The Root of All Evil
It was not a day, but a week of rage. Protests rocked Kurdistan, as clashes broke out between demonstrators and security forces in Sulaymaniyah over the issue of corruption. In Baghdad, similar clashes were reported as demonstrators waved dinar bills challenging the authorities to “live on” these measly amounts. Twenty three people have been killed so far, even as Iraq’s biggest oil refinery was attacked and production halted.
Meanwhile, the political coalition in Yemen took a hit as a prominent tribal leader, considered the second most powerful man in the country, defected from President Saleh’s ruling party and called for his overthrow. This came as tens of thousands oppositionists rallied in the streets. Bahrain swore in five new cabinet ministers for “housing, labor, health, cabinet affairs and electricity and water”, in an attempt to deflect unrest. This came as thousands greeted the arrival of a senior Shi’ite cleric, opposition leader, Hassan Mushaima, as he arrived from the UK. Efforts by the Saudi King to boost welfare payments in the Kingdom by $36 billion were indications it’s “greatest nightmare” had arrived.
Bahrain is only 20 miles from “Saudi Arabia’s oil- and Shiite-rich Eastern Province [it] has been a longtime recipient of Saudi aid. It has also been a focus of Iranian interests. The meeting was a clear signal of support for reigning monarchs, and an indication that the Saudi leadership is concerned about the events unfolding in Bahrain and throughout the region,” according to the Washington Post.
Concerned would be a mild word. “Saudi leaders were reportedly furious that the Obama administration ultimately supported regime change in Egypt, because of the precedent it could set”, starting a wave which everybody except Hillary Clinton’s State Deparment could ride.
That State Department continued to focus its efforts on the UN, where it hoped to find ways to apply sanctions on Libya, a country whose coastline had effectively been split between groups opposed and supportive of the Brother Leader Colonel Khadaffi, even as weapons were being served out to civilians in the streets of Tripoli. But the sanctions may be too little, and too late. Refugees from Libya are already streaming into Tunisia. It was, as the Los Angeles Times reported, “a full blown refugee crisis”.
At first it was dozens of foreigners, most of them Egyptian laborers, teetering under the weight of plastic-wrapped boxes or suitcases they carried on their backs as they made their way past customs guards and immigration officers into relative safety in Tunisia. … Then the crowds grew larger and larger. Busloads of Chinese engineers. Turkish businessmen. A smattering of Koreans. A wealthy Tunisian in a late-model BMW.
In Egypt, the upheaval of last month is moving to its logical conclusion, as “tens of thousands” again converged on Tahrir Square demanding a cabinet reshuffle but receiving in return, a beating from the Army. “Egypt’s ruling military council apologised on Saturday after military police beat protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, but activists called for fresh protests to denounce violence by the authorities.”
All over the Middle East, event is cascading onto event, and the main driver of disquiet was a five letter word: money. An NYT headline captured the essence of the problem. “Long Bread Lines and Open Revolt in Libya’s Capital”. And those bread lines are going to get even longer. Rising food prices, already fueling unrest in the streets, was due to climb even more steeply as the unrest itself raised production costs by raising the price of oil. Those same factors are fueling inflation in the West.
The same forces that are bringing down middle east governments are driving up your grocery bills. A local expert says things are about to get a lot worse. St. Louis shoppers know food prices are rising. A lot of that is because of higher fuel prices. They are raising the cost of growing and transporting food.
Some of those higher oil prices are due to unrest in places like Libya. In many cases that unrest has been caused in the first place by higher food prices. “Algeria had problems with sugar, it started there, then it moved to Tunisia, that’s what started in Egypt. All of these things have been started by food prices. And that’s, it’s, it’s a little scary.” said Economist Steve Nicholson of International Food Products.
That same five letter word is the object of union efforts to converge on Wisconsin. “It’s going to be huge,” one supporter said. “Union organizers are planning what they hope will be the biggest rally at the Capitol, topping last Saturday’s protest that drew 70,000 to the Capitol Square. That rally shut the downtown as parading protesters filled the streets. Today, demonstrators are hoping for even bigger crowds.” Shut the downtown? Sure that will help pay the budget shortfall, since everyone knows government money comes from a “stash”. Who says Arabs are dumb? That’s racist. They are at least as smart as public sector unions.
The drama in Wisconsin was being played out on an even grander scale as President Obama faced off with Congress over budget cuts, with Obama seeking to protect “gains” and Congress attempting to prevent even more raids on the taxpayer wallet. In the immortal words of Abba, “money, money, money”.
The fundamental problem of providing food, shelter, clothing and fuel is beginning to re-emerge in the long-affluent West, though it is nothing like the life and death struggles in the Third World, where crowds are struggling for bread, or running toward imagined safety with their cheap suitcases and boxes. But in both cases the problem is the same: there ain’t none. And in many instances the established order is trying to produce money by printing it, borrowing sums from each other, or simply promising to provide it. Kicking the can down the road.
But the bubble has burst. The can has retired itself from the kicking game and governments find themselves confronted with a thousand foot concrete wall, extending to the horizon in both directions, against which lies an immense pile of cans. A can of Hope here; a can of Change there. And somewhere under the pile, a can labeled the “Middle East Peace Process”.
Supply is unlikely to converge with demand again until a whole termite hill of parasitic institutions falls to the ground and regulatory regimes allow the markets to produce enough to meet the world’s rising expectations, for the color of the current world crisis is the color of money. Only then can some of the cans be picked up off the wall. For much of the world’s existing establishment, the Ideas of March are nearly come. But they are far from gone.
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It is disconcerting, to say the least, that Syria and Iran appear to be so stable in the midst of all this.
Did you drill far enough down, Wretchard? Is money the root of all evil, or the lack of it? I’d suggest it’s the lack. That, and the greed which comes from lusting after more. True, for some no amount is enough, and their gluttony and greed knows no bounds – but I don’t think this is true for most people.
So why is there lack of money in the West? I’d suggest it’s the greed for power and money by those on the Left. It has rarely been clearer than it is in the Wisconsin shut-down by the rampaging Left.
