Complicating The ARAMCO IPO

Thee Saudi ARAMCO IPO is happening on the Saudi exchange just for Saudi citizens, where apparently there is a not-so-subtle campaign on well off and connected citizens who wish to remain that way to buy into the IPO.  But there continues to be delays in opening it up to the rest of the world, with this partly reflecting fears of demands that might be made for more openness, and all that, with various Saudis not keen on that, especially apparently at ARACO itself.

However there are now reports of another development that might encourage domestic purchases but may further put off foreigners.  This is a nw round of arrests of alleged dissidents, up to at least nine in the last week.  These are all fairly prominents leading citizens, a philosopher, journalists, businessmen.  What is curious and sisturbing about this round is that badically all of these have reportedly been supportive of the regime and of the recent initiatives, at least the economic ones, by MbS, the Crown Prince.  But they are being swept up?  Why?  Apparently the only thing that at least some of them have in common is that back in 2011 many of them (not clear all of them) made public statements sympathetic to the initial Araab Sprinbg uprisings, a position never shared by the Saudi government.  The theory is that thanks to Trump's support and the apparent end of the mild disapproval  by many foreigners after the murder og WaPo columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, MbS feels he can get away with clearing out even potential critics.

But then this new round of such conduct may further sour the prospects for obtaining outside investors in the ARAMCO IPO.  The company may currently have the world's highest net income, well ahead of Apple, at $110 billion.  But worries about the future of the oil industry, not to mention the stability of the Saudi royal family.  Of course part of the high net income is that KSA continues to be one of the lowest cost locations in the world to pump oil, with ARAMCO officials claiming that if indeed oil disappears from the world economy, the last to be pumped will be out of Saudi Arabia.

Of course, given worries about the foreigners, not rushing in, it may be that this outburst of arrests may be to encourage more domestic purchases.  So it may be a contest: do the arrests encourage more domestic purchases than it discourages by the foreigners.  Or maybe MbS is not thinking, which he seesms to have done previous, e.g. the Khashoggi murder.

Barkley Rosser

Have the Transfer Pricing Experts at KPMG Heard of the Repo Ruckus?

If one thinks Trump’s economic advisors are the dumbest people on the planet, I have a new candidate for that award – a few supposed experts on intercompany loans that work for KPMG:

In 2017, the ARRC selected the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) as the alternative that represents the best replacement rate for USD-denominated LIBOR. SOFR is based on overnight transactions in the U.S. dollar Treasury repo market, the largest rates market at a given maturity in the world ... In the time since the Federal Reserve Bank of New York began daily publication of SOFR in 2018, significant progress has been made in building liquidity in SOFR-linked markets (which include dollar-based derivatives and loans) … SOFR is fundamentally different than LIBOR in a number of key elements. SOFR is (currently) an overnight rate, is secured and is designed to reflect a (virtually) risk-free rate. LIBOR has forward-looking term options, is unsecured and is designed to reflect a bank’s cost of funding. All of these characteristics factor into how SOFR will perform under certain circumstances and how it can be used by market participations. For example, the following figure compares 3-month LIBOR, one the most commonly used LIBOR benchmarks, to the 3-month simple average of SOFR. SOFR is generally both lower and, depending on the methodology applied to derive a term structure, less volatile as compared with LIBOR. This is to be expected given the lower risk profile of SOFR, since it represents borrowings collateralized by U.S. Treasury securities while LIBOR reflects interbank credit risk.

The purpose of their ramblings was to advise multinationals on what to do with a set of their intercompany loans once LIBOR disappears, which is sort of making an easy issue hard so their arrogant and overpriced clowns can charge lots of fees for virtually nothing. But hey – that is what the Big Four does. Any financial economist with half a brain would spot two serious problem with their comparison of SOFR (an overnight rate) with the 3-month LIBOR. Of course the latter tends to be higher than the former as we have been living in a world of an upward sloping term structure for the last decade. There is an overnight LIBOR rate, which closely tracks SOFR for most dates. In fact, the average overnight LIBOR rate over the April 3, 2018 to current period has been a few basis points less. But to claim SOFR has been less volatile? I guess they did not read The Repo Ruckus where Barkley Rosser wrote:

