In my last post — President Trump’s ‘Xanatos Gambit’ Trade Policy — I spoke to how President Trump has set up his political strategy on trade policy to make any outcome on the USMCA Trade agreement that he negotiated to replace the NAFTA agreement would be to his advantage over House Democrats and the “purchased by the multi-national corporation China Lobby” GOP Senators.  In this post I am going to lay out President Trump’s “Global  Energy Dominance” export policy’s “Xanatos Gambit” strategy tree vis-à-vis the 2020 presidential elections.

To start with, I’m going to refer you back to this passage from my last post on how the Trump Administration is “gaming” economic growth measurements:

This is where Pres. Trump’s ‘Xanatos Gambit’ strategy tree kicks in via a macroeconomic and trade policy manipulation of the very simple economic equation of gross domestic product:

GDP = US ECONOMIC ACTIVITY + EXPORTS + FOREIGN INVESTMENT – IMPORTS – EXTERNAL INVESTMENT

The American economy just grew 3.2% in the 1st quarter of 2019.  It would have grown another 0.3% but for the 30-odd day federal government shut down.  The “markets” were expecting 2.5% GDP growth.  The huge half-percent GDP “miss” boiled down to:

1. The USA exported more.

2. The USA imported less and

3. There was more external foreign investment than expected.

All three were the result of a combination of Trump administration policies on oil/LNG fracking, tax & regulatory cuts and trade/tariffs.

The Trump Administration upon coming into office in January 2017 had a huge windfall of energy projects that the Obama Administration had held up approval of in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.   This windfall neither began nor ended with the  Keystone XL oil pipeline.  There was a whole cornucopia of oil and natural gas energy infrastructure projects that Democratic Party interests, only some of them environmental, that the Obama Administration was using the FERC to sit on for a whole lot of reasons that I refer to as “The Economic Cold Civil War.”

While the media was spending a great deal of time talking about things like the Congressional votes to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in the early days of the Trump Administration’s energy policy implementation.  President Trump spent a great deal of his early political capital on getting his earliest political appointments through the Senate to the FERC to get those projects turned loose as a part of President Trump’s “Global  Energy Dominance” export policy.  The first fruit of this export infrastructure energy policy focus started paying off with the  Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) coming on-line in 2018.  See this Apr 16, 2019 article by Julianne Geiger at Oilprice.com:

U.S. Doubles Oil Exports In 2018

The United States nearly doubled its oil exports in 2018, the Energy Information Administration reporting on Monday, from 1.2 million barrels per day in 2017.

The 2.0 million barrels of oil per day exported in 2018 was in line with increased oil production, which averaged 10.9 million barrels per day last year, and was made possible by changes to the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) which allowed it to load VLCCs (Trent Note: Very Large Crude Carriers) .

The changes to LOOP and to the sheer volume of exports were not the only changes for the US crude oil industry. The destination of this oil shifted in 2018 as well, and even shifted within the year as the trade row between China and the United States took hold.

Overall, Canada remained the largest buyer of US oil in 2018, at 19% of all oil exports, according to EIA data. During the first half of 2018, the largest buyer of US crude oil was China, averaging 376,000 barrels per day. Due to the trade row, however, US oil exports to China fell to an average of just 83,000 barrels per day in the second half, after seeing zero exports to China in the months of August, September, and October.**

[**Please note above the nice thing about energy exports is how futile a energy user embargo is against it.  China’s economic embargo of US crude products only hurt itself.]

The impact of the Trump Administration’s energy export policies from those early days of his administration in terms of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities are now impacting the American economy. A large part of the extra 0.7% GDP growth achieved over the 2.5% Wall Street forecasts in the first quarter of 2019 came from the Corpus Christ 1 and Sabine 5 LNG export facilities coming on-line in late 2018 and making their first full export capacity quarter in Jan – Mar 2019.  The Cameroon 1 and Elba Island 1-6 LNG export facilities were also scheduled to come on-line in Late Feb-Early March 2019, and were very likely large contributors to LNG export surge.

This is how CNBC described 2019’s 1st quarter:

Robust demand for Texas oil and gas in the first two months of 2019 pushed the state’s export activity into high gear, strongly outpacing the national rate and contrasting with a slight decline by California.

Texas represented nearly 20% of all U.S. exports in the January-February period while California accounted for roughly an 11% share.

California has seen its share of total U.S. exports fall in recent years while Texas has been growing its share due mainly to the new oil boom.

CNBC table of US Exports in the 1st Quarter of 2019  Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/25/texas-exports-boosted-by-oil-rise-3-times-faster-than-us-increase.html

And this is only the beginning for the US economy in 2019. See the following text and LNG export facility graphic from a Dec 10, 2018 report by the US Federal government’s Energy Information Administration:

U.S. liquefied natural gas export capacity to more than double by the end of 2019

U.S. LNG exports continue to increase with the growing export capacity. EIA’s latest Short-Term Energy Outlook forecasts U.S. LNG exports to average 2.9 Bcf/d in 2018 and 5.2 Bcf/d in 2019 as the new liquefaction trains are gradually commissioned and ramp up LNG production to operate at full capacity. The latest information on the status of U.S. liquefaction facilities, including expected online dates and capacities, is available in EIA’s database of U.S. LNG export facilities.

EIA projection of U.S. Liquefied Natural Gas Export Capacity from 2016 – 2021. Date of projection, Dec 2018.

Given the above information, barring a war or serious election year intervention to kill the economy by the Federal Reserve, the cascade of LNG export infrastructure coming on-line in the 2nd and 4th quarters of 2019  will mean something on the order of a full percentage increase in GDP growth (in a range of 4.0% to 4.5%) in Jan – Mar 2020 over Jan – Mar 2019.  That is what going from 3.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas export capacity to to 8.9  Bcf/d in Dec 2019 does for you.