And why is there a severe lack of money in the ME? One word: ISLAM.
So the root of all evil in the West seems to be Leftism, and the root of all evil in the ME seems to be Islam. And the confluence of these two evils, again, perfectly epitomized in Baraq Hussein Obama, is a sinister and monstrous storm which is now only beginning to break on the rest. The confluence between Islam and communism will engulf our planet in the coming years.
Chaos in the ME serves two constituencies. The so-called “radical Muslims”, and the communistic subversive groups which have been supported by Obama. Interestingly, the compromise of laws and moral values engendered by the non-stop assault by the Left is the gateway disease which the sinister forces of Islam invade and spread. Multiculturalism — (a.k.a. Cultural Marxism, moral relativity, Social Justice, etc. ) is the method which Muslims use to subvert the West, and the call for social justice by Obama in Egypt is the thing which is ushering in the era of pan-Global Islamic Fascism.
Communism and its offspring are akin to AIDS – civilizational immunity against attack and collapse are mortally compromised by communistic onslaught. Islam is one of the heinous opportunistic infections which strides in once the subversion of Leftism destroys the immunity of a society. It is no coincidence that hard Left communistic regimes from Iran, Egypt, Turkey are now yielding to the opportunistic infection of Islam.
So the lack of money leads to nightmares as we are witnessing today, and what is far far worse, those very ideologies which have caused this collapse are now put forth by maniacs like Obama, Ahmadinijad, and UBL as the solutions to the problems which these charlatans have caused. More Islam in the ME, and more communism in the West.
Other totalitarian nightmares will come in the storm, including nationalistic socialistic movements in the West. This will happen because the descendants of Western civilization are now being drowned by tsunamis of surplus invaders from the broken hell-holes of the third world. This thesis needs refinement, but there it is in a nutshell as I see it.
I don’t think that money as such is the problem, but the distribution of money, of goods, of food and water.
The only modern industry in all of Arabia consists of living on top of oil deposits, and the royals and dictators are taking all of that, except for what they give out according to their own whims. And all they do for sport is look for non-Moslems – that is, foreign tribal members and tribes – to attack, in a tradition older than Islam itself.
In the fat and lazy west, we have industry and food, but nibble away at them over time, “too lazy to turn on the brain” is a critique you often hear of individuals, but we seen to be suffering it on a societal level. Maybe we are addressing our problems, but the process inevitably comprises a great deal of friction and waste heat. What we really hate is inaction, letting entropy just run things down. I’m not panicked, yet.
We (the world) have money, and food, and oil, and flat-screen tvs, and iPhones, but we seem to have more people than we need to produce all of these things, and that’s new. How did it happen? Automation, and outsourcing – bringing a billion Chinese and Indian peasants into the mix of people competing for half a billion jobs. Their subsistance plots can be more efficiently farmed in aggregate anyhow. But now we have too many college graduates, around the world, with nothing to do but twitter and bitch and plot.
I think the crisis is not money, but that whole systems of assumptions and rules are no longer working to distribute that money, to allow daily life, and to drive productivity and progress. Look at North Korea, beggaring itself for no sane reason for fifty years. Other examples may occur to you.
The wheels of fate grind slowly, but exceedingly fine.
And when they speed up, sometimes things get caught and ground up inadvertently.
Wars and Rumors of Wars, convulsion are erupting everywhere, the truth is fearful, unbelievable and denounced as a lie, calling for a one world financial (money) solutions and one world leadership (government). Few even think of what was foretold, most are as blind to the truth as the ones that have never heard it… It seems the days of Noah have returned to much of the earth, how much longer before all are engulfed?
That’s it exactly. Of course, the term ‘money’ is a metaphor for the infrastructure that generates money: “private enterprise free market capitalism”. This process belongs to one set of the population: the middle class.
The middle class are the free individuals who invest in small to medium private businesses that manufacture and sell their produce on the competitive free market. This is the ‘flesh and blood’, this is the productive wealth of a modern industrial economy.
In the Western world – which exploded in wealth, innovation, productivity and employment because of this middle class capitalism — the post world wars regression into socialism, which rests on ‘parasitic institutions’ has almost destroyed this wealth-making middle class.
The development of Redistributive Government in this era, saw govt raking in millions from the taxpayers, to then redistribute to the ‘parasities’, namely, the non-productive sectors of the population. The non-wealth producing sectors are: the permanently poor who have increased their numbers as the handouts increased, the zillions of special interest groups which live off the public purse, the entitled-to-their-entitlements public sector employees, the unions. The ability to tax the private sector to pay these parasites…has hit rock bottom.
The loss of the middle class, that private sector capitalism with its capacity to produce wealth – means that..there’s no more money!
As Wretchard writes: “Supply is unlikely to converge with demand again until a whole termite hill of parasitic institutions falls to the ground and regulatory regimes allow the markets to produce enough to meet the world’s rising expectations, for the color of the current world crisis is the color of money.”
The Middle East is imploding because it never moved into enabling a middle class capitalist economy. It was able to retain its old two-class redistributive economy long past its ‘best before’ due date – due to oil. The Big Govts simply took the revenues and redistributed it to the population, keeping everyone reasonably passive. But that era is over; there’s simply not enough revenue from the oil to keep pace with the exponential increase in the population in the ME. Egypt, for example, went from 40 to 80 million in the last 40 years.
And, the ME delilberately repressed any attempts by the people to set up private enterprises. Why? Because all economies must political empower their productive population. So, if your money comes via the Dictator’s control of oil – well, he gets the political power. If, on the other hand, your money comes from all those people engaged in a free market capitalist economy, well…you have to empower them. Via a constitutional democracy. heh – dictators don’t like that.
Even now – the ME dictators are trying to buy off the people. I hear Gadhaffi has just ‘released’ $400 to each citizen of Libya (as well as guns to fight each other). In Saudi Arabia, the King has ‘released’ money: offering citizens interest-free housing loans, debt forgiveness; a 15% increase to govt workers, families up to 15 members can get state aid; Kuwait gave each citizen $3,600 and free food for a year..
