President Trump has picked David Bernhardt, a former energy lobbyist, to be the Interior Department’s next secretary. Bernhardt, whose past clients include oil companies and others with business before the Interior Department, will lead an agency that oversees about 500 million acres as well as the energy production on that land. It has 70,000 employees in various agencies overseeing federal land, offshore drilling, endangered species and American Indian affairs, among other duties.

As deputy secretary, Bernhardt, worked closely with former, ethically challenged, Secretary Ryan Zinke on his oil and gas leasing agenda and the administration’s push to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He champions the rollback of a number of Endangered Species Act regulations and called the Endangered Species Act an “unnecessary regulatory burden”.

Bernhardt’s lobbying activities have been so widespread that he carries a card with him listing all the recusals he has to make, no doubt with misgivings.

Bernhardt is accused by environmental organisations, appalled at this move by Trump, of pandering to oil, coal, and gas industries. One environmentalist is quoted as saying, ““As an oil and gas lobbyist, Bernhardt pushed to open vast swaths of public lands for drilling and mining. As deputy secretary, he was behind some of the worst policy decisions of Secretary Zinke’s sad tenure, including stripping protections for imperiled wildlife.”

It is sad to comment that this in-your-face example of corruption, pandering to special interests and acting against the interests of American citizens seems to have been normalised. Congress has lost so many of its experts (Republican policy) that it now relies on lobbyists, (who have their own agendas) when it comes to technical knowledge and expertise. The selfish and ruthless are picking at the bones of the United States, while China quietly separates the US from its allies. So much for Making America Great Again – it’s a joke in poor taste.

The UK and Switzerland have signed a deal to continue trading after Brexit as they did before it. The “continuity agreement” – based on the EU’s existing free trade deal with Switzerland – was ratified on Monday. Around £32bn of trade is done between the UK and Switzerland each year, with 15,000 British exporters involved.

The UK is seeking to replicate about 40 EU worlwide free trade agreements, covering more than 70 countries. In 2017, the government announced that the UK could complete them all before leaving the EU on 29 March, to avoid disruption to trade. But with only 46 days until the UK is set to leave, continuity agreements have been signed with only:
Switzerland
Chile
The Faroe Islands
Eastern and Southern Africa
Mutual recognition agreements – where a product lawfully sold in one country can be sold in another – have also been signed with Australia and New Zealand.

The director general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Carolyn Fairbairn, said the lack of other trade deals being signed was an “emergency” – particularly in the case of South Korea and Japan. (adapted from a BBC report)

Gosh! Four agreements in two years! Right wing Tories don’t like a customs union because they claim they can do better deals than the huge EU has been able to do. Easy, they said. But if all you are going to do is to use the identical EU wording, what precisely is the point of all this chaos and angst? Oh, sorry, of course it is the keep the pesky foreigners out.

All the same, we never thought the Faroe Islands would come so readily to the rescue. Thanks, fellows!

Meanwhile, 36 more agreements to go before March 29th! What an incompetent bunch!

It seems to me plausible to imagine that Trump could default on the US national debt. He could quite likely stand up at a rally when things get bumpy for him and say, “we don’t actually owe China that money,” Everywhere he goes Trump finds things that people trust and he undermines them e.g the media, the political process, government departments and clean and competent government What’s left? The money,

Trump has made a career out of stiffing his suppliers and his workers and refusing to repay his loans. He’s already grumbling about the Federal Reserve. All he now needs now to say is, “The Chinese stole that money in bad trade deals and theft of hi-tech know-how.” Suddenly, you get a dollar that is under seige, even though people still trust the dollar. (why is a mystery) and there is no mechanism for stopping it. Actually, you used to have a mechanism – it was called the “government”. But Trump controls the government and has installed corrupt yes-men as department heads. Imagining that because Trump is rich and has lots of rich friends who don’t want a financial catastrophe is wrong thinking. Trump has huge dollar debts that shrink if the dollar goes into freefall. It is actually in his interest to undermine the dollar; his other assets are in land, buildings and hotels, which will survive probably adequately.

Just a suggestion about reneging on the national debt at a rally would be enough to get the supporters talking about the idea and thus make it respectable in right-wing circles. He won’t do it just now because he has a good economy, inherited from Obama, but given a dangerous boost by a massive tax cut. The bust will come and it could come in early 2020. The national debt is growing rapidly because tax income is way down. But bust there will be. The whole world will be affected and mountains of promissory notes and promises made by a basically dishonest president will be worth nothing. (an edited version based of an article in Prospect magazine by Jay Elwes, reporting on Michael Lewis’s book “The Fifth Risk”)

What has this to do with Epicureanism? It has to do witheace of mind and a life of pleasure (or, rather, a. pleasant life. I qualify this so that critics stop claiming that Epiurus advocated endless booze and sex – a total travesty.)

