Power Play: Europe and Asia to Propose a Financial New World Order Less Americanized and Less Capitalistic

 

 

 

The Chinese press has issued a fairly blistering condemnation of the USA, holding us responsible for the financial crisis and contending that we have plundered the worlds wealth by the hegemony of the dollar. While it’s unquestioningly true that the dollar has been, and continues to be, the “reserve currency” for the world it’s quite unlikely that it will remain so for much longer.  First the Europeans are dead set on changing the world economic system to their liking and, to that end; they’ve been seeking allies in China.  European leaders like Sarkozy and even Merkel of Germany may have reached a meeting of the minds with China and hope to dominate the Washington discussions of a new global financial system. Clearly the worlds markets are in freefall at the moment, and the emerging markets are now close enough to default to scare the pants off their European Creditors.  A run on a bank can be dealt with but a run on countrys assets gets to be a bit sticky.  The Chinese are annoyed because as they have become an economic powerhouse it would seem that the worlds markets have come to something of a stop. The Chinese are all dressed up but have no place to go!  The Chinese have emerged as a powerhouse of production and manufacturing but everyone is broke and has no need of their products. 

 

While not the official position of the Chinese Government the following article, found on the front page of a Chinese paper, is telling because nothing happens by accident in china.  The paper points an accusatory finger at the USA and seems to be suggesting that the USA be defanged if not excluded from screwing up the new global financial markets that are expected to grow from this crisis.  I dare say the accusations are nothing new but if Senator Obama becomes President this Anti American philosophy will be familiar to Obama who will be the most left leaning person ever elected President in our history.  There is solidarity between the African American and Minority experience taught by colleges and the foreign policy they advocate.  Really it’s an extension:  White Male Christian Capitalists have exploited people of color and women to build a closed economic system that always favors white males at the expense of all others.  The same holds true on an international level; America has exploited the world with its economic power and needs to take a back seat in the world so that economic justice can have a chance.  This is essentially what the Chinese paper is saying and it’s essentially the doctrine of multiculturalism in a nut shell.  We’ve never had a President who was a true believer in it until about a week from now!  Check out this from Reuters and be sure to visit this URL for the full story.

 

U.S. has plundered world wealth with dollar: China paper

Fri Oct 24, 2008 6:14am EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) – The United States has plundered global wealth by exploiting the dollar’s dominance, and the world urgently needs other currencies to take its place, a leading Chinese state newspaper said on Friday.

The front-page commentary in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily said that Asian and European countries should banish the U.S. dollar from their direct trade relations for a start, relying only on their own currencies.

A meeting between Asian and European leaders, starting on Friday in Beijing, presented the perfect opportunity to begin building a new international financial order, the newspaper said.

The People’s Daily is the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party. The Chinese-language overseas edition is a small circulation offshoot of the main paper.

Its pronouncements do not necessarily directly voice leadership views. But the commentary, as well as recent comments, amount to a growing chorus of Chinese disdain for Washington’s economic policies and global financial dominance in the wake of the credit crisis.

“The grim reality has led people, amidst the panic, to realize that the United States has used the U.S. dollar’s hegemony to plunder the world’s wealth,” said the commentator, Shi Jianxun, a professor at Shanghai’s Tongji University.

Shi, who has before been strident in his criticism of the U.S., said other countries had lost vast amounts of wealth because of the financial crisis, while Washington’s sole concern had been protecting its own interests.

“The U.S. dollar is losing people’s confidence. The world, acting democratically and lawfully through a global financial organization, urgently needs to change the international monetary system based on U.S. global economic leadership and U.S. dollar dominance,” he wrote.

 

European and Asian leaders have been meeting in preparation for the upcoming Washington Summit on the Economy this November and I suspect the Europeans and the Asians may have agreed on far more of how the financial world should work in the future than we might find to our tastes.  I won’t say that the Lame Duck President Bush will get steamrolled, as a lame duck there’s no need to steamroll Bush, and I don’t think President Elect Obama would disagree with, or stand in the way of, implementing a world consensus. 

Were John McCain elected I don’t think his economic team would be terribly receptive to the overtures about to be made by France and Germany and even China. It would be interesting to see how a possible McCain Presidency would play out amid the backdrop of this financial crisis but the odds of McCain winning seem to fade more each day.

Consider this from the Seattle Times:

Wen’s remarks were delivered at the close of the two-day Asia-Europe Meeting in Beijing, where leaders of 43 nations issued a statement calling for new rules to guide the global economy and on the International Monetary Fund to take a leading role to aid crisis-stricken countries.

