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Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said Moscow was bidding to help lead efforts to build a new world economic order after the old system collapsed in the global financial crisis. Mr Medvedev said the renewed interest in Russia this year was a sign of a changing world in which the institutions of the western-dominated world order had had their day amid thousands of corporate defaults and the threat of sovereign defaults. Medvedev said, “What had seemed untouchable has collapsed. The bubbles that created the illusion of flourishing economies have burst. And we should use it to build a modern, flourishing and strong Russia … which will be a co-founder of the new world economic order and a full participant in the collective political leadership of the post-crisis world.” That’s just great. Russia is now vying to lead the world economy. Now, I’m not faulting Dmitry. I don’t fault ambition, ever. But I am going to do some “faulting” here. Here’s what I’m going to fault. Western Government, that’s what.
Two points to consider Dmitry. One, the free market didn’t fail. Two, Western Government failed. Yes, we are in a global recession. Yes, times have been tough.
But mind you Dmitry, the vast, vast, vast majority of failures have been directly tied to government. Let’s check it out. AIG? Credit default swaps unregulated by government, thank you Lindsey Grahm and President Clinton. Financial Crisis on Wall Street? Community Redevelopment Act, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, are the root causes. The auto industry? Government imposed café standards and unions. Steel Industry? Unions and regulation caused its demise. Real estate market crash? Again, Community Redevelopment Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Outlandish corporate risks gone bad? Enabled by government bail outs.
But the biggest failure? Government? Which one? Pick. U.S., Greece, Spain, Portugal, U.K., Ireland, Japan. Every one of them simply spent more than they took in and bankrupted themselves, except they don’t have to go bankrupt, they can tax. The problem is that when they tax they kill the host that their parasitic nature depends on. They kill the private sector which when you look at the portion of the private sector that is not tethered, buoyed or inflated by government, that portion is doing all right, even in these disastrous times. But even the portion of the private sector that isn’t attached to the wet teet of government will be crushed if government takes much more of the productivity.
And that’s the plan, to take more, to redistribute more, to further slash liberty to the bare. Every nation, every leader needs a kick in the head. They need to be forced to objectively review history and admit that they are wrong in their pursuits. They need to accept the fact that government, more often than not, is not the solution, it’s the problem. Government is unaccountable and suffers little consequence, thus they routinely fail as they are now. This isn’t new. This is the same old story.
Come on readers. How’s our government doing on the Gulf Oil Spill? How is our government doing on the illegal alien problem? Our government couldn’t even run Arlington National Cemetery correctly. If you didn’t see the news today, they found a pile of head stones in a creek bed and were recently found to be burying veterans on top of other veterans. It is rather ironic that our government can’t even manage to run a burial appropriately while at the same time, pushing us in a direction where it’s going to need it’s own burial. There’s more. Social Security? Bankrupt. Medicare? Bankrupt. Medicaid? Bankrupt. Our future, bankrupt. (If we don’t act fast). We have 113 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities crashing down on us. If we don’t change, we are dooming ourselves and our children and our children’s children. Shame on us.
Yet, I’ll give Dmitry this: He’s on the right track. He said this too: “Russia needs a real investment boom”, in order to achieve its modernization goals, he said. To stimulate that, Mr Medvedev announced Moscow would introduce zero taxation on capital gains for companies working on long-term investments starting from January next year and said Russia was improving the legal system to provide better protection for businesses against the long arm of bureaucracy.
Wow, we won the cold war only to be out libertied by the Ruskies! Now that’s down right embarrassing.
Wake up folks. Government is the problem. It’s a cancer, and it’s killing us. We need to get it under control. We need to shrink the tumor or learn to speak Russian or maybe Chinese.
That’s my Reetzality for the day.
Thanks for the read.
Brett Reetz
Now this is what I’ve been trying to say! Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing for the Wall Street Journal writes a fantastic piece. Read on with an open mind.
THE ALIEN IN THE WHITEHOUSE
The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president’s earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.
