Trump's Civil Trouble

An unsuccessful defendant who wants to stop collection a judgment's enforcement for he duration of an appeal is generally allowed to halt enforcement by posting a supersedeaas bond, which assures the court that delay won't prejudice collection because the amount due is available to pay the winner if the appeal fails. The bond isn't required to pursue the appeal, just to halt enforcement. Concerns about how fair this procedure is can appreciate the problem best by considering the alternative: should an aggrieved public bear the risk of delay and the possibility that deception or other creditors render a defendant judgment-proof during appeal? The bond is the compromise.

Lat month Mr. Trump induced the major insurer Chubb to underwrite the supersedeas bond to stay execution of a January judgment for his longtime defamation victim E. Jean Carroll. Chubb's CEO gave interviews explaining its position had been fully secured and that its terms with Trump were no special favor: the terms were meant to earn a return for investors. The bond was less than a hundred million dollars.

Donald J. Trump is no stranger to the courts, but he's no longer allowed to harm victims with impunity as when he bullied suppliers out of payment when he was setting up his long-failed casino in Atlantic City. the economic impact of his lies has grown. He's being sued, and successfully, in the communities upon which he's preyed. Now Mr. trump hopes to forestall execution of New York's judgment, awarded when New York proved that Mr. Trump and his co-defendants fraudulently misrepresented assets and collateral to obtain loan terms and outsized profits not available in the market. Disgorgement of profit from fraud in this one New York case amounts to nearly a half-billion dollars. Trump has been unable to get a surety to stand for him to make a supersedeas bond in New York, and he hasn't got the cash to post himself.

Newsweek published a list of properties subject to execution to cover the defendant's debt to New York from his financial frauds. While it may look impressive, the debts secured by these properties make clear that the properties are not all equity; Mr. Trump doesn't actually own them outright, and what he owes his creditors significantly erodes the equity in them.

Mr. Trump faces another deception case next month involving his treatment of a personal hush-money payment as if it were a business expense in order to cheat the government out of tax revenue.

The son of one of Mr. Trump's scam victims, a contractor Trump cheated out of his final payment for woodworking that had been completed and accepted as good work by Mr. Trump's own general contractor, said of his now-deceased father "He would be embarrassed that Donald Trump is actually going to be the nominee for president for the Republican Party in 2016." 

He hasn't apparently become any more reliable.

Russia Handling Sanctions Worse Than It Pretends

 The cost of shipping energy products to more distant customers, the loss of workers to frontline duty and to international flight, and the inability to tap foreign resources to support local operations have left Russia in an economic crisis that its propaganda efforts and international denials cannot hide. The price of eggs increased 18% last month (December 2023) in that one month alone. The Russian Federation has been propping up the economy by directing long-husbanded resources into military-oriented manufacturing, but causing an explosion in Ukraine does nothing for quality of life within Russia; the transformation of Russia into a wartime economy currently directs a third of the federation's national expenditures into the military. 

While Putin claims in his speeches that Russia's economy thrives despite foreign barriers to trade with most of the free world, much of the nation's current production does nothing for Russians: rockets aren't infrastructure, they destroy infrastructure. This game of economic chicken is profitable only if Russia ultimately seizes Ukraine and its natural resources and can compel the service of its millions of inhabitants. Forcing people to serve Russia's tyrants isn't a particularly efficient way to build national wealth, but it's all tyrants know. And they're used to the inefficiency: per-capita GDP within the Russia's empire is so small that despite having many times the population of Texas, the empire's overall GDP was lower even before sanctions cost Russia all the foreign expertise that had kept its energy industry in business. GDP per capita in Russia has been on par with China, at a fraction of GDPs typical of democracies in Europe or Asia.

If nobody throws the Russian tyranny a lifeline, it will likely digest itself trying to threaten neighbors into surrendering to Russia's appetite for geographic expansion. 