It won’t work; that era is over, but the new era in the ME, of private capitalism, a middle class and a constitutional democracy will, with glitches and difficulty, inevitably appear.
In Europe, the era of ‘tax-and-tax and give it all to the parasites, i.e., the non-productive’ is over and Europe is reeling in stunned surprise.
In the US, the Clinton Democrats of previous years and Obama’s agenda of doing just the same: tax-and-tax and give it all to the parasites – is finally meeting some concrete roadblocks. Obama’s ‘stimulus’, which was actually to pay for the massive public service of various states; his health care, which is actually a tax grab of 1/6th of the US economy; his other agendas – are meeting up with an awakening of the Common Sense awareness that: the money isn’t there.
And Obama’s printing of money won’t solve the problem – just as his current retreat from involvement in any government situation, whether it be the Middle East or the Public Unions – won’t solve the problem. Obama can spend his days playing basketball and golfing and his evenings having a party every night at the White House – but – it won’t solve the problem.
What seems to be happening is that the Executive Branch of the US govt has retreated into irrelevance – and the Congress, which Obama snubbed for the first two years – has started to retake control. We’re not there yet, but, the shifts have started…
Wretchard has it about right. The Left’s lust for power and central control are crushing the private sectors ability to generate wealth. It is a vicious circle. The Left has an insatiable desire to tax and regulate the evil private sector so they can redistribute wealth to their Union and government employee supporters. Unfortunately for the Left, they are killing the golden goose and running out of other people’s money. The Left won’t give up their power without a fight, but they’ll eventually weaken the West to the point where the Muslims will start to consolidate their foothold. Then we’ll have a weakened and Godless West fighting a holy war against the Muslims. At this point, it looks like China comes out on top without ever firing a shot. I suspect that historians will view Obama’s election as the final turning point for the West. In hindsight is will seem obvious that a civilization is doomed when it voluntarily elects a man who so obviously despises it.
Is there a pattern to all this? US Fed QE seems to have desired effect of, at least temporarily, propping up western markets. But inevitable commodity price inflation, which central bankers must have known would occur, is leading directly to what could easily been predicted. My guess is that it was predicted, and that while specific details on timing and sequencing were unknown, ultimate consequences were clear to someone in corridors of power. It kind of reminds me of Jack Ripper launching his wing on Plan R…he didn’t know exactly how events would play out, but he had his hope for change. Of course, Maj Kong helped, in greatest US military tradition, to bring about results most unintended.
Wisconsin Update:
No real news, but here’s my take on where things stand.
1. Republicans in the state senate don’t need any Dems to pass non-fiscal items. They can do away with collective bargaining any time they want. I believe they don’t wish to go down this path (for now) because it might appear “high handed” and could hurt them politically. (Too bad Nancy Pelosi & Co. weren’t concerned with stuff like this.)
2. There will soon be real world consequences – layoffs and service cut-backs in Wisc. (“Real World” – now there’s a concept that may be novel to some of the participants in this contest.) It appears Republicans are hoping the real world stuff will pressure at least one Dem to return to the state and provide a quorum.
3. Both sides are moving to recall various senators. Republicans should have the upper hand here. Only senators who were elected in 2008 can be recalled. Any Republican who held his seat in the Obama Wisc. landslide should be pretty safe in the current environment. The same cannot be said for Dems who were elected on Obama’s coattails.
4. Wisc. voters generally support Gov. Walker and the Republican legislature. However, they are somewhat queasy about taking away public sector collective bargaining. More education is needed on the topic. Some good education has been provided recently by Michael Barone here
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/02/24/public_unions_force_taxpayers_to_fund_dems_109013.html
and Kimberly Strassel here
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703530504576164822561737348.html
Yes money is at the top of the list but there IS a list. Everybody ignores the freedom injection given in Iraq by the 3rd Infantry Division(mechanized).
While reasonable people scoffed at the time, the current unrest WAS predicted. Arabs are very interconnected. Families cross boundaries of religion, tribe and country. So when an Iraqi tells his cousin in Egypt or Lebanon, that things still suck but not as bad, and if the fookin Americans hadn’t blown everything up it would be better cuz listens, Everybody wants freedom. What nobody wants is freedom delivered by JDAM. Or by US Marine rifle fire. Nobody wants an M1A1SEP2 clanking down their street looking for something to destroy.
When life is so bad the dead are considered fortunate, life holds little fear. Or rather so much fear that Thugs with automatic weapons don’t top the list. There is a better chance against a AK-47 wielding thug then a US Marine, an Abrams MBT or an Apache.
So they hit the streets. When ALL your options are bad you go with the one that gives the best chance. Taking on street thugs beats the US Military any day. Twice on Fridays.
So a confluence of circumstances. A desire to get rid of Dictators that are causing the poverty thru their mismanagment of resources. Evidence that elites are not needed to run things. The example of what’s wrong with having outsiders do it and the technical means to organize.
Viola; Food riots leading to Revolution.
Col. Quack-quack is trying for the Tiananmen Square solution. It worked for the Chinese, it might work for him. If it does, Every Despot on the planet will be hiring Mercs.
Some of those Mercs will organize coups and become the new despot.
History always repeats itself for those too stupid to learn from it.
Is the source of our sin self love or self neglecting? Is the civilized Taoist answer not to retreat and weep but rather to face the music, and dance?
I’m seeing more articles about how stable and prosperous countries that had/do link their currency to a gold standard were/are. How countries that use fiat money eventual come to grief because they can’t avoid the temptation to cry “Havoc and let loose the printing presses and debase the coinage!”
Money is not the root of all evil. Money is a technological innovation. Back in the day, the money oinked. People had to raise their own food and make their own shoes. Money allowed some people to get really good at just raising food, and other people get really good at just making shoes, and when the food-raisers needed shoes, instead of trading the oinkers for a pair, they just gave the shoe-makers money. And vice-versa.
6. Pavan: Then we’ll have a weakened and Godless West fighting a holy war against the Muslims
That’s sort of a contradiction in terms. A Holy War is more like the Crusades, when followers of competing gods went at it.