There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama’s pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans’ leader, a man of them, for them, the nation’s voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn’t lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.
Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.
A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.
Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president’s appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.
Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America’s attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.
Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of “Allahu Akbar!”), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. “People have different reasons” he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn’t want “to say anything negative about any religion.”
And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: “Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear.”
He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan’s pronouncements in that speech: That “violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces.”
Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: “Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square.” Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.
Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal “man-caused disasters” among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration.
It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.
It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama’s moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.
It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.
So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.
It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.
They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America’s moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.
The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
That’s my Reetzality for they day! Thanks for the read and thank you Ms. Rabinowitz.
June 4 (Bloomberg) – President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.” Bill Gross is the co-chief investment officer and manager of the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. said yesterday the unemployment rate may rise to 10 percent within the next several months with job growth “anemic.” “Over the long term, interest rates on government debt will likely have to rise to attract investors,” said Hiroki Shimaru, a market economist in Tokyo at Nikko Cordial Securities Inc., a unit of Japan’s third-largest publicly traded bank. “That will be a big burden on the government and the people.” (U.S.’s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP: Chart of Day, by Garfield Reynolds and Wes Goodman, Bloomberg)
“The market was assuming that the private sector was coming back, but obviously we’ve seen none of that,” Gross said in a radio interview on Bloomberg Surveillance with Tom Keene. Geithner also singled out Europe as a region needing to push forward with financial regulation reform. “Further progress on financial repair is critical to global economic recovery,” he wrote. “This requires, particularly in parts of Europe, further efforts to restructure and recapitalize the banking system.” In the U.S., where personal savings is increasing and Congress is close to passing legislation overhauling financial rules, “we are meeting our responsibility,” Geithner told reporters in Washington June 2.
The savings rate in the U.S. climbed to 3.6 percent in April, the highest level since January, from 3.1 percent in March as incomes increased and purchases cooled, according to Commerce Department figures released May 29.
June 7 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy may be headed for a slowdown reminiscent of the one it suffered in 2002 as the sovereign-debt crisis in Europe, fading government support and persistently high Joblessness weigh on expansion in the second half of the year. Economists have begun to lower their forecasts for the first time since the recovery began in the middle of 2009. Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics, and Michael Moran chief economist at Daiwa Capital Markets America in New York, said they now see annualized growth of 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent in July-December, down from around 3 percent previously. “The risks to the recovery are growing,” the New York- based Sinai said. “We’ve raised the odds of a double-dip recession to one in four from one in 20.” “Markets had excessively bought into the possibility of a V-shaped rebound driven by a self-sustaining private-sector recovery,” Mohamed El-Erian chief executive officer of Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co., manager of the world’s largest bond fund, said in an e-mail. That view “is starting to be visibly and increasingly challenged by the multiplying facts and realities on the ground.” The latest came on June 4, when the Labor Department reported that private-sector employers added 41,000 jobs to their payrolls in May, down from 218,000 in April and well below the 180,000 median forecast by 35 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. While the unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent, it’s remained above 9 percent. (U.S. Rebound Seen Slowing Most Since 2002 on Europe Debt Woes by Rich Miller, Bloomberg)
O.K., ON TO REETZALITY. There’s the financial news of the day. The European Union is on the brink of failure, Greece has failed, Hungary is facing default, said Viktor Orban who then changed his tune when Hungary’s currency, the Forint fell 4.8% in two days, destroying his credibility. Portugal, Spain, England, Ireland and the United States are “coming on strong” in the race to fail. Things are not looking good folks no matter what President Obama says about the recent job growth which only included 41,000 private sector jobs which barely keeps up with population growth. (Either an amazing lie or an amazing ignorance on his part. New jobs are compared to increased population; thus true job growth requires an increase in the percentage of employed persons to the actual population to increase.) We are in trouble, big time.
