will be looking at political extinction if they side with Trump, and with extinction of their party if they don't.

There will be two strategies.  One will be to try to win the trial but go where the evidence goes, to leave Trump and his White House officials slowly twisting in the wind.  Another will be to stall in hopes the impeachment trial will take place after the 2020 elections.  I predict that won't work because the Democrats will be using footage of the Republican senators dodging and evading at the hearings leading up to the trial.  It will finally be in the Republican senators' interest to get the trial to a vote and get it over with and hope the public will have forgotten how individual senators voted by the 2020 elections.


---Conviction in the Senate

As to the trial in the Senate, my speculation is that Trump will lose and be removed from office.  He will be the fourth American president to be impeached (Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton), and the first one convicted by the Senate.

Among the reasons:  a) the evidence will show he is guilty; and b) if he is acquitted, as a sitting Republican president, he would still be the presumptive Republican nominee in 2020.  If Trump were the Republican presidential nominee in 2020, the landslide against him would widen the Democratic majority in the House and give them the Senate as well as the White House.  It would destroy the Republican Party for a decade or more.  Republicans would be swept out of state governments across the country.

What happens next depends on the charges he is convicted of.  There will already have been a prolonged fight and endless negotiations in the House Judiciary Committee and with the House Democratic leadership about what to charge him with.

My guess is that the facts will show at least a prima facie case of treason.  The problem with treason is that it carries the death penalty.  No chief of state has legally been put to death by a common law jurisdiction since Parliament beheaded Charles I in 1649.  That ended badly for Parliament and the monarchy was restored eleven years later.

Trump's defense will be that he had no duty to protect and defend the Constitution until he had sworn the oath of office, not as a candidate.  This will be correct but so politically unviable that he will be convicted of something else and then sentenced as though he had been guilty on the treason charge.

With Nixon, the problem more or less solved itself.  Nixon resigned when it became clear he would be convicted.  His successor, President Gerald Ford, dutifully fell on his sword and pardoned Nixon.  Nixon tastefully spent the remainder of his days secluded on his estate at San Clemente.

Imagine the situation in 2019.  Trump has been convicted.  Vice-President Pence has already in 2017 shown a clear intention to remain sufficiently aloof from Trump to avoid getting splattered with Trump's mud. Pence may well want to run as the incumbent in 2020 and he knows what happened to Ford as well as anyone else does.  He lost decisively to the Hillary Clinton of 1976, Jimmy Carter.  What if he doesn't pardon Trump?  What should the penalty be?


---Sentencing

Death is pretty much off the table.  But there will still be discussions about guillotine, lethal injection, electrocution, and so on.  Liberals will be torn between their opposition to the death penalty and their hatred of Trump.  As a traditionalist, I support public hanging.

That leaves prison as a possibility, and removal from office without prison as another.

If Trump goes to Leavenworth, the United States looks like Egypt sending Hosni Mubarak to prison,  like a third world country.  Plus Leavenworth would become a pilgrimage site for Trump loyalists.  And knowing our boy, Trump would exploit it to the max.  He would still be able to tweet from there.  Imagine how that would work.  The better solution would be for him to go to Guantanamo where presumably there would be no pilgrims and no tweeting.

Alternately, the Senate removes him and does not sentence him to jail time.  They couldn't duck by referring the case to the US District Court for the District of Columbia because the constitution explicitly assigns trial to the Senate, so the court would give the hot potato right back to them.

Now here's the hard part.  If they go with the Nixon precedent and settle for removal and no jail time, what comes next?  Not tastefully vanishing into San Clemente.  That is not Trump's style.

If he doesn't go to prison, Trump goes back to New York and Trump Tower, to Mar a Lago, he plays golf with celebrities, he builds more hotels, he is in public as much as anyone can be, he gives interviews, he signs autographs, he even goes back on 'The Apprentice' which he owns, he does cameos in movies, he hosts Saturday Night Live, he continuously tweets that he is innocent and that everybody else is crooked.  He leads a right-wing political movement, a la Marine LePen.

You know he will.  That is just who he is.  He has no other way to be him.

That is not acceptable to me nor to you, and it won't be acceptable to the Senate.  He has to go to jail.  It can't be Leavenworth so it has to be Guantanamo.

