Oh, let me count the ways – first, a purely visceral and visual reaction: she’s a snake in a trendy head-scarf. Reminds me of the internet meme of Momo, actually. And the fact that she is a particularly nasty bigot and vocal anti-Ordinary American, and Jew-hater, and might very well have both perpetuated and benefited from immigration fraud.
And … Somali.
Immigration
Fixing the border facility crisis
It’s useful to review how to fix conditions of overcrowding in a facility. There are two fixes available.
1. You build more capacity
2. You increase training and oversight of the personnel running the facilities if they’re not behaving adequately
Both of these fixes require more money allocated by Congress. It helps when the Executive requests more funding but Congress doesn’t require it.
Go look at the legislative history. President Trump asked for more funds, Congress turned him down. It wasn’t his own party that denied him, it was the Democratic delegation that was against relief.
President Trump sought to work around the restrictions by declaring an emergency and using military construction money. It was left wing advocates who went to court to fight Trump, preventing him from building more facilities.
The left wing solution is to cause so much suffering so that our hearts break and we stop enforcing the law.
That’s cruel. It’s cruel on purpose.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alleges misbehavior by camp personnel. She is one of a small select group, just 535 people strong who could directly improve the situation by introducing legislation that would force improvements in behavior. She has yet to introduce any.
The Congresswoman is a prominent part of the cruelty agenda.
In a normal country, hard questions would be asked by the mainstream media of those who have recently been part of this cruelty agenda.
Telemigration
It has often been asserted that the US doesn’t need to worry overmuch about our position in Manufacturing, because Services are the future and that is where we will have the most competitive advantage. And, indeed, the balance of trade in services is more favorable than that in the goods-producing industries: for 2018, exports of services totaled $821 billion, whereas imports of services were only $557 billion.
However, while imports of services are today small compared with imports of goods, which for 2018 were almost $2.7 trillion, it would be a mistake to conclude that services businesses and services jobs are immune to offshoring. Indeed, for many types of services, offshoring/exporting is easier than the offshoring/importing of goods: there are no transportation issues, and, in the case of imports to the US, there are no tariffs at all.
Telemigration…the term was introduced by Richard Baldwin in his book The Globotics Upheaval…is the ability to have remote workers doing things that previously would have required their physical presence. Obviously, the ability to do this has been greatly enhanced by the availability of the Internet and other forms of high-bandwidth low-cost communications. Today, medical images and legal documents are being reviewed in low-cost-of-labor countries. Software is being developed for American companies in countries around the world. Offshoring of clerical operations has been practiced by US firms for a couple of decades, and, of course, the offshoring of customer service is common.
Baldwin also argues that telemigration will be greatly enhanced by the availability of machine translation technology, especially Google Translate. I think he may be overstating the case here–from what I’ve seen, the quality of GT translations is highly variable. Not sure how well this approach would work in facilitating the interaction that is often required among team members to create something or solve a problem, and I am sure I wouldn’t want to trust it exclusively for something like, say, translating the functional specifications for a life-critical avionics system to be programmed by non-English speakers.
But there are a lot of English-speakers in the world, and a lot of activities in which fluency in a common language is not essential.
One area in which a lot of telemigration seems to be occurring is in software development and maintenance. Here for example, is a company which acquires application software companies and offshores much of the ongoing work (which presumably includes incremental product enhancements as well as problem-fixing) to contract programmers: company’s chief recruiter asserts that the current cloud wage for a C++ programmer is $15 an hour. As the Forbes article notes, that’s what Amazon pays its warehouse workers. (Well, at least in the US–and $15/hour for a programmer in, say, India is surely worth a lot more than $15/hour in this country.) What makes this story particularly interesting is that the founder/CEO of the company was noted, in his earlier incarnation in a different software business, for paying software people very well indeed and going to great lengths to recruit them.
Our ‘Xanatos Gambit’ President’s Energy Export Strategy Tree
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.
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.
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.
The very bad Continuing Resolution and how we got here.
We now have a a terrible non-compromise Continuing Resolution on border security. The Appropriations committee reported out HR31, the Continuing Resolution.
The Homeland Security division of this bill upholds Democratic values and funds smart and effective border security including construction and screening technology at ports of entry, where most drugs illegally enter the country.
The $1.375 billion it provides for border barriers is 76% less than the President demanded for a concrete wall, and critical protections are put in place for environmentally sensitive areas.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, yet every Democrat and nearly every Republican who served on the conference committee to write this bill has signed it in support.
Boilerplate. The real story is what was inserted in conference.