While short on details, the statement calls on the IMF and similar institutions to help stabilize struggling banks and shore up flagging stock markets. “Leaders agreed that the IMF should play a critical role in assisting countries seriously affected by the crisis, upon their request,” it said.

They also agreed to “undertake effective and comprehensive reform of the international monetary and financial systems,” the statement said.

Participants said the statement would provide the basis of a joint Asian-European approach at a Nov. 15 summit on the crisis in Washington involving the world’s 20 largest economies.

The document is one of the strongest endorsements yet for the Washington-based IMF, long known as the international lender of last resort, to take a leading role in the crisis.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the Beijing summit had raised expectations for solid results at the Washington summit.

Beijing participants “have all expressed their willingness for the Washington summit to be a place where we make some decisions, and we have all understood that it would not be possible to simply meet and have a discussion, we need to turn it into a decision-making forum,” Sarkozy said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for the IMF to become a “guard for the stability of the international finance system,” and said there was unanimous agreement that it needed to take on a supervisory role.

The IMF, whose loans normally include strict provisions, is discussing loan packages with close to a dozen countries from Iceland to Pakistan, and is examining ways to speed up the process.

Intrigue in the Middle East Continues Amid Key Elections and Financial Crisis

 

There’s about a week to go until the United States picks a new President.  The Israeli’s are going to have their elections sometime in January or February; more or less the time the new US President is getting sworn in. Israeli Forign Minister Tzipi Livni has failed to form a government and has urged President Shimon Peres to proceed with early elections.  Livni heads the Kadima Party and Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud Party will fight it out between them for control of the government.  Amid the Parliamentary Maneuvering and the financial shockwaves there is Syrian activity in the region that gives everyone pause. Consider this from the Debka Net:

 

DEBKA-Net-Weekly 369 of Oct. 24 exposed the complete deployment – from the Syrian 4th Division along Lebanon’s northern border and the 10th, 12th and 14th Divisions on Lebanon’s eastern frontier opposite the Hermil mountains and the Beqaa Valley, and down to the Hermon Mountains facing South Lebanon and northern Israel.

 

Neither the Americans nor the Israelis had expected Damascus to round off this troop concentration so fast. It was taken for granted that Damascus would wait to the spring of 2009, after the rainy season. However, president Bashar Assad saw two advantages in going ahead before the Nov. 4 US presidential election:

 

First, Israel would be unlikely to strike in the days leading up to the US election and, second, Damascus would present the new man in the White House with a fait accompli.

 

Syrian military positions now range from points opposite the northern Lebanese town of Al Qaa on Mt. Hermil to points further south up to the Massena border crossing 50 km north of Beirut. The Syrian 4th and 12th Divisions abut on the 10th Division ranged opposite South Lebanon and the disputed Shebaa Farms enclave. The military chain continues with the 14th commando division positioned on the Syrian slopes of Mt Hermon opposite Israeli military positions.

 

The Syrians continue plans for war unabated while both Israel and America remain paralyzed by internal matters amid the raveging of an unprecedented global finical storm.  This is a time when Syria can take full advantage of alied navle gazing and improve its position for hostilitys as best it can. Imagine the shock of the Syrians as they discoved a US Special Forces Team staged an operation inside Syria that took out an important terrorist leader!  Syria has registed its outrage at the USA staging military actions within its borders and indeed the USA has admitted to the attack on Sunday that killed 8 Syrians including a terrorist leader.  Consider the following from Fox News:

 

A U.S. strike on a network of foreign fighters in Syria killed its main target — an Al Qaeda coordinator who was wanted for sending foreign fighters, weapons and cash into Iraq, a U.S. official told FOX News.

Killed in Sunday’s attack by Special Operations Forces was Abu Ghadiyain, Al Qaeda’s senior coordinator operating in Syria who was closely associated with the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The attack came just days after the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an “uncontrolled” gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

Ninety percent of foreign fighters enter Iraq through Syria, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, bringing cash to Al Qaeda in Iraq’s chief. They also are deadly — trained in bomb-making and willing to sacrifice themselves in suicide attacks.

 

It seems a very pointed message to Syria that even in the midst of electoral turmoil that the United States and Israel can still deal with Syrian Aggression should the need arise or should the advisability of a preemptive action against Syria be found necessary.  The Syrians are making much of going on alert to defend themselves if Israel would attack them after this intolerable American Aggression!  We’ve all heard this stuff before and one can only hope that the Syrians will realize that they can push only so far before, elections or not, there are grave consequences for their actions.