Can we really send an American president to prison?  On the other hand, can we let him commit treason, prove it, convict him, and then have him laugh in our faces?  There will be no good outcomes.


http://usat.ly/2lDVuqo

Why ISIS Might Destroy the Middle East Oil Fields

The Mad Hatter

It is not that ISIS has made any secret of their short term goals - to rule over all Muslim countries and for everyone not to their liking - Shias, Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Alawites - to be dead or enslaved.

Their longer term goals are usually ignored as just vague propaganda - a world Islamic state.  The risk is not that they might achieve it, but the steps they might take in trying to achieve it.

One is that they could take Baghdad.  The majority-Shi'ite majority Iraqi army showed no stomach for fighting and ran away leaving Mosul undefended.  It was hoped that getting rid of Prime Minister al-Maliki and his narrow Shi'ite sectarian government might improve things but the new prime minister seems little better.  If the Shi'ite - Sunni polarization continues, the Sunni tribes will be un-mollified and will either passively or actively support ISIS.   It is perfectly foreseeable that the Iraqi army would be no more successful in defending Baghdad than it was in defending Mosul.

If Baghdad were to fall, the civil war in Iraq would effectively be over.  ISIS would control the country except perhaps Kurdistan.  That would be a bad outcome but not one to make Americans put down the remote during football season.

What comes next however might.  Southernmost Iraq reaches the Persian Gulf, along the shores of which more than a third of the world's petroleum and gas are pumped and shipped.  Were ISIS able to advance against the small countries along the southern, Arab, coast of the Gulf, they could menace the oil fields from Kuwait to Oman.  This has been done before, by Saddam Hussein when he seized and annexed Kuwait.  Saddam's theory was that Kuwait was a province of Iraq and had to be reunited with the rest of the country.  That is what the First Gulf War, Desert Storm, the liberation of Kuwait, was about.  Had Saddam not been driven out, his army would have over-awed Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states on the Gulf, making them in effect Iraqi protectorates.

ISIS' pretensions are far grander.  Their claim is to all Sunni countries everywhere, starting with those closest to hand, those on the Gulf.  Clearly Saddam's plans were to control the export of oil from the Gulf to manipulate Western powers by controlling their energy supply.  And to enrich himself and Iraq with the proceeds of controlling those exports.  Saddam's objectives were the banal and familiar ones of wealth and power for himself and his country.

ISIS sees itself as a religious revival, a restoration of the greatness of the early Arab caliphate, and along with it, the destruction or at least humbling of the Infidel powers who have over-shadowed and oppressed the Muslim countries and Islam in general.

What they see as the sickness of Westernization - materialism, technology, consumerism, Western culture - can not be driven out by accumulating more wealth and with it more import of the trappings, culture, and thinking of Western society.   What religious puritans like ISIS want is not wealth but the austerity and virtue of the early Muslim conquerors of the 8th Century.

They want not to milk Western society of money with which to buy trinkets like Mercedes cars and private jets and MacBooks and iPhones but to rid Muslim society of such things entirely.   They can see as clearly as anyone that the reason Middle Eastern societies are awash in such things is precisely because they have the oil money to buy them.  One way to get rid of them is to get rid of the oil and thus of the money by destroying the oil fields.

They have not destroyed the few small oil fields they have captured thus far because they want oil revenues to buy arms and pay military salaries.  But it does not follow from that that when the scale changes to the vast oil resources of the Persian Gulf that their strategy will not change.  We see what use they have been able to make of looting a bank in Mosul.  Imagine them looting all the banks in Kuwait, Dubai, and the UAE.  Their military needs having been covered, their attitude toward accumulating oil revenues might become quite different than they have shown heretofore.

The other objective they have is not just to manipulate and humiliate the Western countries but to defeat them economically.  The same blow which would purify Muslim societies would also cripple Western ones.

There were temporary and partial restrictions of oil supply from the Persian Gulf in the 1970's after the Arab surprise attack on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur in 1973.  Israel defeated the combined Arab armies in spite of having been taken by surprise on their holiest holiday.  Arab impotence was followed by Arab petulance.  Having been being defeated in spite of their treachery, the Arabs vented their pique with the oil embargo of 1974.   Fluctuating high oil prices led to economic instability in the Arab countries and to inflation in the Western ones throughout the remainder of the 1970's.

That was when the Saudi Arabia, both the largest oil producer-exporter and the most politically fragile one, figured out that it was in their dynastic interests to keep production and prices stable.  Which matched Western interests.  So the Saudis came to be seen as allies and puppets of the West, particularly of the United States.  There have been no oil embargoes since.

