Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The U.S. and its NATO allies are responding to Russian thug Vladimir Putin's aggressive moves against Ukraine:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin briefed President Joe Biden on Saturday about U.S. options for responding if Russia invades Ukraine, as well as options for U.S. military movements in advance of an invasion, according to a defense official and a senior administration official.

Among the options presented for the U.S. military in advance of an invasion were bomber flights over the region, ship visits into the Black Sea and the moving of troops and some equipment from other parts of Europe into Poland, Romania and other countries neighboring Ukraine. 

Austin presented options to reassure NATO allies and reinforce their defenses, specifically the defenses of those countries bordering Ukraine, the officials said. The goal is to show unity and strength among NATO and deter Russian aggression against allies in the region, the officials said. 

NATO said Monday that it was sending ships and fighter jets to eastern Europe and that the U.S. "has also made clear that it is considering increasing its military presence in the eastern part of the Alliance."

There's another option under consideration as well that could cripple Putin's economy:

The Biden administration is threatening to use a novel export control to damage strategic Russian industries, from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to civilian aerospace, if Moscow invades Ukraine, administration officials say.

The administration may also decide to apply the control more broadly in a way that would potentially deprive Russian citizens of some smartphones, tablets and video game consoles, said the officials.

Such moves would expand the reach of U.S. sanctions beyond financial targets to the deployment of a weapon used only once before — to nearly cripple the Chinese tech giant Huawei.

The weapon, known as the foreign direct product rule, contributed to Huawei suffering its first-ever annual revenue drop, a stunning collapse of nearly 30 percent last year.

The attraction of using the foreign direct product rule derives from the fact that virtually anything electronic these days includes semiconductors, the tiny components on which all modern technology depends, from smartphones to jets to quantum computers — and that there is hardly a semiconductor on the planet that is not made with U.S. tools or designed with U.S. software. And the administration could try to force companies in other countries to stop exporting these types of goods to Russia through this rule.

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch wonders if America will hold Trump accountable, or be too exhausted to save its democracy:

... In a year when the fate of U.S. democracy is at least competing with the price of burritos and mask mandates in public schools for the attention of voters, there is the very real possibility of learning in prime time that our president was a crook — and then doing nothing. And that feels like it could be the actual fatal blow for our American Experiment.

Let’s face it, either way it will not be pretty, nor will it go down as smoothly as Watergate, with pundits crowing that “the system worked.” If Trump is indicted for his crimes, it’s not a wild fantasy to imagine a Jan. 6-level response, especially with the added gasoline of racism against the prosecutors in Fulton County, Manhattan and New York State who all happen to be Black Democrats. If, for example, that grand jury in Atlanta does charge Trump, it’s not hard to think that caravans of GOP voters from the red-clay foothills of Georgia or Alabama will pour into the cosmopolitan city to block his arraignment. It’s possible to see the blueprints of a true civil war.

And yet the much greater fear is that — after an ex-president’s efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power and stage the first real coup in American history is laid out in chapter and verse — a depressed, divided and utterly demoralized nation elects to do absolutely nothing about it. That, too exhausted to make the hard choices to save our democracy, we will simply wait for the comet to strike.

Robert Shapiro writes about the Biden economic boom that's being overshadowed by inflation and the pandemic, which are intertwined with each other but are receding:

People who quit in 2021 generally found new positions much faster than normal. The number of open jobs waiting to be filled averaged 9.6 million per month in 2021, 47 percent higher than the average for 2015 to 2019. Those openings outpaced the high levels of quits by 70 percent. As a result, the median length of unemployment fell from 18.4 weeks in January 2021 to 12.4 weeks by December.

The current employment boom is fueled by a highly successful economy and soaring rates of business creation. The Census Bureau reports that Americans created nearly 5.4 million private businesses in 2021—68 percent higher than the average of 3.2 million per year from 2015 to 2019. This historic level of business formation helped make the record level of quits possible, including those who left their jobs to start their own business. It also should help sustain healthy job gains throughout 2022.

In every recent period, some laid-off workers start their own businesses, often by necessity rather than choice. And they are a small piece of current business formation: All told, 16.7 million people lost their jobs in 2021, compared to 47 million who left their jobs voluntarily. 

All of these factors contributed to the strongest job growth in more than 40 years. In 2021, the economy added 6.4 million jobs—a gain of 4.5 percent, or more than three times the average job growth of 1.4 percent from 2015 to 2019. [snip]

...[M]ost economists expect inflation to recede in the coming months. The bond market is not panicking. But we haven’t seen inflation tied to supply-chain problems since 1946–47, so those predictions may be off. If they’re right and inflation ebbs, the sharp increase in wages before inflation will be permanent, since companies know that wage cuts inspire more quits and destroy morale for those who stay. The result would be the strongest GDP growth in a generation, fast-rising new businesses, a red-hot labor market, and real wage gains for most Americans.

There's much more at the links that deserves a read.

Finally, Infidel 753 has identified a slew of links to posts from around the internet for your perusal. They're always varied and interesting selections, and this week is no exception.