 

The Middle East continues to simmer and all indicators point to an eventual day of reckoning with Syria as well as Iran.  The message has been delivered and now the ball’s in Syria’s court.  Would they like to go to war now or later?  It’s up to them.

Like a Run Away Nuclear Reactor the World Economy Continues to Meltdown!

 

While the economies of the earth’s most prosperous countries are burning like an out of control California Wildfire, scant attention has been paid to the so called emerging economies like Russia (Down 80% )and India, (Down 70%) and a host of others from south and central America to Asia to the former communist block of Europe.  It seems that everyone is getting hammered and the emerging markets are getting hit so bad it’s threatening to set off a bigger crisis than the US Sub Prime disaster and consequent meltdown of Western banking.

Europe has been a big source of funding to the emerging nations, far more than the United States and Japan. As in the case of Iceland’s economic disaster; lots of countries are close to economic destruction who owes Europe huge amounts of money.  If these emerging currencies go down the tubes the economies of Europe will follow suit in an explosion that’ll make the recent banking crisis look like a firecracker.  It will be several orders of magnitude worse and its epicenter will be the European Union. Consider the following from the London Telegraph:

The financial crisis spreading like wildfire across the former Soviet bloc threatens to set off a second and more dangerous banking crisis in Western Europe, tipping the whole Continent into a fully-fledged economic slump.

Currency pegs are being tested to destruction on the fringes of Europe’s monetary union in a traumatic upheaval that recalls the collapse of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

“This is the biggest currency crisis the world has ever seen,” said Neil Mellor, a strategist at Bank of New York Mellon.

Experts fear the mayhem may soon trigger a chain reaction within the eurozone itself. The risk is a surge in capital flight from Austria – the country, as it happens, that set off the global banking collapse of May 1931 when Credit-Anstalt went down – and from a string of Club Med countries that rely on foreign funding to cover huge current account deficits.

The latest data from the Bank for International Settlements shows that Western European banks hold almost all the exposure to the emerging market bubble, now busting with spectacular effect.

They account for three-quarters of the total $4.7 trillion £2.96 trillion) in cross-border bank loans to Eastern Europe, Latin America and emerging Asia extended during the global credit boom – a sum that vastly exceeds the scale of both the US sub-prime and Alt-A debacles.

Its entirely possible that a planetary currency catastrophe will ensue, at some point, that will have the basic units of trade and commerce go down the drain, seemingly, overnight.  The United States is flooding the market with Dollars and there’s word that Fed Chief Ben Bernanke may cut the interest rate to a fraction above zero as the US continues to “pull out all the stops” to “manage” the crisis. 

Meanwhile meeting are going on between Asia and Europe in preparation for the Washington meeting this November in which the world may see its first concerted actions taken toward global banking reform and even a global currency.  Fear is the driving force behind all this frantic action.  Fear and uncertainty as the world loses faith in key banks, to certain emerging market nations, to losing faith in virtually any world currency.  The nations of the earth are rallying in Washington to prevent the final and most destructive progression of such a cycle from inaugurating a global economic depression.

The Failure of banks is bad enough but the prospect of countries like Russia or Pakistan failing is many orders of magnitude more destabilizing to the world economy and possibly to world peace. We’re facing the prospect of trying to answer the question, as a planet, what is money and whats it worth?  Who decides what money is worth? 

It’s one thing to ask the question of a nation state and another to ask it for the planet earth yet that seems to be the dilemma the nations of the world face today.  What is our standard of value?  Can we have more than one standard of value?  Who regulates the standard of value?  Who manages the system and sets the rules?  These are very difficult questions because the world seems to have reached a financial unity; or a default interdependence, long before such a world political unity could even be dreamt of. 

Last Friday the Planet Earth lost about 5 trillion dollars into thin air as the market carnage around the world rocked the financial globe.  Worldwide 5 trillion dollars simply vanished.  Gone. 

As the US subprime crisis spread and engulfed investment banking to create the credit crisis: the pounding of the emerging markets took was devastating.  As the European creditors to the emerging markets face the defaults of emerging countries and their currencies it will in turn wipe out the European markets and perhaps most of their individual currencies.  As Europe implodes it will be devastating to the US who will have lost our best trading partners at a time of very steep recession which in turn will become a depression and engulf anyone left standing in Asia. 

Its like the China Syndrome:  Our economy has melted down, causing others to melt down and when they hit the water table of currency failure it will effectively place the nations of the earth back on economic square one unless a miracle occurs. That’s the point at which we’re the most vulnerable and that’s the point where the world can be taken advantage of by complacency among the principled and avarice among the unprincipled. Here’s a bit more of that article from the London Telegraph that I found on Money Net Daily.