This is now about three weeks old news, but it is increasingly clear that it is not clear why it happened or if it will happen again. There was an outbreak of completely unexpected volatility in the repo market, where in the past the Fed had carried out open market operations, although that had largely passed. Indeed in more recent years when the Fed has intervened in markets it has been in the reverse repo market. In any case, interests rates shot up as high as 9 or 10 percent at one point

Now SOFR only shot up to 5.25 percent. LIBOR showed no such volatility during this period. Now one would think the experts at KPMG would have noticed this market development but it appears they did not. Now who on earth would hire people so utterly clueless? Update: This dumb idea of comparing an overnight rate (SOFR) to the 3-month LIBOR rate may have originated with BDO:

SOFR is a secured interbank overnight interest rate. As a result, SOFR rates are lower than LIBOR rates because SOFR is secured by collateral. The table below shows a comparison between historical LIBOR and SOFR since the introduction of the SOFR in April 2, 2018.

Well not quite. One reason why SOFR is lower than this 3-month LIBOR rate has something to do with the term structure as well. Those who know – avoid BDO!

Chaos Theory And Global Climate Change

I am currently attending the Southern Economic Association meetings in Fort Lauderdale, where the street facing the hotel was underwater during the most recent hurricane to pass through.

Anyway, I saw a talk today that took me back to when I first learned about chaos theory, actuallly in the early 1970s before the word "chaos" was used for it. I learned about it and the butterfly effect, aka sensitive dependence on initial conditions, while working on a combined model of global climate change and food production.  It was called "irregular dynamics" back then, and the model showing it was climatologist Edward Lorenz, published in 1963.  Blew my mind then.  Anyway, it is widely accepted that the global climate system is chaotic, which is why one can only make weather forecasts for fairly short periods of time into the future, although one can forecast longer run average changes of averages such as average global temperature.

Anyway, I saw a talk by Emmanuele Masssetti of Georgia Tech that reminded me of all that, a talk thet explicitly drew on this chaotic effect.  So he has been simulating future climate using different assumptions for the various climate models the UN has been using for its IPCC reports.  What he found was that indeed the overall average temperature change projected did not vary as he varied initial conditions by small amounts. But what the projection for particular regions of the world did vary, indeed very much so as in the butterfly effect. So, for exmple, the Great Plains of the US would warm a lot under one simulation, but then actually cool for a simulation following a slightly changed initial conditions.  This is atunning, but not really surprising given the underlying chaotic nature  of th global climate system.

Another talk was a keynote  by Richard Zeckhauser of Harvard, who was pushing for us to study geoengineering.  He made a strong case for it.

Barkley Rosser

The End Of Decades Having Identities In The USA?

We are closing on the centennial of the beginning of decades having identities in the USA, the "Roaring 20s" of the 20th century.  It may be that this centennial will clearly mark the end of this odd phenomenon that we had been used to, but which was always a bit odd.  Why did this start and why might ibe ending?  I have a few thoughts on this.

My theory oon why it started in the 1920s is that this was the first appearance of national news media in the form of radio, which was the first time we could really have aunified discusson and consciousness in a way not possible previously.  Certainly there were decades earlier that had the potential for having identities. The 1860s had arguably the most dramatic event of US history, the Civil War, but nobody has ever talked about "the 60s" meaning the 1860s rather than the 1960s. Likewise, there serious economic downturns through most of both the 1870s and 1890s, but nobody has ever talked about the 70s or 90s referring to those decades.

Indeed this continued into the beginning of the 20th century, with many dramatic events in the first decade and, of course, WW I in the second, although the US was in that war for less than two years.  But it was the 1920s that got an identity for the first time in US history.  Maybe it is not the spread of radio, maybe it is the spread of automobiles, which became the dominant form of personal transport in that decade, which helped increase social mobility and communication.  So add the auto to radio, and maybe some other things, jazz, although we also got the spread of records and movies also.  So, there we had that roaring decade.

