Trump Transition: Conservative Christmas

Energy secretary nominee Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and a longtime conservative government standard-bearer, visits Trump Tower in New York during the president-elect's Cabinet hiring spree in December. /Getty Images photo by Drew Angerer

Conservative Americans found an unexpected haul of presents under the Christmas tree this year: a bigly box bursting open with a business-tycoon president-elect and a Cabinet stuffed with billionaires and plutocratic ideologues.

Several of the executive-department nominees are more akin to a wolf pack guarding the whole farm than a fox guarding the hen house.

Trump's nominee for Housing and Urban Development secretary, Ben Carson, is a retired neurosurgeon and former Republican primary-season rival of the president-elect. He has no public housing experience and a self-help ideology that seems ill-suited to providing an essential safety-net service. /Getty Images photo by Andrew Burton


Trump's nominee for Education secretary, Michigan Republican Party bigwig billionaire Betsy DeVos, has no experience in public education, including with her own children. She favors private-school vouchers and charter schools as solutions--and likely poison pills--for struggling public schools.

Trump's nominee for Energy secretary, two-time GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry, has advocated dismantling the department. While calling for the agency's demise in an epic 2011 debate gaffe, he forgot the department's name.

Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, U.S. Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia, favors a free-market approach to medicine that includes slashing HHS regulations and privatizing Medicare.

Trump's nominee for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, E. Scott Pruitt, has been a fierce critic of the EPA in his current role as Oklahoma attorney general. Pruitt is among the named petitioners in a 25-state lawsuit against the EPA over greenhouse gas regulations.

As the country embarks on Republican government in the White House, both houses of Congress, and a majority of statehouses, a host of hurdles that require united effort confronts the apparently partisan Trump administration: healthcare reform; national governments that threaten global security such as North Korea; external economic threats from powerful competitors and volatile global markets; internal economic challenges including a dilapidated infrastructure, an aging population, a skewed concentration of wealth, and disruptive waves of automation that upend the workforce; roiled race relations; immigration reform; and climate change.

Tackling these hurdles from the right, or any single-minded approach, is doomed to failure measured in blood and national treasure.

Reminder of humanity's evolutionary infancy

More than a dozen skinned cats hang on hooks at the Yulin Meat Festival in China. The People's Republic also has a massive dog meat trade, with as many as 20 million canines slaughtered annually for human consumption. /Reuters image

On the timeline of human evolution, civilization has existed for the blink of an eye.

There may be no better illustration of humanity's relatively brief development of civilization than the Yulin Meat Festival. Humane Society International has documented this horrific celebration of the dog-and-cat meat trade in China. But if anyone wants to confirm the existence of this extreme barbarism in the 21st century, all they have to do is Google search images of the festival. Warning: These photographs are unbearable if you have a semblance of a conscience.

Depending on which distant ancestral species you pick for homo sapiens, the human brain is rooted in an evolutionary timeline about 3 million years deep. Humans have been developing the trappings of civilization such as written language for about 40,000 years, which is a figure that generously considers cave paintings as a form of written communication. In other words, humanity and its bipedal forebearers have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth as savages.

The mass slaughter of humans' primary animal companions in China--and the rest of humanity turning a blind eye to the practice--reflects who we are as a species. It is not a pretty picture.

China playing rough in superpower game

The U.S. Department of Justice accuses five Chinese military officers of cyber espionage, including the theft of intellectual property such as product designs from American companies. /CNN image

Still have any doubts about the Chinese playing rough on the world stage?

The U.S. grand jury indictment of five Chinese military officers last week on economic espionage charges is the latest proof of Beijing's relentless quest for superpower status. While only a symbolic legal gesture, the 31-count indictment accuses the spying suspects of hacking into the computer systems of American companies to steal information "that would be useful to their competitors in China," a prepared statement from the U.S. Department of Justice says.

"For too long, the Chinese government has blatantly sought to use cyber espionage to obtain economic advantage for its state-owned industries," FBI Director James Comey said.

The U.S. attorney who prosecuted the Chinese People's Liberation Army officers before the Western Pennsylvania grand jury condemned Beijing's cyber snooping.

"This 21st century burglary has to stop," U.S. Attorney David Hickton said. "This prosecution vindicates hard working men and women in Western Pennsylvania and around the world who play by the rules and deserve a fair shot and a level playing field."

China enabling North Korean nuclear ambitions

North Korea tests a three-stage rocket in December 2012. The launch drew international condemnation because it is widely viewed as an attempt to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. /Image via AP


Only China can peacefully compel the North Koreans to drop their quest for a nuclear weapons arsenal but that's unlikely to happen.

From the Chinese government's perspective, maintaining the status quo is clearly in its interest compared to the alternatives:
- With the Obama administration seeking to bolster the U.S. military, diplomatic and economic presence in Asia, China probably won't do anything significant to undercut its North Korean ally.
- Any effort to force North Korea to scuttle its nuclear weapons program bears a high risk of armed conflict, which would surely be frowned upon in Beijing. No country wants to see a war break out on its doorstep, particularly a conflict in which other nations are calling the shots.
- Tightening of U.N. sanctions against North Korea could destabilize Kim Jong-un's regime, and Beijing has long feared the consequences of a North Korean government collapse, including a flood of refugees pouring over the Yalu River into China.

If China won't stop North Korea from becoming a fully fledged member of the Nuclear Club, who will?

China, Japan playing with fire in East China Sea

The rocky East China Sea archipelago known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan and the Diaoyu Islands in China is one of the hottest flashpoints in Asia. /Image via The Guardian


North Korea is not the only threat to global security in Asia.

The ongoing dispute between China and Japan over craggy islands in the East China Sea is heating up, with Japan accusing its longtime regional rival of locking naval firing system radar on a Japanese destroyer and helicopter last month. Japan is the leading U.S. ally in the region. Given the American-Japanese military assistance pact in place since the end of World War II, if any armed conflict arises over the territorial dispute, the United States would likely be drawn into the confrontation.

The islands have been a source of geopolitical friction between China and Japan for more than 100 years. And the discovery of natural gas deposits under the ocean floor around the islands has raised the stakes. An agreement between the energy-hungry nations to conduct joint development of the archipelago's natural gas potential has been on hold since 2008.

I wonder how John Kerry is liking his new job in the State Department.

Hold the Chinese government accountable

 

The Chinese government's recent vote in the United Nations Security Council to veto a resolution designed to help end the state-sponsored slaughter in Syria is the last straw for me.

The bloodshed in Syria is playing out much like the genocidal violence in Bosnia in the 1990s. Enclaves of opposition to a brutal authoritarian regime are besieged, and civilians are dying by the hundreds. A massacre of thousands in one of these enclaves could happen any day.

Russia's veto of the U.N. resolution is no surprise. Vladimir Putin is a cold, calculating, larger-than-life figure ... a James Bondesque villain. Russia has had strong political, military and economic ties with Assad regimes in Syria for decades. Putin knows the stakes are extremely high. And as the state-sponsored violence in Chechnya has shown, the death of thousands of civilians does not weigh heavily on his conscience.

China is vying to become the world's prime superpower. The Chinese government's veto of the U.N. resolution is yet another grim example the kind of world the Chinese leadership is trying to craft. Time after time, from the Cultural Revolution, to Tiananmen Square, to the mountains of Tibet, Chinese leaders shown they place minimal value on human rights or even the very lives of those perceived to be in their way.

The Chinese government poses a grave threat to anyone who cares about freedom from government oppression. I'm not opposed to strong ties with the Chinese or any other nation. But people around the world need to stand up to this barbaric regime and demand that the Chinese state act responsibly at home and abroad.