Trump’s Mess - Part One

I have tried to support and defend Trump as President, but it is getting harder and harder.  I supported him as the common man’s response to the establishment, but he is making the establishment look better than it used to.  

I don’t think he should have fired Comey or interfered with the Russian hacking investigation, although he should have prepared a strong defense against whatever allegations were made against him and his administration.  I still don’t believe that Trump is a pawn of Putin or a traitor, although he might be guilty of some criminal conduct before or after his election.  It seems like the most egregious criminal offenses in politics are committed during the coverup, rather than in the questionable act itself.  We should let the investigations proceed unimpeded and see what they turn up.  Unfortunately, the Clinton Whitewater investigation showed that once these start, they never end, but Trump is stuck with it because of the way he ran his campaign and transition.  

The fact that Trump wants good relations with Russia does not bother me.  I don’t think Putin’s Russia is the old Soviet Union.  I don’t think it is the existential threat to the US that the Soviet Union was.  Putin’s challenge to the US is partly personal, because the US has been so critical of him personally, and partly an effort to make Russia great again (like Trump’s America).  Off and on for a thousand or so years, Russia has been a significant player on the European continent.  It defeated Napoleon and Hitler.  The divide between east and west Europe has moved to the east or west, depending on the relative strength of Germany, France, or Austria, and Russia.  As Russia strengthened, the border moved west, as western Europe strengthened, the border moved east, in either case often to the detriment of Poland with occasionally disappeared, swallowed up by one side or the other.  I think Putin is trying to reassert Russia’s traditional importance, and it does not necessarily threaten the balance of power in Europe, although it might threaten some Central European states in one way or another.  Whatever might happen would probably still be better than being part of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.  The most obvious appearance of these tensions is Ukraine, which is where the two forces of east and west are meeting at the moment.  Nevertheless, I do not see the current Russian threat as anywhere near the existential threat the old Soviet Union posed during the Cold War.  It’s a rivalry that can be managed.  So far, neither Trump nor Putin is doing a good job of managing it, but it can percolate without serious damage.  

I think the scare tactics about the Trump-Russia connection are mainly a Democratic political attack strategy.  They create the impression Russia is a danger to the US without explaining why.  But I think partly the Russia scare is due to Jewish racial fears.  Jews lived in oppressive conditions in Russia for hundreds of years.  The mass exodus from Russia was largely due to the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which restricted trade with countries that limited Jewish emigration to the US or Israel.  The four Jewish staffers for Senator Scoop Jackson responsible for the amendment were Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz, according to Commentary Magazine.  These past experiences automatically associate Russia with evil in Jewish minds.  

All of these staffers went on to have important positions in later Republican administrations. .  According to urban legend, Richard Perle was the main person responsible for persuading Reagan to reject the opportunity to eliminate all US and Soviet nuclear weapons at his  summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland.  Putin is no doubt very grateful to Perle.  

On foreign policy, I am more concerned about what is going on in the Middle East with Qatar, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, if only because Trump seems more personally responsible for that, while Putin seems more responsible for what’s happening with Russia.  Trump was just in Saudi Arabia and hailed his visit as a great success.  Right after he left, Saudi Arabia appeared to take two actions against Iran -- making Qatar a pariah in the Sunni Middle East, and perhaps encouraging a terrorist attack on Iran by ISIS.  Trump has already applauded Saudi Arabia’s ouster of Qatar.  Qatar’s main offense seems to be less than fulsome opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Meanwhile, it hosts a very important American military base and sponsors the best news service  in the Middle East, Al Jazeera.  

Domestically, I thought during the election that Trump was a Democrat at heart, and that his Democratic leanings would come out when he arrived in office.  So far, there is no sign of them.  He has embraced hard right policies on immigration, healthcare, and taxation, the main issues he has addressed so far.  As a former consular officer for the State Department, I favor enforcement of immigration laws, which have been generally ignored by both Democrats and Republicans for fifty years or longer.  Immigration laws have been enforced (or not) like Prohibition was.  Once Prohibition was enforced by Eliot Ness and the untouchables, it was repealed.  People pretend to care about immigration, but wealthy individuals like their foreign gardeners, cooks, and care takers, while businesses like their foreign engineers and coders.  

