Tag: politics

Iceland defies the vampire squids

A few politicians are finally beginning to listen to the people rather than the banksters:

Iceland will hold a referendum on a depositor accord with the U.K. and Netherlands after President Olafur R. Grimsson blocked the bill in a move that threatens to undermine the island’s efforts to repair international relations.

“The constitution is very clear about the need for a referendum in this situation,” Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir told reporters in Reykjavik today.

Grimsson vetoed the so-called Icesave accord after more than 60,000 of Iceland’s 320,000 inhabitants signed a petition urging him to reject the legislation. The bill, which polls show about 70 percent of the population opposes, had obliged Iceland to use $5.5 billion in borrowed funds from the U.K. and Netherlands to cover depositor claims from the two countries after the failure of Landsbanki Islands hf in October 2008. The absence of clear cross-border regulatory rules on depositor insurance has allowed settlement of the claims to drag on and left Icelandic taxpayers disgruntled over having to pay for the failure of a private bank.

Why should all the people of Iceland be responsible for paying 40 percent of their annual GDP on behalf of the 22 people who owned the failed Icelandic bank? Why should they be held responsible for paying off the Dutch and UK governments just because the Dutch and UK politicians decided to prevent Dutch and UK investors from suffering the negative consequences of their bad investment decisions? The truth is that there is no reason whatsoever, and the Icelandic people should call the banking community’s bluff; the banks need borrowers more than the borrowers need banks. And even in the unlikely event that the financial isolation threat is carried out, in the long run the Icelandic people will be much better off without having the vampire squids constantly draining their economy of its profits. They will be even better off if they use this incident to stay out of the EU.

“Britain warned Iceland that it would be frozen out of the European Union after its President abruptly vetoed the repayment of a £3.6 billion loan.”

I seem to recall that 70% of the American public opposed TARP. And I imagine an even higher percentage will oppose SuperTARP once they realize that the White House just opened up the floodgates for a continuous banking bailout via Fannie and Freddie. So, it’s interesting to see this demonstration in real-time of which countries are genuinely democratic and which are not.

Wikipedia and the warming scammers

The latest editing scandal underlines the inherent problem with Wikipedia and why it is intrinsically unreliable:

Through his role as a Wikipedia administrator, Connolley is said to have created or rewritten 5,428 unique Wikipedia entries.

“When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it – more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand,” Solomon wrote. “When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred – over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.”

….A Wikipedia arbitration committee has stated in the past: “William M. Connolley has, on a number of occasions, misused his administrator tools by acting while involved.”

If Wikipedia doesn’t immediately remove Connolley’s administrative privileges and ban him from ever editing Wikipedia again, this will conclusively prove that it is nothing more than a propaganda device, not an encyclopedia. When one dishonest ideologue is permitted to run roughshod over 2,000 other individuals, the pretense of democratic openness simply cannot be maintained. Any doubts about the fictional nature of global warming should not be difficult to see by this point, as is the left-wing nature of the charlatans. Those who are telling the truth are seldom interested in scrubbing the history books, and rewriting accurate history is the one of the Left’s signature characteristics.

UPDATE: The good news is that apparently Wikipedia hasn’t entirely given up on the idea of providing accurate information to the masses:

In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming.

A rational metric

Karl Denninger proposes one at the Market Ticker:

[T}his is where government and regulatory interests align to the detriment of economy stability: Governments want to see big GDP increases, and increasing leverage (amount of borrowing outstanding in the economy for a given GDP level) is one way to do this.

The best way to control this trend would be to mandate (by law) that GDP be adjusted to reflect leverage changes in the economy – that is, if debt goes up by 4% of GDP then the 4% has to come off the reported GDP numbers.

The reason this isn’t tenable, of course, is that it would make it clear that we’re well into the economic contraction of massive proportions that is beginning to become visible despite the best efforts of the governments and banks to statistically obfuscate.