So for the rest of the 20th century people talked about each decade as something with an identity, even as some had less clear identities than others.  The 30s were dominated by the Great Depression.  The 40s were clearly dominated by WW II, and  its aftermath in the latter half of the decade.  The 50s was that golden time of US dominance with big cars and suburbs and I Like Ike.  The 60s, well, from civil rights to the Vietnam War, not to mention sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  The 70s were more complicated, marked after 73 by economic stagflation and much pulling back from excesses of the 70s, while certain movements that barely began (or started up again) got going  more seriously in the 70s, notably both the womens' movement and the gay rights movement (the latter only really getting going with Stonewall in 69).  The 80s saw the major shift associated with Reagan, the 90s had the foloowup to the end of the Cold War with an economic boom under Clinton in its latter part.  Indeed, the 90s may have been the last decade with a clear identity, with the US arguably reaching some sort of optimistic peak of world standing at the end of the millennium/century, although in fact the US was more globally dominant in the late 40s and 50s.

Here is where things get complicated, and I would argue that neither the Noughties, as the first decade of this century tends to get called when somebody bothers to call it anything, and the current nearly ending teens, do not have strong identities.. Of course the early part of the Noughties was dominated by 9/11 and the following War on Terror, including the awful war in Iraq.  But then we got someting that spilled over into the teens, the Great Recession, which began at the en of 2007.  Ironically the teens have not had a single period of time when the US economy was officially in recession, but certainly the first part of the decade was dominated by the recession that happened at the endo of the prvious decade.  Somehow by the end of the decade we had come back to reasonably growing and full employment economy, but the long dragging aftermath of the Great Recession soured our society, with the nationalist, racist, populist attitudes that brought us Trump, but have also spread across the world.  And while ISIS has been defeated, we continue to be "fighting terror" in many places.  In short, it is hard to separate these two decades.  When we look at it hard, we may be in a situation where we have been in period where we have a kind of two decade period that has its own identity, with in effect the Great Recession and its long aftermath being the unifying factor spilling across from the latter part of the first of them into the early and mif part of the second one.

I shall comment on one other reason why we may be coming to a time when the decades lose their identities, if in fact we may have already done so as I have suggested just above.  If this is the case, it may be due to an undoing of what happened a century ago, a disintegration of the unified mediia based story that emerged with radio.  As has been noticed for quite some time we have had an increasing diversity of media into ever more fragmented parts, which has allowed for large groups to simply live in different worlds, with the polarization between those who watch Fox News versus most of the rest of us symbolic of it. But watching the current situation I am struck that I have never seen such a divide in the nation in terms of fundamental perceptions about the nature of reality.

So what this centennial of the Roaring 20s brings I do not know, but it may well be that 2020s will have no more decadal identity than did the 1820s in the USA.

Barkley Rosser

Is Venezuela Stabilizing?

Maybe.
ry It looks the inflation ratei in Venezuela maxed  out in January at an annuualized rate of 192,000 % , whiich fell by September to 4,600% rate, still in hyperinflationary teritoryy, but  clearly coming down substantially.  I am not  a fan of this regime and never was, unlike some prominent economists saying nice t8ings about tueir economic performance, especially back in 2007, just berofe  the  world crash, when indeed their  numbers  looked prtty good.  But, not more recently unfortunately.  But maybe they are slowly returning to a more functional economy now, with still a long way to go.

There are also reports that oil production in Venezuela has recently risen.  Reportedly some of the recent possible stabilization in Venezuela may reflect influence of Russian advisers.

Barkley  Rosser

"Are Robots Stealing Your Job?" is the Wrong Question

Andrew Yang says, "Yes, Robots Are Stealing Your Job" in an op-ed at the New York Times. Paul Krugman thinks they're not and advises, "Democrats, Avoid the Robot Rabbit Hole." This is, of course, a classic case of asking the wrong question.

The real question is: will robots burn down your house and kill your grandchildren? Let's imagine that all those self-driving trucks and the computers needed to guide them will run on electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels. Will the robots in the truck factories and the robots in the computer factories also run on wind and sunshine? How about the robots in the wind turbine factories and the solar panel factories and so one ad infinitum? I know an old lady who swallowed a fly...