Halting Russia's advances into Ukraine has been an efficient investment for the United States. For only a few percent of the existing US defense budget, the United States has created a state of emergency in its most aggressive international adversary which is spending not just a third of its military budget, but a third of its entire national budget, to hand onto its untenable position. Especially since Ukraine is willing to contribute all the combat personnel, supplying them with equipment to test and improve American tactics and methods against Russia's current best technology and electronic systems is a fantastic investment in the future of our defense of American interests and the interests of democratic trading partners around the world.

Wagner Felons Turn Out To Commit Felonies

 So, this happened. Was anyone surprised?

Russia Over the Long Term

 Much ink has been spilled arguing about the impact of sanctions on Russia using such evidence as the "price" or the Russian rouble or GDP figures that turn on the sales volume of exported energy products, but these metrics don't offer much insight into the strength of Russia's ability to sustain itself while antagonizing the world's democracies with renewed imperialist ambition. (This article won't describe those ambitions; anyone interested in them is well served to read Putin's speeches going back the last few decades to appreciate his longing for the era of Stalin and his hope to return Russia to a similarly feared global power of similar size and international influence.)

What's wrong with looking at the price of the rouble to understand the nation's economic strength? The question one might ask is, whose price? The price available in a free market can hardly be assessed in Russia, where post-invasion law promptly forbade forbade banks and brokers to sell dollars, euros, and other foreign currencies to rouble-paying buyer. If you can't sell roubles, how do you know its price? Russian gaming of currency didn't end there, either. Despite having long-term contracts that required Russia to supply energy products to foreign buyers in currencies such as the euro, yen, or dollar, Putin declared that all purchases would be made in Russian roubles or not at all. Basically Putin declared the power to unilaterally change contract terms at a whim and held energy products hostage to enforce it. The upshot is that nobody knows what the rouble is worth in a free market because there is no free market in roubles after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Nobody who wants to bail out of roubles can. Indeed, nobody who wants to bail out of Russian assets can: foreigners can't sell stock on Russia's exchanges, they can't sell their interests in Russian energy programs, and they can't liquidate any proceeds they do have in local currency in order to leave with their own currency.

Russia simply seized Western investment. Since nobody will be selling it for foreign currency, the "market" in Russian assets, firms, and currency will not depict the exodus.

What will?

Production.

A look at Russia's production of domestic cars yields some insight into the effect of Russia's policies on Russia's ability to produce passenger cars. The year ending March 2023 shows Russia's automotive production suffering a short-term near-halt, with eventual recovery to about one third of the nation's pre-invasion:

Automobiles don't really show the whole range of Russian production capability, but consider the non-mobilized population of Russia and its interest in normal life. With foreign auto makers bailing out of Russian production partnerships and halting export to Russia, Russians face the alternatives of domestic production or imports from Chinese firms which Russians historically avoided. Although Russian auto sales plummeted over 60%, Chinese share of those sales more than tripled to nearly a third of Russia's ailing auto market. Soviet-era auto brand revivals feature Chinese designs and key components.

As interesting as the evolution of seized foreign plants into Russian production centers may be, the story of Russia's consumer vehicle market isn't the story of Russian GDP. Consider something closer to the priorities of Putin's war machine: trucks required to support war logistics. Russia actually needs trucks to re-establish the empire Putin imagines in his fantasies. Trucks have a certain priority. Before Russia's invasion, a February 2022 estimate foresaw Russia's commercial vehicle market growing at over 3% per year through 2028 on the strength of joint ventures with foreign firms bringing their expertise to the Russian market. The dislocations described above killed growth in Russian commercial vehicle production just as the war in Ukraine destroyed thousands of trucks driven by Russia to lose in Ukraine:

Outside the realm of trucks, Russians find themselves relying on suddenly slower, costlier, and more tenuous supply lines for foreign goods ranging from perishable food items to teabag paper.