Amazingly, Spanish banks alone have lent $316bn to Latin America, almost twice the lending by all US banks combined ($172bn) to what was once the US backyard. Hence the growing doubts about the health of Spain’s financial system – already under stress from its own property crash – as Argentina spirals towards another default, and Brazil’s currency, bonds and stocks all go into freefall.

Broadly speaking, the US and Japan sat out the emerging market credit boom. The lending spree has been a European play – often using dollar balance sheets, adding another ugly twist as global “deleveraging” causes the dollar to rocket. Nowhere has this been more extreme than in the ex-Soviet bloc.

Russia too is in the eye of the storm, despite its energy wealth – or because of it. The cost of insuring Russian sovereign debt through credit default swaps (CDS) surged to 1,200 basis points last week, higher than Iceland’s debt before Götterdammerung struck Reykjavik.

The markets no longer believe that the spending structure of the Russian state is viable as oil threatens to plunge below $60 a barrel. The foreign debt of the oligarchs ($530bn) has surpassed the country’s foreign reserves. Some $47bn has to be repaid over the next two months.

Traders are paying close attention as contagion moves from the periphery of the eurozone into the core. They are tracking the yield spreads between Italian and German 10-year bonds, the stress barometer of monetary union.

The spreads reached a post-EMU high of 93 last week. Nobody knows where the snapping point is, but anything above 100 would be viewed as a red alarm. The market took careful note on Friday that Portugal’s biggest banks, Millenium, BPI, and Banco Espirito Santo are preparing to take up the state’s emergency credit guarantees.

Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas, says there is an imminent danger that East Europe’s currency pegs will be smashed unless the EU authorities wake up to the full gravity of the threat, and that in turn will trigger a dangerous crisis for EMU itself.

“The system is paralysed, and it is starting to look like Black Wednesday in 1992. I’m afraid this is going to have a very deflationary effect on the economy of Western Europe. It is almost guaranteed that euroland money supply is about to implode,” he said.

Barney Frank as Santa Claus: Goodies for the Poor, Redistribution for Everyone Else.

 

Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, best known for his chairmanship of the House Banking Committee, as well as for his open Homosexuality and slovenly wardrobe,  has ruled out giving the rich “coal”for Christmas because it’s too expensive and its not environmentaly friendly should the rich try to burn it. Congressman Frank is looking toward the election with glee awaiting the coronation of Barak Obama as President of the United States and the installation of many more democrats in the house and senate.  Nothing can stop the bizarre sleigh ride of entitlements and spending that he and other democrats are planning. As our economic situation grows worse; they’ll simply come up with more programs, for more people, to keep themselves in power and us quite.

Barney Frank is hardly the only Democrat trying on the red suit and desperately begging PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to let him hitch up the reindeer for a photo opp!  Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi is cooking up a $300 Billion dollar giveaway as another “stimulus” while Senator John F. Kerry is calling for a new, New Deal!  It’s said that Senator Edward Kennedy is on his sick bed writing a new nationalized health care scheme that will make European Governments look like Ebenezer Scrooge in comparison. 

Given the economic climate; you and I are going to have a leaner, more frugal Christmas: but not the democrats in Washington.  Christmas is coming to Capitol Hill and the rumpled, lisping, homosexual activist Barney Frank will be wearing the red suit and the white beard and his bag of presents will never run out. Consider some quotes from an article in South Coast: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081024/NEWS/810240332/-1/NEWS10

NEW BEDFORD — After the November election, Democrats will push for a second economic stimulus package that includes money for the states’ stalled infrastructure projects, along with help paying for healthcare expenses, food stamps and extended unemployment benefits, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank said Thursday.

In a meeting with the editorial board of The Standard-Times, Rep. Frank, D-Mass., also called for a 25 percent cut in military spending, saying the Pentagon has to start choosing from its many weapons programs, and that upper-income taxpayers are going to see an increase in what they are asked to pay.

The military cuts also mean getting out of Iraq sooner, he said.

You know its Democrat Christmas when they can talk about a 25% cut for the military and no one has the numbers to stop them.  The rosy glow on democrat cheeks comes from the knowledge that no one cans stop them from cutting the military, ending the war, raising taxes and coming up with way more programs than Harry Hopkins and FDR ever dreamt of.  Dreams of the Fairness Doctrine and the end of talk radio dance in their heads while renewable solar power cells, not drilling, give them unaccustomed Christmas Cheer.  (Sorry, I meant Winter Holiday!) Yes its going to be a Merry Winter Holliday for Democrats that’s going to last at least two years maybe more and China is going to make us, not them, pay every last penny of what our spendthrift Democrats are about to spend.  Ho Ho Ho!

