From an NYT article about Japan-US trade relations: the Japanese are considering retaliatory tariffs against US products. They are not interested in bilateral trade talks but prefer that the US rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks with 11 countries– an attempt to create a free-trade zone that competes with China. Japan exports specialized steel parts to the US that are not available elsewhere, so it is likely that US companies will have to pay the tariffs; if not, this steel is a small fraction of Japanese exports and can be sacrificed. Japan exports very little aluminum. Thus, Japan has little to lose by refusing to engage in bilateral trade talks with the US.
Today, “Japan notified the World Trade Organization that it was reserving the right to impose retaliatory tariffs against the United States in response to tariffs on steel and aluminum imports proposed by President Trump.”
Japanese Prime Minister Abe had tried to cultivate a personal relationship with Mr. Trump but was said to be disappointed with the “cool, even cold” way he was treated. Trump has repeatedly stated that he wants a bilateral trade agreement with Japan, but Mr. Abe has politely and firmly declined.
The last time the US under GW Bush applied tariffs to Japanese steel, Japan complained to the World Trade Organization and eventually was vindicated– but it took three years. The Japanese appear to be willing to wait for a judgement.
Unfortunately, Mr. Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the first week after he was inaugurated, so the chances of negotiating a multilateral agreement under his regime appear to be slim to nil– especially since Trump brought Mr. John Bolton into his administration.
President Trump’s concept of trade relations with other countries is primitive and he does not seem to understand the significance of the balance of trade between countries. He seems to think that a deficit in the balance of trade between two countries represents a loss– a retrogression to mercantilism, an obsolete concept of foreign trade that was the excuse for colonialism and imperialism. The damage done to US relations with other countries will be hard to reverse when Mr. Trump leaves office; we hope that more competent “globalists” will supplant him, but anything could happen.
“It took 30 years of diplomacy and an unlikely confluence of factors to get Iran to agree to the JCPOA’s limits on its nuclear program,” wrote Nicholas Miller, a nonproliferation expert at Dartmouth University. “Attempting to achieve a better deal without any of these favorable conditions would be quixotic at best.”
“The pitched battle between political moderates and hard-liners is so perilous that there is even talk of a military takeover,” wrote Thomas Erdbrink, the Tehran bureau chief of the New York Times. He added that Trump’s move tipped the scales against the so-called moderates: “Hard-liners, who have long lost popular support but control security forces, the judiciary and state television, are set to declare victory, since they have always argued that the United States can never be trusted in any deal.”
“The common people will hate America more if Trump withdraws,” said Hamidreza Taraghi, a hard-line analyst, to Erdbrink. “They will face hardship and be poor. They will hate Trump. That’s good.”
This may all be by design: The Trump administration, particularly noted hawks like national security adviser John Bolton, could be applying pressure in the belief that it will cause the regime in Tehran to collapse. But it’s more likely a prelude to greater instability, further crises and perhaps even military confrontation.
“I think there are those in the administration who have a fantasy that we can somehow have a bloodless … peaceful change in Iran if the president just punches the right buttons,” said Wendy Sherman, a former senior State Department official and Obama’s lead negotiator, in a phone call with Washington-based journalists. “That is an extraordinarily simplistic and naive understanding of this theater.”
These quotes come from a Washington Post article about Trump’s withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear accord (the Joint Plan of Action)… According to multiple observers, the JCPOA was cobbled together after 30 years of work by professional diplomats from European, Iranian, and American embassies. It represented the best possible agreement limiting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and replaced sanctions that have been falling apart over the last few years. Now, Mr. Trump will attempt to reimpose sanctions unilaterally and expects to get a better deal all by himself (he has hollowed out the State Department and dismissed professionals who could have helped to negotiate.)
The worst part of this precipitate action by Mr. Trump is the negative effect it will have on North Korea’s ability to trust the United States in negotiating an end to the nuclear threat on the Korean peninsula, indeed the entire Korean war. The North Koreans will negotiate with South Korea and appear to be well on their way to a peace treaty without Mr. Trump’s direct involvement. Cynics can have some hope that the end of the Korean war will occur without any credit accruing to the Trump administration.
