May 2019 – The McCullough Report

ROBERT MUELLERS SURPRISE PRESS STATEMENT, SIMPLY AN INVITATION TO AN IMPEACHMENT STYLE LYNCHING

Mr. Mueller spoke to us today. In a nutshell, he cast a dark shadow over the Collusion theory, indicating that although there was not enough direct evidence present to indict, there could have been collusion, but that there was not sufficient evidence to actually make a charge. With Obstruction, there was in his opinion a clear case for Presidential obstruction, but no charges were made because a sitting president cannot be indicted according to Federal law. Then he made it clear that what he is speaking to is directly contained in his report, that he would not be making any more statements, but if required, would only refer to the report itself. His speech was clearly a political statement, and he invoked the Congress to do their job. It was an invitation to impeach, and Jerry Nadler will make sure that does happen.

The report has been out for weeks. We all have had the opportunity to read it. The first part, Collusion was a wet noodle. It clearly pointed out that there was no collusion. The second part, Obstruction, was a legal work of fiction, showing the President growing weary, and discussing with his staff ways to shut the “witch hunt” down once and for all. None of that happened, and for political reasons, the “witch hunt” went on until its inevitable conclusion. In effect, no Obstruction actually happened, but was considered by the President, a man unjustly accused of crimes that never happened. A President aware that he was the target of a coup, who wanted to fight back, but had the realization that doing so would convince the public of alleged guilt to fictional crimes that would surely lead to impeachment, and one that may have even been supported in the Senate.

The Mueller team clearly was formed to get the President, no other reason than that. Even though they spent much time, treasure and effort to bring him down, there was nothing there for them to indict, nothing there for them to get their job done the way the swamp wanted. Now, with the “Investigation of the Investigators” and the IG report on its way, its panic time in Washington, and that is exactly why Mr. Mueller spoke in public.

The swamp desperately wants impeachment, and Jerry Nadler is a willing accomplice. The House will impeach, and drag it out before the media until November 2020, hoping beyond hope that the public will have a tainted view of the President, and vote Democrat to actually get rid of him. They know that impeachment is dead on arrival if it goes to the Senate, so instead it will be a “show trial”. They are hoping that this circus will divert attention from other investigations that will be damning to the Democrats if the public pays attention. With a compliant print and television media, they may be right, but I give the American public more credit for common sense than that.

The swamp is terrified that the truth will come out, and that truth could very well include indictments for many in the bureaucracy, including Mr. Mueller and his band of merry lawyers. The Clinton Campaign and the DNC will also be threatened, as they were major players in the investigation and the coup. Democrat Senators and Congressmen will also be implicated. It will be an interesting run up to the 2020 election. Fasten your seatbelts people, this is going to be quite a ride!

THE PARIS ACCORD, DEAD IN THE WATER, OR A PATH FOR GLOBAL GOVERNANCE?

The 2015 Paris Agreement was an interesting exercise. The nations of the world came together, ostensibly to fight the good fight against climate change. In my opinion, it was a dark Fairy Tale, designed by Globalists with a more comprehensive idea in mind, something actually different from the “good fight” that was presented to us commoners. Our President seemed to see through the haze of what it was, wealth re-distribution, virtue signaling, and ultimately globalist governance. He decided to opt out, and from my perspective, for good reason!

First, the USA was a major contributor to the economic re-distribution. We were in 2020 to start off with $100 billion in tax dollars to be given up for the “cause”, and given to 3^rd world countries. In subsequent years we were to increase our contribution from year to year in order to allegedly fund the 3^rd worlds effort to comply with establishing a “green economy”. It was called “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”, which sounds a lot like a Karl Marx’s axiom “To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities”.

The objective was to rebalance resources. Developed countries were to give dollars to the 3^rd world (especially the USA) and were to increasingly decline carbon emissions, so much so that with present technology would put the 1^st world into a declining economic spiral. On the other hand, the defined 3^rd world, with the notable inclusion of China and India, repositories of the fastest growing economies and 2+ billion people, were actually required to do nothing. They talked about reducing emissions, but in reality, their emissions are going up exponentially, and there is no end date in sight for that to stop and reverse itself. In fact, just in those 2 countries emissions are much higher than in the rest of the 1^st world, but is is the 1^st world that would be sacrificing and paying the economic price.