The long-prophesied government

The outlines are beginning to become clear:

The word “global” has taken on sacred connotations. Any action taken in its name must be inherently virtuous, whereas the decisions of individual countries are necessarily “narrow” and self-serving…. There is a whiff of totalitarianism about this new theology, in which the risks are described in such cosmic terms that everything else must give way. “Globalism” is another form of the internationalism that has been a core belief of the Left: a commitment to class rather than country seemed an admirable antidote to the “blood and soil” nationalism that gave rise to fascism.

There is more than “a whiff of totalitarianism” about it; globalism is an intrinsically more deadly threat to Man than fascism, Communism, and Nazism combined. The sacred connotations it has taken on should cause every religious and non-religious individual alike to question just what, precisely, is the nature of the religious spirit behind it. As for me, I think it stinks of sulfur.

The key to full grokking

This statement by Frederic Bastiat is all you really need to know in order to understand the current political economy:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

It’s always interesting how reading the great minds of the past reveals how little changes in human society. But how surprising to see such a quote appear in the New York Times, even from an outsider!

Sander’s sensible move

This is one of the few times you will ever see me speak well of a socialist politician’s actions:

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders said on Wednesday that he was placing a hold on Ben Bernanke’s nomination for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman, a move that could slow the confirmation process. If the hold is not withdrawn, the move by Sanders, an independent from Vermont, means that Senate leaders will not be able to bring up the nomination for a vote by unanimous consent. Instead, they may need to garner 60 votes in order to consider the nomination.

There is no question that Bernanke should not be reconfirmed. He is a charlatan cut from precisely the same cloth as the fraudulent Climategate “scientists”, who are claiming to be saving the world from global warming in much the same way that Bernanke claims to have saved the USA from a second Great Depression. He didn’t, he hasn’t, he has only made the situation much worse through his bankers-first policies of extend and pretend.

Mike Shedlock presents a dialogue that is a great case against Bernanke:

Bernanke: For many Americans, the financial crisis, and the recession it spawned, have been devastating — jobs, homes, savings lost. Understandably, many people are calling for change.

Mish: Ben, the reason people are calling for a change is that you and the Fed wrecked the economy. You did not see a housing bubble, nor did you foresee a recession. I would also like to point out your selective memory loss about your role in bailouts.

Bernanke: Yet change needs to be about creating a system that works better, not just differently. As a nation, our challenge is to design a system of financial oversight that will embody the lessons of the past two years and provide a robust framework for preventing future crises and the economic damage they cause.

Mish: No Ben, we need a system that works differently. You have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you and the Fed are incompetent and cannot be trusted. Ben, here is a compilation of your own statements made from 2005-2007 proving you have no idea what you are talking about.

Understand that the Federal Reserve system is going to collapse at some point regardless of what action is taken by the Congress. But Fed’s end will be much less catastrophic to the U.S. economy if it is intentionally and deliberately shut down as happened with each of the three previous American central banks than if it is left alone to collapse under the weight of its horrific economic contradictions. Denying a second term to Bernanke would be small first step towards winding down the current monetary system and replacing it with something more stable.

And when even something as flimsy and rife for abuse as a pure paper government currency is more stable, you know the present system can’t possibly survive.

The anti-Peanuts president

Obama doesn’t want to be president anymore. I don’t see how you can possibly interpret his decision to embark upon his own Vietnam any other way:

The address before the United States Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday night will not only be used to announce the immediate order to deploy roughly 30,000 more troops, but the administration will also use the occasion to convey how it intends to turn the fight over to the Kabul government, the New York Times reported.

And with their reliably impeccable judgment, his PR handlers actually scheduled the speech to preempt A Charlie Brown Christmas. Whether you see this as accidental or part of the Left’s ongoing War on Christmas, it’s just blatantly stupid. It’s bad enough to Vietnam your presidency, but allowing yourself to be identified as the anti-Peanuts president takes it to a whole new level. This guy is going to have non-black approval ratings in the single digits by the time 2012 rolls around.