From an article in today’s Guardian. It seems that large European companies are quickly pulling out of Iran in response to the re-imposition of sanctions by the US, abrogating the anti-nuclear accord. Angela Merkel warned that companies should have “no illusions” that the EU could protect them from US sanctions, despite attempts to protect “medium and smaller companies” with laws that prevent foreign economic sanctions from affecting EU nations.
Iran has not reacted other than to complain as yet, although they could conceivably announce that they were restarting work on a nuclear weapon since the agreement has been breached.
The result, intended or not, of the US pulling out of the Iran agreement, is chaos for the Iranian economy. Oil exports will be greatly affected, reducing from about 2.5 million barrels a day to 1 million. This will probably increase oil prices, although other countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia will be able to fill in the shortfall easily. In combination with the moves last year to levy tariffs on solar products, this is an indirect attempt to shore up the oil and coal industry and fight the advance of solar power. Dramatically lower prices on solar panels has led to a building boom for the solar industry, and even the tariffs enacted by the US last year will not stop it, especially in China. In combination with the increases in production of electric cars, this means that China is likely to outpace the US in renewable energy soon.
We can surmise that, in his heart of hearts, Trump loves China and hates Europe (for its effeteness and appeasement of Iran). China is the ultimate bully and will soon be the strongest country on the planet. Trump is busy weakening the United States government so that China will have less competition. He may soon weaken the US further by actually going to war against Iran, particularly because economic pain will not lead to regime change in Iran, only a hardening of their attitudes. War against Iran would be the ultimate diversion from the Mueller investigation.
An article in the New York Times from May 14, 2018, calls it a “Medical Mystery”: health spending per capita in the United States has increased dramatically compared to other developed countries since 1980, but life expectancy and fifteen-year survival expectancy has deteriorated. The article references research published almost ten years ago by Peter Muennig and Sherry Glied in “Health Affairs”, which analyzes comparative survival expectancy in forty-five and sixty-five year olds since 1975 in a dozen highly developed countries. The research shows increases in spending per capita in the US compared to a dozen other countries (such as Great Britain and Switzerland), all of which have “universal coverage” health care “insurance.” The United States has no universal health care payment– generally, families have been insured under health plans subsidized by employers since WW II, and those over sixty-five have had insurance through the federal government (Medicare); a percentage of poor people have health care paid for by Medicaid, which has had poor acceptance by health care providers.
This research, and other studies referenced in the NYT article, shows relative increases in health care spending but losses in life expectancy compared to other highly developed countries since 1980. This relative deterioration cannot be explained by differences in smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, or firearms mortality. There may be some correlation between increased spending on specialty care and other “unnecessary” medical expenditures and loss of life expectancy. In other words, some medical care may be increasing mortality rather than decreasing it.
In any case, comparison of countries that provide universal health care protection with the United States, which has relatively poor health care access for those at the bottom of the income distribution, reveals higher spending and lower life expectancies, with deterioration over the last thirty-five to forty years. It appears that payment for health care for poor people is more efficient than payment for health care for well-to-do people. Poor people have poorer nutrition, higher accident and homicide mortality, and lower rates of preventive health care in spite of programs like Medicaid.
These findings are strong arguments in favor of more and better health care, particularly preventive health care, for poor people. In addition to providing subsidized health care for all people living below the national median income, emphasis on preventive care is likely to provide substantial benefits in life expectancy and health. On the other hand, payments to drug companies for expensive drugs that are helpful to small populations are unlikely to provide much overall health benefit.
President Trump Abandons Campaign Promise to Lower Drug Prices, Knuckles Under to Drug Manufacturers
Mr. Trump announced his plans to “lower” drug prices over the weekend– claiming to fulfill his campaign promises while continuing to pave the way for drug manufacturers to remain profitable. For most of us, Mr. Trump’s scandals have overshadowed anything he could present as a “policy”– but that hasn’t stopped him from continuing his catastrophic misrule and bigoted, sometimes hysterical pronouncements. His scandals have distracted those who already know he is too corrupt and too narcissistic to be president, while he quietly destroys the government and institutes hateful right-wing policies.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised to lower drug prices, a very popular position because of people’s wide– and accurate– perception of being over-charged for medicine. The most popular tactic Mr. Trump offered was a proposal to introduce negotiations between government payers and drug manufacturers to lower prices in return for market share in the Medicare Part D program. Many people– especially those over 65– were already aware that Mr. Bush’s original Part D plan had specifically prohibited the government from negotiating price breaks on medication covered by Part D. Many people– especially veterans– knew that the Veteran’s Administration had a very effective program of price negotiations and a preferred formulary; people wondered why the same couldn’t be done for Part D.