Let's assume that it is feasible to phase out all current fossil fuel consumption by 2050 and replace it with renewable, zero-carbon energy. Does that mean it is equally feasible to provide the additional energy needed to run all those job-stealing robots? Or to put the question in proper context, would it be feasible to do it without an uncorruptable, omniscient global central planning authority?

The hitch in all this robot speculation is a little paradox known as Jevons paradox conjoined at the hip, so to speak, with it's counterpart, "Say's Law." The former paradox says that greater fuel efficiency leads to more fuel consumption, the latter paradox tells us that labor-saving machines create more jobs than they destroy. Here are two inseparable positive feedback loops that together generate an incongruous outcome. "Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." Or lots of jobs, jobs, jobs. Or a monthly $1,000 payment to every adult "so that we can build a trickle-up economy," Choose your poison.

There is, they say, "a certain quantity of work to be done." Who says that? Good question. In the beginning, it was the political economists -- even proto political economists -- who said it. But around 1870 economists realized that the maxim conflicted with other things they had in mind so instead of professing it they began to condemn it and to attribute the idea to others -- to Luddites, Malthusians or Lump-of-Laborers. The idea that a people could always do more work was just too great a temptation. In principle, the amount of work that could be done is infinite! The robots will not replace us! The robots will not replace us!

What this job-stealing robot debate is really all about is an economics version of theodicy. "Why does evil exist if God, the creator, is omnipotent, omniscient and good?" This theological question is echoed in the puzzle about poverty in the midst of plenty and in Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees," where private vices promote public virtues. If it seems like robots are stealing your job, have faith, all is for some ultimate purpose in this best of all possible worlds, as Candide's tutor Dr. Pangloss would assure him.

Taking the Panglossian philosophy into account, it becomes clear that both Andrew Yang and Paul Krugman are on the same page. They are just reading different paragraphs. Although they disagree on what the solution is, they agree that there is a solution and it doesn't really require a fundamental change in the way we think about limits to the "certain quantity of work to be done."

Ukraine Corruption and Transfer Pricing

As I listened to the testimony of Bill Taylor and George Kent, I was also reading up on some South African transfer pricing case involving iron ore:

Kumba Iron Ore will pay less than half of the tax bill it received from the SA Revenue Service (Sars) last year following audits of its export marketing practices during the commodities boom. The settlement of R2.5bn significantly overshot the R1.5bn Kumba had set aside as a contingent liability. It is, however, a fraction of the taxes, penalties and interest payments Sars was pursuing the country’s dominant iron ore producer for. The existence of a potential tax liability was first reported to shareholders in June 2014, but Kumba could only put a number on it early last year when it received a tax assessment of R5 billion for the years 2006 to 2010.

If this account sounds like a lot of accounting gibberish, one might check with other accounts including whatever BDO wrote but these other accounts were even less informative. To paraphrase one commercial “people who know” avoid BDO. I think what happened is that the South African tax authority objected to what it saw as a lowball transfer pricing paid to the South African mining affiliate by a tax haven marketing affiliate and decided to completely disallow any commission income for the tax haven affiliate. This account at least notes that Kumba Iron Ore eventually told its shareholders that there might be some transfer pricing risk and that the issue was eventually resolved with a more modest commission rate booked by the marketing affiliate. So what does this have to do with Ukraine?

There is high public interest in the topic of “offshores” in both Ukraine and the EU. It is of particular importance for Ukraine which is categorized as an “open economy”, meaning a country with a high share of exports and imports relative to GDP. In particular, iron and steel production and exports from Ukraine are very significant even by the scale the global iron and steel markets. These sectors have also become the single largest source of wealth for the richest Ukrainians ... It is intriguing that even the Ukrainian authorities publicly declare that there is significant profit shifting occurring to avoid corporate taxation. For instance, according to the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine the usage of transfer pricing within all types of operations results in 100 billion hryvnia tax avoidance annually (around 3.3 billion euros), which leads to almost 20-25 billion hryvnia loss of the national state budget (Riabych, Vakulchyk 2015). This budgetary loss is equivalent to 660–750 million euros, which is comparable to the scale of the annual macro-financial assistance received by Ukraine from the European Union in the last several years to fill the budgetary gap.

