JimofPennsylvan
Platinum Member
- Jun 6, 2007
- 890
- 548
- 910
In President Donald Trump's first week it is clear he is making big changes in Washington and the picture to a large degree looks very good. But and this is a big "but" him and his administration need to stop doing things that needlessly bring serious criticism on his Presidency! I don't think President Trump is heeding commonly held wisdom about the American electorate which is that they are largely moderate, they are not far right or far left ideologues, and they want the government to act in a good manner! This past week leaves a lot of Americans rubbing their forehead and asking why is the Trump administration doing this and that! President Trump is a dynamic and a very effective leader but he needs to recalibrate so that he is careful not to move the mass of American voters to conclude President Trump needs to be checked, he needs to be stopped in a lot of respects, so in the mid-terms they give the House of Representatives to the Democrats; if this happens and if the Democrats see this what seems the administration likely track record a lot of real abuse of power then they will clip his wings and but good so the last two years of his second term will accomplish little! Example of needless actions:
America has been doing immigration raids in employment settings for thirty-five plus years why is the Trump administration turning this into an issue with their raids "without warrants". Don't get me wrong It is great their doing these raids, America has immigration laws that protect important public policy so these laws need to be respected; and I haven't legally researched the respective laws I am assuming the media is right that the law and ICE's history calls for warrants so why is the Trump administration subjecting themselves to the label of violating the law here! It is inexplicable and indefensible that ICE isn't getting warrants in compliance with the law for it is so easy for ICE to assemble the evidence that establishes probable cause for a warrant against these law breaking employers; all employers in America have to use the Federal Government's E-Verify system to check if an employee has the right to work in America, the E-Verify system checks with the DHS and SSA data bases to make sure the applicant is eligible. If there is people illegally working at a U.S. employer E-Verify records or lack of records will provide the probable cause for the warrant! Further why is the Trump administration going down this unpalatable path where it is now okay to go into schools, churches and hospitals to arrest people that don't have legal permission to be in this country, the numbers of violators at these sites is miniscule compared to the fifteen plus million illegal immigrants in the country why break these long standing social taboos in America and unnerve a lot of people!
Why did the Trump administration fire "seventeen" Inspector General's this past Friday and do so in a manner in violation of the law by not giving Congress the required "thirty day" notice and providing a substantive basis for each dismissal. The U.S. government cannot be in such bad shape that it has seventeen corrupt and/or incompetent Inspector General's it really gives the impression that President Trump is clearing the deck and removing obstacles for him to do anything he damn well pleases and embark on his campaign that says to hell with America's laws it really looks like he is going to install loyalists in those jobs that will turn a blind eye to any potential wrongdoing the administration will carry out! This is not what ordinary American citizens want, America's form of government is we don't have a President that acts like a Monarch or a Dictator, the President has to follow the law he isn't above it, end of story. It was also rather stupid for the Trump Administration to arrogantly ignore the law on "removal" here because if a Federal Judge wants to give the Administration a comeuppance over its arrogance the Judge could issue a preliminary injunction temporarily stopping the terminations until the case on the merits is heard and the Judge could drag out the case for like nine months allowing each fired Inspector General to provide evidence why there is no substantive grounds to remove him or her!
President Trump with his Executive Order purging DEI efforts throughout the government and significantly throughout the private Sector is so shortsighted and so detached from what is good it is like he is an infinite number of galaxies far away from where he should be leading the country. I know President Trump has made this policy agenda a cornerstone of the MAGA movement but it is incredibly misguided. This whole ideology has its main foundation in the long history of U.S. Supreme Court opinions on the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution where the Court repeatedly throws cold water on racial preferences on admission into higher education facilities and other government actions! Frankly I think decades ago the Supreme Court made a humongous fundamental mistake in its judicial analysis of Equal Protection cases and America has been lifting with this error's incredibly divisive and corrosive aftermath ever since! Supreme court jurisprudence has long recognized that a person's constitutional right can be violated if the government has a compelling interest to do so and in these Equal Protection cases the Supreme Court should have found a compelling interest in reasonable affirmative action. The truthful reality of our American society today is that racial, ethnic and gender groups matter, the truthful reality of life in America today is that a person is not just a person the person is a white or black or Hispanic, etc. person, a person is a male or female or trans, a person's demographic criteria profoundly shapes his or her life for the government not to recognize this precludes it from being fully fair in its actions. So true full fairness dictates these demographic groups be treated fairly in divvying out opportunities in our society that have a direct impact on a good quality of life: like admissions into graduate schools for major professions, jobs and business contracts! The Bottom line here is that the country is never going to get completely out of this diversity quagmire until it changes the Constitution and creates an amendment that recognizes reasonable affirmative action as an exception to Equal Protection clause and as lawful behavior.