Given that Russia now apparently depends on China for its domestic supply of automobiles and trucks, one must ask where Russia is getting the money to pay China for the exported parts. Here, at least, there is no mystery: exported raw goods, primarily in the form of energy products. With the departure of experienced foreign operators, Russia's gas production has already fallen 10% in the last year. Gas is kind of a problem, because its existing pipelines to China won't take more volume and Russia lacks the ability to create LNG terminals to shift gas production to export by ship. Making big capital investments isn't really the style of the Russian empire: it expects others to make the investments on which it depends. By contrast, Russia's oil exports have declined only slightly since its invasion of Ukraine:

Russia is selling all the oil it can to the closest buyers it can manage, because each round trip with an oil transport ship to Europe took something like one week whereas it can take months one-way to India. There's not enough ships to handle all Russia's export if Russia ships oil to India, and Europe has slammed the door on it. It turns out that China is close. And it doesn't matter so much what currency China pays for oil, as Russia must immediately pay Chinese firms that same currency to buy the auto parts, computer chips, cell phones, automobiles, drones, communications equipment, food, and everything else Russia imports from China. 

By reducing itself to a raw good supplier and a finished goods buyer, Russia has remade itself into, in effect, a colony. China, recognizing this, has approved a new map model that renames Russian border cities with old Chinese names (e.g., Vladivostok swapped for Sea Cucumber Bay ("Khaishenvai")), and is already publishing the new maps. Border territories are also renamed. Xi does to Putin what Putin does to former Soviet republics: he's reneging on border-fixing deals made with Yeltzin in the '90s. 

Putin can hardly object: he's rendered Russia so wholly dependent on Chinese matériel and funds that he's got to accept what China offers. A Chinese-speaking informant who saw Putin appearing with Chinese officials noted that the Chinese translation of Putin's remarks appeared to suggest the entire speech had been written by the Chinese, as the Chinese text veritably drips with language of a vassal addressing his emperor. Putin either accepted this, or he's an oblivious fool. And it doesn't matter which: he's helpless. Russia no longer poses a credible threat of projected military power. China will enjoy this for a while, no doubt, observing the developments in Ukraine, before taking action. However, Russia will have no practical ability to oppose China when it starts changing street names and flags in former Soviet lands that interest Xi. 

As Russian population has failed to keep Russian resources productively employed, Chinese have taken over former Soviet farms and now own and live on land in Russia. There aren't a lot of ethnic Russians in the eastern reaches of what is left of Russia's empire, so the takeover is already well underway. Putin's Russia endures like a frog in a heating pot: at the sufferance of a chef who's already got the rest of the dinner cooking.

On the Supreme Court's Ruling in Dobbs

The headline today in legal matters will surely be that Roe v. Wade (1973) has been overruled, but the problem goes further. The reasoning employed by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) undermined the reasoning employed in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) under which Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) was overruled to end anti-sodomy statutes, which is the same line of reasoning ultimately used to prevent states from banning same-sex marriage (e.g., that the State had no legitimate interest to protect), and in fact the same line of reasoning used by the Supreme Court to strike down laws criminalizing birth control.

We have not seen the end of this.

Putin's 3-Day War: Day 100

One hundred days into Putin's 3-day war to capture Ukraine for re-integration into the Russian empire, things are not going well for anyone. Blockade of Ukraine's ports is starving Africa. Ukrainian sources estimated Russian tank losses at 1000 units some weeks ago. During the last week of May 2022, U.S. intelligence sources assessed that Putin's invading force had lost a thousand tanks. Part of Russia's disasterous performance comes down to Russian decisions to ignore Russian doctrine and take risks assaulting with armor ahead of infantry protection. In what was perhaps its worst engagement so far, Russians were allowed to slowly assemble multimillion-dollar segments of a pontoon bridge and begin crossing a key river with armor before prepared Ukrainians obliterated scores of vehicles and apparently an entire division of Russian forces.