This extra 1% GDP will be happening just in time for the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

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I’ve written previously in my column “President Trump’s ‘Xanatos Gambit’ Government Shutdown” of President Trump’s tendency for building political strategy trees were every possible outcome is to his advantage. (See the “Xanatos Gambit” strategy tree example in the figure below)

This is a decision diagram example of a “Xanatos Gambit.“ Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit

It very much looks like President Trump has done the same thing with the Democrats and “China lobby” GOP Senators with the post-NAFTA US-Canada-Mexico (USMCA AKA “You Smack-A”) trade agreement and the US economy.

THE US ECONOMY, NAFTA & USMACA

The key thing you need to understand regards NAFTA and American manufacturing is that NAFTA was geared to allow the “China lobby” of multinational corporations to use Canada and Mexico as an “international arbitrage opportunity” for Chinese slave labor wage manufactured goods to be assembled at Canadian and Mexican production facilities and avoid American tariffs.

Multinational corporations exploiting this “international arbitrage opportunity” was “The Great Sucking Sound” that Ross Perot talked about which killed the US domestic refined metals industry and hollowed out middle class manufacturing jobs in the American economy.

President Trump’s USMCA removes that “international arbitrage opportunity” via original 75% North American manufacturing content requirements for metals and intermediate manufacturing goods as well as a Mexican minimum wage rules on the order of $15 an hour for automotive parts assembly.

In response the “China lobby” has been paying large campaign contributions to both House Democrats and “free trade” GOP Senators to try and keep NAFTA, as well running info-war spots everywhere in the corporate media and “movement conservative” publications/media outlets about the benefits of “free trade.”  This has resulted in public statements by Speaker Pelosi that the House does not intend to vote for USMCA.

This is where Pres. Trump’s ‘Xanatos Gambit’ strategy tree kicks in via a macroeconomic and trade policy manipulation of the very simple economic equation of gross domestic product:

GDP = US ECONOMIC ACTIVITY + EXPORTS + FOREIGN INVESTMENT – IMPORTS – EXTERNAL INVESTMENT

The American economy just grew 3.2% in the 1st quarter of 2019.  It would have grown another 0.3% but for the 30-odd day federal government shut down.  The “markets” were expecting 2.5% GDP growth.  The huge half-percent GDP “miss” boiled down to:

1. The USA exported more.

2. The USA imported less and

3. There was more external foreign investment than expected.

All three were the result of a combination of Trump administration policies on oil/LNG fracking, tax & regulatory cuts and trade/tariffs.

First point, the USA will be a net energy exporter — of oil, natural gas & coal combined — in 2020 if it isn’t one already.

Some rough numbers:  In 2012 US oil production was ~8 million barrels a day, all for domestic consumption, and in 2019 it is 12.6 million with some exports.  Today’s US oil consumption is 20 million barrels a day.  That increase in oil production that has reduced imports of oil by a net of 4.6 million barrels a day has also been accompanied by the displacement of coal and oil in both electrical production and manufacturing by cheaper natural gas, thus freeing both the coal and oil not used to be exported. This combined economic change since 2012 alone is worth a 1% increase in GDP growth a year compared to 2012.

Second, the Trump administration’s systematic and sustained attack on Obama era federal regulatory growth is reducing business compliance costs particularly in the energy sector for new infrastructure projects.  These are the “anti-green” actions the Democrats accuse the Trump administration of.

Third, the Trump administration/GOP tax bill, in addition to increasing spending power for the middle class, has had a huge -YUGE- reduction in capital gains taxes and a one-time break in repatriating overseas capital holdings. This has made America a much more attractive place to hold and invest money.  Particularly for energy companies like Exxon, which are dropping this foreign capital inflow into the Permian basin for oil and natural gas fracking and energy export infrastructure from the Permian to the Gulf Coast.

Finally, in terms of trade and tariffs, President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum combined with the business implications of USMCA rules have made further investment in Canadian automotive plants a net loss position.  American metal content is now economically competitive for energy sector infrastructure and automobile parts such that US Steel among others are reopening US metal plants.

Taken together every part of the GDP equation has been directly affected by the Trump administration macroeconomic policies to get that 3.2% GDP number.

This is where the Xanatos Gambit for USMCA arrives.

Things will be worse for the China lobby without a vote on USMCA than with one.

Short form:

NAFTA is dead regardless of any action or inaction by the House.  All the House and Senate can do is not vote on USMCA.  The legislative branch cannot revive a NAFTA trade agreement the federal executive has withdrawn from.

This means without a signed USMCA trade deal Pres.Trump can — and will — lay on even more tariffs on the multinational corporations playing price arbitrage in Mexico and Canada between Chinese and American manufacturing.

While such trade sanctions can reduce the American economy like a tax increase, when we are likely at close to 4% economic growth in late 2019 to early 2020 from the accumulated investment in energy projects bringing defacto energy independence, a 3.5% economic growth rate with tariffs is still pretty good.

And when the House refuses to vote in USMCA, NAFTA still dies.

Pres. Trump can and will lay on new massive new anti-Chinese tariffs on Canadian and Mexican front companies for China without USMCA rules.  This will be massively popular in the Midwest in an election year and will hurt the income streams of the multi-nationals supporting the Pelosi Dems and McConnell RINOs.

From Trump’s point of view, What’s not to like about America’s manufacturing base employing the Midwestern white working class growing while the “international arbitrage opportunity” of China’s slave labor economy contracts?

It was hard for the transnational progressives that dominate American politics and media empires to understand in their gut either President Trump’s successful 2016 campaign or his 2018 campaigning, because Trump’s campaign “dog whistles” are outside their frame of reference. The reason why is that the Trump political phenomena is very much Trump being a “fire and brimstone preacher from the non-denominational Low Church of American Exceptionalism” in the midst of the PC dominated American High Church outlawing displays of the American flag on Cinco De Mayo for “reasons of diversity.”

Two examples for your consideration:

1) My wife found this article below for me, because she is better at spotting the American fundamentalist Christian Right’s symbols than I.

