Vox Popoli

Poland is eager to abandon its brief experiment with democracy:

POLAND’S PRIME minister vowed yesterday to do his utmost to avoid a referendum in his country on the European Union’s reform treaty after being grilled by anxious EU leaders at a summit. Powerful anti-EU nationalists in Poland’s opposition Law and Justice party are demanding a referendum, suddenly complicating an expected smooth ratification of the treaty by the bloc’s biggest east European member.

USSR or EUSSR, the only significant difference is the number of nukes. Give the Eurocrats 50 years of centralized rule from Brussels and they’ll set back the European standard of living as badly as their Soviet predecessors ever did.

No, calling them dunces isn’t fair. But it’s pretty easy to see why economics-trained individuals are often able to run rings around the butterfly collectors. They simply tend to be more intelligent in the aggregate. Unsurprisingly, those studying philosophy tend to be towards the very top, along with the usual suspects, the engineers, barring the latter’s inability to write. And as usual, it’s the would-be educators that cluster at the bottom:

This may go some way towards explaining why the world’s most famous biologist is so demonstrably hapless outside of his area of immediate expertise.

Once more we see the limited utility of a modern university education, even one from a pretty good school:

I’m a graduate of William and Mary, where I majored in English. I also have a lot of French under my belt. However, I did not take German. Your columns would be more effective and less frustrating if you did not assume that we are all Mensa caliber.

Aber es gibt kein Deutsch auf der letzte Abschnitt. Hier koennen wir dass man kann wirklich nicht ein Diplom mit einer Bildung missverstehen sehen. Und ja, ich weiss mein Grammatik ist sehr schade, es tut mir leid.

Look, I threw away my last opportunity at national syndication because I refused to dumb things down, so it should be eminently clear by now that I’m just not going to do it. If that means some of you would prefer to read other columnists, that’s completely fine with me. But since I’ve gotten several questions about this, Ragnarok is the end of the world and death of the gods in Norse mythology, while the Fimbulwinter is the harsh winter that lasts three years and precedes the great battle and the eventual perishing of the world at the hands of the king of Muspelheim, Surtr the Fire Giant.

Just wait until both health care and the banks are nationalized:

Americans have stopped sneering at Britain for nationalising Northern Rock. After all, the Fed needs White House and Treasury approval for taking $30 billion of Bear Stearns’s liabilities on to its own balance sheet because in the end taxpayers are now on the hook. If it looks like nationalisation, and feels like nationalisation, it is nationalisation. And there is more to come.

Because it worked so very well in the pre-Thatcher, pre-Reagan past. By the way, it looks like Lehman is the prime candidate to go down next, options on its stock were removed from several European markets this morning. If you can still buy them on the Chicago options exchange, you might want to pick up a few.

Joseph Farah overestimates both Rush’s influence as well as the essential nature of presidential election campaigns:

I hate to say it. Rush is a friend. I love listening to him. He is one of the most entertaining people on the planet. But it was this crossover voting inspired by him and a few other talk-show hosts that kept Hillary’s candidacy alive – positioning her for the collapse of the Obama campaign.

They outsmarted themselves.

I had a bad feeling about it at the time. I recalled my own thoughts along the same lines years ago, when I lived in California. There were a number of Democrats running to be the nominee for governor at the time. There was only one Republican, Dan Lungren, vying for that party’s nomination. So I decided to vote as a Democrat and to pick the least likely candidate to be able to win. I picked a dull bureaucrat with no charisma, no accomplishments and no natural constituency. His name was Gray Davis.

Needless to say, he won the nomination and beat Lungren in the general election – inducing my family’s hurried exodus from the Golden State, not to mention power failures, an economic crisis and an eventual recall election. I outsmarted myself, too. That’s why I was suspicious of this effort to save Hillary’s political career.

Just think where we would be had Obama won Texas. Hillary would probably have quit the race. Everyone knew she had to win that state. Had she been defeated then, Obama would be the only Democratic candidate standing when Jeremiah Wright’s sociopathic ramblings were played for the entire nation. Essentially, the Democrats would be up the creek with no paddle – and wouldn’t that be just too bad?

But that is not the case now.

The problem with this analysis is that Jeremiah Wright has been around for the duration of the Obama campaign, in fact, he’s been around for decades. Had Hillary needed to make use of him sooner to take out Obama, then she would have done so. Look at how far back the McGreevey and Spitzer “scandals” go… most high-level politicians have similar vulnerabilities which allow them to be destroyed at will whenever it is deemed necessary. This is one of the ways in which the elite orders the process on the rare occasion it feels the need to step in and make a choice between two of its servitors.