So this agreement privileges the countries, large and small, emerging countries under the definition put forth, and severely damages 1^st world countries that already have pollution under controls. The Paris convention blames the West for the world’s problems, but they ignore that the so called “privileged countries are the most serious threats. This is a completely lopsided agreement that has no chance of working, especially with the USA opting out, and Nationalism on the rise in Western Civilization.

The “free riding” is built into the model, not only with the 3^rd world not being held to any accountable standards, but with the 1^st not legally bound to their commitments. In fact, the 1^st world for the most part, even though they give lip service to the accord, are not living up to the standards they have set for themselves. Further, technology is not developed enough to actually replace fossil fuels at this point in time, and so called “Green Energy” as it stands today will not meet future demands under any circumstance.

So, is there another approach to this goal of “Saving the Planet”? I seriously doubt it. China and India will continue to grow burning coal and petroleum. Even the EU, with most of their countries giving lip service to the agreement are in the process of building 55 coal fired electric plants. FYI, the USA has not built any coal fired plants in decades, and is in the process of retiring 26 coal fired plants in the next few years. That is in the face of getting out of this failed agreement, and counter to the dialog that globalists are putting forward.

There is also an argument that man’s input into climate change is significant, but minor to the ebb and flow of that process that has gone on throughout the history of our planet. A lot of so called “scientific evidence” has been altered to give credence to the narrative that man is the deciding factor in climate change. Computer models have been proven time and time again to have been ineffective in predicting the future of climate change, and man’s activity as the major imputes to its swings. Is there a political approach to this alleged problem? I doubt that there is.

It is my belief that the US has effectively killed the Paris accord. Even though the EU and others still give it verbal support, without the economic transfer that we were required, it will eventually fall apart. I also doubt that there is sufficient international interest in creating a new agreement, being that Nationalism is on the rise, and people are seeing through the fault lines of the climate change narrative. Further, I believe that as in our own country, individual countries in the 1^st world, and some in the 3^rd will continue their efforts to keep the environment clean, but it will be an individualistic national effort. Most people on our planet treasure a clean environment. Most people also do not want a 1 world government.

CHILD LABOR PRACTICES INTERNATIONALLY, AND THE ILL EFFECTS IT HAS ON CHILDREN AND THE SOCIETIES THEY LIVE IN

Contrary to popular belief in our country, child labor is alive and well in many parts of the world. Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Asia and the Pacific are areas where the practice is most evident. The one commonality that these countries have with each other is poverty. Non-elite families in these countries have to scrape just to earn enough money for food, and starvation is often the alternative to either pressing their children into local labor or actually selling their children into some type of slavery. It is a complex problem that tends to justify itself out of economic necessity.

There are numerous articles on this subject. The estimates for how many children are participants in the child labor market vary widely. From what I could find, they go from 100 million all the way to 218 million as of 2018, being that there is no official count of child laborers, so these are guesses. Regardless, this is a major problem in 3^rd world countries. Poverty seems to generate this societal problem.

That is the crux of the problem, poverty. Poverty drives the need for additional income. The exploitation of children is a logical approach to acquire additional income, but the unintended consequences are severe. When children are exploited in the workplace, they have a much higher rate of physical injury, due to the propensity to be put in dangerous job situations, and their lack of experience using dangerous tools and lack of PPE’s to protect their health. Young children are put in a position where they can be permanently damaged physically which will have a direct relationship on their earning ability later on in life.

In some countries, primarily in Africa, children are drafted into the military or paramilitary groups, with a high rate of mortality. They also are often drafted into the international sex trade, subject to disease and early death. Those that survive these conditions to adulthood are then saddled with serious mental health issues.