Irregardless of America's deficient Equal Protection law, the Trump administration made a colossal mistake in its whole scale purge of DEI because the country desperately needs reform of its Diversity effort agenda across the nation it is unfair and hurts effectiveness in our society and the Trump administration had and has the power to stop this huge harm in our nation and dropped the ball by going completely overboard which is going to trigger a backlash where the old system returns where the abuses will be more ingrained and more expansive. What is going to happen with the Trump administration complete purge of DEI is that the American people will see in a couple of years the results where minorities and women will have significantly less number of the valuable jobs in our society and significantly less income. The Trump administration and all their backers in this overboard DEI campaign being implemented will see that Republicans that back this right wing ideology will lose their seats in Congress and the loss numbers will be significant and the pro-DEI movement across America will bounce back incredibly strong and be a juggernaut political movement. Also, and one cannot really harp enough on the shortsighted of this agenda of President Trump's here for the following reasons; America's demographics are irreversibly and profoundly changing in a way that majorly undercuts the President Trump agenda, to spell it out to these right wingers "the White People" population in America is declining within two generations White People will be permanently and clearly in the minority in America. Before this transition is complete common sense would indicate that elected officials from a growing non-white population are not going to allow a Diversity policy that promotes and protects White people getting good jobs and better income in jobs to the detriment of non-White people to stand they are going to take a sledge hammer to this President Trump policy agenda. President Trump and his administration would be smart to tact to the really needed public policy change needed in this area where yes we have diversity goals and they are a top priority but were also going to have the policy that diversity candidates need to be more than minimum qualified and minimum good candidates for jobs they need to be strong candidates for the job. And pay scales and raises need to stop being drawn by fear about diversity law violations they need to be drawn on merit and education and experience as it makes the employee more valuable to the employer. In part I mean things like if a women takes off eighteen years to have and raise children and then comes back into the workforce she doesn't have as much value and isn't worth as much as an employee as a man who was working in the profession for those eighteen years and a pay disparity is fair and should be protected as being fair!
One last topic I would like to comment on is President Trump's strategy to try to get OPEC to drop the price of oil dramatically lower to cause economic pain to Russia to bring them to the negotiating table about the Ukraine War and force them to cut a fair deal to end the war. President Trump's core reasoning I think is prudent hurt Putin's oil revenue and you hurt Putin domestically politically and you hurt his capacity to supply his war in Ukraine and you pressure him greatly to cut a deal to end the war. But President Trump's current strategy is off the mark! For one Saudi Arabia the king size producer in OPEC who is the only OPEC producer that has real leverage on price needs the price of a barrel of oil to be in the high $90s/barrel range to fully fund the its government and if Saudi Arabia tried to implement the Trump plan other OPEC members would rebel and be mad as hell because they would be really hurt and there would be long term consequences that would hurt long-term oil prices around the world some OPEC countries have the reserves to dramatically increase production over time like Iraq if they wanted to they could largely over time replace Saudi Arabia as the controlling producer and remember Iraq is largely Shiite so is subject to strong influence from Iran the key Shiite country in the Middle East and it wouldn't be good if the anti-west Iranian Mullahs were controlling the world's oil prices. Most importantly though America needs the price of oil to be at the $70.00/barrel price point and above continually for U.S. producers to be aggressive about drilling more oil wells because new wells are costly in the U.S. the break even prices for America's three largest shale oil fields this is for new wells is $62/bl for the Permian and $60/bl for the Eagle Ford and $60/bl for the Bakken and you want the price to be above the break even to incentivize U.S. producers, aggressive U.S. oil producers maintain stable and good oil prices. What the strategy should be to pressure Putin is to shut down his sales directly. Putin has a super huge fleet of tankers that ship oil to China and India and other countries in violation of the sanctions these ship turn off their transponders and sail covertly so they cannot get caught. What America could do is enforce the sanctions fully against Russia and use America's sophisticated military surveillance capacity AWACS planes and satellites to track these covert shipping transactions and after the illegal shipments are made impound the respetive tanker for the balance of the war if the U.S. does not want to get its hands dirty it could create a Ukrainian Navy in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean they don't need sophisticated ships Ukrainians allies could dig up something for them this navy would just be impounding oil tankers. The specific strategy the Ukrainian navy could follow is impound the tankers in two locations like one spot in international waters off America and another off the United Kingdom and what they could do is wire the tankers with explosives that would blow holes in the tankers hulls which would sink them and set it off if the Russian Navy by force tries to take the tankers back! Another option the Trump administration could pursue to crush Putin's oil revenue is give Ukraine a bunch of cruise missiles and give the Ukrainian government the permission to use them against any and all oil refineries in Russia, this would not only hurt Putin's revenue but would hurt his precious stature amongst the Russian people stature he needs to continue this costly war for Russia.
