This article first appeared in The Orange County Register.
Perhaps no economic issue — even trade — is as divisive as the energy industry. Once a standard driver of economic progress, the conventional energy industry has become increasingly vilified by the national media Read more
This piece originally appeared in the Daily Beast.
When President Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords, embraced coal, and stacked his administration from people from fossil-fuel producing states, the environmental movement reacted with near-apocalyptic fear and fury. They would have been better off beginning to understand precisely why the country has become so indifferent to their cause, as evidenced by the victory not only of Trump but of unsympathetic Republicans at every level of government. Read more
This article first appeared in Real Clear Politics
Even as Venezuela falls deeper into crisis, and the former Soviet bloc nations groan under its legacy, socialism is coming back, and in a big way. Its key supporters are not grizzled pensioners yearning for Marxist security, but a whole new generation, most of whom have little memory of socialist failure.
This article originally appeared at The Daily Beast.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” —Justice Louis Brandeis
With his $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has made clear his determination to dominate every facet of mass retailing, likely at the cost of massive layoffs in the $800 billion supermarket sector.
This article first appeared in The Orange County Register.
President Donald Trump’s recent renunciation of the Paris climate change accords has spurred “the international community” to pronounce America’s sudden exit from global leadership. Now you read in the media aspirations to look instead to Europe, Canada, or even China, to dominate the world. Some American intellectuals, viewing Trump, even wish we had lost our struggle for independence.
Excerpt from an article that first appeared in the OC Register.
California is widely celebrated as the fount of technical, cultural and political innovation. Now we seem primed to outdo even ourselves, creating a new kind of socialism that, in the end, more resembles feudalism than social democracy. Read more
This article first appeared in the OC Register.
Even before the election of Donald Trump, and more so afterwards, the dysfunction of the GOP has been glaringly obvious. Yet, despite the miserable favorability ratings for both Trump and the Republicans, those of the Democrats, notes Gallup, also have been dropping, and are nearly identical to that of the Republicans.
This article first appeared in The Daily Beast
The people who wanted Donald Trump to halt the rule of their “betters” are having a rude awakening.
America’s vast midsection, a region that has been hammered by globalists of both parties, has been abandoned by the great corporations that grew fat on its labor and resources.
To many from the Appalachians to the Rockies, Donald Trump projected a beacon of hope. Despite the conventional wisdom among the well-heeled of the great coastal cities, these resource and manufacturing hubs elected the new president.
Yet barely six months after his election, Trump is emerging as the latest politician to betray middle America. Read more
This article first appeared in the OC Register.
Just a few short months ago, we seemed on the brink of a new political era. Donald Trump improbably was headed to the White House, while the Democratic Party, at near historic lows in statehouse power and without control of either house of Congress, seemed to be facing a lengthy period in political purgatory.
Today some progressive voices still see a “bleak” future, but it is increasingly the Republican Party, and its shattered conservative core, that is reeling. Bitterly divided among themselves, and led by a petulant president with record-low ratings, the Republicans seem to be headed to a major crash just six months after a surprising victory.
Gone from view now are visions of a renewed Republican Party uniting its traditional base with historically Democratic parts of Middle America. Rather than a realignment in the mode of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, the Trump administration seems to be devolving into a remarkably early interregnum, a pause between alternating progressive eras.
Trump supporters, not Trump, the real losers
Donald Trump’s nationalist agenda started with a natural appeal to much ignored non-cosmopolitan America. Unlike the seemingly diffident and distant Barack Obama, Trump offered a laser-like focus on growing high-wage jobs for the declining middle and working classes. A reform agenda on everything from deregulation and taxes seemed to have the potential to escape the low-growth “new normal” and restore broad-based opportunity across the country.
Read the rest of the article at OC Register
Photo credit: Michael Vadon via Flickr under CC2.0 License
This article appeared in the OC Register.
The decisive victory of Emmanuel Macron for president of France over Marine Le Pen is being widely hailed as a victory of good over evil, and an affirmation of open migration flows and globalization. Certainly, the defeat of the odious National Front should be considered good news, but the global conflict over trade and immigration has barely begun. Read more
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