Here’s why we are in trouble: Insane government policies of redistribution of wealth! Governments throughout the world have made endless commitments to take care of people and industries, addicting its masses to the government teet. In doing so, governments have thwarted individuals’ ability to take care of themselves. Governments have reared generations of dependents rather than independents. They have done so through liberal policies of government handouts to individuals, corporations and unions. They have taxed people, either directly or indirectly (see license fees, excessive regulation, hidden taxes, value added taxes, Obama care, etc.) and threaten to tax and regulate more (see EU meetings and listen to President Obama). They have taxed us to the point that we are now partial metaphorical slaves, handing over in some cases more than fifty percent of our productivity to government so they can redistribute it, take our earnings, our wealth, and giving it to somebody else. Now, the true private sector, the corporations not in bed with government, the traditional family, the small business, these entities are doing what they should be doing, and rightfully so; they are preparing for the worst part of the storm. Folks are saving more. Folks are not spending as much. Companies are not hiring. Folks will be leaving the equities market or hedging against the predicted and ominous free fall. The world economy is faultering. It is on the brink of disaster. Let me rephrase the last sentence. We are on the brink of accepting the reality that we are in a disaster. The disaster started a long time ago.
We will begin to see government pensions fail. As reported by David Cho, a Washington Post staff writer, October 11, 2009, “The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees.” See also http://www.pensiontsunami.com/. The fact is, financially government pensions have already failed. They are broke because the governments that run them, federal, state and local, have not only taxed the private sector to pay for them, but then, in a way, double dipped and took, they call it borrowed, the pension reserves to again redistribute the wealth, the same actual wealth, a second time.
Government has anesthetized the private sector which is not the best metaphor because although the private sector is hunkering down, hibernating, it is doing so consciously as a defensive measure to governments’ reckless spend and tax policies.
Here’s more Reetzality, a prediction in part and also an observation. The private sector is going to decouple from the public sector. Decoupling is a financial term. Decoupling is a situation in which returns on two assets or asset classes that normally move together move separately. For example, oil and natural gas prices usually move together: when one goes up, so does the other, and vice versa. Likewise, stocks and corporate bonds usually behave the same way. Decoupling in both cases occurs when oil moves in one direction while natural gas moves in the opposite, or when stocks’ and corporate bonds’ returns diverge.
Unfortunately, but it’s the Reetzality for the day, the public and private sector are not asset classes in the literal sense. Therefore, I am opining on a more ominous decoupling. The private sector has lost all faith in the public sector. The true private sector, the portion that is not in bed with government, unlike Wall Street, the auto industry, unions, etc., is decoupling itself from the government. Folks are sheltering their productivity, not spending when the government attempts to get them to spend through faux stimulus plans, saving more, getting out of the market, working for cash, trading goods and services to avoid taxes and generally as stated previously, hunkering down for the worst of the storm. The private sector is decoupling.
Here’s the problem with that: As the governments’ reckless, disastrous and wrongful policies manifest in failure, as government workers (see Greece) protest the bankruptcy of their employers, the governments, governments will come for the private sectors money. Governments will hijack even more of the private sectors’ productivity. I’m not certain that the private sector will tolerate this ominous Reetzality. I am not suggesting that there will be an actual revolution. I am suggesting that the private sector will say that it has had enough and will civilly revolt through the vote, through increased frugality and through government avoidance policies. The private sector will say, “No thank you government, we’ve helped enough. Time for you to accept responsibility for yourself. Be sure to tell your people.”
And let me tell you this, the government will not like this one bit. The government will blame the private sector. The government will refuse to acknowledge the real crisis which is not financial, not health care, not energy, not private debt, not education, not hunger, not anything other than a single crisis that has a redundant history, a Government Crisis. (See Rome, Greece, U.S.S.R.) Until our “leaders” accept responsibility for their policies and turn to the dependents they’ve been spoiling for generations and tell their dependents that they can’t afford it anymore, times they are a changing, things won’t get better. And if they don’t? Well then my readers, history will repeat itself and we will have a comprehensive collapse of the world economy.
God save our Children.
Note: Thank you Bloomberg for your resources. You are an honest news source indeed.
Captain Obonga to the Rescue!