Renewable Energy - Food Stamps for Millionaires

 With all the talk about how dead the coal industry is and how vibrant the renewable energy sector is, there is little talk about the government incentives for the renewable energy sector.  According to the US Energy Information Agency:

In 2016, about 4.08 trillion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity 1 were generated at utility-scale facilities in the United States.2  About 65% of this electricity generation was from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum, and other gases), about 20% was from nuclear energy, and about 15% was from renewable energy sources. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that an additional 19 billion kWh (or about 0.02 trillion kWh) of electricity generation was from small-scale solar photovoltaic systems in 2016.3

Major energy sources and percent shares of U.S. electricity generation at utility-scale facilities in 20161

• Natural gas = 33.8%
• Coal = 30.4%
• Nuclear = 19.7%
• Renewables (total) = 14.9%
• Hydropower = 6.5%
• Wind = 5.6%
• Biomass = 1.5%
• Solar  = 0.9%
• Geothermal = 0.4%
• Petroleum = 0.6%
• Other gases = 0.3%
• Other nonrenewable sources = 0.3%
• Pumped storage hydroelectricity = -0.2%4

The Washington Post reported that 2014 (the latest data available) Census data put the number of people employed in the coal industry at 76, 572.  A 2017 Department of Energy report puts the number at 160,119, with 86,035 working in electricity  generation, and another   74,084 working in other coal operations.  The table above shows that the coal industry produced 30.4% of all US electrical energy.  By these figures, each coal worker in the electrical sector produced about 0.0038% of all US electrical energy.  

For the renewable energy sector, the first thing that stands out is that highest percentage of renewable energy is produced by hydropower, a pre-industrial age technology, the water wheel.  The EIA says there is no good data on the number of people working on solar electric power, because the government does not have a good category for this job survey.  The EIA estimates that 260,077 people spend at least half of their time working on solar energy.  The largest percentage of workers in this sector are working on construction of new solar plants.  The EIA estimates that these workers produce 0.9% of US power; then, each solar worker produced about 0.00035% of US power, or about 1/100th as much as a coal worker.  Per worker, coal is 100 times more efficient than solar.  

If this is so, why would anyone invest and work in the solar industry?  Because of government incentives.  There is a 30% federal tax credit for individuals installing solar panels.  In addition almost every state offers additional incentives.  The Washington Post reported in connection with the failure of Solyndra solar company that the Obama administration had instituted an $80 billion clean technology program.  The Post article says:

The [Obama] administration, which excluded lobbyists from policymaking positions, gave easy access to venture capitalists with stakes in some of the companies backed by the administration, the records show. Many of those investors had given to Obama’s 2008 campaign. Some took jobs in the administration and helped manage the clean-energy program.   

These government incentives are no doubt responsible for much of the investment in the solar industry, rather than hard-nosed business decisions.  

Investment in wind energy is probably a more rational business decision than solar.  Wind energy produces 5.6% of US energy according to EIA.  It estimates that there are 101,738 workers in the wind energy sector.  By these figures, each wind energy worker produces about 0.0055% of US energy.  This indicates that coal workers are about six times more productive than wind workers.

Environmentalists who espouse renewable energy generally oppose nuclear energy.  I think this is wrong.  Nuclear energy has downsides, but does not contribute to global warming.  Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima illustrate the dangers of nuclear energy, but the number of people killed or badly injured is not out of line with the people killed or injured by the fossil fuel industry, with its exploding wells, ocean platforms, pipelines, etc.  If wind power produced all US energy, we would probably have many people falling from windmills, hit by spinning blades, etc.  Unlike solar and wind, nuclear can produce large amounts of power needed by big cities and industry.  By hew EIA figures we have about 67,000 workers in the nuclear industry, which produces 19.7% of US energy.  This means that coal workers are about 1.3 times more efficient than nuclear workers in amount of power produced.  Of course there are huge costs involved in building new nuclear plants which are not included in these numbers.  