I suspect that historians will view Obama’s election as the final turning point for the West. In hindsight is will seem obvious that a civilization is doomed when it voluntarily elects a man who so obviously despises it.
Actually, a civilization is doomed when the people vote largess for themselves out of the treasury, as noted by Alexander Tytler:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
One by one they are going, and Saudi Arabia is next. No matter the president of the United States bowed down to the Saudi king, the days of the House of Saud are numbered.
Heavy heavy sleeps the crown
As protests grow intense
The blow may come from anywhere
They know not when or whence
The potentates have lived like kings
Entitlement their sense
The oil beneath the sand has made
Them rich beyond offense
But now their subjects feel the winds
Of change blow down the fence
That separates them from the kings
In silken Bedouin tents
Who dine on golden plates and who
Breathe only fine incense
And loll on satin sheets with dolls
Though some prefer the gents
And now it all turns into dust
In storms of violence
Yes heavy heavy sleeps the crown
That once owned presidents
Ah money! That mysterious being that Marx called the “object par exellence.” We seem to understand what it’s dynamics are, and then they eludes us. As economists we comb through the records of transactions, following the squelchy slip and slide of money, foaming from one currency to another, yet rarely are we in accord as to why money flowed that way then, but flows this way now.
Right now, many central banks of developed countries are injecting money into their economies hoping to keep a lackluster recovery going. At the same time developing countries and China are raising interest rates and banking reserve requirements to keep the presence of surplus money in their economies from pushing inflation to double digits. Friedrich Hayek argued that the appropriate focus of monetary theory had to include both the classical theory of price determination, based on the use of money as a barter, and a study of the indirect exchange of money in an economy. He coined the term “neutral money” in part as a means to allow for the study of “injection effects.” When money is introduced or injected in some particular way, this event temporarily distorts relative prices causing them to communicate false information about consumer preferences and resource availabilities.
The present “bumpy ride” in the political economies of the world, can they be attributed to the distortions of the never-before-now injection of trillions into the limp developed economies? Keynesians would say “no”, but I think Hayek is once again having the final word in the debate.
Yes we want more money, but do we really LOVE money? Money can be as dangerous as any liquid when it becomes too scarce or too plentiful. Drought or Tsunami, what’s your death wish?
Beware the Ideas of March.
Col. Quack-quack is trying for the Tiananmen Square solution.
The Duck of Death has evidently lost his duck-ess:
Ace notes:
“Losing major cities? Bad.
Losing oil-rich coasts? Worse.
Losing your paid big-breasted ‘nurse’? It’s over.
And I’m not just being silly — Gadaffy presumably has much more control over this prostitute than the average man in the street of Tripoli. She’s close to him, she’s important to him, and as he says, ‘I either rule you or I kill you.’
So now she’s splitting. Possibly with his approval, but if that’s the case, he knows he’s done. And if he’s not insisting she go down, Eva Braun style, with him, maybe he’s thinking about sparing Tripoli his last bloodbath, too.”
http://minx.cc/?post=312603
Money isn’t wealth, though it looks like it to an individual.
It’s a ticket in line to say what the economy does next, presumably something for you.
The central bank creates and destroys tickets so as to match their number to what the economy is capable of doing at once, so the economy doesn’t go idle from lack of tickets, nor do too many tickets bid against each other over scarce goods.
It’s not creating and destroying wealth when it does this – it’s just matching the money supply to the economy’s capability.
When you run out of stuff, it’s production that’s starved; not money.
Avoid making it worse, might be a good rule.
The traditional basket case economy way to starve production is hand out free goods. The local economy can’t compete with free and dies out. That’s a side effect of foreign aid.
Another good tradition is no way to get clear title to property – so you can’t use your property as collateral on a loan, and so can’t get a loan.
And general corruption and thuggery makes business unprofitable.
Add riots and that’s where we are.
There used to be a category of person called a louse.
He would break in and steal your $500 stereo (old example) and sell it for $10.
Modern kleptocrats steal a tiny fraction of the economy and collapse the entire thing, which is pretty much the same category.
It’s not the stealing so much as the huge disproportionality of it to its effects.
Look at North Korea, beggaring itself for no sane reason for fifty years. Other examples may occur to you.
Speaking of which, Dan Miller writes, “How About Adding a North Korea Crisis to the Mix?” — well not just North Korea, but Pakistan and Venezuela. He uses a phrase, “the economic hot-spot du jour” to illustrate the Obama administration’s inability to track.
I prefer the phrase engagement queue, but no matter. Miller writes:
Rising prices may impoverish Americans, but they will literally starve millions of others first. Beginning with North Korea, Cuba, Pakistan and all those other picturesque places so beloved of the Left which cannot and have never been able to feed themselves.
China pays for fuel too. As does Japan. Both import food. As does Britain. So if the fuse has only just started to burn, just look at what it may be rigged up to detonate. Oh, and the engagement queue.
The President’s ability to consider and deal with these issues is now fully saturated. As additional problems come on line, they will be essentially be uncovered. For example, the refugee floods in Tunis would ordinarily be the subject of humanitarian relief. But at the rate things are going any actions will be overtaken by events.
I wrote in other posts that the real argument for against intervening in Libya was that it already too late. We have bigger fish to fry. The region, not just one country, is changing. And the diplomatic machine is caught up in the toils of that hopeless time waster, the United Nations, when it should be trying for formulate a common understanding among allies to the biggest crisis since World War 2.
In the end there are three countries which are stable, secure and food-rich enough to provide the fulcrum of fate. They have the land area, the encircling oceans, the technological base to make a difference. The arsenals, granaries and Athenses of the a new era are the United States, Canada and Australia. If they don’t screw up.
And that’s a big if. Julia Gillard is if anything, more feckless than Hillary Clinton. She thinks a “carbon emissions scheme” is what the world needs now. But neither she nor Harper count. The game will be decided in Washington. If America can recover rationality, there will be hope for the Allies and the world. If not, well we are in for a rough ride.
