Month: November 2012

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and the US Trafficking in Persons Laws

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The Human trafficking scandal involving Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) raises further questions about the Obama Administration’s troubling record of selectively enforcing American law for political gain, and the Main Stream Media’s active cooperation with that agenda.

The Drudge Report broke a scandal involving Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) going to a tier 3 Human Trafficking nation — the Dominican Republic — to visit prostitutes. According to the State Department here These are the following U.S. Laws on Trafficking in Persons that Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is in jeopardy from —

1. The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 (P.L. 106-386),
 
2. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003 (H.R. 2620),
 
3. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005 (H.R. 972), and
 
4. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 7311), also known as the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.

The TVPA laws are set up for easy extra-territorial law enforcement as they are laws where guilt is a matter of fact and not intent.

Statutory Rape Laws are an example of a law of fact. It does not matter if you didn’t know the person you were sleeping with was under age. If you slept with him or her, you are guilty. Being drunk or any other excuse only applies to the penalty phase, not the guilt or innocence of a felony sex offender conviction.

Similarly, under the TVPA, if you are an American citizen and sleep with a 15-year old prostitute in a Tier 3 nation like Thailand or the Dominican Republic. You are going to be in jeopardy not just for sleeping with a prostitute, but the American age of consent applied to you over seas. Even if the local age of consent is very much under that of the American state the visiting American is legal resident of. [Sen. Menendez (D-NJ) is subject to age provisions of New Jersey Permanent Statues, Title 2C, Chapter 14, Section 2]

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Releasing the Brakes and Advancing the Throttle Works Better Than Trying to Push the Train

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“Job creation” is of course a key issue in this campaign. Each of the candidates claim that he will outshine the other in this area.

Simply creating jobs is easy. You can pay people to dig holes and fill them up again. You can ban the automatic operation of elevators. You could even eliminate ATMs. The proper measurement is not just “jobs,” but rather jobs that will contribute to overall long-term prosperity rather than subtract from it.

Mitt Romney has argued for five points which he believes will create 12 million jobs. The plan has been predictably attacked as insufficient; for example, Noah Millman, in the publication called The American Conservative (founded by Pat Buchanan, among others) says that “the mismatch between the scale of the challenge and the proposed solution is almost laughable.” But it is Millman’s critique, in my view, that tells us what is wrong with so much current economic and political thinking.

Romney’s first point is energy independence–by 2020. To which Millman says:

Energy independence, if taken literally, would mean higher energy prices (if it was economically efficient for us to be independent, we would be). But what Romney really means is simply to roll back regulation against drilling and mining. More energy development will indeed create some jobs – it’s doing so in Western Pennsylvania, in North Dakota, for example. But it won’t make a big dent in a 12 million job goal.

Energy independence would require higher prices if nothing else changed. But increases in domestic supply shift the curve. In the case of natural gas, higher domestic supplies have allowed us to remain independent of non-US supplies in this area—remember, just a few years ago it was believed we would have to *import* vast quantities of natural gas, via LNG ships–at the same time that prices have fallen. There is no economic reason why the same phenomenon could not occur with oil.

And the argument that the employment in the expanded drilling/mining industries is insufficient to make a big contribution to the 12 million jobs target represents simplistic first-order thinking. In reality, lower energy prices, coupled with more certainty that these prices will not skyrocket in the future, have a huge impact on location decisions for a wide range of energy-intensive businesses…primarily in manufacturing, but also including data centers. And for companies in the process industries (plastics, chemicals, fertilizers, etc), the costs of feedstocks represent a significant portion of the total cost of goods produced, and the availability of cheap natural gas or oil has an especially direct impact on location decisions. See for example Fracking brings manufacturing back to rust belt and Europe left behind as shale shock drives America’s industrial resurgence.

You can be quite sure that the competitive advantage that America gains from shale gas..and oil…will be far stronger with a President Romney than with the fossil-fuel-resenting Barack Obama.

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How Obama Makes Decisions

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While searching for an old post, I ran into a post in which I’d excerpted some passages from an article on Obama’s approach to decision-making.

Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men portrays Barack Obama as being confounded by his duties as president. Some of the scenes depicted by Suskind would be comical if they were not so tragic for America.

For example, when Obama’s experts assembled to discuss the scope and intricacies of the stimulus bill, Barack Obama was out of his depth. He was “surprisingly aloof in the conversation” and seemed “disconnected and less in control.” His contributions were rare and consisted of blurting out such gems of wisdom as “There needs to be more inspiration here!” and “What about more smart grids” and — one more that Newt Gingrich would appreciate — “we need more moon shot” (pages 154-5).

Suskind writes:

Members of the team were perplexed…for the first time in the transition, people started to wonder just how prepared the man at the helm was. He repeated a similar sorry performance when he had a conference call with Speaker Pelosi and her staff to discuss the details of the planned stimulus bill. He shouted into the speakerphone that “this stimulus needs more inspiration! Pelosi and her staff visibly rolled their eyes.”

Presidential exhortations more befitting a summer camp counselor will evoke such reactions.

In the post, I cited a study of Woodrow Wilson written by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt:

Throughout his life he took intense interest only in subjects which could somehow be connected with speech…He took no interest in mathematics, science, art or music–except in singing himself, a form of speaking. His method of thinking about a subject seems to have been to imagine himself making a speech about it…He seems to have thought about political or economic problems only when he was preparing to make a speech about them either on paper or from the rostrum. His memory was undoubtedly of the vaso-motor type. The use of his vocal chords was to him inseparable from thinking.

To Obama, it’s all about the speeches, all about the hype. Despite his faux reputation as an intellectual, the man has remarkably little interest in contemplation, analysis, or problem-solving.

Thinking about Obama’s overall presidency, and especially about his performance or lack of same on the Benghazi debacle, I’m reminded of what C S Lewis wrote about his protagonist (a sociologist) in his novel That Hideous Strength:

His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw…

Original post with CB discussion thread, here.