More than a year after his administration has begun, Mr. Trump has finally gotten around to discussing his proposals for the problem of high drug prices in the US. The idea of negotiating prices and creating a preferred drug list for Medicare Part D has been forgotten (although it was probably the most effective among his proposals.) Instead, one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent proposals today is to force people in other countries to pay higher prices– because, according to him, the governments of other countries, by regulating drug prices and negotiating terms with drug companies, have been unfairly paying less than Americans for drugs.
This proposal appears to have been lifted directly from a drug industry playbook. Penalizing other countries for controlling drug prices– because they are unfairly forcing Americans to pay more by leaving the drug companies an unregulated market in the US?? The delusion is that American consumers are “subsidizing” Europeans, who are cheating by not paying drug companies enough for their product. Clearly, this hallucinatory proposal suits Mr. Trump’s nationalist and pro-business prejudices well.
Wouldn’t it be fairer to the public for the US government to join in on this negotiation with drug companies to try to get some of the same discounts? Surely drug companies can be induced to lower some of their prices and cooperate for a more rational allocation of drugs overall. The shareholders need to temper their greed a little.
The rest of Mr. Trump’s proposals to “control” drug prices are either irrelevant or ineffective. One proposal is to change the way patents are handled– to stop companies from exploiting protection beyond the twenty-year exclusive (up from seventeen years) that patents now provide. Some companies have refused to provide any samples of their patented drugs to other companies, making it impossible for them to do FDA-required comparability studies. Other companies have made trivial alterations in their products to create “new” formulations that can be patented again for another twenty years. These tricks and many others are legal even though they are obviously anti-competitive; attorneys general have not seen fit to investigate. How Mr. Trump intends to stop these practices is unclear, but this is really an area where a lot of savings cannot be expected.
In the meantime, Mr. Trump’s proposals make no mention of artificial shortages created by the decisions of managers not to perform required maintenance on their production equipment until the equipment breaks down and the lines have to be closed for months at a time. Naturally, the shortages create additional opportunities for price increases.
Mr. Trump is trying to deflect the attention of his voters by pretending to follow through on his campaign promises without hurting the bottom line for his friends who are CEO’s of drug manufacturers. He has seen handsome rewards from the drug companies– compensation that has not become public due to the risk of a backlash from his voters. Mr. Trump is in desperate need of distractions since the Stormy Daniels scandal has mushroomed with the revelation of his lawyer’s slush fund.
No wonder Novartis paid into Michael Cohen’s limited liability company, Essential Consultants, to “consult” for the new president. There is no telling how many more payoffs the drug companies have secretly provided to the president who claims to be so rich that he can’t be corrupted by bribes.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and qimono)
A Look Into the Future: Mueller finishes investigation one day before Trump Declares War On Iran
The near future is set, according to Mr. Donald J. Trump’s driving egotism, the inevitability of Mueller finding massive Russian influence on Trump himself, and the need for something to draw the attention of the American public away from Mueller’s report– which will inevitably be immediately leaked. Everyone with a grasp of recent history is aware that Mr. Trump has paid cash for a lot of buildings recently, and since the late 1990’s, he has been seeking funding from Russian sources. Everyone remembers that Mr. Trump’s son said in 2008 that “we get all the funding we need from Russia”– never mind that he said it in the context of an interview about golf courses.