I am so relieved. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Captain Obonga. I had no idea that the government, that failed to prevent a terrorist on the watch list whose father reported him as a radical without a passport from getting on a plane headed to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear, no idea whatsoever that that government could fix everything else. The next thing you know they’ll be joking that the government can’t even keep strangers out of White House dinners? But you set me straight Captain Obonga. Thank you.
O.K., on a more serious note (although the first note was serious, I just utilized humor to demonstrate the seriousness, now I’ll get rid of the humor) was that a speech or what? Shoot, here comes the humor again. Captain Obonga is going to do everything. Pheewww! Say good bye to worries my little friends, I mean you American People. You “they” people.
O.K., O.K. O.K., I took a serious pill, so here goes, firm, fair and frank. The State of the Union address was a rambling cacophony of lies, misrepresentations, false promises, insincerity, rewriting of recent history, bragging, blaming, arrogance, ignorance, condescension, and otherwise consistent with a complete ripper of a marijuana fest. Thus, the “Obonga” nick name. We’ll call it a “BS”-afest instead.
Folks, he’s going to raise our taxes either directly or indirectly and has already done so with his deficit spending. Wait, small correction-maybe. He may have only raised our childrens’ taxes. Folks, he’s not going to endorse nuclear energy or off shore drilling. Folks, he has no desire to assist small business. He doesn’t even respect business for what it does. He said that all student loans would be forgiven in twenty years but in ten years if a graduate goes into public service. That’s right, we need more social workers and bureaucrats in our future than business people because social workers and bureaucrats are just so damn critical. See folks, this is another window into Captain Obonga’s soul. He values government more than the private sector. And he doesn’t understand basic values either; like paying off your debt. What in the world would justify a person to stop paying a debt if it’s not paid off? Shoot, that’s that pesky “keep your word” stuff. God that’s irritating. So what’s the big deal? I cut a deal, borrow some money for a four year degree which I actually spend six getting, drag the payments out for twenty years and then tell the lender that Captain Obonga told me I didn’t have to pay anymore after twenty years. Wait, wait, wait. I thought of something. Why don’t I just grab a public sector job in let’s say year nine, work it for a year, stop paying which is absolutely justified since I’ll be doing something so critical to America, actually serving the public for America, like for example, collecting tolls on a turnpike, and then, when I’m free of my promise to re-pay my student loan, I quit my cherished public sector job and go into the private sector and stick the tax payer with the rest of my debt. So many possibilities.
O.K. Folks, now I’m really going to be serious, actually I have been. I was just using humor to exemplify how much of a joke the State of the Union Address was. Our president has never made a bottom line, hangs out with communists and terrorists, loves Government, big government, is a progressive democrat, wants to socialize medicine, (He said he’s not quitting in his pursuit of his anti-American Agenda (He didn’t say “anti-American” but it is)), has no understanding of the economy, nothing is his fault, and after listening to his speech, wants to run everything.
Prior to his address, it was suggested that the Obama Administration was going to do a “re-set” on its agenda due to the rapidly growing trend against them. The pundits got it half right. Obama did do a reset but not on his agenda. He did a reset on the focus button so that the picture we see is different than before, blurred; but the content, the actual content, is exactly the same.
Beware folks, this guy does not like us “they” people. But he’s afraid of us and that’s why he reached out last night and spun the focus button. He changed the focus to hide. What he didn’t change was the content of his ambitions which are very un-American. Only our ability to see it was changed. But folks, you need not worry. I know this guy and his ambitions will come back into focus sooner than you think, definitely by November.
NOTE: I use the “Captain” title to remind folks of the Titanic, you know that unsinkable ocean liner that sank on its first voyage. Of course, America could never be like the Titanic.