Donald Trump and the Evangelical Vote
By Emily Johnson
December 8, 2015

And herein lies the political genius of Trump. Without tying himself to any particular group, Trump has captured the populist rhetoric of the most conservative elements of the GOP base. He spoke for more than 45 minutes in Knoxville and hardly referred to religion at all, focusing instead on issues related to immigration, defense, and trade. But religion was not absent from the event. It began with a prayer, given by a local law enforcement officer, beseeching God to bless America with a “guiding hand of direction” and a “guarding hedge of protection.” Corum, the 92-year-old first-time voter who warmed up Trump’s audience, also had a great deal to say about good, evil, and God. The United States, she said, “ought to be like it should have been in the beginning” when God bestowed a special blessing on the nation.
 
But direct appeals to religious rhetoric are less important to Trump’s campaign than is his appeal to far-right voters as a brutally honest man who is only a reluctant convert to the world of politics. For these voters, Trump is like them: a passionate American who was compelled to become involved in the political realm because of his commitment to return the nation to the way it ought to be.

This is the founding myth of General George Washington coming to the Constitutional Convention as the American republic’s Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, and then dropping the reigns of power to return to Mt. Vernon for a second and final time.

Emily Johnson’s article is really good, and you should read it in full after seeing the following:

2) This video of a performance of the “USA Freedom Kids” at the beginning of a Trump for President campaign rally.

As a military kid, that performance pulled so many of my strings that I knew immediately that;
a. I was being purposefully manipulated by the symbols I grew up with, and
b. I loved it anyway.

Trump’s political rallies then and now are revival meeting of American exceptionalism for America’s Scots-Irish, and extended by assimilation, white ethnic  Jacksonian faction.

This style of campaigning is 180 degrees out of phase with traditional negative campaigning, which is to paint other candidates as the enemy of you and yours — “OTHER.”

Trump’s campaign rallies have been about affirming Jacksonian tribal identity in much the way Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia did and Putin of Russia is currently doing in Russia.

The issues that Trump has chosen to run and govern on are all about American blood-and-soil nationalism at the expense of international politics and trade. And President Trump has been painting himself in the traditional role of Cincinnatus & George Washington coming down from his estates to set right the ills of the Republic.

The transnational progressives that dominate the political parties of the West simply cannot compete with this American tribal identity stuff because they are not nationalist.

National identity is outside their frame of reference. So are appeals to them.

The Origins of Our Second Civil War by Victor Davis Hanson.

The first half of this VDH piece seems over-the-top. Would the intermarriage and cultural assimilation that he cites in his next-to-last paragraph be happening if the situation were as bad as he thinks? Or is the country mostly culturally sound but burdened with dysfunctional elites dominating politics, big business, the universities and the media.

This part is good:

Again, Obama most unfortunately redefined race as a white-versus-nonwhite binary, in an attempt to build a new coalition of progressives, on the unspoken assumption that the clingers were destined to slow irrelevance and with them their retrograde and obstructionist ideas. In other words, the Left could win most presidential elections of the future, as Obama did, by writing off the interior and hyping identity politics on the two coasts.
 
The Obama administration hinged on leveraging these sociocultural, political, and economic schisms even further. The split pitted constitutionalism and American exceptionalism and tradition on the one side versus globalist ecumenicalism and citizenry of the world on the other. Of course, older divides — big government, high taxes, redistributionist social-welfare schemes, and mandated equality of result versus limited government, low taxes, free-market individualism, and equality of opportunity — were replayed, but sharpened in these new racial, cultural, and economic landscapes.

The rest of the piece is also good and points out how the country’s situation might improve. “A steady 3 to 4 percent growth in annual GDP” doesn’t seem very far from where we are. University reform seems likely as the public increasingly catches on to the corruption and excessive costs of higher education. Race relations seem to improve when not politicized. Spiritual and religious reawakenings happen every few generations.

Keyboard trash talk and dark speculations about violence and civil war are not the same as actual violence. They might even be safety valves to release transient passions, cautionary tales, for everyone outside of a tiny lunatic minority. (The lunatic minority who are spurred to action by online/media hype are a serious problem, but not mainly a political one except as regards public and hence political unwillingness to force treatment on recalcitrant individuals with severe mental-health issues.)

Today’s political violence is a problem but not one at the level of 1968 much less 1861. Almost all of the action now is in the political realm. There is little reason to expect an intractable impasse on a fundamental issue as in 1850-60 over slavery. There is no substantial constituency favoring civil war as there was in 1861. The modern federal government is huge, profligate and obnoxious, but risk-averse deep-state bureaucrats and crony-capitalist opportunists aren’t going to take physical risks to defend the status quo. The political process still responds to public concerns about governmental overreach, which is probably a large part of why Trump was elected. There is also enough collective memory of the last civil war and its awfulness to discourage enthusiasm for a replay from anyone who is sane.

None of this is to say dire predictions won’t come to pass, but that’s not the way to bet. The country has been through harder times and surmounted them through politics rather than violence. My money’s on the basic soundness of our culture and political system this time as well.

In case you all had not noticed, a -LOT- of what is going on in the news between the Deep State and Pres. Trump here in the USA is a intra-Deep State factional Civil War over Iran.

In short — It’s Iran, STUPID!

This can be shown via the fact that the Obama “Iran Nuclear Deal” faction used the full powers of the FISA counter-intelligence to ram the Iran deal through Congress in 2015. (See the text immediately below and the Tablet on-line magazine link to their April 2017 article on the subject)

In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

.

and

.

The reason the prior abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus is clear only now is because the Russia campaign has illuminated it. As The New York Times reported last month, the administration distributed the intelligence gathered on the Trump transition team widely throughout government agencies, after it had changed the rules on distributing intercepted communications. The point of distributing the information so widely was to “preserve it,” the administration and its friends in the press explained—“preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.” The Obama team seems not to have understood that in proliferating that material they have exposed themselves to risk, by creating a potential criminal trail that may expose systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.

Now you know why General Flynn was under counter-intelligence surveillance by the Asst. AG Sally Yates at the DoJ and Andrew McCabe at FBI Counter-Intelligence in 2015.