This deep debt to Russian sources, not to mention his brief oral statements shortly after the firing, is the motivation that will force Mueller to conclude that Mr. Trump intended to obstruct justice when he fired Mr. Comey. Mr. Trump was worried lest Mr. Comey’s FBI dig too deep into his personal financial ties to Russia because he realized that he could be held responsible for the activities of the Russian spy agencies and their unofficial friends. At first, he claimed that Comey was fired because of the way he handled the Clinton investigation. The White House brought forth a memo critical of Comey to support this reasoning. Then, as he always does, he let slip his real motivation– “It was because of this Russia thing…”
Now, the way Comey handled the Clinton email investigation is certainly susceptible to criticism, although in the end he decided not to prosecute; the remarks he made when that decision was announced, as well as the re-opening of the investigation shortly before the election, were criticized by Democrats. It is not clear what Comey did that Trump disapproved of. If the FBI had done justice to the investigations, the existence of the intelligence probe regarding Trump campaign communications with Russian espionage would have come out during the period before the election as well as the email story.
Stories that impugn Mrs. Clinton’s integrity, health, mental condition, and so on have been half-accepted even though they are demonstrably false, making the public media’s picture of her completely out of focus. The activities of unknown intruders have only superficially been discovered– there are more malign doings than we know about.
True to justice, Mr. Pence should be impeached as well. I know that’s hard to do, but he was on the same ticket as his boss, and he got the same advantages from the Russian cheating– he was elected vice president along with the Yosemite Sam of presidents, Donald J. Trump.
Unfortunately, that is not going to happen, and we will not move forward. Meanwhile, the future will overtake us in our blind spot.
Rakem Balogun (Christopher Daniels) is a relatively young man, with a son and daughter, and he was a stranger to violence, although he did own a gun. He had never advocated that policemen should be killed or made any threats, but unbeknownst to him, the FBI had him under surveillance for some time and internally labelled him a “black identity extremist.” He was arrested– a full-on bulletproof vest and shotgun no-knock warrant– in December and held in jail for five months while his case– he was charged with one count of owning a gun while being ineligible because of a prior misdemeanor domestic violence conviction– fell apart and was dismissed. In the meantime, he lost his house and his car, but fortunately not his job; he works in IT (I guess that means programming computers; that’s what we’d call it in the old days.)
Mr. Balogun’s son (fifteen) had to transfer to a different school, and he didn’t get to see his newborn daughter unless he was exonerated. Believe it or not, the FBI insisted that he couldn’t get any bail because he represented a risk of committing further crimes while out on bail. His case should be lifted up and examined in the hot spotlight of public opinion and people should know that there is a racist element in the FBI that has invented “black identity extremism” to categorize a theorized wave of crimes against police, most obviously the assassination of five police officers at a demonstration recently. This from Foreign Policy describes the “Black Identity Extremist”:
“The terrorism classification is used to describe individuals who resort to violence or unlawful activities “in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society,” according to a copy of the report obtained and published by Foreign Policy.”
There is, of course, a tradition among “black identity extremists” of defiantly owning guns to combat perceived effeteness. A copy of the book “Negros with Guns” was also seized when Daniels was arrested. The Black Panthers were treated as armed threats because many of them were, in fact, armed. Now the police have “Black Lives Matter” to worry about, and they have developed some conspiracy theories about “BLM”, partly involving the so-called organization behind it. Unfortunately, the man they picked for an example (the technique of arresting lower level members of a gang to gain access to upper levels with confessions) was so low he didn’t have any connections worth exploiting or organizations that used mafia-type techniques on their members. So they ruined his life for nothing and got no cooperation to use against really extreme extremists like Malcolm X.
Update: the FBI had been keeping Daniels under surveillance since March 2015, when he was identified in a video of a public demonstration against police brutality that was shown on the Infowars web site. Infowars, in case you forgot, is the site that promotes the most outlandish conspiracy theories. One of their theories was that the “Black Lives Matter” demonstrators were part of a secret network that amounted to a fifth column of anti-police black people who were likely to commit “domestic terrorism.” The twisted worldview of right wing conspiracy theorists is hard to penetrate.