It has been quite clear since 2003 that for whatever reason, Hillary’s presidency has been deemed a necessary step in the road to global integration. (I don’t quite understand why, since Obama and many other potential presidents on both sides of the aisle have no principles that would cause them to defend national sovereignty, but nevertheless it’s obvious that she is the chosen one.) Therefore, Hillary will win and those who stand in her way will be first raised up in order to make it look like a genuine competition, and then destroyed should the sacrificial lamb threaten to actually present an obstacle.

McCain is no threat to Hillary, as I stated from the start, only Ron Paul could have been anything but a sacrificial lamb. To me, the only question is whether Hillary’s landslide will approach Reagan’s 1984 slaughter of Mondale or not. I don’t think so, since she won’t win enough staunchly Republican states to swamp the electoral college, but it should be a sound thumping either way.

I just thought those who were interested in a Voxonomics podcast might like to know that I completed my first interview today. I may have a voice for literature, but I was pleased at how substantive it was. I think I’ll be posting the podcasts on either Thursdays or Fridays, does anyone have any preferences in that regard?

Also, is there anyone you be particularly interested in having me interview? Please send me contact details as well as the name if there’s someone you’re seriously interested in hearing, as that will make the interview rather more likely if I don’t have to dig around just to get in contact with them.

The irrepressible Larry Kudlow sees no trouble on the horizon, none at all:

A great old firm got bought out today for peanuts. I was a partner before and after the Reagan administration. A sub-prime credit casualty. Paulson and Bernanke have done exactly the right thing. It was a run on the bank. The Fed stopped it right there. No banking crisis. The big Wall Street banks are in good shape, even with earnings losses they’re still well capitalized, profitable and solvent. Fed stopped it from spreading on Friday; JPMorgan takes them over tomorrow.

The Fed cut the discount rate today by a quarter point. It will reduce target the fed-funds rate on Tuesday. The banking system will function fine.

I’m just disappointed that he didn’t use the word “masterful”. I always enjoyed listening to senators and congressman perform their humble obeisance before the shining wonderfulness of Sir Greenspan. Meanwhile, like a good neocon, David Frum doesn’t hesitate to stab his one-time hero in the back:

Now the Bush administration has been stamped with the mark of indelible failure – even as, brutal irony, Iraq seems at last to be taking the upward path. This mark is not wholly just, but it is not wholly unjust either. The administration bears some of the responsibility for the gathering economic crisis at home. In order to claim the distinction of raising home ownership to an all-time high, the Bush administration favored and supported the loose home-mortgage lending practices that are now convulsing global financial markets.

You always knew the neocons were going to turn on Bush once his administration’s failures became apparent to everyone. Apparently, that time is now. And needless to say, it was that crazy Ron Paul who was the only one in Washington protesting the Fed’s madness in pushing ARM-based home ownership on those who couldn’t afford it, and the only presidential candidate who understands what is going on and how it could have been avoided. America is getting the government it deserves.

AE-P’s report helps explain why the euro and the EU may not survive the Fimbulwinter, as socionomics would predict:

Morgan Kelly, of University College Dublin, said the government is almost powerless to stop the downturn becoming a severe slump. “We’re in a classic post-bubble recession, yet we can’t do anything that a country would normally do in this situation because we’re inside the eurozone,” Prof Kelly said. “We can’t cut interest rates, we can’t devalue, and there is a lot less room for fiscal stimulus than people think. We’re stuck.

When a nation permits its government to hand its monetary policy over to Belgian bankers, it shouldn’t be terribly surprised to discover that its monetary policy is run for the benefit of Belgian bankers, not the nation. I wonder how many times the Irish government will have to make the Irish people vote in order to get the European ConstitutionLisbon treaty passed?

The winds are blowing colder:

The share of foreign buyers (“indirect bidders”) plummeted to 5.8pc, from an average 25pc over the last eight weeks. On the Richter Scale of unfolding dramas, this matches the death of Bear Stearns. Rightly or wrongly, a view has taken hold that Washington is cynically debasing the coinage, hoping to export its day of reckoning through beggar-thy-neighbour policies.

It is not my view. I believe the forces of debt deflation now engulfing America – and soon half the world – are so powerful that nobody will be worrying about inflation a year hence.

This is precisely what Prechter was talking about in the 2004 interview. While the Fed and Wall Street would love to inflate their way out – and that’s all the 2003 – 2007 “recovery” of the stock market has been, pure price inflation – they simply can’t do it. The sneak Sunday rate cut, combined with Tuesday’s probable shock super-sized cut, are only intended as temporary measures intended to hold up the markets long enough for the banks to exit their problematic long holdings and position for a period of decline.

If these heroic measures manage to push the Dow up to its 200-day moving average, that would probably be a very good time to exit your equity positions and move into BEARX. That’s probably the best run bear fund and I don’t recommend options because of the time-decay.