This is the thing that President Trump needs to remember the reason why the world allows Putin to skirt the sanctions on oil sales and sell oil at a price as high as $60/barrel is because world prices on oil have a critical impact on the world economy and of course oil prices are driven by the supply/demand curve and Russian oil is needed to provide the a good supply cushion in the world markets so prices aren't driven unduly high. This is important to remember if the plan is too cut Russia out of the world's oil market it can probably be done with a modest negative impact to world oil prices but the Trump administration cannot be screwing around with major oil producers in the world energy market and cannot be increasing oil demand in the U.S. by screwing with EV tax credits. Specifically, the Trump administration cannot be putting 25% tariffs on four million barrels of oil per day Canada exports to the U.S. and the million barrels per day Mexico exports to America because this will drive up prices for the American consumer and it will cause U.S. refineries to be new buyers in the world's oil market pressuring world oil prices. To fill the void left by the loss of Russian oil is likely doable because to just name a few potential increases in supply sources countries like Iraq have concrete plans slated to produce more oil and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have significant capacity to expand oil production. On the EV tax credits that $7500 per car credit that exist today facilities a ton of lease deals for EV cars for the American consumer the savings on monthly lease payments because of this credit is truly impressive; I am sure experts would tell the Trump administration cut the EV credit you cut EV car sales and increase combustion engine car sales keeping upward pressure on oil demand in the U.S.!
America has been doing immigration raids in employment settings for thirty-five plus years why is the Trump administration turning this into an issue with their raids "without warrants". Don't get me wrong It is great their doing these raids, America has immigration laws that protect important public policy so these laws need to be respected; and I haven't legally researched the respective laws I am assuming the media is right that the law and ICE's history calls for warrants so why is the Trump administration subjecting themselves to the label of violating the law here! It is inexplicable and indefensible that ICE isn't getting warrants in compliance with the law for it is so easy for ICE to assemble the evidence that establishes probable cause for a warrant against these law breaking employers; all employers in America have to use the Federal Government's E-Verify system to check if an employee has the right to work in America, the E-Verify system checks with the DHS and SSA data bases to make sure the applicant is eligible. If there is people illegally working at a U.S. employer E-Verify records or lack of records will provide the probable cause for the warrant! Further why is the Trump administration going down this unpalatable path where it is now okay to go into schools, churches and hospitals to arrest people that don't have legal permission to be in this country, the numbers of violators at these sites is miniscule compared to the fifteen plus million illegal immigrants in the country why break these long standing social taboos in America and unnerve a lot of people!
