They Ain’t Exactly Quivering in Their Boots

Master negotiator, Donald “The Art of the Deal” Trump loves luring his negotiating partners in, pulling back at the last minute, adding threats and sanctions, postponing them, lifting them, pretending to trade off of them successfully. He one-upped Kim Jong-Un to get that North Korean leader back in line… but hadn’t South Korea’s President Moon already worked out all the biggest points with Kim?

So Trump just rubber stamps the end of the “armistice” with that pre-set peace treaty and comes up with an observer/enforcement plan to track the nukes. Until Kim decides to resume his nuclear program at a later date. For President Moon’s efforts – from the joint Korean Olympic team to his direct workout with Kim of a mutual goal to denuclearize the entire peninsula –Trump believes The Donald should get the Nobel Peace Prize? Hey, Donnie, could it be that Moon was just flattering you (by thanking you for all your sanctions and help) to keep the money flowing and the tariffs down? You always buy anyone who flatters you. Why is that again?

China makes concessions to us that look great on paper as well, but a pledge for China massively to increase its purchases of American goods is really impossible to track accurately. China has still militarized its man-made Spratly Island, still makes it tough for American businesses in China to get their profits into hard dollars, has tortuous patent, copyright and trademark protection (unless you are Ivanka Trump) and is still heavily into ferreting out our best technology through rather indirect means. In short, China has played the Donald like a puppet. Oh and higher tariffs on Chinese goods tends to hurt U.S. consumers much worse (higher prices and tariffs on Trump’s farmer constituency) than they do on Chinese companies.

And yes, Donald, pulling out of the U.N. six-party Iran nuclear accord (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) and imposing harsh new sanctions on Iran didn’t move us one lonely inch closer to getting nasty Tehran out of suborning terrorism in the region – with its surrogate Hezbollah and direct aid to Shiite Houthis and Sunni Taliban and Hamas. That’s what you told the world your actions would produce. It did, however, put in question  whether or not Tehran might resume its nuclear weapons development program and handed their leaders a bargaining chip to use against the remaining six nations (Russia, China and especially Germany, U.K. and France). Russia is so busy winking at Iran their eyes hurt!

Effectively, Tehran’s hardliners want some powerful reassurances from the remaining five nations (mostly the European Union members) that they will honor the JCPOA they signed, despite American threats to punish nations who violate our sanctions (especially in connection with that nuclear program). What a nice way to embarrass the United States and further foster a growing wedge between Europe and the United States.

As the United States winds down its JCPOA involvement, the U.S. has made demands of Iran to get us back into a treaty. “U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reinforced Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in recent remarks at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, stating that the deal ‘failed to guarantee the safety of the American people from the risk created by the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.’ Pompeo also highlighted what the administration views as the JCPOA’s shortcomings, including its ‘sunset provisions,’ which lift restrictions on critical Iranian nuclear activities in 10-15 years, its verification measures, and its failure to address Iran’s ballistic missile development or destabilizing actions.

“Pompeo also outlined twelve demands that the Islamic Republic must meet for relations between Washington and Tehran to be normalized. The list requires Iran to provide complete transparency and comprehensive verification of its past and current nuclear activities, release detained U.S. citizens, halt the launching and development of nuclear-capable missile systems, terminate its support for terrorist organizations and proxy groups across the Middle East and South Asia, and end its interference in the sovereign affairs of neighboring countries.

“Since assuming office in January 2017, the Trump Administration has taken a tough stance toward Iran. Following Iranian ballistic missile tests conducted in January 2017, the Trump administration put Iran ‘on notice’ saying it will ‘no longer tolerate Iran’s provocations that threaten our interests.’ During a speech delivered last October, President Trump emphasized that his administration is focused on working with allies to counter Iranian aggression in the Middle East, increase sanctions on Iranian entities, address Tehran’s proliferation of missiles and weapons, and deny the regime all paths to a nuclear weapon… Over the last few months, the Trump administration has also sanctioned major Iranian individuals and entities.” Bennett Seftel writing for The Cipher Brief, May 29^th.  Has Iran moved slightly as the Donald said they would? Nope!

But Iran, in turn, is enjoying the widening schism between the U.S. and Europe – particularly Trump’s ignoring the entreaties from France’s Macron and Germany’s Merkel on the JCPOA – way too much and has ratcheted up its own rhetoric and demands: “Nonetheless, the Iranian leadership continues to initiate chants of ‘Death to America’ and remains committed to supporting terrorist and proxy groups that have sown chaos throughout the Middle East.