The authors spend considerable effort attempting to document the extent of transfer pricing manipulation involving Ukraine’s exports of iron ore and steel. While I’m not convinced they have the right metrics, let’s admit that such tasks are difficult without the multinationals providing information on their business and transfer pricing policies. Of course, multinationals involved with the type of tax avoidance suggested in this document are reluctant to provide such clarity unless they were compelled to do so. It was funny yesterday when the Trump sycophants whined about second hand information with the obvious reply being to demand the testimony of those with first hand information. Now if we could get Rudy Giuliani under oath, not only should he be asked about UkraineGate but he should also be compelled to tell us what he knows about Ukrainian iron ore transfer pricing.

What quid did the president quo and when did he quo it?

Aside from the headline news about a July 26 phone call, I learned four big things from the impeachment inquiry hearing this morning. First, the specific corruption surrounding Burisma Holidings had to do with self dealing by company founder Mykola Vladislavovich Zlochevsky -- issuing oil and gas licences to his own company when he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. In other words, Zlochevsky did exactly what Donald J. Trump attempted to do with his Doral Golf Club and the G7 summit.

The second thing I learned is that President Trump was nursing a grudge against Ukraine because some Ukrainian politicians said some nasty things about him after he made a comment about letting Russia have Crimea. That's why he felt Ukraine "owed" him. The third thing is that the Ukraine shit made fanfall just about exactly the time that Trump was extemporizing about Hurricane Dorian hitting Alabama. Who knew Trump could multi-task?

The fourth thing I learned is the big one. There was not one quid pro quo but two. One involved Zelensky, the other Putin. That's the significance of the timing of the Trump-Zelensky phone call -- the day after Robert Mueller's congressional testimony was a dud. Humiliating Zelensky by forcing him to make a public announcement of a politically-motivated investigation of Biden-Burisma-2016 would hand to Putin his reward -- a weakened negotiating partner -- for the favor of having helped put Trump in the White House. The art of the deal, indeed.

OK, Who Approved Of The Ads Here Now?

And not only that, presumably they are paying money to put them on, so who is getting that money?  I am not, although it may not amount to much.  Hey, I see there  are not nearly as many as on Angry Bear, where I find them to be obnoxiously in one's face, and they are pretty low key.  But, personally, I would rarther not have them and I sure as hell was never asked by anybody if I did want them.

This is also a message to those who may think I should be getting rid of weird stuff showing up in posts that I am not the person in charge of that.  So I guess I also have no say on whether we get ads, much less what they will be for.  Heck, I saw some survey about Trump.  I do not even want to see his m--f--g face here at all.

Barkley Rosser

"ok boomer " or "gas all boomers"

Within the last week or so there seems to have been an explosion of yattering over "ok boomer." Over the last few years in various parts of the internet there was a self-righteous meme pushing "gas all boomers."  Yeah. This never made it to the MSM, I suspect  because it was just too extreme for the MSM to publicize.  But now we have the MSM allover this milder "ok boomer" meme, now a big deal.  I think I have an original view of this,that the "gas all boomers"  is an idealistic millennial view, reflecting their boomer parents. This new milder meme reflects the view of the Gen-Z group, \

My view is that the former nastier "gas all boomers" meme was from the idealistic millennials, strongly rebutting their boomer parents,  We failed them, and them wanted us gassed for our  failures to deliver for them, especially in the Great Recession, which in their view at least of several years ago, was our boomer fault, although that is a pretty weak argument.

But now w come to this milder meme of "ok boomer," how polite.  Word is  that this is coming from Gen-Z sources, a groups younger than the angst-ridden millennials., who seem to have come up with the "gas all boomers" meme that went nowhere.