Why did the Trump administration fire "seventeen" Inspector General's this past Friday and do so in a manner in violation of the law by not giving Congress the required "thirty day" notice and providing a substantive basis for each dismissal. The U.S. government cannot be in such bad shape that it has seventeen corrupt and/or incompetent Inspector General's it really gives the impression that President Trump is clearing the deck and removing obstacles for him to do anything he damn well pleases and embark on his campaign that says to hell with America's laws it really looks like he is going to install loyalists in those jobs that will turn a blind eye to any potential wrongdoing the administration will carry out! This is not what ordinary American citizens want, America's form of government is we don't have a President that acts like a Monarch or a Dictator, the President has to follow the law he isn't above it, end of story. It was also rather stupid for the Trump Administration to arrogantly ignore the law on "removal" here because if a Federal Judge wants to give the Administration a comeuppance over its arrogance the Judge could issue a preliminary injunction temporarily stopping the terminations until the case on the merits is heard and the Judge could drag out the case for like nine months allowing each fired Inspector General to provide evidence why there is no substantive grounds to remove him or her!
President Trump with his Executive Order purging DEI efforts throughout the government and significantly throughout the private Sector is so shortsighted and so detached from what is good it is like he is an infinite number of galaxies far away from where he should be leading the country. I know President Trump has made this policy agenda a cornerstone of the MAGA movement but it is incredibly misguided. This whole ideology has its main foundation in the long history of U.S. Supreme Court opinions on the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution where the Court repeatedly throws cold water on racial preferences on admission into higher education facilities and other government actions! Frankly I think decades ago the Supreme Court made a humongous fundamental mistake in its judicial analysis of Equal Protection cases and America has been lifting with this error's incredibly divisive and corrosive aftermath ever since! Supreme court jurisprudence has long recognized that a person's constitutional right can be violated if the government has a compelling interest to do so and in these Equal Protection cases the Supreme Court should have found a compelling interest in reasonable affirmative action. The truthful reality of our American society today is that racial, ethnic and gender groups matter, the truthful reality of life in America today is that a person is not just a person the person is a white or black or Hispanic, etc. person, a person is a male or female or trans, a person's demographic criteria profoundly shapes his or her life for the government not to recognize this precludes it from being fully fair in its actions. So true full fairness dictates these demographic groups be treated fairly in divvying out opportunities in our society that have a direct impact on a good quality of life: like admissions into graduate schools for major professions, jobs and business contracts! The Bottom line here is that the country is never going to get completely out of this diversity quagmire until it changes the Constitution and creates an amendment that recognizes reasonable affirmative action as an exception to Equal Protection clause and as lawful behavior.
Irregardless of America's deficient Equal Protection law, the Trump administration made a colossal mistake in its whole scale purge of DEI because the country desperately needs reform of its Diversity effort agenda across the nation it is unfair and hurts effectiveness in our society and the Trump administration had and has the power to stop this huge harm in our nation and dropped the ball by going completely overboard which is going to trigger a backlash where the old system returns where the abuses will be more ingrained and more expansive. What is going to happen with the Trump administration complete purge of DEI is that the American people will see in a couple of years the results where minorities and women will have significantly less number of the valuable jobs in our society and significantly less income. The Trump administration and all their backers in this overboard DEI campaign being implemented will see that Republicans that back this right wing ideology will lose their seats in Congress and the loss numbers will be significant and the pro-DEI movement across America will bounce back incredibly strong and be a juggernaut political movement. Also, and one cannot really harp enough on the shortsighted of this agenda of President Trump's here for the following reasons; America's demographics are irreversibly and profoundly changing in a way that majorly undercuts the President Trump agenda, to spell it out to these right wingers "the White People" population in America is declining within two generations White People will be permanently and clearly in the minority in America. Before this transition is complete common sense would indicate that elected officials from a growing non-white population are not going to allow a Diversity policy that promotes and protects White people getting good jobs and better income in jobs to the detriment of non-White people to stand they are going to take a sledge hammer to this President Trump policy agenda. President Trump and his administration would be smart to tact to the really needed public policy change needed in this area where yes we have diversity goals and they are a top priority but were also going to have the policy that diversity candidates need to be more than minimum qualified and minimum good candidates for jobs they need to be strong candidates for the job. And pay scales and raises need to stop being drawn by fear about diversity law violations they need to be drawn on merit and education and experience as it makes the employee more valuable to the employer. In part I mean things like if a women takes off eighteen years to have and raise children and then comes back into the workforce she doesn't have as much value and isn't worth as much as an employee as a man who was working in the profession for those eighteen years and a pay disparity is fair and should be protected as being fair!