O.K. President Obama did his apology tour through Europe, catered to Middle East Muslim interests, promised “change,” is beholden to left wing special interests, almost assented to a world currency, and yet, his popularity is waning in the United States, but in Europe? Yep. Here’s an article that sets forth quite a laundry list of European discomfort with our President. I guess it was a fling with Europe and Obama and not a love affair. Read on:
OBAMA THE IMPOTENT! (THE EUROPEAN COLUMNISTS’ TITLE, NOT MINE)
The disappointment with Barack Obama is tangible – on climate change and financial reform Europe leads while the US lags. Steven Hill/guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 September 2009 13.00 BST
Much hope has been invested in Barack Obama’s ability to strike a new course for the US following eight years of Bush administration unpopularity. Yet many in the US and abroad are impatient with the pace of progress under the Obama administration. The president made the rounds on five news talkshows on Sunday as he pressed his policies and vision, preparing for what is likely to be a difficult week.
Besides the ongoing battle over healthcare, this week sees two showdowns between Europe and the US that will reveal further slippage in American global leadership. The first showdown comes today at a UN special session on climate change in New York City; the second will come at the end of the week at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, where America and Europe will butt heads over financial system reforms designed to ensure that the AIGs of the world can never again cause an economic collapse.
Europe has been increasingly critical of America’s failures to live up to its global responsibilities. The US is not only the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases but is by far the largest per capita emitter of carbon and other pollutants. China comes close to the US in terms of total carbon emissions, but it has four times more people, who each belch far less individually. Europe, while having much the same high living standard, has an “ecological footprint” that is only half of America’s, since Europe has taken leadership in implementing renewable technologies and conservation practices.
On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised to reverse the Bush administration’s terrible ecological record. Yet so far the world has seen more symbolic gestures from the Obama administration than accomplishments. Its biggest achievement so far has been a disappointment. President Obama signed an executive order to increase US motor vehicle mileage standards – but only to a level that will push fuel efficiency by 2020 to a level that European and Japanese cars reached several years ago, and even China has already achieved.
Europe has announced donations of $2bn to $15bn a year for the next decade to help developing nations cope with climate warming, yet the Obama administration has not offered anything close to that amount. Europe also wants binding, near-term targets for developed nations, proposing a 20% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020, or 30% if everyone agrees. The Bush administration of course rejected such targets – but now it looks like the Obama administration is not willing to go much further. It has said such targets should be voluntary but verifiable.
With the US Senate bogged down in the fight over reforming healthcare, American leaders have said that the senators might not move on climate legislation until 2010, well after the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. That drew a sharp response from John Bruton, head of the European Union delegation: “The United States is just one of the 190 countries coming to this conference,” Bruton said, “but the United States emits 25% of all the greenhouse gases that the conference is trying to reduce. I submit that asking an international conference to sit around looking out the window for months, while one chamber of the legislature of one country deals with its other business, is simply not a realistic political position.”
Even Europe’s conservative politicians, such as Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, are expressing impatience: “It’s rather crucial that the US can show a credible pathway,” Hedegaard said, pointing out that the US emits twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as Denmark, without gaining anything in improving its quality of life.
That’s the start of President Obama’s week. At the end of it, President Obama will appear at a meeting in Pittsburgh of the G20, a bloc of both developed and developing nations, representing 85% of the world’s economic output and most of its population. On the table will be reforms designed to avoid a repetition of the financial panic and global economic collapse perceived as having originated on Wall Street. Despite immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages needed to overcome the crisis, the financial sector in the US is rapidly returning to business as usual. Indeed, three US banks – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan – which received some $45bn of bailout aid, each paid billions of dollars more in bonuses in 2009 than they earned in 2008.
Here again, Europe is leading, while the Obama administration is dragging its feet. Europe has proposed far-reaching reforms designed to impose new rules on executive pay and bonuses, requiring that banks link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance, and that they “claw back” any bonuses received in the face of losses. Europe wants a financial police force that has powers to slash payments where investments prove to have failed, and to force boardrooms to control levels of speculation. Europe also wants to block the exercising of stock options for set periods and expose top bank directors to penalties, following huge payouts to failed bank chiefs.
The Obama administration’s approach has been much more tepid, to say the least. The US financial industry, as expected, is fighting these reforms, but what do we make of a recent quote by President Obama questioning the need for supporting Europe’s proposals. “Why is it,” he asked during a recent interview, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or [American] football players?”