Obviously younger generations in the US have reasons  for being unhappy. The US economy, along with the  world economy, is slowing down.  Both the milllennials and the Gen-Z group face higher college costs and housing costs than their predecessors.  That the boomer gen is responsible for this outcome is a highly unreasonable view.

The middle portion of the millennials have  indeed been big victims of the Great Recession, and will for the rest of their lives will have lower incomes the MSM, was just too shocking, while arguably idealistic hard core in its formulation

But the new less shocking "ok boomer" meme is  coming from the new rising Gen-Z gen. Most commentary has lumped them in with the millennials, but this is crap.  They are following the "ironic" meme of their  parents, the supposedly loser Gen-X, with their irony.

So indeed that is this new "ok boomer" meme  that  is ironic, coming from the Gen-Z gen, following their  Gen-X "ironic' parents.  This contrasts with the hard line millennial "gas all boomers" view, ironically following the idealistic view of their boomer parents.

Barkley Rosser
 

Mankiw’s Ideal Democrat (Bloomberg Alert)

Greg Mankiw has always been a Never Trumper:

I just came back from city hall, where I switched my voter registration from Republican to unenrolled (aka independent). Two reasons: First, the Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump's misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during his impeachment). I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior. Maybe someday, the party will return to having honorable leaders like Bush, McCain, and Romney. Until then, count me out. Second, in Massachusetts, unenrolled voters can vote in either primary. The Democratic Party is at a crossroads, where it has to choose either a center-left candidate (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Yang) or a far-left populist (Warren, Sanders) as their nominee for president. I intend to help them choose the former. The latter propose to move the country too far in the direction of heavy-handed state control. And in doing so, they tempt those in the center and center-right to hold their noses and vote for Trump's reelection.

In a way I get this and a lot of other centrist Republicans are saying similar things. Enter Michael Bloomberg:

Michael Bloomberg is taking steps to enter the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, a person familiar with his plans tells CBS News. Bloomberg, 77, has dispatched aides to Alabama to file paperwork in the state to run as a Democrat. The Cotton State doesn't hold an early Democratic presidential primary, but has the earliest filing deadline for the presidential campaign. Taking steps to file paperwork is the most serious signal yet that the former New York mayor and billionaire is seriously planning for a White House run. Howard Wolfson, a longtime Bloomberg adviser, said in a statement that Bloomberg "is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned" to defeat President Trump.

I guess Bloomberg thinks Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Yang are way too liberal for his America. Hey Never Trumpers – more tax cuts for rich people! Now of course, we need to pay for all of this and something tells me that proposals to slash Social Security and Federal health care payments are not exactly going to win the Bloomberg ticket a lot of votes. Oh wait – tax the little guy. Of course, Bloomberg has long proposed a soda tax. Let’s hope Mankiw convinces to go for a carbon tax instead. But addressing income inequality in a Bloomberg Administration? Not going to happen if the Mayor of Manhattan (mainly the Upper West Side and Upper East Side) becomes President!

The ARAMCO IPO Stumbles Out The Door

Finally after numerous delays, the potentially largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) of stock has finally become for fully state-owned ARAMCO in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).  MOst of the delays had involved an unwillingness by the Saudi royal family to publicize financial and other factual details about the company, although issuing an IPO for 5 percent of the company was a part of the Vision 2030 plan of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS). 

As it is, for the time being the IPO is only available to Saudi nationals through the Riyadh stock exchange.  It is unclear how long or even if it will open up to foreigners.  Reportedly the Saudis are hoping for it to value  the company at $2 trillion, which would put it well ahead of Apple and Microsoft, both of which are around $1 trillion.  But some observers think this is overly optimistic on the part of the Saudis for a variety of reasons.

Along with that, the US has this past month for the first time since 1978 recorded a trade surplus in petroleum products.  This will continue to put  downward pressure on global oil prices, and also depress the prospects for how much money this IPO will raise in the end.

Barkley Rosser 

Has Tyler Cowen or John Cochrane Ever Heard of Monopsony Power?