It is disconcerting, to say the least, that Syria and Iran appear to be so stable in the midst of all this.
They have better mechanisms of repression and better press with the Left. But that won’t help them in the end any more than it helped Khdaffi when the tipping point was reached. Countries like that never blow any gaskets but the really big ones. And then it’s fire-in-the-hole!
“Algeria had problems with sugar, it started there, then it moved to Tunisia, that’s what started in Egypt. All of these things have been started by food prices…”
Those crafty Brazilians. They began turning sugar into ethanol knowing sugar prices would go up and cause riots in the Arab world that would lead to a shut down in oil production and drive up the price of oil — Right when their own offshore finds came on line!
And the Brazilians also helped con us into electing the Democrats (we would so love Americans if only they elect Obama! You can come carnival with us!). You see, they knew the Democrats would shut down US oil production — thus driving up the price of oil right when they became flush with oil. I, for one, never trusted those Brazilians when they said they’d love us if only we got rid of George Bush.
Crafty, those Brazilians are — and clever, too. One question: can they go back to exporting sugar? And will the US drop its sugar quotas — first adopted, oh, a couple of centuries ago (in the nineteenth, I believe).
As for “useful regulations,” I use to say that the American Textile Industry started as a highly protected infant industry in the early 1800′s and ended as a highly protected senile industry — it went from the maternity ward to the nursing home without ever experiencing robust youth. Do we even have a textile industry anymore?
It is my understanding that even with the absence of its Democratic contingent the Wisconsin Senate may consider legislation that is not budget related. Now might be a good time for the WI upper house to consider a statute to require all persons being placed on the WI Ballot for the office of U.S. president be required to present a valid birth certificate. This statute would be non-partisan and not aimed at any individual politician but would be in pursuit of good governance. This might help productively use downtime that otherwise might be wasted by not having 2/3 of the legislative body present. As it now stands a completely faultless politician could conceivably be tainted by accusations of not being a U.S. citizen. Such a statute would go a long way towards protecting such a politician from such unfounded accusations. The WI legislature may even wish to title such a proposed piece of legislation the “2011 Anti-Birther Law”. Democrats certainly pride themselves as being the party of good governance and some of the missing Democratic WI Senators may wish to return so that they may have some input into such a statute. Should any Democratic WI Senators return this would obviously allow the upper house to then also address budget related items which as this post indicates is quite timely and necessary.
Things are going to be tough on the cosmopolitans, though with any luck, not as tough as they were on the crowned heads of the 19th century. Part of their misfortune is that many won’t see it coming. Lee Smith notes that “First Lady Mrs. Asma al-Assad” — First Lady of Syria that is, is now the cynosure of Vogue. Although that source is not directly available, we do have some second-hand quotes.
In and around the article, we learn why the Opthamologist of Damascus studied his specialty.
It’s a world away from the grubby confines of sandbagged outpost in Afghanistan or the hovel of the Hapi-hapi man, or the senior found frozen dead in apartment with bits of cardboard and dogfood in his stomach, clipped out coupons hopefully folded on the nightstand. The bitter clingers.
F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that when you’ve got the means, you don’t have to be shy. You just radiate personality upon the world. Nick and Gatsby got to talking about Daisy.
Fitzgerald said elsewhere, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
For one, they don’t even own cardboard suitcases of the kind being borne on refugee’s heads across the Tunisian border. And if the smash comes I think even the poor dopes will find their heads bowed in sorrow, in ways they would not even mourn themselves. “When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
Maybe, it’s the repitition at Passover; but plagues came to Eygpt (then.) Haiti has them, now. And, no press.
As to those who’ve showed up to Madison, Wisconsin, where the Capitol, itself, has seen the demonstrators, this just opens the door to the Capitol being used by others. (The Supreme Court said IF one group can demonstrate, then ALL can do so.)
While the American press has pretty much fallen silent on what’s going on. Except of course, whipping Israel is still the farce that keeps playing out.
Maybe, it’s the repitition at Passover; but plagues came to Eygpt (then.) Haiti has them, now. And, no press.
As to those who’ve showed up to Madison, Wisconsin, where the Capitol, itself, has seen the demonstrators, this just opens the door to the Capitol being used by others. (The Supreme Court said IF one group can demonstrate, then ALL can do so.)
While the American press has pretty much fallen silent on what’s going on. Except of course, whipping Israel is still the farce that keeps playing out.
If no one noticed, the world’s over-populated. So the stresses on food production can’t really be met. And, it’s time to STOP putting corn into gasoline. Time for the US Congress to catch up. (Part of this they see. New heroes have come down the pike. News like this even makes its way inside Congress.)
@ 6. pavan. Foresight?
“In hindsight is will seem obvious that a civilization is doomed when it voluntarily elects a man who so obviously despises it.”
…-
“Society Against Itself: Howard Schwartz On The Suicide Of Western Civilization
From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Tue, 2011-02-22 18:04
Howard Schwartz chooses to begin Society Against Itself (Karnac 2010) – a book that belongs on the shelf with Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Paul Gottfried’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002) – with an epigraph from Euripides’ tragedy, said to be his last in order of composition, The Bacchae. In the twilight of the polis-phase of Greek existence, in the aftermath of the catastrophic wars between Athens and Sparta, and under the looming shadow of Macedonian hegemony, Euripides draws a picture of a state in precipitous dissolution, gripped by a combination of religious mania and petulant rebellion against the limitations of civic life. The source of the crisis is the siren-call of a wandering stranger who urges the women of Thebes to renounce civic order as the equivalent of unbearable tyranny and to desert their city for the sake of orgiastic Amazonism in the surrounding countryside. In the scene that has piqued Schwartz’s imagination and which forecasts his argument, Agave, daughter of Cadmus and mother of Pentheus, the reigning king, has just murdered her son under the mad delusion that he was a lion, and she is displaying the trophy of her kill, a severed head, for her sire to see.