If you’d like sophisticated military analysis of the decision to put an additional 30,000 troops in pointless peril, here it is in three words: never reinforce failure.

Warning: feminist committing historical analogy ahead

You have to know a bit about Rome to understand how amusing this clueless female attempt to draw upon history is:

When the Roman Empire was broken, Diocletian fixed it. He completely revamped the imperial government, discarding centuries of tradition in favor of a new organizational structure designed to meet the challenges of the day. You can do stuff like that when you’re an emperor. It was sort of a one-man Constitutional Convention.

Considering that Diocletian’s economic reforms were a complete failure – his Edict on Maximum Prices is a byword for futility among economists – he was responsible for the bloodiest Roman religious persecutions since Nero, and his abdication led directly to an empire-wide civil war, it should be readily apparent that the historical example of Diocletian is not the ideal one for a would-be reformer to cite. It’s almost impressive that the woman managed to outdo Thomas Friedman and his wistful dreams of Communist Chinese autocracy with this historically illiterate analogy.

Although I have little doubt that given his dithering over Afghanistan and the warnings of a Dubai default, it’s not going to be long before abdication will look more than a little attractive to Obama.

UPDATE – the poor woman still doesn’t realize how dim-witted her attempt to look scholarly by citing history was:

You know what they think is the most important thing about Diocletian? Price controls. I’m serious. The Edict on Maximum Prices: that’s what they think is the big deal. The second thing they know about him is the Christian persecution. Not one of them even mentions the division of the empire, which by any measure was one of the most critical and formative moments in history (one we’re still living with). None of them mentions the Tetrarchy. None of them is aware of what I would have thought was basic knowledge: that Diocletian fundamentally restructured the Empire and reformulated its constitution.

First, Diocletian didn’t fix anything; most of his policies were failures. As the Cambridge Medieval History writes: “It is natural to think of Diocletian as the projector and of Constantine as the completer of a new system of government for the Roman Empire, which persisted with mere changes of detail until it was laid in ruins by barbarians. But in reality, the imperial institutions from Augustus onwards had passed through a course of continuous development. Diocletian did but accelerate processes which had been in operation from the Empire’s earliest days….” Of course, “the new type of monarchy” which Diocletian and Constantine established between them was a more centralized, more absolutist one, so it should come as absolutely no surprise that a feminist would find inspiration in it.

Second, she simply doesn’t understand that the salient point isn’t that Diocletian restructured the Empire, it is that the form his restructuring took was absolutely insane and led to precisely the sort of violent power struggles that could easily have been predicted from the failures of the First and Second Triumvirates, to say nothing of the four wars of the Diadochi that preceded them. After Diocletian’s abdication in 305, the Tetrarchy lasted precisely ONE year before the inevitable civil wars began; these lasted 18 years until Constantine managed to defeat Maximian, Maxentius, and eventually Licinius in 324.

Also, Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices is the most important thing about his rule today; it is far more intellectually significant now than the fact that a Roman Emperor elected to centralize power and establish a fundamentally flawed administrative scheme that failed on numerous occasions in the past. Sure, the division of the empire affected the course of history, but then, so did the foolish decision of Perdiccas to marry Alexander’s sister and in a very similar manner.

Today, there is no one pushing the notion of four co-presidents and persecutions of American Christians are mostly limited to refusing to let Boy Scout troops meet at schools and refusing to say “Merry Christmas”. Price controls, on the other hand, are still being enacted around the world despite the fact that Diocletian’s Edict offers powerful evidence that not even an autocratic government with a determined and violent dictator at the helm can successfully debase the currency or enforce predetermined price levels.

All that being said, note that I am definitely in favor of a third party, a fourth party, and a fifth party. Regardless of whether you are on the left or the right, you should be able to recognize that America badly needs alternatives to the present bi-factional party ruling on behalf of the banks rather than the liberal or conservative bases its two factions purport to represent.