Cannot Remain In Power: What That Means Without Any NATO Attack

Information Gap

If Putin's rule could survive Russians learning what its government was doing at Putin's instructions, Putin would not have suddenly changed the law to prevent Russians calling his invading Ukraine a "war" and closed all the independent news outlets in Russia. He knows his rule depends on misleading Russians. It's a lesson he learned while in the KGB, helping to mislead Russian and East German workers whose output was captured for the benefit of the regimes' political elites. Putin may have been deceived by Soviet propaganda about Russia's history, but he certainly understood his government employers did not try in any way to deliver Russians communism – ordinary Russians didn't control the means of production in Russia, did not choose how Russian resources would be allocated, and were prevented from achieving reform by farce elections that existed only for propaganda purposes (anyone operating a reform party was killed or incarcerated). Putin knew Russia's government existed for the benefit of its political elite, and he's worked to become the head of that political elite and to restore what he regards as the tragically lost glory of Stalin's Soviet empire.

Putin's miserly grip on true facts is killing Russians. Consider the soldiers who had no knowledge of the history of Chernobyl – why would Putin-authorized schools and media allow information about Russians causing the world's most notorious and nasty nuclear disaster? Ordered to seize Chernobyl with no forewarning of its dangers, soldiers not only stirred up radioactive dust driving vehicles through danger zones but dug trenches in areas so toxic facility oversight workers were forbidden even to go there. The deaths aren't all over-the-horizon horrors of dying slowly at home in a later year: in the first month Putin has gotten as much as 25% of his entire invasion force killed. This is a direct result of what onlookers have noted as a surprising inability to execute combined arms: Putin's armor has advanced without infantry support so armored elements could be picked off and destroyed by anti-armor infantry weapons like the NLAW and Javelin (or mines) which have been delivered to Ukraine in quantities that significantly outnumber Putin's entire inventory of tanks; advancing infantry has consistently lacked close air support; artillery hasn't supported armor; in essence, each of Putin's infantry, armor, artillery, and air units have been acting in relative isolation, and without the coordination required to execute military maneuvers at the skill and effectiveness NATO forces have trained to achieve. Putin's police state, apparently assuming that its information campaigns and not its huge numbers of troops have allowed it to swallow tiny opponents, grievously misunderstood the nature of the conflict it started in Ukraine.

The death toll isn't a diversion from the discussion of information, but a consequence of Putin's iron-fisted control over the distribution of facts. A Western military conducting a ground assault would empower a local officer to receive intelligence from every available source so that commands could be given across all military branches to achieve a joint mission intelligently integrating armor, artillery, bombing operations, infantry, close air support, and intelligence. Imagine for a moment how long Putin would last in office if some office other than his own had such broad access to information and military command. Would he last a week? The fact Western militaries do this all the time without governments collapsing in a coup shows that Western governments have the support of their people: they possess what in a democracy passes for legitimacy, which is broad popular support. Putin does not. In a Putinesque government, legitimacy is the fact of rule as maintained by bribe or threat and nothing more.

Putin can't let local commanders coordinate or he'd be out of a job and he knows it. Putin can't give his commanders the ability to perform like Western forces. This isn't something Putin can learn from: this is a fundamental flaw in Putin's entire style of government.

Ukrainian Capabilities

From the outset, Ukrainian civilians have opposed Russian invaders, refusing to collaborate with invaders (for which some were murdered), and poisoning occupiers. The crimes committed against Ukrainians have galvanized them against Russia. The enormous catalog of photos available online of Russian armor standing in a derelict shambles in Ukraine proves Ukraine is willing to engage Russia's armor, and the fact Ukraine has retaken towns Russia formerly occupied proves that it is capable of succeeding in offense against Russian infantry. The scores of Russian aircraft lost so far demonstrate it can do what Afghans did for more than nine years of occupation and make air operations a sphincter-puckering experience for Russians.