Cadmus, founder of Thebes and its first king, replies in an upwelling of anguish: “Fair is the victim thou hast offered to the gods, inviting me and my Thebans to the feast. Ah, woe is me first for thy sorrows, then for mine.” Yet Cadmus himself is not guiltless in the enormity, for he too has felt the allure of the antinomian cult, donning the goatskin to dance with the women in the Bacchanals. Even Pentheus, seeking to restore order, had yielded to prurient curiosity; he let himself be persuaded to spy on the mountainside orgies and thereby fell into the Bacchants’ homicidal clutches.
As Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy (1870), the phenomena of the Dionysus cult, which so troubled the Athenian assembly that it once banned the rites, were and are quite real and are fully attestable in other historical contexts than the Classical one.”
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4689
We are seeing the meaning of the phrase “incomes are being downwardly aligned to output.” The leftist fairy tales about the peoples’ great bank account in the sky have been exposed. The only way out is to increase output of things that carry intrinsic value. The faster output increases, the faster incomes will rise.
One partial fix for the food problem in third world countries might be to abolish or drastically reduce the EU’s golden farm subsidies. These subsidies have put farmers out of business in places like Ethiopia and other third world countries, therebye undermining their agrarian economies. Removing or reducing the farm subsidies (including biofuel subsidies) in America and Canada might also be a good idea because it would encourage new techniques, would improve productivity and would produce the things that the market wanted, not what the government wants to produce. The downside would be the increase of market prices for unsubsidised food in Europe and N. America until productivity increased. The upside would be cuts to government expenditures. In Canada the Canadian Wheat Board which distorts the market for and the production of wheat grown in Western Canada should be abolished. Ditto the Canadian quota system for dairy farmers which inflates Canadian prices of all dairy based food products.
Industrialized countries have for the most part declining population numbers, third world countries of the islamic and/or socialist bent have had increasing populations. But now the third world’s lack of productivity is comming home to roost and despite natural resources are facing a die off. In Japan the farming villages are depopulating and disapearing, people don’t want to do it and small patch farms can’t compete in the market anymore. In Rural S. Korea the men have been accepting foreign brides because Korean chicks don’t want that life style.
Anyhow as Wrecthard points, out the changes are accelerating faster than the old elites an institutions can cope with. The question is not if but when and how many casualties will there be before things shake out.
Here’s a question – when North Korea looks at the newly prosperous China, what do they think? That China has sold out the people and the revolution, I guess, what else could they think?
–
c.h @ 23: it is not clear that the world’s carrying capacity is maxed out, in “The Rational Optimist” Matt Ridley argues we can do another two billion without undo strain at current consumption levels. We may seem to be pressing on the limits of food production, but who would grow 30% more food when there’s no need? The critical resource in the next century may be fresh water, but there’s no shortage of non-fresh water. We may not have quite the margins in that there are no new continents to walk into and start farming, but the only people who actually starve in today’s world starve for political reasons, not because there is no food.
–
Back on the general topic, it is still my understanding that there are just oceans of loose capital (ie, money) sloshing around the world, say Mubarak’s and Khaddafi’s bank accounts, several trillion dollar sovereign wealth funds, etc. I think this is more liquid capital by far than in any previous era.
The Irish election was today; the ruling party that favored paying back all their banks’ debts lost big time. This may be another black swan.
As is usual for him, Robt D Kaplan has a thoughtful article in the W Post re North Africa. One point is that whereas Tunisia and Egypt are actually countries of long standing the rest (eg Algeria, Libya) are made-up, lines on a map. For these latter entities it will be a period of trial and error, imposing order from the bottom up vs the US, inheriting a system from England and struggling to limit power from the top down.
cadams…
That’s a WHITE swan: entirely predictable.
#5 ETAB: You missed a glaringly obvious, completely non-productive and ethics-free institution or set of institutions. Banking, particularly merchant banking. What exactly does the latter contribute to the welfare of society? Answers on the back of a postage stamp, please.
#31 Fletcher Christian – I wouldn’t define a bank as non-productive. And ethics has nothing to do with institutions; ethics is an individual responsibility.
A bank gathers money from investors and then, invests that money by loaning it to someone..to develop some commidity. That is, a bank or set of investors funds the future infrastructure of a society. What’s wrong with that? It can fund low-risk or high-risk ventures. Therefore, this function – the act of financially supporting the future – is highly productive.
How does a society support its continuity and its robust existence in the future? It must gather surplus from its current activities and use it to invest in the future. In an agricultural economy, this can mean saving grain seeds to plant next year, ensuring that animals reproduce and are healthy. It can mean making a profit to invest, as a community, in a road. In an industrial economy, it can mean funding a new research centre to develop treatments for diseases. Or to develop more productive farms.
So- I might be missing some vital outlook, but I see banks, or investment activities, as vital to a strong society.
A bank adds liquidity, concentrates capital, and makes rational judgements. It allows time-shifting of earning and spending. It spreads risk.
It also seeks rent on all those functions, and adds large-magnitude risks of error and malfeasance across all of its liabilities.
Costs and benefits, folks.
A couple of more five letter words, profit and covet.
The Brits have have taken decisive action to save their citizens
Special forces swoop on Libya to pull Britons to safety
A daring rescue operation by Special Forces flew scores of British citizens out of Libya last night as the net closed in on Col Muammar Gaddafi.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8349896/Special-forces-swoop-on-Libya-to-pull-Britons-to-safety.html
Well done SAS–Who Dares Wins !
Who is going to incinerate the Mustard gas stockpile?
We know where it is–if nobody acts it will fall into very evil hands.
The UN SC unanimous vote tonight to take Gaddafi and gang to the International Criminal Court sets a very interesting precedent
–hearing China support the motion was a hoot.
Who is next up before the ICC?
#34 robott – profit is absolutely vital for a people. You’ve got to ‘make more’ than you consume. If you don’t, then you cannot control the future.
If you don’t harvest more grain than you consume, then you have no seeds to plant next year.
If you don’t make a profit from what you produce, then you cannot purchase the new tractor or land or put in a water purifying system or…
Profit is necessary in any and all economies.