The Obama Administration was afraid ex-Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen Flynn would be called to testify before Congress about how CIA Chief Brennen and DNI Clapper were cooking the intelligence books on Iran and ISIS.

It turned out the illegal FISA surveillance by the Obama Administration got enough dirt on Congressional leaders to prevent that from happening.

The Deep State’s Iran Deal factional plans might have worked if Trump had lost…but he didn’t.

Everything regards the spying on the Trump campaign and attempted coup d’etat by special council/lawfare/impeachment against President Trump is about hiding the facts of that Iran Nuclear Deal from the American people and law enforcement.

But while the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal faction was the largest and strongest Deep State faction…it wasn’t the only one.

Pres. Trump has the anti-Iran Deep State faction on his side as well — which is mainly uniformed US military intelligence, see Gen Flynn and Adm Mike Rogers formally head at NSA — with a foreign intervention in the form of Saudi Arabia, the Israeli Mossad and Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu on Trump’s side of the ledger.

Some in the the ‘coup supporting media’ would argue that this gets into fine shades of “what is treason” regards President Trump.

This sort of argument  ignores the fact that the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal Deep State faction — the DoJ, FBI, CIA, the State Department and a small faction in the senior civil service at the Defense Department — had the support of the EU political and IC elites as well as Iran’s Mullah’s & the Moslem Brotherhood in ramming home the Iran deal.  And that they

1. Launched FBI Operation Crossfire Hurricane which;
2. Illegally used Stefan Halper as a ‘Agent Provocateur’ to tag Trump campaign officials with the FISA tag of ‘Foreign intelligence asset’ to;
3. Use the full powers of the Federal government to spy on the Trump for President campaign,  and government, plus
4. Has had Asst. A.G. Rosenstein appoint Special Council Mueller and delegate to him — quite illegally mind you — full authority to conduct on-going FISA surveillance in a criminal investigation against US citizens.

IMO, the bottom line up front here is that the Trump faction was and remains “constitutional” in its actions — his faction won an election and is following legal procedure.

The legal terms of art for  “Iran Nuclear Deal” Deep State faction efforts engaged in to date are an on–going seditious conspiracy to violate both the Trump Campaign and Trump Administration’s civil rights “Under color of Law” in order to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

The short form for that is the Iran Nuclear Deal faction the Deep State are attempting a Coup d’etat.

It gets worse.

Whether or not President Trump finally wins over the Obama faction and takes down the Iranian Mullah’s.  The Obama’s Deep State Faction has done deep, lasting and permanent “Gramscian damage” (See link: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260  for an explanation of the term) to the American Republic, because they attempted a Coup De Etat against the tradition of peaceful succession of executive political power.

We can no longer take for granted peaceful opposing political party transitions of power in the American political system.

Now I am pretty sure that a goodly percentage of the Gentle Readers are looking at the title and going, “What???” A significant number will recognize it as a reference to the Constitution, but to be honest only a limited number of people know that Article I defines the Legislative Branch, Article II the Executive, and Article III the Judicial. Most people are not quite sure about the other Articles.

Let’s cut to the chase. It is the Supremacy Clause:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

The reason that states have to obey Federal laws and the Constitution as a whole is specifically because of this clause of the Constitution. That obedience is not optional, conditional, or debatable. If you are part of the United States, you are subject to Federal law and your “feelz” otherwise have no bearing. If you disagree with Federal law, if you want to deny rights under the Constitution, you are out of luck. You can try to change it in court. You can try to have Congress pass a change to the law or repeal it. You can try to amend the Constitution. But the Federal power in the areas where the Constitution grants lawmaking power to the Federal government over-rides anything the States can do.

This is key to the functioning of a free, constitutional republic. If a state, or group of states, can defy the Federal government at will, there is no Federal government. There is no equal justice under the law. And there is, in fact, no rule of law.

This was recognized from the beginning. In Federalist #44 James Madison pointed out that if it was not included, then each state would have functional veto power over the entire country. Without it, the country would not work.

There have been 3 attempts to over-ride or ignore the Supremacy clause and each was aimed at destroying the country.
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You know the one I mean. When you can see what is coming at you head on, and yet it is considered very poor form in the proper circles to admit the truth.

This is written on July 10, 2017. Tomorrow Congress returns from its VERY long weekend for the 4th of July. Note that they refer to it in official documents as the “4th of July” recess, for them the date is more important than the Independence of our country.

By whatever name, it is the calendar that is of import. Remember, from tomorrow, our worthless, ambulatory violations of Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution take their next vacation after barely a fortnight and 3 days after returning. And they will take the end of July, all of August, and the first part of September off. Technically, there are 12 working days before that respite. Technically. But Congress cannot be troubled, regardless of supposed party, to actually work 5 days a week. Mondays and Fridays are part of the congressional weekend and are not to be profaned by the work of the public.

So, what of that work remains to be done, and under what strictures?
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The no-leak, no-warning, firing of FBI Director Comey is riling up Washington D.C. like nothing I’ve seen in years. So many powerful people, so many lost minds.

This Instapundit tweet about covers it, as removing “unwritten limits on executive power” was only supposed to help the Deep State power club, not anyone else.

This Fredreka Schouten  USA TODAY piece at the following link (James Comey memo: Why his bosses say they fired the FBI director) outlines the five key points in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s firing recommendation memo:

1. “The FBI’s reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage, and it has affected the entire Department of Justice. That is deeply troubling to many department employees and veterans, legislators and citizens.”

 

2. “I cannot defend the director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unifies people of diverse perspectives.”

 

3. “The director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the director to make such an announcement. At most, the director should have said the FBI had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors.”

 

4. “Compounding the error: The director ignored another longstanding principle: We do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.”

 

5. “Although the president has the power to remove an FBI director, the decision should not be taken lightly. I agree with the nearly unanimous opinions of former department officials. The way the director handled the conclusion of the email investigation was wrong.”

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein was right, whatever way you cut it, Comey violated a basic trust.

The problem here is that DC is about power, not ethics. And Comey was acting in the mainstream of Wash. DC political deep-state culture of the last 25 years. This was one of the reasons Trump was elected President.