Russian claims about its destruction of Ukrainian personnel and equipment are pretty easily debunked: had Putin's forces obliterated more than 50% of Ukraine's inventory of tanks or artillery,  Ukraine's military would no longer be an effective fighting force. Yet, it's Russian forces in retreat. While Russia has managed to capture several small military watercraft, it's lost a landing craft and suffered damage to another landing craft and a patrol boat. Out of the water, the tables are turned: Ukraine has destroyed at least 62 Russian aircraft, the number Oryx has been independently able to verify through photographic evidence, while losing 30. Oryx has confirmed Russia's loss of 2608 ground vehicles including 448 tanks, of which 182 have been captured by Ukraine and turned against Putin; Oryx has confirmed Ukraine has lost 697 vehicles, including 95 tanks. This means Ukraine's tank count may have actually increased since the start of the invasion as its forces have captured from Putin more tanks than it has lost in battle. Other sources make Russia's losses to Ukraine look much grimmer: since Russia is unable to field precision munitions, the only way its aircraft can hit anything on the ground is to make a bombing run that is low enough for visual targeting, which drives planes directly into the teeth of the air defense Russians have no hope to suppress – man-portable anti-air rockets of the kind NATO countries have been showering Ukraine. Three weeks into the war Ukraine was claiming 77 aircraft kills, and the New York Times radio intercepts included numerous ignored pleas by a Russian armor radioman for close air support that never came. Russians can't do what they want with air.

Russians may be able to murder Ukrainian civilians at will, but they've been unable to defeat Ukraine's military forces anywhere. Citing Ukrainian sources, Pravda reports Ukraine has killed 16,600 invading Russian soldiers, a number greater than Russia's losses over several years in Chechnya or even its nine-plus-year campaign in Afghanistan.

Putin's Ambitions

Anyone who has been watching understood Putin planned to take the rest of Ukraine after he ordered it partially seized in 2014. His blatant invasion lacks the middle-of-the-night quietness of salami-slicing border encroachment committed by prior regimes, by China into India, or even by Putin into Georgia. Aggression hasn't worked out for Putin in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine: within the first two weeks Putin lost up to 10% of his combat forces – the very definition of "decimation."

Since Putin committed Russia's entire deployable force, there's nothing with which he can quickly reinforce troops he sacrificed to wood chipper that is Ukraine. Accordingly, Putin has been scraping to find soldiers he can re-allocate from occupation of Georgia (which Putin invaded in 2008), mercenaries from Syria and Putin's advertising campaigns targeted at Russians who have previously murdered civilians abroad, and a tyrant enthusiasts from war-ridden places like Chechnya. Putin's pleas for Belarusian soldiers have not met with success: Belarus' dictator owes his office to Putin's intervention, but Belarusians are dissatisfied with his sham elections, and Belarusians are undermining their dictator's effort to support Putin's war in Ukraine. Putin's work to keep Belarus under the boot of a puppet dictator has, in fact, made Belarusians enter Ukraine to kill Russians. Foreign volunteers motivated to defend against Putin for free might not actually reach the reported 20,000, but even so may dwarf the number Russia has been able to hire or import. One of the major foreign fighter groups in Ukraine is the Georgian Legion, which since 2014 has been striking back at the dictator who invaded their homeland; they're training other foreigners (including many from English-speaking countries). Since 2016 the legion has swelled from about one hundred fighters to hundreds of applications per day.

Putin's biggest enemy may be the shocking incompetence of his own regime. His army can't manage to get a column of vehicles to Kyiv on a paved road. The missiles he's firing into Ukraine have a fail rate approaching 60%. And he's not going to make it up in volume: he seems to be running out of inventory (other arguments here). The fact he wasn't ready for the war he started has been something of a shock to observers. Forces sent to capture Kyiv included elite Russian units like the now-decimated 331st Guards Parachute Regiment. Decisions to staff logistical roles with conscripts who haven't been on job even a single year hasn't helped keep Russian invaders supplied with food or armaments. Although Putin has just ordered another 134,500 men to be conscripted into the Russian army, they won't be of much help until trained. Also, deploying conscripts in a foreign war violates Russian law, and Putin's own claims, though he has been contradicted by Russian military sources who confirm Russia indeed ordered conscripts deployed to war to Putin's "special military operation" in Ukraine. The domestic effect of this news is severe enough that Putin made a public announcement ordering military prosecutors to identify and bring charges against those who sent conscripts into Ukraine in his invasion's first phase. Putin claims that these conscripts won't be sent to Ukraine, but time will prove him a liar as the vanishing Russian soldiers begin contradicting Putin's propaganda that everything is going to plan.