I’m going to replicate one portion of a long winded rant about alleged cognitive dissonance:

The argument for a minimum wage is that labor demand is inelastic -- employers will hire the same number of workers. They will just absorb the higher wages or pass along the costs to customers. Workers get all the benefit. If labor demand is elastic, employers cut back on the number of employees.

Of course, labor economists would recognize that John Cochrane’s entire post assumes a perfectly competitive labor market. One has to wonder about economists who have never even considered monopsony power.

Republican Senators Suggest Trump’s Treason is Legal

Yes – we know President Clinton cheated on his wife while in office. And yes some Republicans such as Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham passed Articles of Impeachment over adultery. Graham was rewarded by being able to move from the House to the Senate where he repeatedly suggested that the Whistle Blower complaint was nothing more than “hear say”. My have things changed:

An increasing number of GOP senators are preparing to acknowledge that there was a quid pro quo in President Trump’s leveraging of military aid with Ukraine as a means to urge the country to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, The Washington Post reported Friday. While some Senate Republicans have defended Trump’s insistence that there was no quid pro quo, a growing number of GOP officials in the chamber are adopting the stance that what Trump did was a quid pro quo but that his actions weren’t illegal and don’t constitute impeachment, the Post reported.

Since when did treason become AOK? Yea I know these same Republicans will say “treason” is a harsh word for this holding up of military aid authorized by Congress to Ukraine which needs it to fend against Putin’s invasion in exchange for political dirt on Joe Biden. Of course, Trump’s sycophants say a lot of really stupid things. I listened to two proponents of impeachment debate on what to stress: (a) that Trump was selling out the national interest to our enemy Putin; or (b) Trump was gaining a corrupt benefit. Both statements are clearly true. But we can summarize (a) and (b) into a single and very understandable word – TREASON! Just in case these Republican Senators are confused as to what our Founding Fathers wrote when they gave us the Constitution, let’s remind them about Article II, Section 4 which states:

The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Donald Trump did commit treason. Treason is an impeachable event. The only question is whether these Senators will fulfill their Constitutional roles or will simply remain Trump sycophants. Update: Mike Schupp has a rather weak argument to dismiss my use of the word treason. Yes he cites Article III section 3 but I would argue withholding military aid from Ukraine gave aid and comfort to the Russians who have invaded Ukraine. Mike also wrote this:

But we can't convict someone simply for being a rogue, we try them at law for specific criminal acts.

Sorry Mike but a lot of learned people would disagree. I would also remind people that Senator Trent Lott argued people had committed treason for a lot less than what Trump has done. Speaking of Senator Lott:

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said Tuesday that Congress need not prove that President Clinton committed a crime to impeach him. “I think bad conduct is enough, frankly, for impeachment,” said Lott, who has provided guidance to Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) as the House grapples with perjury and other allegations against Clinton. But that is a far different standard from what Lott advocated during the Watergate hearings in 1974, when he was one of President Nixon’s staunchest congressional defenders. Lott and nine other Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee argued then that even proof of criminal conduct by a president was not necessarily enough to proceed with impeachment--precisely the position now taken by the White House and Clinton’s Democratic defenders. “It is our judgment . . . that the framers of the United States Constitution intended that the president should be removable by the legislative branch only for serious misconduct dangerous to the system of government established by the Constitution,” Lott and the other Republicans wrote in a minority report.

Adultery is neither a crime nor “serious misconduct dangerous to the system of government established by the Constitution. What Trump has done does represent the Lott 1974 standard for impeachment.

The Death Of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi And Related Matters

The self-proclaimed "Caliph" of Da'esh/ISIL/ISIS, Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarri, who took the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has blown himself up after US special forces successfully attacked his compound in Idlib province of Syria near the Turkish border after a US military dog attacked him. (His nom de guerre was chosen for its links to historical caliphs, the leaders of global Sunni Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammed supposedly in his place, with Abu Bakr being the first such after the death of his son-in-law the Prophet and al-Baghdadi invoking the capital of the most powerful of all the caliphates, the Abbasid that ruled for 500 years from their capital in Baghdad).  A few observations.