And please carefully note — Pres. Trump’s firing of Comey was staged in a way to completely cut FBI Director Comey off from all of his political connections and most especially his personal FBI Director eyes-only files with no notice.

The fact that the Deep State just lost control of America’s chief federal investigative and counter intelligence agency with no warning has made them all lose their collective minds.

They haven’t had time to coordinate a story because too many are calling their lawyers.

All the discussion of the Trump “wiretapping” seems to assume that there are targets of surveillance. I thought that had passed away years ago and that NSA was simply capturing all transmissions in the ether, converting them from voice to text and storing both in a searchable data base. While additional land lines may be intercepted, the vast majority of signals are now airborne at some point so the NSA has access to virtually all electronic communication, foreign and domestic. Likewise, they do not, except in extraordinary circumstances, have acres of analysts sitting in cubes listening to conversations in real time. Instead, software constantly crawls the text database for terms of interest or manually input searches, such as the names of everyone on the Trump transition team. This is how team 0bama got the dirt that has been leaked to the press.

Politics is now under the influence of those at NSA with search authorization much more than the Kremlin, except to the extent they have comparable capabilities. I suspect the Kremlin has comparable intellectual capabilities but less access to transmissions and even less processing bandwidth. Given the acceptance of the loss of privacy by the facebook generation, this can only expand. And to think that only 80 years ago a Secretary of State could opine that “Gentlemen do not read each others mail.” Things have changed, and once again, not for the better.

Got that off my chest. Now if only the tin foil would stop irritating my scalp.

Mr. President,

As you form your administration, I have one recommendation for you: hire my friend Mike Lotus.

Who is Mike Lotus?

Mike Lotus is a fierce and passionate servant of Jesus Christ, patriot, and father. He loves his God, these United States of America, and his wife and five children.

Though these loves are the center of his world, they might not strike you as things that should single him out as someone worthy of your attention. Great to have, you might say, but why should I care? Many of the fellow citizens of our America, the greatest nation of history, love and serve their God, love and serve this nation, and love and serve their spouse and children. Many of those, in the wise (and weary) words of my own beloved mother, herself a mother of six, have been crazy (and devoted) enough to have given this republic five citizens as Michael and Jean Lotus have.

My, you New Yorkers are a tough lot. Let me mention a few of the many things that should persuade you to hire Mike Lotus.

In his day-time job, he is Michael J. Lotus, attorney at law, practicing in Chicago, Illinois. He is an experienced warrior of law, fighting for the same overlooked Midwesterners whose love of country allowed you to pierce Mrs. Clinton’s formidable blue wall and win the presidency over the near universal scorn of those that have led this great nation into shame.

On top of the demands of his law practice and his large and busy family, Mike has also somehow found enough time to be a fearless advocate for the conservative cause and loyal volunteer for the Illinois Republican Party. This can be a lonely and thankless job, especially in the harsh blue wilderness of Mrs. Clinton’s birthplace and President Obama’s chosen hometown. Yet he continues to go out, watch the local polls, and fight the good fight for the GOP in a town run by Democrats so dedicated to civil rights that they believe that no-shows, the dead, and the fictional deserve the equal right to vote in our nation’s elections. In a town where the dead rose en mass for JFK in 1960, Lotus-scale exorcisms are too small on their own to stop legions of the dearly departed pressed into voting one more time for the city machine. But you become a determined and experienced exorcist in the face of such chronic outrages and, in the demon-haunted swamp you are descending into, you need all the great exorcists you can get.

Mike is a fighter in the arena of ideas. With his good friend James C. Bennett, he wrote America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century—Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come. In America 3.0, Mike and Jim lay out one road toward making America great again. While they differ in some details from your emerging plan to keep America great into this new millennium and beyond, in the larger thrust and spirit of their program they are in accord with the direction you want to take this country: up. It never hurts to have men of practical affairs who can double as men of practical ideas on your side. In Mike (and Jim), you’d hire a man who hits these two and other marks. Consider it a multitude-to-one deal, something well within your art.

Mike and I differ on a few points of policy. For example, I’m a mercantilist and a protectionist and he’s a staunch advocate of free trade. We’ve had some energetic debates on this and other topics. Yet Mike has always been a good sport even when, as I too frequently do, I get lost in rhetorical excess. When the tide, as it sometimes but rarely does, goes against him, he salutes and does his duty like a good soldier and carries on with your ideas as if they were his own. It is a rare quality in these days where comprehensive indoctrination is often mistaken for thorough education and a brave and uncanny ability to regurgitate the views of the entrenched and powerful on demand is conflated with intelligence and insight that Mike can mix independence of mind and loyalty without leaving either shortchanged.

You can’t fake authenticity, as your opponent in the recent presidential election so readily demonstrated.

Hire Mike Lotus. You won’t be disappointed.

Godspeed,

Lynn C. Rees
Murray, Utah, USA
December 11, 2016

Nigel Farage, commenting on the election of Donald Trump:

“This is a big opportunity for all British business because once we’ve left that awful EU thing we can do our first trade deal with the United States of America. Isn’t that great?”

Making a nomination to the Supreme Court to fill the Scalia seat is easy, and it will permit Trump to control the news cycle. Trump will be tempted to make this his first substantial order of business, but it is a temptation to which the future president ought not succumb, even if he risks losing some political popularity while delaying the eventual nomination.

Read the rest.

Let’s not kid ourselves, NATO, in its current structure, destabilizes the peace of Europe vis-a-vis Russia. Europe’s states will not pay for their own defense as long as those states can enjoy a free ride courtesy of the American tax payer and the American elite’s visions of Pax Americana. Those visions are long past their sell-by-date. If American participation in NATO ends, there is a good chance (albeit, not a sure thing) that the Europeans will cooperate and defend themselves. That’s a win-win. Good for America, and good for Europe.
 
I propose a national referendum—an American Brexit—to settle the question. Let’s put the question to all of our people. Should the United States continue to participate in NATO?

Read the whole thing.