The term ‘covet’ is a psychological rather than economic term and thus, the two ‘profit and covet’ don’t have any relation to each other.
But look on the bright side.
Now that the Saudis have to give more of their oil revenues to the locals, they will have less to spend on spreading their Religion of Peace, constructing mega-mosques around the world, etc.
They will then discover what Obama knows – no one wants you when you lose.
ADE
A thought, maybe as the Iranians spread their reach, the Sunni Arab nations may decide that they are running out of time and use mercenaries and purchased weapons to strike their traditional Persian enemies.
@wretchard 22: Yes, yes, the present rulers of Syria are wealthy, but their wealth differs from that of the Buchanans of which FitzGerald writes. These rich Americans gained their wealth from the efforts of earlier generations who presumably worked the more-or-less laissez-faire capitalist system of the 19th century. There is little to link their wealth with blood-soaked fascism of the sort practiced by the Assads. No, the wealth of these folks, Assad, Khadafi, Hussein, Bashir, etc. is linked to the deliberate political mass murder of human beings who they found inconvenient for their reigns. Yes, the wealthy are different from the poor or middle class, but they are also different from each other … a fact that FitzGerald never knew, being only a powerless middle class writer who never met monsters of the above variety, and so never imagined the immensity of bloody death they can deal out. Some nights are not tender.
“Along the way, songs like ‘Dancing in the Streets’ and ‘What’s Going On’ became the soundtrack of the civil rights era,” President Obama said in the East Room of the White House. What? ‘Dancing in the Streets’ came out in 1964 was a party song and had nothing to do with civil rights, ‘What’s Going On’ came out in 1971 well after the civil right era. Obama is making up history again. I seem to remember spirituals being sung by the freedom fighters of the early 60′s.
As the new republicans haul that sacred cow into the public square for slaughter, the Donks believe that the townsfolk will eventually lose their appetite. That’s why —at the national level— 0’s budget proposal is lacking any genuine cuts. Someone said a few threads back, Any politician who tells the truth is toast.
So why not just keep your mouth shut and let the other side scare the hell out of everybody? I know Walker will succeed with the current agenda, but in 2012, I worry that BH0 —and an army of can-kickers across the country— will be summoned by the electorate to end this mad neo-fad. The number of protestors amassed at the Wisconsin capital is utterly stunning.
Remember Bluto whipping up the Delta House against the establishment? Who’s with me?! Let’s do it!
Out the door he charges, alone.
Wretchard #22:
Or as Heinlein put it “The guy that goes broke in a big way never misses a meal. The little guy that is short half a buck is the one that has to tighten his belt.”
So Obama can see to it that “electricity rates sprial upwards” in order to thread his way though the delicate set of illusions that is Leftist philosophy – and never have to break a sweat or feel the chill of winter.
Instead of “Let them eat cake” it’s “Let them use compact flourescent bulbs.” And if senior citizens are eating not only Raman noodles but the box they came in, not to worry, they’ll have a “program” to handle that.
The cuts MUST await exposition.
Britain never faced the pain until the imminence of Hitler launched Churchill.
Likewise, for us.
All of the conservative pundits are all wet WRT the Speaker and current legislation. Shutting down the Government is a terrible idea. It’s TERRIBLE politics. No wonder the Democrats are praying for it.
Issa is the point man. The truth must be outed FIRST. Investigations have to expose what has happened.
Likewise, the WI teacher’s scam is still not fully exposed. The Union Democrat axis in WI was enabling the Democrat Party to feed directly off of state payrolls via a two-step scheme. Beyond that, the Union vectored even more money to union coffers by dictating the health plan provider — which was the highest cost most union connected one to be found!
The spreadsheet needs to go public. Wisconsin voters need to know how many ways the Democrat Party squeezed the State teat.
In a decade of no real growth in the private economy — Wisconsin’s outlays, per capita, on students went up 7% year over year — for the whole decade! That’s a clean double. The public union employees left the private market in the dust.
Yeah, blert, I found out yesterday about that scam where the WI unions started their own high cost health insurance plans and vectored state money to them. Outrageous stuff. And to that I’d add the vectoring of the ‘stimulus’ money.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tracked $701 million that came there from the federal stimulus package, and $632 million of it went straight into public union pension and health plans. No wonder those shovel-ready jobs proved so elusive!
A decade of working and living in the vicinity of San Francisco heightened my personal distaste for our era’s unwholesome obsession with technology. During the climax of the “Dot-Com” frenzy TV commercials harangued viewers to abandon all traditional forms of commerce and social interaction, and surrender to the New Deity of the Internet, where buying groceries online would restore your wilted sex drive, re-grow lost hair, and make your poop smell like peppermint. In the rarified technoculture of Silicon Valley, new personal gadgets became the measure of a person’s status.
Venture Capitalists or IC chip designers who could afford a vehicle from Automibili Lamborghini S.p.A., a classic Bugatti, and a private jet to visit their facilities in Cleveland and Kaua’i, would retire to their estates to mope and sulk if a competitor or friend managed to score a pre-release version of the latest speaking PDA, satellite-dish-on-a-roll-up-keyboard, or 3D wireless goggles with go-faster stripes, before they did. Similar torments prevailed for us lowly peasant “non-exempt” employees, though on a more modest budget.
So what? I guess my response to all that has been similar to the many high-techies I met in the Society for Creative Anachronism — about a solid quarter of whom were Fortune 500 system administrators, programmers holding several patents, designers and owners of chip manufacturing facilities, developers for DARPA, Livermore, Berkeley, Stanford, etc. In other words, they found great relaxation in camping in silly clothes, carrying their own water, food, cookware, bedding, and shelter to a campsite for days at a time, and learning medieval crafts such as tanning, cheese-making, textile dying, minting coins, fabricating their own museum-quality armor, blacksmithing, woodworking, et cetera.