In today’s divided Washington there is one thing the Left and Right agree about: that some companies have grown too powerful. Even conservatives were disgusted by the way states recently showered perks on Amazon in the hope of winning the right to host its new headquarters. “The richest man in the world just got $2bn in taxpayer subsidies,” said Tucker Carlson of Fox News. “How does that work?”

Monopolies are rife across the US economy. Facebook and Google control 63% of online ad revenue; two companies produce 78% of America’s corn seeds; one assembles 61% of its syringes. Lawmakers are increasingly calling for Congress to intervene, whether by making mergers harder to complete, tightening oversight, or directly breaking up firms – as it did in the 1930s, with the banks and electric utilities. Critics say direct intervention is too drastic, but in practice it could just mean reversing mergers that “shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place”, such as Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp. The conditions are ripe for Congress to be more assertive against corporate concentration. The benefits for the public if it did so would be “profound”. (Matt Stoller, The New Republic, New York and The Week, 14 Jan 2019).

So corrupted has Washington and congress become that these monopolies proliferate. They are a blight on what is supposed to be a competitive economy and, and, because they all encourage predatory pricing (why else do they do it?) they are leeches on the pockets of men and women in the street. We are never privy to discussion in smoke-filled, darkened rooms, where company executives promise goodies to politicians if they wave through unwelcome and unnecessary takeovers and mergers and acquisitions, but that they happen there is little doubt. It is anti-democratic and both political parties should summon up the courage to say “NO!.

A recording was leaked to the UK Press recently. It was a conference call between Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, and bosses from Amazon, Siemens, Tesco and other multinationals, in which they all discuss how to block a no-deal Brexit. It’s a key concern for such companies, and you can see why. The giants do well out of the EU system. Rather than having to invest in machinery and training, they can rely on a steady flow of imported cheap labour. They can afford lobbyists to ensure the regulations work for them, not least by serving as a barrier to entry for smaller competitors. So naturally they want to preserve the status quo.

“But “Brexit was a vote to change the system” and was much favoured by small companies, which were more likely to support it. Yet as the Hammond tape shows, ministers only listen to the big companies – the small ones don’t get a look in. As the party of business, the Tories ought to be on the side of the “small guy” as well. “Colluding with corporates about how best to frustrate a referendum result isn’t a good look.” (Fraser Nelson Daily Telegraph reported in The Week, 26 January 2019)

For non-Brits this is a good example of the sly misinformation put out by the right wing media. Of course big companies want to avoid Britain crashing out of the EU. It would be very damaging and disruptive to businesses, large and small, cascading down, with trade disrupted and great uncertainty.

The amateurish manner in which Brexit was presented to the British public might have persuaded some business owners that it would be advantageous, but now they have learned the real, hard facts and have seen the dismal economic forecasts, it defies logic and common sense for small businessmen to back Brexit at all. The only reason they might is personal feelings about immigrants. I have little regard for the Chancellor, but what is he supposed to do, phone thousands of small companies, one at a time?

For the record: in 1689 the principle of the sovereignty of parliament was finally established, with no ifs and buts, and role of the new king and queen, William and Mary and their successors, has been to sign off on any legislation passed by Parliament, whether they liked it or not. Thus it has been ever since – until Harold Wilson organised a non-binding, advisory-only (note!) referendum. There have been other referendums since, but only one, in 2011, was specifically binding on the government. The Brexit referendum carried no mention of being binding. As one constitutional lawyer commented, “Brexit could end up being a lot more damaging to parliamentary sovereignty and the domestic constitutional order than the external influences of EU law may ever have been”. (R. Ekins, ‘The Legitimacy of the Brexit Referendum’, UK Constitutional Law Association, 29 June 2018)

A major point of the referendum was to restore British parliamentary sovereignty, but it simply doesn’t! It hands over major decisions to the people, 95% of whom do not have a clue about the complexities of modern government, or the the workings of the EU (apparently Leave MPs don’t, either!). Westminster faced the Catch 22 situation where it couldn’t politically ignore the results of a referendum supposedly held to restore its sovereignty, despite the fact that the majority of its members disapprove of the outcome. In addition, the UK government robbed Parliament of its role in the actual Brexit process.

Why has there been so little debate on this subject? Do MPs understand the point? And why is this an Epicurean question? Because it will cause great loss of peace of mind in the future. Generations to come regret it as more stupid questions are asked of a poorly informed electorate