Seven Baton Rouge area law men have been shot and three are dead in an ambush near Police H.Q. in Baton Rouge.  There was as single perpetrator in a black outfit, with a hoodie or other face covering, with a long rifle. He was engaged by Police and shot in the exchange. The USA Today won’t say his race.

The best one-stop place to cover the shooting seems to be this “The Conservative Tree House Blog” thread.

Odds are 9-to-1 that this perpetrator was a single black male with some connection to the Black Lives Matter’s protest movement.

Excerpt from USA Today below —

————————–

Three police officers have been shot dead in Baton Rouge, La., and others may have been wounded, authorities said Sunday.

.

The three officers were shot near the department headquarters, Baton Route Mayor Kip Holden told MSNBC. At least four others were injured in the shooting, he said.

.

“They are investigating,” he said. “Right now we are trying to get our arms around everything.”

.

Two Baton Rouge police officers and one East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy are dead, according to WBRZ-TV’s Michael Vinsanau.

.

The gunman was shot, a Louisiana State Police spokesman said, but his condition was not immediately clear.

and

A witness told WBRZ-TV that a man was dressed in black with his face covered was shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash across from Hammond Air Plaza. Police closed the streets between the police department’s headquarters and Interstate 12.

.

Vinsanau of WBRZ tweeted that more than a dozen marked and unmarked police cars have sped to the scene, and that a SWAT team is on location. State police armed with rifles are posted blocks away, Vinsanau tweeted.

UPDATE:

Perpetrator Description —

Dale Franks, Vote Properly, You Virulent Racist!:

But let’s go even further. Even if you could prove that, on balance, free trade is an unquestionable economic benefit, people might still prefer to be measurably poorer if that’s the price that must be paid to maintain their traditional social and political cultures. (This has even more relevance in the case of the EU, because the EU actually has power. Imagine if NAFTA had an unelected Commission in Ottowa or Mexico City that could impose laws on the United States.) Perhaps people don’t regard their economic interests as important as their national or cultural interests. It doesn’t matter what elite opinion thinks the people’s most important interests are. In a democratic society, ultimately, it only matters what the people think they are. People get to determine their own priorities, and not have them dictated by elites. The people get to answer for themselves the question, “In what kind of country do I want to live?”
 
Of course, I would argue that we don’t have truly free trade or, increasingly, a free economy in the United States. The Progressives always look at the rising income inequality and maintain that it’s the inevitable result of capitalism. That’s hogwash, of course, and Proggies believe it because they’re dolts. But the problem in this country isn’t free trade—we have precious little of it—or unrestricted capitalism, since we have precious little of that as well. The issue behind rising income inequality isn’t capitalism, it’s cronyism. Income isn’t being redirected to the 1% because capitalism has failed, it’s happening because we abandoned capitalism in favor of the regulatory crony state and its de facto collusion between big business/banking interests and a government that directs capital to favored political clients, who become “too big to fail”. It doesn’t matter, for instance, whether the president is a Democrat or Republican, because we know the Treasury Secretary will be a former—and future—Goldman Sachs executive.

Franks’s post is very well thought through and ties together the main themes that appear to be driving US, British and European politics. It’s worth reading in full if you haven’t yet done so.

FBI Director James Comey today in a Washington DC news conference confirmed what many have suspected.

The Rule of Law in America is now strictly a political football for those who are in power.

The FBI has refused to indict ex-Sec of State Hillary Clinton for multiple clear violations of Federal law by hosting an unsecured e-mail server with classified data off-site from the State Department.  A server that was know to have been hacked by most of America’s foreign enemies.

Gatewaypundit has many of the details here —

FBI Director Comey: We Found Hillary “Work Related” Emails That Were Not Turned Over to FBI – But Recommend NO CHARGES FIled

Richard Fernandez:

It should be obvious to the status quo that the crisis has arrived. Brexit, for all its drama, was a warning. The real collision is close ahead.
 
The basic demand is for a moderation, if not a reversal of the centralizing tendencies. It’s a brief for less immigration, less political correctness and less government.
 
Unfortunately conceding to these demands this is like reversing the Titanic. There’s so much momentum, it’s hard to stop. But they have to stop. The Iceberg looms ahead. All Brexit has done is give the warning.
 
From now on, the countdown begins. Can the elites turn the ship in time?

A Time For Audacity: New Options Beyond Europe

—-

As we approach tomorrow’s long-awaited referendum on continued UK membership in the European Union, James C. Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Challenge, co-author of America 3.0 and friend of this blog has a new short book out that deserves attention.

From the book’s Amazon page:

For Britons, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, and their friends and allies, the time has come to consider an audacious option. It is time for many reasons. One is that each of you today faces a series of critical decisions about what and who you are and will be. Britain less than two years ago passed one such decision point, which is whether the historical British Union of the four nations would continue together. Although the option of full independence for Scotland was rejected, the question of how the four nations will work together, and in what sort of framework, has now been opened, and it is time for the options that this book will discuss to be part of that discussion.
 
Now, Britain is on the verge of making another decision threshold about another Union. Again, this is an issue where the answer appears obvious to an outsider, but seems to be a matter of great controversy within the UK. There may be valid reasons why Britain might not want to exit the European Union, but the lack of adequate alternatives for closer trade relations and partnership should not be one of them. Ironically, many of the arguments of advocates of British membership in the EU work better as an argument for the option presented in this work, a Union of the Commonwealth Realms.

You can read the rest and order the book (Kindle download only) here.

In my two previous blog posts here and here I talked of a new extended flow oil fracking technique coming on-line that resulted in a lot of drilled uncompleted wells (DUC) and the population of such wells (~5,000). In the comment section of one of those columns I speculated that we have a top end on oil prices where “turn on a dime fracking” will cut in at a price point of $50 a barrel

We now have a “flaming datum” for that speculation, oil having just bumped -HARD- into the $50 a barrel roof for world oil prices. The 5,000 DUC Frack-log is being activated with — I strongly suspect — the new extended play oil fracking technique.