“‘The timing of what [these recent sanctions] mean for Iran is going to depend on many variables ranging from the effectiveness of sanctions enforcement to regional developments to Iran’s perceptions of what domestic requirements must be satisfied to maintain stability,’ says Cipher Brief Expert Norm Roule, former National Intelligence Manager for Iran (NIM-I) at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“As part of its effort to limit the impact of the sanctions, Roule expects that Iran will look to ‘sell as much oil as possible in the next few months,’ and is also likely to attempt to ‘lock in contracts with China and Russia as a means of demonstrating weaknesses in the sanctions regime.’

“One potential setback that could impede the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions is the divide between Europe and the U.S. over the Iran nuclear deal. Last Wednesday [5/23], Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei spelled out a number of conditions that the European parties to the deal must meet for Iran to remain a party to the JCPOA. Khamenei insisted that European powers should continue to buy Iranian oil, that European banks should continue to protect trade with Iran, and that the European countries pledge to not negotiate on Iran’s ballistic missile program or regional activities. If these demands were not met, Khamenei threatened to resume enriching uranium.” The Cipher Brief.

Good thing the Donald hates to read and gets most of his information from Sean Hannity and his cronies at Fox News. He would not remotely be happy at what is really happening with all of his “The Art of the Deal” diplomatic initiatives and how the world sees the truth. If it creates good sound bites on Fox, regardless of the substance, that does seem to be enough.

I’m Peter Dekom, and to watch this self-aggrandizing diplomatic charade, one most of the world recognizes for what it really is, seems to be particularly distressful in light of the most significant negative long-term consequences for the United States… and the world.

That’s Hitting below the Border

I grew up in a bi-lingual home with a bi-lingual family. My mother was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, my father in Romania (German and Italian heritage) and my step-father in Hungary. We spoke Bulgarian to my Baba (cute for “grandmother”), although a U.S. citizen (she mistakenly described a bill of lading when asked about the Bill of Rights, which impressed the testing officer back then), but her English was as best stumbling and went against her grain. OK, my Bulgarian was “baby talk,” what was a Slavic “diminutive” manner of speech and which did not evolve into adult-speak because she passed before I was old enough to make the change.

Believe it or not, in my birth city of Washington, D.C., there was a small Bulgarian community, and when they got together, I understood everything that was said, and in my diminutive, I could carry on a very appropriate conversation. They were fiercely pro-American and anti-communist. Each of my parental group not only spoke many languages fluently, but each one of them (only my mother kept her accent) spoke impeccable English, never making grammatical errors and commanding a vast and nuanced English. My father was a journalist (in English, of course), my mother an analyst for the U.S. Department of State and my step-father was a senior career U.S. Foreign Service officer-turned professor.

Nobody ever told us to “speak English or go back where you came from.” Nobody threatened to call the immigration authorities on us. Nobody ever questioned our commitment as U.S. citizens, our loyalty or our priorities. Nobody looked at us as unwelcome outsiders.

In local public schools, which by the way were uniformly then excellent (today, the D.C. public school system is a joke), I learned that we were a nation of immigrants (no, we didn’t study much about Native Americans back then; sorry) and a mixing bowl that combined to make us the most powerful nation on earth. Mixed ethnicities and racial blends brought diverse thinking, new approaches, to problem solving. Immigrants, cherishing the freedoms we once had, that once-omnipresent upward mobility and that now-past ability to achieve the American dream through public education and hard work. That mix was our strength. No one had the slightest inkling of “income inequality.” Nobody thought that the United States needed help to compete with the rest of the world.

Our infrastructure exploded. President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) instituted the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956, which created that extraordinary web of interstate roads that hyper-accelerated the United States into a well-connected and highly productive economic machine. Our massive increase in research and educational spending, our reaction to a Soviet launch of the first orbital satellite (Sputnik) in 1957, also under Republican Eisenhower, pushed the United States to become the global educational, technology and innovation leader for decades to come. We are still living on the investments of that era, having elected to pull back on research and education with obvious negative results. We no longer invest in ourselves.

Indeed, just about everything in current GOP economic and immigration policy is directed at growth for only one segment of this nation: the rich. Everyone else is part of a massive “big loser” pool. And to justify this folly, the GOP has turned our twisted immigration reality into the “big scapegoat” for their horrifically failed and failing policies.

Nothing screams injustice and short-sightedness like our current immigration enforcement choices, and contrary to AG Jeff “zero tolerance” Sessions, they are choices not legal mandates. By choosing to prosecute as a felony anyone who crossed the border illegally, we have literally forced any accompanying minor children to be separated from their parents.