Even before Thanksgiving, just before the smell of our chestnuts, roasting in an open White House fire, registers in our brains, President George W. Bush and the President Elect, widely presumed to be Obama, will be reforming the global economy with Communist China and Socialist Europe.  (No Santa in China, by law, and they have one in Europe but they’re so sophisticated that they all just shun him.) I dare say that Obama will be in a receptive frame of mind when the Europeans explain to him how America has exploited the global economy and has to do more to help other nations and destroy its economy for the good of the world. 

Obama already believes it, he either learned it from anti Americans professors in the Ivy league or from an Anti American preacher at church for 20 years.  He’s been expecting our economic “chickens to come home to roost” for some time and Barak Obama has a plan.  He’s going to be talking about a Cap and Trade system for this nation that will do more to screw up the economy than it will reduce world carbon emissions.  He’s going to give to the world until it hurts! (Until it hurts you and me, not him) He knows firsthand  how much “resistance” there will be as he reforms American Culture and Politics to a more sophisticated, inclusive and worldly set of policies.  We need to be more French in our outlook and less materialistic and shallow.  Like the French we need to stop and smell the sautéed shallots! 

Barak has always known that capitalism is headed for the dustbin of history and that when others have great dreams it somehow threatens those without similar ambition.  Barak Obama is the agent of Social Change we’ve labored on for thirty years and now he’s within weeks of achieving supreme power on earth.  Even before he’s sworn in on January 20^th he’ll be redesigning the world with Europe, China and the World Bank!  Consider this from an article on Bloomberg:

Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) — Asian and European leaders called for an overhaul of World War II-era banking rules, lending support to French President Nicolas Sarkozy as he pushes the U.S. to embrace greater supervision of global financial markets.

The leaders “pledged to undertake effective and comprehensive reform of the international monetary and financial systems,” according to a statement in Beijing yesterday. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told reporters after the gathering of more than 40 heads of state and government that “we need even more financial regulation to ensure financial safety.”

The EU has floated the ideas of including more bank supervision, stricter regulation of hedge funds, new rules for credit-rating companies and changes at the International Monetary Fund. The French president has compared the effort to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire that fixed exchange rates, hitched the world to the gold standard and created the IMF and World Bank.

The gathering to be hosted by Bush, who leaves office in January, will be the first of a series of financial summits that will also address foreign-exchange rates, according to Sarkozy, who said talks about currencies may be put off until after Nov. 15. “It is simply impossible to talk about the financial crisis without discussing currencies and the way in which they interact.”

It getting to be Christmas Time in America and while the politicians promise us the world; they’re sighing Chinese Promissory Notes in the names of our Grand kids.  As congressman Frank might remark while reading the election polls:  “Ho Ho Ho!!”

 

 

 

 

Socialist Democrats Running the Show: Proposed Abolition of 401(k) Tax Break

 

The Democrat Party may attack peoples 401 k investments in favor of a compulsory pension plan administered by the bankrupt, insolvent, Social Security Administration.  All the volatility on Wall Street has given the democrats a chance to exploit that volatility to being nationalizing retirement funds and forcing self administered retirement savings out of business.  As buzzards circle a carcass in the desert so the Democrats are circling over the financial turmoil to seize wealth and remake the financial system according to their ideological strictures.  Once again the Nanny State Democrats will penalize the people who saved and did it right to create a terrible program for everyone.  Even in a full blown depression I would rather have control of my retirement funds and keep the bankrupt Ssocial Security Administration out of my affairs.  Consider the following excerpts from the Investment News: http://www.investmentnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081012/REG/310139971&template=printart

 

Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation’s $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute

 

Under Ms. Ghilarducci’s plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5% of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3% a year, adjusted for inflation.

The current system of providing tax breaks on 401(k) contributions and earnings would be eliminated.

“I want to stop the federal subsidy of 401(k)s,” Ms. Ghilarducci said in an interview. “401(k)s can continue to exist, but they won’t have the benefit of the subsidy of the tax break.”

Under the current 401(k) system, investors are charged relatively high retail fees, Ms. Ghilarducci said.

“I want to spend our nation’s dollar for retirement security better. Everybody would now be covered” if the plan were adopted, Ms. Ghilarducci said.