It is being reported in various places that the US rig count jumped from NINE RIGS in mid-May to 325 last week and there was no change from 325 rigs this week. That is a 36 fold increase in rig count in a week!!

Based on figures I’ve gotten from those in the industry, the range of production you can expect from those wells, depending on the geology, length of the laterals (6,000 to 8,000 feet) and the number of fracking stages (200′, 300′ or 400′) will result in initial barrel per day production of between 400 and 800 barrels a day per fracked well (with a very, very rare 1,300 barrel a day play from time to time). So we are looking at between 130,000 to 260,000 barrels a day of American oil fracking production arriving in the next few months.

Compared to Saudi production, 130,000 to 260,000 barrels of oil a day represents between 1.3% and 2.5% of the Saudis’ daily oil flow. The number of DUCs activated to provide that production amount to 6.5% of the frack-log. And all that for what amounts to Zero “CAPEX” (capital expenditure), plus the operating expenses of worker wages, the rental price for existing, out of service, oil fracking rigs, and oil tanker trucks to move product to rail heads or oil pipelines.

Now you know why the Saudis didn’t agree with OPEC oil production cutbacks this week. The Saudis maxing out their oil production is no longer about stopping American oil frackers. The Saudis’ long term regime survival strategy amounts to being the “Last Petro-State Standing.”

The Saudis — like everyone else inside the Big Oil economic paradigm — simply cannot compete with that sort of rapid to market, low cost & low risk oil. The Saudis’ highest priority now is to keep their customers as long as they can, because if they lose them they may never get them back.

The “DUC” in this case being _D_rilled but _U_n_C_ompleted shale oil & gas wells

I ran into this article by Seeking Alpha energy analyst Gary Bourgeault over on Real Clear Energy which gave a figure for how many drilled but ‘unfracked’ wells are available for the new extended oil flow fracking technique I mentioned in May 15th 2016 post Texas Fracking and the Death of Big Oil.

The key passage from “U.S. Shale Oil Boom Over Says CSMonitor – Hahahahaha” below —

DUC wells waiting in the wings
 
Another major reason the shale boom isn’t over is the large number of drilled but uncompleted wells waiting to be brought into production. There is an estimated 5,000 in the U.S. which can be quickly brought to market when the price of oil is high enough to reward it. Some companies have been completing them for some time, and more are being completed in 2016.

There are a lot of implications in that number. Starting with the fact that new oil & gas rig counts are going to be minimal for some time. And the hard economic fact that major politically event driven oil price spikes are going to be extremely short and will drop below 50 dollars a barrel within weeks to three months, given how fast these North American “DUC” wells can be fracked to bring product to market.

This new age of “banked” cheap oil plays, and the resultant oil price stability, will see off both the “Big Oil” economic model and the political/corporate elites that live by it.

Update May 27 2016:

It looks like Zerohedge has come to the same set of conclusions about the “Big Oil” economic model with his post “Peak Petro-State – The Oil World In Chaos”

It isn’t often you see the death of a major worldwide industry. Last week I saw the death of the “Big Oil” economic model. It just died at the hands of Texas oil frackers who have developed a new “disruptive technology” that has made obsolete all the pillars of technology underpinning large, vertically integrated oil companies. More importantly, the same is true of all the petro-states that nationalized Big Oil’s assets in the 1960s to make all the state oil companies around the world today.

I found this out doing my day job last week as a Defense Department quality auditor visiting a mid-sized oil service company diversifying into federal contracts. The meeting was about issues with the contract they won and touched on others they have bid on. As a side bar at lunch the following points about their main business came up:

1. Oil field spending has died. Rig count in the USA is the lowest it has been since 1940.
 
2. One oil rig controller company these folks worked with saw a year over year drop of 72% in its business.
 
3. Another company they supplied had their “Cap-X” budget drop from ~$400 million for 2015-2016 to little over $30 million for 2016-2017.
 
4. One drilling company they supplied went from 120(+) new wells last year to _12_ this year.
 
5. This supplier sold a lot of copper tubing for “frack-log” drilling. That is the drilling of holes in good oil-bearing rock without fracking rock for oil immediately — and here is the new part — to take advantage of a new long-flow fracking technique.

While most of the points above are due to the Saudis’ oil price war on Texas frackers. An ex-Big Oil geologist I know put it this way —

The entire reason for the price drop was because the Saudis wanted to destroy fracking in the United States in order to keep us dependent upon them in order to keep them getting a free defense. The Saudis will have to diversify and start spending money on defense before the price goes back up, or they will be in serious trouble.

The technique in Point #5 above marks another “fracking revolution” that is of growing importance to the USA. This new fracking energy revolution will upend the world order as we know it. Political winds willing, America may well be a net hydrocarbon exporter in five to eight years.

Explaining why that is requires some background in Texas oil fracking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in January 2016 there was a lot of speculation over whether Pres. Obama would pardon Former Sec of State Hillary Clinton for E-Mail/Server-gate, (See Google Link ).

Now that Trump has the GOP nomination well in hand with a preference cascade in the North East (See MSNBC video link), Trump has said Hillary should be prosecuted for E-Mail/Server-gate, and that Democratic strategist Dave “Mudcat” Saunders is telling the Daily Caller Trump Will Beat Hillary Like ‘A Baby Seal’. It is time to again ask the questions:
1. When Will Obama Pardon Hillary? and
2. For What Crimes?

I suspect, whatever the answers to those two questions are, after January 2017 GOP Congressional committee chairmen will call her in to testify under oath, in hopes of catching her in a perjury trap.

Discuss.

America’s incompetently planned and led wars in the Middle East have acted as a biological process of evolutionary selection that has been creating nastier and more lethal terrorist organizations. This has happened because of the fecklessness of America’s political leaders. (Bing West covers that political fecklessness and the selective pressures on our Islamist enemies in his article America the Weak.)

Nowhere is this selective pressure seen better than with the evolution of ISIS and its adoption of “Auftragstaktik”‏ in order to execute terrorist operations.