The destruction of the Gulf oil fields would not just causes high oil prices, it would cause simultaneously high prices and outright lack of supply.  The world economy in the past few years showed its vulnerability to no worse a disaster than the floating of fraudulent mortgage-backed-securities on Wall Street.

The Persian Gulf countries, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman, have 40% of the world's oil production capacity and 55% of all proven reserves.  The abrupt removal of that much capacity and reserves from the world market would make the economic disruptions of 2008-2009 look small.  One could use the word "collapse" to describe the effect on the world economy, particularly on world trade.  The certainty that the removal would be permanent would compound the seriousness of the collapse.

Everywhere governments would be forced to institute systems of rationing.  Air travel both domestic and internationally would be severely curtailed by fuel prices and availability.  Commuting would wither and with it the prosperous suburbs surrounding every major city.  Trucking would become prohibitively expensive or impossible.  Goods would travel by ship and by rail.  Power plants that could would switch from oil to coal.  Those that couldn't would close, causing widespread and permanent power outages among peoples for whom, for generations, power outages have been momentary inconveniences, not permanent.  Large areas of the developed world would go off the grid.  People in once-rich Western countries would be reduced to kerosene lamps for lighting, and even kerosene would be expensive and hard to get.  Televisions, refrigerators, computers, and indeed all appliances, would become inert relics of another time.   So would private automobiles.

Deprived both of petroleum-based fertilizers and fuel for farm equipment, agricultural production would plummet.  Hunger would stalk once-rich lands.  The GDP of big Western countries could be cut by half or more.  The fact of the shortages being known to be permanent would mean that there would be no new investment in plant or equipment to help economies recover.  After the initial crashes would come not recovery but continued economic shrinkage as both supply and demand for goods and services continued to diminish as purchasing power shriveled everywhere.  

Unemployment, already stubbornly high in many Western countries, would rise to Third World levels and stay there or continue to rise.  There would be rioting and political instability even in Western countries with long histories of democracy.  In other countries things would be still worse.

That is what happened in the 1930's.  The Great Depression illustrated the fragility of the world economic system.  That collapse came about through internal instabilities in the capitalist system, without any external cause at all.  The downward spiral lasted three years.  In 1932 the cumulative value of the corporations on the New York Stock Exchange was 6% (not a typo - six percent) of what it had been at its peak in 1929.  Recovery was tepid and slow.

In the oil-exporting countries outside the Gulf:  Russia, Indonesia, 
Venezuela, Norway, Mexico, Nigeria, Angola, Brunei, there would be floods of wealth.  It would come both from the sale of petroleum to a world market starving for it and from the economic effects of breakneck development of new oil production.

Economic contraction in the West would be compounded by persistent waves of terrorist attacks against urban subway systems, power grid infrastructure, bridges and tunnels, airports, airplanes, freeway overpasses, ports, ships, and political institutions.

Governments would begin to print money to cover shrinking revenues and growing deficits.  They would call it "expanding the money supply".  Inflation and falling stock prices would destroy the value of savings and nest eggs.   Interest rates would rise to two and three digits figures as lenders moved to ever-more secure and ever-less productive places to put money.

Western governments would find their war potential curtailed.  Russia would continue to find excuses to annex one after another of the former Soviet republics.  NATO would become impotent to do anything about it.  As the Russian sphere-of-influence expanded into eastern Europe and the Balkans, into Turkey, and Central Asia, Putin's vision of a Eurasian union would begin to hove into view.  The only sand in Moscow's gears would be escalating terrorist attacks within Russia from its own large Muslim minorities.

The United States would, both from necessity and inclination, begin to turn toward a Tea Party-led soft isolationism.  American influence throughout the world would become as quaint a memory as the British Empire is today.

The Saudi regime and the other oil-supported monarchies of the Gulf would collapse quickly without oil revenues to smooth over and bribe away opposition.

The Islamic State, un-menaced by the US or other Western countries, would expand effortlessly throughout the Middle East as morally bankrupt regimes from Morocco to Oman, now also financially bankrupt, toppled one after another.  Israel would be besieged.  After repeated mob attacks and rioting, Muslim quarters in European cities would become something like fortified.  Within their closed ghettos, sharia would become the norm without much protest from distracted European governments.

That scenario, the purification of Muslim societies of paid-for Western influences, and inflicting catastrophe on the Western and world economies, is why ISIS might destroy the Persian Gulf oil fields if they get them.