 

It would seem that we’re returning to the bad old days of elaborate structures to keep the government from confiscatory orgies of taxation in which people have to fight for any tax shelters they can find.  I have sufficient faith in the fundamental corruption of the Democrat Party to believe that they’ll always have loopholes, for those in the know, to shelter money from their insatiable appetite for your money.  Government has become the adversary of success and if you want to get ahead and have a life you’ll have to evade the Obama/ Pelosi/ Reid Politburo.   Consider the following excerpts from an outstanding article at Forbs.com: http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/24/barack-obama-law-ent-law-cx_rb_1023robertbovarnickobama_print.html

 

In certain unscripted moments, Obama has given us a glimpse of his somewhat socialist leanings.

Couple that with the recent pronouncement of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has pushed to implement a $300 billion stimulus package–on top of the $700 billion financial rescue package and the $800 billion of additional proposed spending under an Obama presidency–and you can see where we are headed.

I would encourage you to click on the above link for an outstanding story but I’ll give you some of the highlights: Obama will eliminate the statute of limitations on discrimination suits further miring the United States in litigation and class warfare that we can ill afford. He’s going to hit small businesses with massive new taxes, a “global poverty initiative” that will function like a UN payroll tax on Americans, Regulation of the Internet and more.  There are 10 area’s where the author of the article, a Philadelphia Lawyer, figures Obama will well and truly screw up the country.  We’re talking fundamental changes that will be our undoing in the end.

If the changes the Democrats are talking about are enacted in mass; our American Experiment will be over because we’ll be France.  Further, I suspect that Obama will embrace the new push for global financial regulation and institutions that will be disastrous for the American economy for the foreseeable future.  It should prove interesting to watch the stock market contemplate an Obama Presidency in the days to come because I have doubts that we can survive the credible threat of his winning to say nothing of enacting his ambitious social agenda.

We’re already in deep financial trouble that’s likely to last years but if we elect a real socialist to empower trial lawyers, hate crimes, UN taxes, and national health care we’re finished as a country.  Government under Obama will simply take over everything and reward those who blindly go along with the program and sanction those with any initiative at all.  The worst of all is that it seems that we’re ready to vote in this Orwellian world on November 4^th.  We’re poised, as a nation, to make the biggest mistake of our national lives and the cost in blood and treasure is likely to be enormous.   

Check out the above articles: they’re well worth the time.  The Government is not supposed to be our master in this country but it seems that too many of us have forgotten.  Its going to make for a somber thanksgiving as we mark the passing of our greatest traditions of the American Spirit and the American System with barely a whimper.  God help us and God help the United States of America.

Here We Go Again: Black Friday October 24th 2008 Heralds the Failure of the Rescue

“The panic levels are now quite unseen,” said Christian Gattiker, Zurich-based head of equity research at Bank Julius Baer & Co. which manages about $307.6 billion globally. “It’s difficult to have any words for this situation right now.”

The American Administration has failed to stem the tide of the global sell off and credit crisis of 2008.  Once again the banks are hording wealth as the whole bloody mess that we call the stock market comes unglued and panic selling ensues.  There were massive sell offs in Europe and Asia last night and the pre trading on the American Stock Market was so bad it triggered the circuite breakers set at -6% to stop panic selling.  The Word is that Wall Street will open today but everyone and his grandmother is expecting a very ugly day as panic returns to Wall Street.

Trading in futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was limited to prevent contracts from further declines after drops of more than 6 percent. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 Index sank 7.5 percent and the pound slid the most versus the dollar since 1971 after the economy shrank for the first time since 1992. South Korea’s Kospi Index slumped 10 percent as the country’s economy grew at the slowest pace in four years.

Trading below the “limit down” level for the S&P 500 futures will resume when U.S. exchanges open for regular trading at 9:30 a.m. New York time, said Jeremy Hughes, a London-based spokesman for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The Automakers are getting flattened and even Toyota is reporting a decrease in sales.  Oil prices are tanking as OPEC tries to cut production but fearing that the global turndown, the prospect of a global economic depression, will continue to suppress demand for the foreseeable future. The Russians have suspended trading on their stock market as the collapsing price of oil deals them one concussing blow after another and they wont reopen until the 28^th of October.

“The sum of all fears is driving asset prices down — oil, defaults, ruble-devaluation risk and the fear of a massive cut in earnings growth,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib Financial Corp. in Moscow. “For investors oil is the critical factor as everything hinges on the amount of oil revenue that the country earns.”

Crude for December delivery tumbled $3.42, or 5 percent, to $64.42 a barrel in New York on concern OPEC’s output cut, announced today, won’t stem the slide in prices and demand.