“Auftragstaktik”‏ is a German military term that is loosely translated in English as “Mission Tactics”. According to the UK Daily Mail, the terrorist organization ISIS has adopted “Auftragstaktik”‏ as a central organizing theme because Western signals intelligence destroyed other Islamic terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda that tried to be more centrally directed.

ISIS figured out that if you give a leader resources, a target, and a time to get it done, then tell him to get it done however he can, you will get big, nasty and above all successful terrorist attacks in western nations, because such methods do not require detectable electronic communications.

See this UK Daily Mail clip:

The bloodthirsty militant group admitted to following the technique in a recent issue of Dar al-Islam, its French-language propaganda magazine.
 
It was this strategy of warfare that led to the November 13 Paris attacks, in which 130 people died, and the Brussels bombings two weeks ago that killed another 32.
 
The doctrine was first developed in the early 19th century in Prussia in response to the state’s crushing defeat against Napoleon.
 
This new theory of war – which gave troops the skills to respond to rapidly changing circumstances in the heat of battle – was then refined by general Carl von Clausewitz.
 
Later fellow Prussian general Moltke the Elder further tweaked his theory, ushering in a new way of commanding modern-day armies.
 
Today, similar tactics form a crucial component of the U.S. and UK armies military training.
 
The February ISIS article, which was devoted almost entirely to the Paris bombings, explained that its jihad in Europe encompasses three types of attacks.
 
This includes ambitious mass slaughter plots carried out by operatives sent from ISIS headquarters in the Middle East, to lone-wolf attacks by people with no connection whatsoever to the group.
 
It even cited a historical German infantry manual from 1908 as its inspiration.
 
The soldiers’ manual stated: ‘There is nothing more important than educating the soldier to think and act for himself.
 
‘Autonomy and his sense of honor push him to do his duty even when it is not in front of his superior.’
 
According to SOFREP.com, this style of warfare – known in the U.S. as mission-type tactics – translates to: ‘Here is your target, here are your assets, go get it done.’
 
This, ISIS claimed, allowed its cells to inflict terror in Europe with ‘complete tactical autonomy’ and leaves little evidence that can link back to their commanders.

This ISIS “Auftragstaktik”‏ model will be replicated and improved upon. This will not end well.

We have sowed the wind, now we reap the whirlwind.

Discuss.

…what could go wrong?

That sounds like the plot line from a Broadway musical comedy, yet it’s happening. See this this text clipped from THE HILL column “Trump angst pours in from overseas” about the details.

Lobbyists in Washington say they are being flooded with questions and concerns from foreign governments about the rise of Donald Trump
 
Officials around the globe are closely following the U.S. presidential race, to the point where some have asked their American lobbyists to explain, in great detail, what a contested GOP convention would look like.
 
The questions about Trump are “almost all-consuming,” said Richard Mintz, the managing director of Washington-based firm The Harbour Group, whose client list includes the governments of Georgia and the United Arab Emirates.
 
After a recent trip to London, Abu Dhabi and Beijing, “it’s fair to say that all anyone wants to talk about is the U.S. presidential election,” Mintz added. “People are confused and perplexed.”
 
The Hill conducted interviews with more than a half-dozen lobbyists, many of whom said they are grappling with how to explain Trump and his unusual foreign policy views to clients who have a lot riding on their relationship with the United States.

The comic possibilities in those sorts of miscommunications are better than THE PRODUCERS improbably successful money scam play “Springtime for Hitler.”

We let the Saturday/Sunday WSJ opinion pages remain unopened as we have errands to do and our local paper has dispensed with its Sunday edition to deliver its scant weekend advertising edition on Saturday. So this morning I ate my eggs accompanied by a whimpering Peggy Noonan.

She sounds like an out of phase boomer crying “Has anybody here seen my old friend Jeb?” because her Republican party is shattering in her mind. So long has she lived in the comfort of her subservient cocoon that she cannot imagine that the shattering of the chrysalis will allow the emergence of the beautiful and powerful butterfly instead of the inert pupa to which she had become accustomed. Instead the agent of that shattering, Donald Trump, is seen to be destroying the comfort to which she had looked forward in her old age.

I also saw the returns for yesterday’s contests where Cruz won two and narrowed The Donald’s margins in two others while leaving Rubio and Kasich far behind, clutching for straws. We now have the two man race. Bad news for the Donald because he now faces the candidate most likely to reveal the true emptiness of the man behind the curtain. And the candidate most likely to present a clear choice for voters in November.

And on the other side, the Bern won 2 of 3 which will force Hillary to rededicate herself to leftism past which she will, if still free, be forced to defend in the autumn against Cruz painting the future in bold colors.

Who ever became president in 2008 was doomed to preside over 8 terrible economic years. The withdrawal of the boomers from economic productivity into dependent consumerism was inevitably about to begin, our financial institutions were in disarray, and a vibrant China was eating our lunch as had the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s.

The next president, whoever it is, will face far less difficult prospects. Boomers will continue their decline into consumption, but they will begin to abandon the jobs to which they have so bitterly clung to the X’ers and Millenials who so desperately need them. Our financial institutions, while still unreformed, are stronger than any others in the world. China faces interesting times, and our adversaries in Russia, Arabia and Persia will struggle with the onslaught created by one of the 20th century’s greatest unsung heroes, George P. Mitchell, father of fracking. Who knows, there may be enough wealth to cover Social Security, if not Medicare.

What remains unstated in all of Noonan’s and others’ commentary is that this election has the opportunity to be a revolutionary generational transfer of power. The Donald, having done the prophetic work of Jeremiah, has paved the way for Cruz, the new Josiah, to rediscover the law of old and restore it to guide a new age. An age in which Republicans have an embarrassment of talents and the Democrats none. Should Cruz gain power there is greater than normal reason to expect his redirection of the nation could be sustained simply because of the lack of opposition talent and the gift of fracking. After the last 30 years, we can at least pray for it.

No one can know the future, and there are some reasons why this may not be it, but for this afternoon, I can at least try to remember where I left those sunglasses.