Apparently, part of the plan is shoddy equipment. Instead of military-grade communications with encryption, Russian soldiers have been found using unencrypted off-the shelf handheld walkie-talkies from budget Chinese manufacturers. Accordingly, their disorganization and panic can be heard on open channels, as captured by The New York Times. Russians' discussion of their own war crimes can be captured by German intelligence services. 

Considering the huge trove of photographs showing Russian armored personnel carriers and tanks destroyed in every corner of Ukraine, it's hard to see how Russia can sustain war while it can't build more military equipment. Check out this image, showing Russia removing from Ukraine the scrapped husks of destroyed Russian armor:

Looking at this photo casts in a new light all the photos shown of Russian armor rusting by a roadside or laying upside down or standing in a roadway with the turret blown free of the body: how many more of those we'd see if Russia had been able to spirit away more of the physical evidence.

Speaking of evidence, Putin's propaganda that Russians are carefully targeting exclusively military targets while providing humanitarian assistance to locals has been undermined by drone and satellite footage showing Russian forces slaughtering fleeing motorists, murdering bicyclists, shooting civilians in a bread line, and Russians killed civilians and left their corpses on the street before Ukrainians could possibly have created a staged scene. Russians killed and wounded civilians indiscriminately while committing an airstrike against a maternity hospital in Mariupol, which is not an isolated incident: Putin's forces have destroyed every single hospital in Chernihiv. By March 26, 2022, Russians had launched more than 70 separate attacks on Ukraine's hospitals and the World Health Organization said the number grew daily. The fact Russian soldiers are robbing civilians during their invasion is proved by the fact Ukrainian survivors can track their robbers' movements as they retreat with stolen Apple devices trackable by their owners. 

Looting expensive consumer tech isn't necessary to Russia's advance, but with Russian logistics in the toilet Russian soldiers have been looting grocery stores and living out of civilian houses and committing other criminal acts against civilians while driven to otherwise avoidable contact. Russia can't supply soldiers. So, it's little wonder all the evil Putin can order has failed to take Ukraine. It has, instead, galvanized against Russia virtually everyone capable of receiving uncensored news. Germans, who long disdained active military activity beyond their borders and resisted spending on defense what NATO encourages its members to spend, have escalated from sending Ukraine non-lethal aid like helmets to sending antitank and antiaircraft missiles while bumping defense spending above NATO's recommended 2% threshold. Putin's effort to strangle democracy in neighboring nations – Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus – has driven democracies together.

Sanctions have halted Putin's ability to restore lost force-projection capacity. For example, the two principal factories that make and rebuild Russia's tanks and armored personnel carriers have been shuttered for lack of parts formerly imported from Europe, which is Russia's most leading trading partner. Putin's aircraft lost their source for repair parts. Russia may have the ability to manufacture small arms, but vehicles? Putin had a hard enough time moving soldiers away from a railway when his ability to amass war matériel stood unobstructed. Now his power to project force is gone.

International condemnation isn't mere words: substantial changes in international trade posture has created a long-term and growing problem for Russia, the impact of which is already contracting the Russian economy. To prop up the Rouble with deposits in Russian banks, Putin had Russian banks more than double the interest rate to 20% – but inflation was forecast at 24%, but the White House Economic Council reported April 5 that current inflation in Russia stood at 2% per week or 200% per year. 

Putin wanted to live in the Soviet Union again … and now he does. He'll better understand how the Soviet Union he served through the '80s collapsed in the early '90s by making it happen again under his watch.

He'll throw bodies at this problem – and, like all those sent to their fruitless destruction in Afghanistan, they'll die.