That we have actually lost track of 1,500 minor children so separated shows our callous disregard for basic humanity. That too many of us now characterize adults who were brought to this nation as children, often very, very young children and know of no other country (the DACA Dreamers), as unwelcome undesirables is testament to our complete rejection of the most basic Judeo-Christian values. That police officers are ready to stop persons, even US citizens, just for speaking the second most prevalent language in this country, Spanish, that ICE has swept up and inadvertently deported US citizens because of their Latino look and accent, tells you how cruel and bigoted a nation we truly have become.

“Spanish, the first European tongue to take root in North America, has established itself as perhaps the most relentlessly polarizing language in the United States… Two decades ago it sparked an emotional debate in California about banning bilingual education, a topic that divided even Latino families. During heavy immigration into California and other border states, Spanish was the language of choice in whole neighborhoods.

“Now, the presidency of Donald Trump has reignited the linguistic divide. Trump has railed against illegal immigration, attacked the character of those who cross the border and once said ‘this is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.’

“At the same time, Spanish is making inroads in American pop culture. Luis Fonsi’s global hit ‘Despacito’ broke numerous records on the pop charts and became the first YouTube video to hit 5 billion views… ‘When we’re living in a world where symbols become dividing lines, language can be one of those,’ said Brian Levin, director for the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino… In this environment, two recent incidents seared themselves into the long tradition of people being berated for speaking Spanish, while also illustrating the power of video and social media to launch a counterattack.

“In one case, New York attorney Aaron Schlossberg yelled at Latino restaurant workers at a Fresh Kitchen in Manhattan for speaking Spanish and threatened to report them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement… ‘My guess is they are not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country,’ Schlossberg said in the recorded incident. ‘I pay for their welfare. I pay for their ability to be here. The least they can do ... is speak English.’… After a barrage of criticism that included an ironic serenade from a mariachi band, Schlossberg apologized on Twitter and said he is not racist.

“The same week as the New York incident, a Border Patrol agent was recorded stopping two women in Montana and asking them for identification… ‘Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here, and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,’ the agent can be heard saying in the video… A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said the incident is ‘being reviewed to ensure that all appropriate policies were followed.’

“It’s hard to know whether there has been an uptick in confrontations over the speaking of Spanish. Such incidents have been reported for decades, and the share of Latinos who can speak Spanish has declined over the last decade, with 73% of Latinos speaking Spanish at home in 2015, down from 78% in 2006, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. Many Latinos grew up in households where only English is spoken.

“Since the presidential election, dozens of Latinos have reported verbal assaults for speaking Spanish through Documenting Hate, a project that tracks bias incidents and hate crimes around the country. The reported incidents include insults over a truck driver radio channel and confrontations in a movie theater and at a hotel pool.

“‘The prejudice against Spanish is not about Spanish the language; it’s about the people who speak Spanish,’ said Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College. ‘Who tend to be people of color, who tend to be people from a lower socioeconomic background and who, not always but sometimes, are immigrants and are in the center of a lot of negative targeting in the political arena.’” Los Angeles Times, May 28^th. Just like those white lower class immigrants of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century.

I know that 50% of the CEOs of successful Silicon Valley start-ups, huge job-creators, are immigrants. I know that so much of the food I eat was grown with massive undocumented labor, proud, hard-working and dignified. I am the proud son of immigrant parents. Why am I acceptable? Why were my parents acceptable by the same country that is turning against immigrants, even educated and skilled immigrants, today? Because we were/are white and Protestant? I’m sorry, that’s not good enough!

That is most definitely NOT what made America great! That is NOT the country that my parents fled from communist Europe to find freedom and the American dream! I am ashamed of this malignant populist force that is eroding those aspects of my country, a nation, that I as a lawyer and officer of the court, was sworn to protect under a system of justice, freedom, fairness and equality.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I will rail and scream until my voice turn hoarse against that massive tide of un-American populists, whose ignorance of democratic principles and willingness to allow bigotry and sloganeering to guide America, is literally destroying this land that I love, piece by piece.

The Two Worlds of China – Mythology and Reality

Americans still think of China as a job-stealing pool of impoverished manufacturing labor, putting out masses of cheap goods upon which we have become addicted. That image clearly defined the earliest phases of China’s growth in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. And equally clearly, even today there are two Chinas: one rural, backward, poor and very traditional, the other wealthy and ultra-modern. But as average real wage rates in China have doubled every 10 years – much faster in the larger cities, less in rural venues – Chinese is hardly the “cheap labor” capital we still think it to be.

Labor costs have soared so high that even China is turning to the same focus on automation, driven by artificial intelligence, that has driven virtually all of the “reshoring” of manufacturing back into the United States. As technology-driven growth has become a forceful economic driver, hard patent filings in China are rising just as they are contracting here in the United States. Their exports are becoming increasingly sophisticated electronics and machines.