Child labor practices also preclude 3^rd world societies from economic and social improvement. Children engaged in work are not being educated and that perpetuates the cycle of poverty, with no way out. This is the true moral dilemma of the practice. With no way out of the cycle, poverty appears to be a permanent fixture in those affected societies.

It is morally reprehensible for child labor to be a permanent fixture. The big question is how to stop this vicious cycle and give these children and their countries the ability to advance up the economic and societal ladders to join the rest of the world in peace and prosperity. We, as citizens in the 1^st world can insist on our retail buyers to only source goods from companies that do not use child labor. We can crack down on child sex trafficking and insist on children not being used in militaries. That would put a dent in the problem, but the underlying reason for the practice, poverty, would not then in any way be addressed.

Most if not all of these countries do not have the assets to fund adequate public schools, or to offer any government assistance to poor families that would be educating, rather than working their children. It points to the need for the international community, possibly the United Nations, to have a dramatic push to assist these countries in developing their children through education. Supplanting family incomes through food distribution in order to make it possible to educate children for the future, rather than to work them for present needs. Only then would the international community have an impact on this problem.

Now the question is, will anything actually get done? Most of these countries that embrace child labor are corrupt dictatorships or pseudo-democracies that would have little interest in change, unless it had a direct and immediate benefit to their income and power. Chances are that any assistance, if offered, would not trickle down to those that needed it most. With Nationalism on the rise, it would be doubtful that many countries would be interested in contributing to costly programs that would have little if any direct benefit to their immediate national interests. With political leaders worldwide mostly focused on “short-term” interests, it is doubtful that this problem will be eradicated any time soon.

WHAT IS TRADE PROTECTIONISM, AND WHAT ARE THE ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES?

Image result for pictures of protectionist trade

Trade protectionism are restrictions on the free flow of international trade, and it takes on many forms. The intention is to protect a nation’s economic well-being. It can take the form of tariffs to protect home industries from foreign competition by levying fines to make the outside goods less competitive. It can be quotas, which are restrictions of certain goods that can be imported from other nations. It can be subsidies, which are payments made by a government to a private industry, which can be direct cash transfers, lines of credit (low interest), or government ownership of common stock. Governments can also impose local content requirements in order to internalize at least a portion of the manufacturing of the finished good. Rules and regulations can also be put in place by governments to make it next to impossible for imports to enter the country. Antidumping policies can be enforced to prevent other nations from selling their oversupply of goods at below the cost of manufacturing. Currency manipulation is also a method of restricting imports while lowering the cost of a nation’s exports, much like what China does today.

All of these methods restrict free international trade, some for good reason, and many just to protect inefficient industry in their own country. Politicians use reasons like “protecting our legacy industries” in order to sell the idea. They also sell trade restrictions on the basis of national interest, protecting industries that support the military complex, thus making it a matter of national defense. Administrative trade policies are often initiated on the argument that it protects the safety and health of consumers, and so to anti-dumping policies are also sold to the electorate as some sort of protection from unfair foreign competition.

The consequence is that consumers pay more for less. The politicians that implemented these restrictions usually get re-elected because they did their job of selling the policies in question as a net “benefit” to the electorate, protecting health, safety, national defense, or a variety of other reasons left to the creative processes of these same political actors. Other possibly unintended consequences are inflation cause by currency manipulation, trade wars, and infant or legacy industries that intentionally do not modernize for efficiency because of artificial protection.

Most economists believe that these types of protectionist activities do more harm than good. Few economists agree with President Trumps contention that tariffs can be used exclusively for bargaining chips to eventually lower most if not all trade barriers. Time will tell if President Trump is right, but so far, he has re-negotiated NAFTA to the mutual benefit of all involved, has China close to a rightly needed agreement on fair trade, and has the EU coming somewhat closer to the negotiating table. If he loses this bet it could cost him the election in 2020. A side-note is that congress has to ratify these re-negotiated agreements, and the Democrat House is refusing to put the re-negotiated NAFTA agreement on the floor for a vote in order to stop the President from having a political victory before the 2020 election.