Besides the fact that President Obama was wrong – the National Football League does have salary restrictions – Silicon Valley businesses and NFL quarterbacks don’t cause an economic collapse when they screw up. It’s very sobering that, if David Letterman read that quote on his TV show and asked his audience: “Who made this clueless statement, former President Bush or President Obama?” we know what the response would be. Or would have been.
In response to American foot-dragging, European leader Jean-Claude Juncker said Europe should act on the bonus issue “whether the Americans are with us or not.” He said that a Europe-only charge “will take on such force over time that the Americans will not be able to sit on the sidelines.”
Many leaders and supporters are beginning to wonder what is causing this growing gap between the Barack Obama that many people saw on the campaign trail, and the Obama they see in the White House? Beyond Obama’s oratorical skills, which excited not only American voters but people all over the world, he is mostly untested as a politician. His previous experience was only a few years in the US Senate and a few years more as a state senator. A sinking feeling is arising among many that President Obama may not be up to the task, that he may not possess the artful skills needed to accomplish even his own goals.
But it must be recognised that it’s not just Obama’s shortcomings that are causing the problem. The very structure of the American political system is at the heart of these failures. For example, thwarting Obama on a regular basis is an unrepresentative senate where “minority rule” prevails and undermines what a majority of the country may want. With two senators elected per state, regardless of population, California with more than 35 million people has the same number of senators as Wyoming with just half a million residents. This constitutional arrangement greatly favours low population states, many of which tend to be conservative, producing what one political analyst has called “a weighted vote for small-town whites in pickup trucks with gun racks.”
In addition, the senate’s use of that arcane rule known as the “filibuster” means you need 60 out of 100 votes to stop unlimited debate on a bill and move to a vote. A mere 41 senators, representing as little as 20% of the nation’s population, can stymie the other 80%. Given a vastly unrepresentative senate wielding its anti-majoritarian filibuster, it is hardly surprising that minority rule in the senate consistently undermines majority rule, whether on healthcare, financial industry reform, environmental legislation and many other policies.
Pile on to that an uncompetitive, winner-take-all electoral system, marinated in money and special interest influence, and the sclerotic US political scene is deeply troubling. None of these anti-democratic structural features are going away any time soon. Unless Barack Obama is able to demonstrate a better level of political skill than he has shown so far, everyone needs to fasten their seatbelts. The world is about to enter a challenging phase where the US – the undisputed leader of the free world for the past 60 years – is going to rapidly cede its place at the head of the line.
It appears that the wheels may be coming off the world’s post-war leader, and not even Barack Obama can stop it happening.
Back to Reetzality from Reetz. Certainly, I am not advocating catering to Europe’s desires. What I am saying is that even Barack Obama, with all of his superficial charm, can’t get Europe to love us again, can’t even get them to keep loving him. Wow! Here’s what I think we should do. Embrace American principles. Tell Obama to go on vacation, rebuild our country via the private sector rather than destroying it with the public sector, and wait. We’ll get strong again that’s for sure and also for sure, trust me on this one, Europe will once again get its collective ass in a major crack and then, as usual, come calling for help. And we will be there again, just like old times, and they’ll love us again.
But in the present, until we become American again, the real thing Europe should be worried about is not the United States catering to their desires, but the United States indulging Obama’s desires. If we do indulge Obama, socialize medicine, pass cap and trade, give amnesty to illegals, raise taxes, launch debt into an even higher stratosphere, become European, if we do these things, then Europe should be worried. Europe should be worried if we indulge Obama because we won’t be able to be there for them when they once again need us. I mean come on Europe, he hasn’t even helped his brother move out of the mud hut in Africa. You really think he’s there for you? Don’t count on it. Just ask his brother.
That’s my Reetzality for the Day.