One last topic I would like to comment on is President Trump's strategy to try to get OPEC to drop the price of oil dramatically lower to cause economic pain to Russia to bring them to the negotiating table about the Ukraine War and force them to cut a fair deal to end the war. President Trump's core reasoning I think is prudent hurt Putin's oil revenue and you hurt Putin domestically politically and you hurt his capacity to supply his war in Ukraine and you pressure him greatly to cut a deal to end the war. But President Trump's current strategy is off the mark! For one Saudi Arabia the king size producer in OPEC who is the only OPEC producer that has real leverage on price needs the price of a barrel of oil to be in the high $90s/barrel range to fully fund the its government and if Saudi Arabia tried to implement the Trump plan other OPEC members would rebel and be mad as hell because they would be really hurt and there would be long term consequences that would hurt long-term oil prices around the world some OPEC countries have the reserves to dramatically increase production over time like Iraq if they wanted to they could largely over time replace Saudi Arabia as the controlling producer and remember Iraq is largely Shiite so is subject to strong influence from Iran the key Shiite country in the Middle East and it wouldn't be good if the anti-west Iranian Mullahs were controlling the world's oil prices. Most importantly though America needs the price of oil to be at the $70.00/barrel price point and above continually for U.S. producers to be aggressive about drilling more oil wells because new wells are costly in the U.S. the break even prices for America's three largest shale oil fields this is for new wells is $62/bl for the Permian and $60/bl for the Eagle Ford and $60/bl for the Bakken and you want the price to be above the break even to incentivize U.S. producers, aggressive U.S. oil producers maintain stable and good oil prices. What the strategy should be to pressure Putin is to shut down his sales directly. Putin has a super huge fleet of tankers that ship oil to China and India and other countries in violation of the sanctions these ship turn off their transponders and sail covertly so they cannot get caught. What America could do is enforce the sanctions fully against Russia and use America's sophisticated military surveillance capacity AWACS planes and satellites to track these covert shipping transactions and after the illegal shipments are made impound the respetive tanker for the balance of the war if the U.S. does not want to get its hands dirty it could create a Ukrainian Navy in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean they don't need sophisticated ships Ukrainians allies could dig up something for them this navy would just be impounding oil tankers. The specific strategy the Ukrainian navy could follow is impound the tankers in two locations like one spot in international waters off America and another off the United Kingdom and what they could do is wire the tankers with explosives that would blow holes in the tankers hulls which would sink them and set it off if the Russian Navy by force tries to take the tankers back! Another option the Trump administration could pursue to crush Putin's oil revenue is give Ukraine a bunch of cruise missiles and give the Ukrainian government the permission to use them against any and all oil refineries in Russia, this would not only hurt Putin's revenue but would hurt his precious stature amongst the Russian people stature he needs to continue this costly war for Russia.
This is the thing that President Trump needs to remember the reason why the world allows Putin to skirt the sanctions on oil sales and sell oil at a price as high as $60/barrel is because world prices on oil have a critical impact on the world economy and of course oil prices are driven by the supply/demand curve and Russian oil is needed to provide the a good supply cushion in the world markets so prices aren't driven unduly high. This is important to remember if the plan is too cut Russia out of the world's oil market it can probably be done with a modest negative impact to world oil prices but the Trump administration cannot be screwing around with major oil producers in the world energy market and cannot be increasing oil demand in the U.S. by screwing with EV tax credits. Specifically, the Trump administration cannot be putting 25% tariffs on four million barrels of oil per day Canada exports to the U.S. and the million barrels per day Mexico exports to America because this will drive up prices for the American consumer and it will cause U.S. refineries to be new buyers in the world's oil market pressuring world oil prices. To fill the void left by the loss of Russian oil is likely doable because to just name a few potential increases in supply sources countries like Iraq have concrete plans slated to produce more oil and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have significant capacity to expand oil production. On the EV tax credits that $7500 per car credit that exist today facilities a ton of lease deals for EV cars for the American consumer the savings on monthly lease payments because of this credit is truly impressive; I am sure experts would tell the Trump administration cut the EV credit you cut EV car sales and increase combustion engine car sales keeping upward pressure on oil demand in the U.S.!