 Gold is down, commodities are down, stocks are down but mattress sales of beds with special compartments for stashing cash are through the roof. It’s a worldwide panic and it comes on the heels of extraordinary government actions across the globe to stop exactly what’s resuming today.  The loss of confidence in the world’s economy is a dagger leveled at the jugular of companies and governments around the world and recovery is going to take years and its going to be painful. 

A measure of banks’ willingness to lend, the London interbank offered rate for overnight dollars, rose for a second day after declining for nine days. The Libor-OIS spread, a gauge of cash availability that measures the difference between the three-month rate and the overnight indexed swap rate, widened 8 basis points to 262 basis points, the British Bankers’ Association said.

With the failure of the world’s central banks and the governments of the top economys I think that today may well be seen as the start of the next Great Depression.  People aren’t spending anymore and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.  I think the central banks and government intervention has failed and later in the crisis will be found to have made matter much worse.

It turns out that the great generational challenge we face is not the War on Terror but an Economic Challenge that will shake the foundations of our nation in a way that makes 911 look like Romper Room.

We’re in big trouble folks and today is going to be long and troubling.

But who is going to clean this mess up?  What are we going to do?  Who’s going to take the lead?  Who?   Bush?  No!  In the short term the world leader with the most influence on the world economic meltdown seems to be Nicolas Sarkozy of France.  That’s right: France.  The Crisis fell during his term as EU President and he’s been running point on the matter from its inception in addition to taking the lead in Europes response to the Russian Georgian war. 

All quotes in this article were taken from storys on Bloomberg this morning and I leave you with a few more on the intriguing Mr. Sarkozy of France.

The nominally pro-American Sarkozy, who ran as a pro- business candidate last year against Socialist Segolene Royal, is taking his crusade for a “re-founding of global capitalism” to Beijing today, when European leaders meet with the heads of 16 Asian countries including China, India and Japan. His next chance comes at the first in a series of global summits addressing financial markets slated for Nov. 15 in the Washington area.

“Nothing in the global economy will be the same as before,” Sarkozy said yesterday in Annecy, France, as he announced plans to create a sovereign wealth fund to invest in French companies, protecting them from foreign “predators” after the global stock-market rout.

Sarkozy’s Presidency

The crisis struck during Sarkozy’s six-month term as European Union president, enabling him to marshal the EU’s response and festoon it with ideas that, until recently, few outside France embraced.

The first European convert was U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, up until now the EU’s most forceful free-marketeer. Brown’s partial nationalization of the British banking system, praised by Sarkozy, unleashed an EU-wide move to pony up at least 2 trillion euros ($2.6 trillion) in capital and loan guarantees for banks.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson subsequently decided to take $250 billion of equity stakes in U.S. lenders, though his $700 billion rescue package was initially intended to buy their bad debt.

Sarkozy’s proposed “toolkit” would broaden the International Monetary Fund’s mandate and set up a new system to manage the dollar, euro, yen and emerging-market currencies — an impossibly broad agenda that has gotten little traction in Europe and even less in the U.S.

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http://www.valuevotersusa.com/

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Gay Day for Kindergarteners: It’s Time to Get Politics Out of the Classroom

 

 

When I went to Kindergarten it was fun.  There were lots of games and fun things to learn and we even got free milk and a chance to take a nap.  That tradition of taking a nap on a rug that you and your mom would pick out is a tradition that I’ve often wished would have lasted all the way through college.  But I digress….

When I went to Kindergarten we drew stuff for our mom on mothers day, we could be a vampire or a witch for Halloween we could sing Christmas Songs like O little Town of Bethlehem. we played some serious Dodge ball for recess when the weather was bad and tag when the sun was shining!  Those were the good old days! 

Today’s educators have evolved in their thinking to such a degree that I barely recognize how barbaric my education based education really was.  They taught me facts in history and how to read and write and to some small extent, mathematics.  They traumatized me in math class and damaged my self esteem to such an extent that my wife has to add stuff for me to this very day!  But I digress….

I remember going to show and tell and telling a joke that kinda backfired on me.  It was a joke I heard Dad tell to Mom and I figured it wasn’t a cool rock or a frog but the joke would do for show and tell.  So I told this joke:

A Kindergarten Teacher told her class to take a few minutes at their desk and think of a pleasant thought.  After a moment or two the teacher called on little Sally to inquire what her pleasant though might be. 

Sally immediately said:  I’M PREGNANT!