Today, I came up with an idea that will save America. Really! Here it is, after a few premises. The premises are these:
1. We are spending our kids and grand kids future away, we can’t afford it, and Washington, D.C. doesn’t care. 2. Washington D.C.’s agenda’s viability depends on foreign nations lending us money. No loaners, no ridiculous spending.
So what do we do? Do we wait until the next election until we can get some fiscally responsible folks in Washington? It may be too late if socialize medicine and the bail outs continue so that’s a NO! Do we write letters to our congressman? We barely saved ourselves from the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill and 70% of the Americans are against bail outs so my thoughts are that the letter campaign isn’t working. Do we turn off CNN and CNBC and only watch Fox News? I love Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, and Rush who is not Fox, but it isn’t working, so again the answer is NO! Need you worry, No! Here is the answer:
1. We as American tax payers send the message to every other nation to stop buying our debt. We tell them that Washington is a bunch of spoiled kids and although spoiling a kid, by in the present example, throwing money at them, makes the short term more pleasant, it costs way more in the long term. So stop subsidizing the United States of America’s frivolous ways. Yes, we will be strapped for a while and also in the short term our weakened economy will cut down on imports, but in the long term, we’ll get stronger and be a better long term market place for foreign goods. Come on folks, sometimes a kid needs tough love. In the end the kid gets better, performs, becomes self reliant. Think about it, if United States can’t sell its debt, we’ve got to reel things in which means two options: One, we cut spending. Two, we raise taxes. Both defeat the current American agenda. This goes for the Wall Street boys as well, stop buying our debt. If the debt is no longer able to be sold, then the government will have to cease its current path. Period. No pay, no play. It will shackle the wasteful spending and force us to do the right things, make the right choices, be responsible for ourselves. It will be beautiful.
2. The Chinese buy the majority of our debt. They already are on to the fact that we can’t last under the current path. So we send the message to them that if they don’t buy our debt, we can’t become them, and they will save the market they so much depend on. It is in their interest to stop buying our debt. In ours too.
3. If the Chinese won’t stop buying it, we stop buying Chinese products. We force them to be responsible in their spoilation of the American Child’s, ostensibly manifested in Washington, D.C., ways. They’ll listen. It is in their interest.
4. We start an effort to have American companies that make things in America label themselves as “A Free Market Company.” This will be a metaphor for made in America without government subsidies and against the current Washington D.C. trend. This will help the economy and will not be clouded in the “buy America” label. We’ll buy America, but only if the corporation is a “A free Market Company” which means it is against the current trend of Washington D.C. The point is this; Stop buying goods from foreign companies from foreign nations that are subsidizing our failure. Feel free to buy goods from foreign nations that are not buying our debt. See, still free trade. Just not free trade with the enablers.
It’s as simple as that. 1. Convince Foreign nations to not endulge our government’s childish ways. 2. Convince Foreign nations that it is in their long term interest to not endorse our government’s ways. 3. We punish the foreign nations if they don’t take heed. 4. We reward American companies that do.
Simple as that folks. No military overthrow. No change via election. Just common sense communicated to the enabling foreign nations that if they don’t take the advice of the American’s, the ones who ultimately can’t pay them back, they’ll ruin their export market for good, they’ll ruin the world.
Think about. Washington D.C. without the money to be spoiled and wasteful. We will bankrupt the Washington Child just like the Washington Child did to G.M., Chrysler, and in the near future Citi-Group. If they cut spending, great. If they raise taxes, they’re out. We the citizens win by encouraging the metaphorical spoiling short term thinking parents (foreign investors in our debt) that sometimes kids need tough love and right now, our Washington D.C. kids need some real tough loving. We all need it bad.
Please, let’s start a movement and get this done. Ultimately, we have control because we’re paying for the Washington Child. So let’s send the message to our subsidizers; thank you for buying our debt and making the Washington Child happy but realize we’re not paying you back, so do yourself a favor, stop loaning us money. And do us a favor, help us grow up.
Send this to your friends. It’s our only non-violent hope. And before I resort to Violence, I’m moving to Patagonia. There’s great fishing and great skiing and it looks a lot like Alaska.
