RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/02/trading-realpolitik-for-a-puppet-show/

A week, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is supposed to have said, is a long time in politics. Poor Joe Biden would doubtless agree, assuming that he remembers what a week, what a long time, and what politics are. It was just about a week ago, on March 26, that he said, “As a result of our unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble.” 

I wonder who thought of that play on words? The ruble is rubble. Ha, ha, ha. 

The Russian currency did take a sharp dive. But then, almost immediately, it recovered. Why? There are several explanations. The conventional headscratchers hold that it is largely because the nefarious Vladimir Putin has nefariously blackmailed the weak-willed Germans and others who prefer bucking the sanctions in order to heat their homes. What cowards. 

A better explanation, I think, is that Putin, having played this game before, more or less knew what to expect when he invaded Ukraine. The Western press was full of gloating stories about how Mastercard and Visa stopped handling transactions when Biden announced the sanctions. That’ll show ’em. But those companies had done the same thing back in 2014 when, with Barack Obama at the helm in the United States, Putin gobbled up Crimea. This time, Putin was ready. He had already implemented his own card payment system. Mastercard and Visa piggybacked on it. One irony of the situation, as the web site Daily Reckoning observes, is that “instead of Visa and Mastercard getting the fees, Russia’s central bank collected 8.2 billion rubles in net profit, or about $94 million at current exchange rates. Russia actually profited from Visa and Mastercard sanctions.”

File that under “unintended consequences.” 

https://freebeacon.com/columns/biden-runs-out-of-gas/

‘This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply into production,” President Biden said during his announcement Thursday that he would release more barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve than at any point in American history. His decision was also a concession. None of the policies Biden has enacted throughout his short presidency have alleviated the problems they were meant to solve. Quite the opposite: In practically every case, Biden has made things worse.

Energy? Killing the Keystone pipeline was one of the first things Biden did when he took office. In February, Biden delayed approval of new oil and gas leases. He continues to blame the increase in gas prices on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, even though prices began to rise early in Biden’s term. Biden scapegoats oil companies for sitting on profits, while he could be doing everything in his power to ramp up domestic production of available fuel sources — including nuclear.

The fallout from Putin’s war was bound to make energy scarce and thus more valuable. Biden could have lessened the pain on the American consumer by pursuing an all-of-the-above energy dominance policy from the start, and by reducing the size of the American Rescue Plan so that it didn’t contribute to inflation. He chose to ignore the warnings of economists such as former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and followed his advisers who incorrectly predicted that inflation would be temporary. By turning to the Strategic Reserve, Biden is promoting a temporary fix while the long-term solutions are plain to see. He’s relied on similar gimmicks before. They haven’t worked.

Consider Biden’s immigration policy. He spent his early days as president tearing up President Trump’s agreements with Mexico and several Central American countries that forced asylum-seekers to stay in third-party nations while U.S. judges decided on their claims.