The New York Times published a story today that reported on revelations from Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for “Stormy Daniels” (Stephanie Clifford), who is suing to be released from a nondisclosure agreement that she entered into with Donald J. Trump a couple of weeks before the presidential election of 2016. As you recall, “Stormy Daniels” went on “60 Minutes” the other night and described a one-night stand with Mr. Trump that occurred perhaps ten or twelve years ago, shortly after his third wife delivered their only child, Baron Trump– and the subsequent execution of a document binding her to silence in return for $130,000, which was paid by Mr. Cohen through Essential Consulting LLC. This is entirely separate from the serial assignations that another woman, a former Playmate of the Year, had around the same time with Mr. Trump. She was paid off by a contract with the Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid carried by Wal-Mart, in a transaction worth $150,000.
Following me so far? Today, Mr. Avenatti described multiple separate transactions engaged in by Essential Consulting LLC, which was controlled by Mr. Cohen. The LLC was used as a recipient for hundreds of thousands of dollars paid by an investment company closely linked to a Russian oligarch last year. The LLC also received $200,000 from ATT and similar amounts from Novartis, two large corporations with business deals pending before the administration.
That’s open and blatant corruption and all the proof I need that Donald J. Trump colluded with the Russians to throw himself the presidential election. The web of evidence is just too extensive to deny. The only problem now is that we will have to wait for Mr. Mueller to finish up his investigation (if he is not fired) and for a newly elected Democratic majority in Congress to impeach Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence as well. Both the president and vice-president must be removed because they are both beneficiaries of blatant and extensive collusion in spreading propaganda and making numerous illegal deals to induce Americans to vote Republican in 2016.
The worst news of the day is that gasoline prices are likely to rise to $6 a gallon as a result of the destruction of the nuclear deal with the Iranians. This atrocity will greatly benefit the Russians, who depend on oil exports for most of their government’s revenue. It will not help the American government because, although the US is one of the largest oil producers in the world thanks to fracking, American oil companies are privately owned and pay little taxes.
“It’s not difficult to understand why Trump and his allies would try this tactic [intimidation] on their investigators, too. If you know that an adverse finding about Trump will come with a personal cost and with 35 percent of the country thinking you are a rogue prosecutor trying to take down a president with trumped-up charges, that could feasibly affect your conclusions, even subconsciously.”
The writer (of this Washington Post piece, or at least, a close (and uncredited) copy from a discussion board) is explaining that federal prosecutors may feel uncomfortable charging Mr. Trump with obstruction of justice (the equivalent of “not paying your taxes” as a charge to take down Al Capone) because about a third of the country seems to be infected with Trump-mania and would not believe anything bad about the object of their crush. Mr. Trump has encouraged his followers in the House to threaten the federal prosecutors with impeachment if they persist in their investigation. This is more serious than the constant anonymous death threats that they have become used to by now.
The technique of intimidation (first in the business world and now in the political world) has served Mr. Trump well. In the present climate, all he has to do is threaten anyone with a lawsuit and they fold… or do they? Not people with enough money to afford a decent lawyer. The only thing you have to do in order to counter the threat is to answer all the filings– don’t ever ignore when you are legally served with notice of a lawsuit because they could convict you by default if your lawyer doesn’t respond in a timely fashion.
If your lawyer responds (and he usually charges five or ten thousand dollars for the privilege of representing you) the lawsuit will go nowhere. In fact, the usual response to this type of tactic is to ask the court to dismiss the suit– most any reason will do.
Death threats are more easily ignored– although, in today’s climate, a documented death threat is usually enough to convince the police to allow you to carry a concealed weapon. Not a bad idea, in today’s climate.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
The Rude Pundit (one of those Twitter maniacs) revealed, in a series of tweets this morning that Melania Trump published, through the FTC (“a booklet by Melania Trump and the Federal Trade Commission”) a very nice booklet about cybersecurity for families (“Talking to Your Kids About Being Online”) which is, without attribution, nearly identical to one published in 2014 by… the FTC. A few minor changes were pointed out by The Rude Pundit, but as you read this material, you can see that it resembles a plagiarized PhD dissertation in Physical Education (actually PE degrees max out at Master’s)…
So it’s great material, but don’t you think the FTC (or somebody with a little humility) should reveal somewhere (like in the copyright notice) that Melania had practically nothing to do with the creative side (the writing) on this very nice booklet?
(photo of Billy The Dog not caring who wrote that pamphlet ’cause he can’t read anyway)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 