The main point of these numbers is to refute the statistics which say that the future of labor is in renewable energy, not coal or other traditional sources.  In fact, it looks like the solar industry is extraordinarily inefficient.  It’s as if solar workers are making labor intensive, expensive Swiss mechanical watches, while coal workers are making cheap but accurate digital watches for ordinary people.  Who pays for the expensive, hand-made solar energy?  Mainly the government.  At the moment that is the only reason it is financially feasible.  The government gives billions to rich investors for solar work, just like it gives billions in food stamps to poor people.  Both are well intentioned, but it may be too early to tell whether solar will be a practical as its champions claim.  

Kushner Investigation

 I don’t know what is wrong with Jared Kushner talking to Soviet diplomats about opening a secret channel of communications between the US and Russia.  You might question the political wisdom of such an arrangement, but I don’t see what is illegal about it.  

I see the potential criminality of Gen. Michael Flynn’s taking payments from the Russians, especially his not reporting the payments to the Pentagon.  I see a lot of smoke indicating the possibility of criminal activity surrounding Paul Manafort, who has been a paid consultant to a number of unsavory individuals and organizations connected to the Russians and the Ukrainians.  However, both of these potentially criminal actions are outside of those individuals’ activities directly connected to the Trump campaign. It is as if Trump had hired a thief to work in his campaign.  If that thief did not steal while he was working for Trump, then Trump might be guilty of poor judgment for hiring him, but that’s all.  There is no criminal liability attached to the campaign itself.  

I think the liberal press is trying to create some kind of guilt by association, by talking about the innuendo involving people in the campaign.  It is as if they were talking about someone going to a bar, and thereby trying to create the impression that he is a drunkard, just because he went to a bar after work.  

Your business is not criminally liable because one of your employees set his neighbor’s house on fire.  Again, you can be criticized for employing an unsavory character, but that does not make you a criminal or your business a criminal activity.  As usual in Washington, if there was some criminal act involved in trying to cover up the associate’s criminality in order to avoid bad publicity, then that coverup might be criminal, but not the original act itself.  But that coverup would have to be criminal in itself, not just poor judgment.  

In fact, I think much of the ado about Russia is an attempt by the liberal press to create some kind of implicit guilt for something that is not a crime.  Liking the Russians may be a poor political judgment, but it does not appear to me to be a crime.  The Democrats are trying to revive the hatred of the old Soviet Union from the bad old Cold War days.  Russia is not the Soviet Union.  The Democrats make the Russians look like some huge threat, but from the stories in the New York Times and Washington Post, the Russians look pretty incompetent.  We seem to see every cable that the Russian ambassador sends to Moscow.  Civilian Russian hackers may be pretty good, but the FSB security people seem like rank amateurs.  Their codes can be broken easily.  It’s like American breaking the German’s Enigma code in World War II, but in that case the intelligence services managed to keep it a secret.  It was not headlined on the front pages of newspapers.  America’s intelligence services can break codes, but they can’t keep a secret.  

I worry that some elements of the intelligence community have gone rogue and are more loyal to the Democratic Party than to the US Constitution, which they took an oath to uphold.  

NYT and Wash Post Leaks

The New York Times ran a front page article defending its decision to print leaked intelligence about the Manchester bombing from the British, which aided the terrorists by giving details of the British investigation.  The NYT put getting a scoop ahead of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/world/europe/manchester-bombing-leaks-donald-trump.html

The Washington Post printed leaked intercepted communications between the Russian ambassador in Washington and the Kremlin in Moscow.  I don’t know how the ambassador communicated with Moscow, but the ambassador does, and he will know not to use the same channel again unless he wants to give the information to the US. The article may have revealed that we have broken Russian codes that they did not know we had broken.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-ambassador-told-moscow-that-kushner-wanted-secret-communications-channel-with-kremlin/2017/05/26/520a14b4-422d-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html

Neither newspaper seems concerned about damaging US national security either vis-a-vis the terrorists or Russia.  It appears that whoever is leaking information to the press is less concerned about US national security than about other issues, like getting rid of Trump.  

The inability of the Russian government to keep a secret makes the Russian spy agency, the FSB, look like a joke. The Russian ambassador, Kislyak, looks like a fool, an incompetent nincompoop. If Putin had some plan to get an inside track with the new administration, his team botched it horribly. The Russians look like the gang that couldn't shoot straight.