Author: VD

Europe Closes Early

Years ago, I worked for an American technology company that derived about half its revenue from European customers. It used to amuse me how halfway through every August, the executives would start to panic because their sales were falling short of the projections which invariably failed to account for this month-long, continent-wide break. The executives would breathe a sigh of relief when business activity returned to normal in September, and they would completely forget anything had ever happened by December when they calculated the sales projections for the following year. Eventually, the second week of August would roll around, and the whole process would begin again. But when Europe closes, it’s usually just for the month of August.

For dinner:

8x Ritz crackers
8x slices of Parmesan Reggiano
1x Champion Nutrition protein shake, chocolate
1x bottle of Italian merlot

And you probably think I’m kidding….

The problem isn’t the marketing, gentlemen:

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it’s lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language.

This is such classic left-wing thinking. They genuinely believe the majority of people will cheerfully engage in Holocaust 2.0 so long as “kill the Jews” is properly marketed as “an innovative solution to the very serious problem of global overpopulation.” The sad thing is that they believe it because so many of them are capable of falling for it themselves.

So much for the multiculturalist theory of inevitable, unstoppable, one-way migration:

Consider Ireland’s capital, which earned the nickname Dublinski after roughly 180,000 Poles, Czechs and other Eastern Europeans went there in search of work after the European Union expanded in 2004. Now, a stunning rise in the unemployment rate, currently 10.4 percent, is making even the most recent arrivals rethink their plans.

“Since 2000, there has been a resurgence of intra-European migration,” said Rainer Muenz, a migration scholar who is head of research and development at Erste Bank in Vienna. “To a certain extent, that’s clearly unwinding now.”

Between April 2008 and the end of this month, as many as 50,000 workers are likely to have returned home from Ireland, mostly to Eastern Europe, according to Alan Barrett of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin.

Of course, it would be deeply racist for anyone to believe that Mexicans should follow suit and return to Mexico. Poles, Czechs and Romanians may be many things, but it is undeniable that one thing they are not is Mexicans. And since, as has often been asserted by the pro-immigration set, some Mexicans are good for the economy and the nation, it is obvious that more Mexicans would be even better. And therefore, it logically follows that the optimal situation rests upon the maximum number of Mexicans migrating to the United States as soon as possible.

I, for one, am convinced and I will not be satisfied until every last Mexican is happily ensconced within the borders of the United States and the entire nation of Mexico is an empty, windswept land inhabited solely by vultures and gila monsters. Una nación azteca! Sí, se puede!

While many are starting to believe that the worst is past, I wouldn’t put any stock in all the prognostications of recovery later in the year. I recently met a European executive and we spent some time talking economics over several espressos. He told me that steel shipments have come to an almost complete halt around the world. In Germany, for example, the export market has collapsed so completely that not only have orders dropped to 10 percent of previous levels, but their inventories haven’t changed much since January.

And this is subsequent to the previous reports of huge declines: “In the European Union, there were production drops of 31.6 percent in Germany, 35.7 percent in France, 35.7 percent in Spain and 39.9 percent in Italy. Brazilian steel production decreased by 39 percent last month from February 2008 totals, and both Russia and Ukraine saw steel output fall by 32.1 percent and 33.6 percent respectively.”

Since steel is a leading economic indicator, this bodes very, very poorly indeed for the world economy.

I can’t imagine how issuing legal dictates to doctors ordering them to kill people could possibly go awry:

Physicians in Montana could be facing “kill-on-demand” orders from patients who want to commit suicide if a district court judge’s opinion pending before the state Supreme Court is affirmed. The case has attracted nominal attention nationwide, but lawyers with the Christian Legal Service have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the pending case because of what it would mean to doctors within the state, as well as the precedent it would set. The concern is over the attack on doctors’ ethics and religious beliefs – as well as the Hippocratic oath – that may be violated by a demand that they prescribe deadly chemicals or in some other way assist in a person’s death.