I mind a writer’s anecdote describing stories of his grandfather as a young man in early 19th century New England. IIRC, he described the man starting his day doing chores on his farm, then traveling some miles to meet with neighbors to write up a proper contract for them to take to the courthouse to register their transaction, later setting a broken leg for an injured worker at another neighbor’s farm, finally returning home to administer Latin grammar and math lessons to his children to supplement their regular schooling. Not all of those every day, of course; the point was that people had to be self-reliant in a number of skills, to thrive.
Well, after all, any of us can learn enough first aid to handle things like draining abscesses, births without complications, resolving fractures, dressing and bandaging wounds, and so on. Anyone with a few hundred square feet of land can grow enough food to keep from starving. Just a passing ability with hand tools is sufficient to build a shelter to keep a body warm and snug.
The problem is not growing a garden. It is protecting that garden from the predations of panicked and utterly unskilled dependent types who have only ever waited for government food stamps, government checks, government cheese, government health clinics, etc. This would happen when local government has abdicated its police power, or when the police or national guard are fully engaged elsewhere. Would you be prepared to use whatever level of force is necessary to repel other humans in order to protect your family from a horde of freeloaders who will break down your fences, trample your cabbages, steal your chickens and cracked corn, rape your wife and daughter, eat your dog, and kick you out of the cottage you’ve built by the sweat of your brow?
As a Christian, I view these extremities with much ambivalence. In counterpoise to the instruction to “turn the other cheek” I set my responsibility to protect from evil the innocent and powerless in my care. In other words, just as forgiveness is said to require repentance and the renunciation of sin, charity is for those who are not trying to kill me or my family. I’ve devoted a good deal of my personal efforts to helping to share self-reliance skills with other folks. Theology and Practical necessity.
Libya: Regime of Gaddafi in its final hours http://bit.ly/fTgv8z
The tyrants were always there, as were the poor and the disaffected. The would-be revolutionaries were always hunkered down, unable to organize without meeting, and meeting exposed them to the gestapos. They didn’t know their own numbers. Didn’t know each other. Couldn’t speak with one voice.
Then came the cellphone, the cellphone camera, Twitter and all that. Instant mobs could respond to news known instantly worldwide. They discovered each other. They are now faster and smarter than the old tyrants. Iranians demonstrated the potential, though they haven’t won theirs yet. The possums are eating the dinosaurs.
…my guess: Gaddafi is offed by mercs…
blert,
Britain never faced the pain until the imminence of Hitler launched Churchill.
The minute that Hitler was out of the room, before the Japanese were even defeated, the British fired Churchill while he was at Potsdam. They refused to face reality and resented being made to, so they blamed Churchill for it and ran again away from the pain into a world of real promises of narcotics. The real decline of Britain can be marked from that moment. Not the physical destruction of the war nor even the loss of a sense of mission that came with decolonization but the sickness of the National Health Service and the Welfare State is what undid Britain.
BTW
Just send a dossier of photos of Kakadaffy’s All Girl Commando Body Guard to the Marines onboard USS Kearsarge and tell them those poor misguided ladies need rescue. I’ll bet that ship will crank out warp speed if it has to dig a new canal and 1,500 guys in green will show up in no time.
uh he only had Ukrainian nurses lately, though seems that they left
see some pics
http://tinyurl.com/6feqnoo
FWIW – Wisconsin Police Union Members Threaten Insurrection
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2011/02/wisconsin-police-union-members-threaten.html
f47,
The line is crossed. There is no overestimating how important that is, even if it is really a handful of blowhards. In the dreams of the radicals they want to reenact the scene in Trotsky’s Russian Revolution where the people crawled under the horses of the Cossacks. If they can crack the police, just like they work tirelessly to undermine discipline in the military, then they think they are winning the big fantasy payoff. If I was Governor Walker I’d mobilize the Guard. Some states have a non-federally recognized organized volunteer militia in addition. They are usually of little use but could provide logistic support if the Guard has to go in and clear the building. He may want to call other Governors for support. I am not sure if a Governor can order his troops to operate under the orders of another state’s Governor. To me any LEO found in that building contrary to orders should be arrested and face the most serious charges that the Attorney General can bring.
This could be grounds for decertifying the union and firing members who stated that they would defy lawful orders.
To semi quote Obama:
“It is neccessary for the price of energy to rise to the point to where there is an awakining to a new dawn. A sunrise of sustainable energy that is clean and pure”.
The fool in the WH is getting his wish.
As the breadbasket of the world crumbles into Marxist oblivian.
And the rest of the civilized world crumbles beside it.
Hmmm, polling in Japan shows that the current Kan government and party is not popular at all. Now polling is showing they are not at all happy with the Chinese and the Russians, their is talk about changing the Japanese constituion, in part due to lack of confidence in the US comming to Japans defense…..hello Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere?
o/t
Bernard Lewis on the explosion of outrage in the Muslim world
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/02/bernard-lewis-on-explosion-of-outrage.html
bftp 49
Churchill is said to have been especially depressed by losing the votes of the army in 1945. What he was probably unaware of was that the army educational corps, tasked generally with the maintaining of soldiers morale, had been taken over by communists such as Eric Hobsbawm and become another tool of socialist propaganda.
The root of all evil is the heart of a black soul
A force that has lived all eternity
The never ending search for a truth never told
The loss of all hope and your dignity
Slayer
“South of Heaven”
#8 Radag Brown “It appears Republicans are hoping the real world stuff will pressure at least one Dem to return to the state and provide a quorum.”
I hope your conclusion is wrong and the Republicans are not that naive. If one Democrat senator broke unity to return, giving the Republicans their quorum, not only would (s)he be politically dead, (s)he would be in real physical danger.
And thanks for the updates.
((pasted from Instapundit:
ECONOMIC WARFARE: Was the U.S. a victim of an economic 9/11 in 2008? Unclassified DoD report at the link.
So does this mean that Jim Cramer was actually right?
Posted at 7:44 am by Glenn Reynolds
end quote))
***
There’s a lot more to it than the DoD PDF mentions. But it’s a start. And there’s news on the BP front, too.
***
Once folks understand BP, it’ll get a ‘gate’ appendment. And maybe a ‘BO’ too. Beepgate. Bobeep gate. Little Bobeep.