As we spend less on research and education, China spends more. As our aging infrastructure falls into disrepair, China’s is massive, new and cutting edge. As we shoot ourselves in the foot with future-killing austerity where it matters, China just sneers and accelerates its fueling of growth into becoming a fully-developed country with a highly competitive innovative push.

While rural centers remain decades behind, you just have to look at the People’s Republic of China’s most developed urban centers, Beijing and Shanghai to see how deep change has been. “At the high end are Shanghai and Beijing. Gross domestic product per capita adjusted for purchasing power — one measure of average incomes — was slightly more than $53,000 last year. That’s a similar level to Switzerland and the U.S. At that level, in fact, those cities would rank among the top 10 of all countries with populations of at least 3 million people, according to a Bloomberg analysis of data sourced from the International Monetary Fund and China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

“Shanghai, the mainland’s biggest financial center, and Beijing, the nation’s capital, lead the list in large part because they are more compact and benefit from supportive government policies. They have the best universities, the highest-paying jobs and, until recently, unmatched infrastructure development.

“For at least two decades, general laborers and highly skilled workers have been lured to help the big cities grow, though most have second-class status. Most lack the difficult-to-acquire household registrations, or hukou, meaning they don’t have access to legal residents’ rights to social services and education resources.

“‘There are places farmers can move, now, and transfer to being fully urban, but there is a point system for elite cities like Beijing and Shanghai,’ John Giles, a World Bank economist, said at a recent conference on China’s antipoverty campaign in Washington. ‘You have urban residents who don’t want those migrant kids in school with their children.’

“China’s yawning economic disparities aren’t just of academic interest — they form the basis for one of Xi Jinping’s three ‘critical battles,’ namely poverty alleviation. And as the economy slows, policies that bring the incomes of those in Gansu closer of those in Shanghai will help ensure that the whole pie grows in a sustainable way.

“‘While early waves of migrants flocked to more affluent coastal and higher-tier cities, more migrants are now choosing to stay within their home provinces,’ Hyde Chen, an equity analyst for UBS AG in Hong Kong, wrote in a report that compared urban development trends.

“‘Historical experiences from mature economies suggest that household incomes of wealthy and poor areas in China will likely converge over time,’ Chen said. ‘In China, the income convergence is taking place at a fast pace, with the household per capita income gap between lower-tier cities and tier-1 cities narrowing from 56% in 2005 to 46% in 2017.’

“Just 10 years ago, it would’ve taken a dozen workers in Guizhou province to earn what one worker in Shanghai made. By 2017, that wealth gap had narrowed by half.

“Still, the gap remains wide… Guizhou and Yunnan provinces in the south and Gansu in the north each had per capita GDP income below $10,000 last year, ranking them among Ukraine, El Salvador and Guatemala. But with a combined population of 110 million — nearing that of Japan, with average income of $39,000 — those three provinces have tremendous potential.” Los Angeles Times, May 28^th.  The emphasis going forward is to level off wage growth in those biggest urban centers and spread that wealth to the lesser provinces in a catch-up effort.

Thus, President Xi Jinping has targeted bringing the rest of China up to the top urban economic standards, and given the PRC’s track record of implementing its desired growth targets, we can expect the next decade to reflect an increase in the professionalization of the biggest cities combined with the rise in economic power in those rural areas and smaller urban markets once left behind. China is pouring billions into these lesser areas for infrastructure, education and research. All the while turning towards the Silk Road nations to the south and east as part of building China’s power and influence in the region through its high-investment Belt and Road initiative.

As Donald Trump pulls the United States out of its once powerful global connectivity, he is trying to push the United States back in time to restore uncompetitive blue collar labor to middle class earning power, mostly through trade barriers and tariffs. Most economists see that effort as dead on arrival. Add federal budget cuts to educational support and research and an inability to mount a coherent infrastructure policy, and you can actually see how federal policies are actually handing over the economic baton to China.

Even Trump’s rather obvious “gift to the rich who didn’t need it” tax cut marketed as a job-creator – which mandates further federal budget cuts where it matters most to pay for it – has not only failed to generate those higher-paying jobs (the only measurable increases have been in the lowest earning sectors, particularly part-time and unstable gig economy jobs) but increased income inequality. The resulting dividends and stock buy-backs have made the rich richer… and done virtually nothing for everybody else.

So as our income polarization slams our middle class and skews our earning force into a world where a tiny minority control virtually all our wealth, we take on the economic appearance of a banana republic… even as authoritarian China has policies that have simply exploded a massive new middle class into being. In short, Donald Trump has found one clear slogan he literally is implementing every single day: Make China Great Again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Donald Trump’s “nationalism masquerading as patriotism” may reduce our power, influence and economic well-being to a level no prior American president has remotely ever done.