Enough with the preludes already! Really, government can be such an infuriating tease at times. I’m sure everyone is wondering when Obama and the courts are going to stop faffing around with unborn children and the useless elderly and get on with the important business of the American Endlösung.

It’s hard to imagine anyone, on either side, lamenting David Souter’s retirement. And it’s telling how few Republicans are even bothering trying to pretend that McCain’s appointment would have been conservative; I will be personally disappointed if Obama doesn’t name a black lesbian Muslim to the Supreme Court. From Kenya.

Two guys wished me a Happy Commy Day at the gym yesterday, which made me laugh. Whether they’re socialists or anti-socialists, it seems Europeans are much more cognizant of Labor Day’s true meaning. On a related note, it’s interesting to see the socialist New Statesman echo Daniel Hannan in pointing out the intrinsic left-wing nature of the British National Party:

Public anxiety about immigration may have helped fuel the BNP’s rise, but the party is about more than racism and xenophobia. Under the leadership of Nick Griffin, it has worked hard to develop a full manifesto of policies – a strategy that it hopes will pay dividends by improving its image and broadening its appeal. But who exactly is the party appealing to? A brief skim through BNP manifesto literature brings to light proposals for the following: large increases in state pensions; more money for the NHS; improved worker protection; state ownership of key industries. Under Griffin, the modern-day far right has positioned itself to the left of Labour.

How, one wonders, can the far right position itself to the left of a socialist party? The political spectrum is not a circle; the concept of two wings meeting at the extremes is nonsensical. The reality is that it’s just more of the same anti-right propaganda of the sort Jonah Goldberg explicated so thoroughly in Liberal Fascism. After all, when the Left engages in an internecine struggle, both sides usually call the other one “fascist” and “right-wing”. And, one of them is even correct, but only in relative, not absolute, terms.

The corporate parasites protect their own:

After months of anger at Bank of America (BAC) chairman and CEO Ken Lewis, shareholders voted to fire him as board chairman yesterday at the company’s annual meeting in Charlotte.

Lewis had a terrible year in 2008, as did everyone in the banking industry, but he had the added baggage of having withheld material adverse information from his shareholders about the forced merger of BAC with Merrill Lynch late last year. After shareholders approved that merger (which was instigated by government authorities), it came out that Merrill’s losses were going to be considerably worse than anyone knew. To add insult to injury, Merrill’s recently-installed CEO, John Thain, found it prudent to accelerate the payment of Merrill’s annual bonuses by a month. This meant they would be largely complete before the BAC merger completed, making it impossible for BAC’s shareholders to nix or reduce them…. It gets interesting at this point, because even though shareholders did what they think is the right thing, the rest of the company’s directors unanimously voted to retain Lewis as CEO, the top management position.

What the board was saying in effect was: Lewis is the best guy for the job; we’re not going to easily find anyone as good; and his malfeasance in withholding information about the Merrill deal was not sufficient grounds to dismiss him.

Speaking as an entrepeneur, let me state unequivocally that one of the biggest problems in corporate America is the fact that the professional executive class is the most useless bunch of thieving scum in the country. (The Human Resources departments are useless too, but at least they’re not thieves.) Most corporate executives are not businessmen, they’re not capitalists, they’re simply parasites busily engaged with siphoning off as much corporate money as they think they can get away with. Every single member of that board should be fired. If Lewis hadn’t violated his responsibility by keeping his mouth shut about the massive devaluation of the company that the Merrill merger would entail, there’s no way it would have gone through.

It’s sickening the way that the parasites chant “increasing shareholder value” like a mantra while doing their damndest to reduce it in every way. Lewis is a parasitic poster boy; he was willing to sink the entire company rather than risk – risk – the chance that the U.S. Treasury would try to break the law and fire him.

If you’re going to compare the effect of interest rates on GDP and housing prices, would you use the Fed Funds rate, the Discount Rate, the Prime Rate, or the 30-year mortgage rate?

Please note that I said “interest” query, I didn’t say it would be an interesting one….