While President Trump Trump bragged about this success of the US military for 46 minutes as a personal success of his own, the event was delayed for nearly a week and almost did not happen as al-Baghdadi was reportedly on the verge of moving again from the compound he was caught in because Trump had allowed Turkey to invade northeastern Syria, disrupting the Syrian Kurds there who had been the main US allies against Da'esh and al-Baghdadi, thus disrupting temporarily the planned attack.

While Trump most prominently thanked Russia and secondarily Turkey for their assistance in his speech while barely mentioning the US Kurdish allies, it was the latter who not only were largely responsible for ending the self-proclaimed caliphate as an entity ruling over people and territory in Syria, but also reportedly according to the Washington Post developed the mole within al-Baghdadi's circle who provided the crucial intelligence on al-Baghdadi's whereabouts and the details of his compound that made it possible to carry out this attack successfully.  The only thing Russia did was allow this attack to go forward as they reportedly control the airspace over Idlib province.  I am unaware of anything Turkey did to help this at all and in fact had in the past allowed goods to flow to Da'esh across the Turkish-Syrian border and most recently has been de facto supporting the al-Qaeda-related groups controlling Idlib province on the ground, with al-Baghdadi's compound near the Turkish border and the remnants of Da'esh apparently forming an alliance with those groups after having split from al-Qaeda in Iraq originally, with al-Qaeda considering them to be too violent.

In his bragging account of the successful operation Trump appears to have made up some details out of whole cloth in order to heighten the drama of it all, including perhaps most importantly a claim that al-Baghdadi was crying and screaming in a cowardly way at the end, something that has not been supported or verified at all by anybody publicly having primary knowledge of the events there.

Obviously Trump's decision to let Turkey invade Syria against the Kurds there and to describe these allies without whom al-Baghdadi would not have been found to be "worse terrorists then ISIS" as well as "no angels" as well as approving the entry of Russian and Syrian national troops into northeastern Syria reflects his admiration for the leaders of Turkey and Russia, where has major hotels in Istanbul and long has had financial relations with Russian oligarchs and desires to have a Trump Tower in Moscow.  His willingness to nearly botch this operation by betraying the Kurds (language used by Putin's press secretary, Peskov, regarding his actions) seems best explained by Trump's ongoing view of himself as "being primarily in the hospitality business" as his Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney inadverdently put it in an interview on TV.

We finally have the absurd spectacle of Trump deciding to keep 200 troops in Syria to control a small group of oil wells there that Da'esh had gotten money from selling oil from until the SDF took control of them, but with the largely Syrian Kurdish SDF (which includes Christian Arabs) on the run thanks to the Turkish invasion, control of those wells might fall into the hands of either Da'esh agaiin, who will probably gain from this invasion given the freeing of over 100 fighters, despite the death of its leader, al-Baghdadi, or Syrian national troops backed by the Russians or maybe even the Turks.  Trump is under the fantasy that this oil might be developed and sold by an American company, but none will do so given that they are actually in Syrian national territory and thus this would be illegal internationally, as well as the area being a war zone.  Trump is simply delusional on this matter.

While I do not wish any particular person dead and oppose the death penalty, I do not mourn the horrible al-Baghdadi and am glad to see him no longer around to lead the remnants of Da'esh/ISIL/ISIS (I continue to be appalled by the insistence of western media of calling this renegade murderous outfit "the Islamic State" thus spreading the group's own propaganda).  But rather than deserving praise for this outcome, President Trump deserved the booing and "Lock Him Up" chants he experienced at the fifth game of the World Series given his betrayal of the Kurds that nearly made this operation impossible.

A final note is that in the wake of this, for the first time ever, the US House of Representatives has passed a resolution condemning Turkey for its refusal to recognize and apologized for the genocide carried out by the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire in 1915 against the Armenians.  This resolution, likely not to be passed in the Senate, had strong bipartisan support in the House.  It is about time, and the credibility of  Turkey's claims of innocence in the 1915 matter are as good as their  claims that the SDF was carrying out terror attacks against them, which is basically near zero in both cases.

Oh, Happy Halloween everybody.  I figures this makes for an appropriate post on Halloween.

Barkley Rosser