The flummoxed teacher stammered a bit and asked Sally to explain…

“Well this morning at breakfast my mommy said to my daddy that she was pregnant.  And my daddy said: NOW ISNT THAT A PLEASANT THOUGHT!”

Now when you’re five years old and you’ve forgotten to bring something cool to share at Show and Tell you have to improvise on the spot and while my telling of the joke lacked the adult intonations I’m sure accompanied my father’s version, I got it right and it was just another day at the office for me. I honestly don’t remember the reaction of my teacher but it must have made quite an impression on her because the subject came up again at this thing called a parent teacher conference. 

Apparently my mother was talking with the teacher when a neighbor of ours walked by and my Mom and the teacher waved at her and my mom shared with the teacher the fact that our neighbor was pregnant again.

The teacher got this strange expression on her face and said to my mother:  “NOW ISN’T THAT A PLEASANT THOUGHT!”

Mom told that story about me for the rest of her life.  She told everyone.  Everyone!

That was the world I grew up in.  Here’s a little something from World Net Daily about the Kindergarten of Today.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Some parents are shocked to find their children are learning to be homosexual allies and will participate in “Coming Out Day” at a public elementary school tomorrow – and they claim the school failed to notify parents.

According to a Pacific Justice Institute report, Faith Ringgold opted not to inform the parents of its pro-homosexual activities beforehand. The school is celebrating “Gay and Lesbian History Month” and is in the process of observing “Ally Week,” a pro-”gay” occasion usually geared toward high school students.

 

The school is scheduled to host discussions about families and has posted fliers on school grounds portraying only homosexuals. According to the report, a “TransAction Gender-Bender Read-Aloud” will take place Nov. 20. Students will listen to traditional stories with “gay” or transgender twists, to include “Jane and the Beanstalk.”

“Do we need any further proof that gay activists will target children as early as possible?” he asked. “Opponents of traditional marriage keep telling us that Prop. 8 has nothing to do with education. In reality, they want to push the gay lifestyle on kindergartners, and we can only imagine how much worse it will be if Prop. 8 is defeated. This is not a scenario most Californians want replayed in their elementary schools.”

When I went to Kindergarten Heather had a Mommy and a Daddy not two Mommies and we all made stuff for our parents on Mother’s Day and Fathers Day.  Today’s kids don’t have Mothers Day or Fathers Day because that might imply that a homosexual lifestyle is wrong or weird and that would lower the self esteem of any kid who had homosexual parents.

Being a vampire or a witch for Halloween is just reinforcing violent patriarchal stereotypes of the domineering vampire or the sexist idea that women were either babes or witches.

You can’t play Dodge Ball these days because that’s just encouraging violence in kids who might grow up to be Timothy McVeigh someday.

You can’t sing O Little Town of Bethlehem at Christmas because Christmas is an imposition of one’s religion and we aren’t all Christians.  It’s ok to be a kid at school and not be Christian.  (In college its even mandatory) Even the Holy Grail of the school year: Christmas Break has been declared a vile and loathsome thing that’s been renamed Winter Break.  When Kids sing ;they sing about Frosty the Snowman or Jewish or Kwanza songs….   But I Digress.

The kind of craziness we’re subjecting our kids to today is something for the record books. 

When I went to Kindergarten there was no political indoctrination.  There was no political indoctrination all the way through High School and it was a shock in College when professors used their position to push outrageous propositions on the students who knew the professors were crazy.  I college student can thing for themselves and make decisions about what’s important to them and about values and what moral and spiritual codes and traditions to follow. 

You can’t do that when you’re five.

The other week it was the lesbian teacher taking her class to her lesbian wedding as  field trip… But I Digress….

There has to be a way to put an end to the political addenda that’s destroying American education and return some innocence to the lives of our kids, at least for a few years, before we make them pawns in the culture wars.

How is it that we all can’t agree on that?

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

This is simply one of the best articles on the media in our times I’ve ever read.  Ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Orson Scott Card.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor’s note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism.  You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere.  It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan?  It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups.  But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay?  They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it.  One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules.  The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans.  (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me.  It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn’t there a story here?  Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout?  Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal.  “Housing-gate,” no doubt.  Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?” ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago.  So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President.  So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts.  This financial crisis was completely preventable.  The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party.  The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie.  Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What?  It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents.  Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link.  (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth.  That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans.  You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do.  Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences.  That’s what honesty means .  That’s how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one.  He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all?  Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women.  Who listens to NOW anymore?  We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late.  You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis.  You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

 

http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html

A Gathering of Turkeys: World Leaders to Hold Economic Summit in Washington

 

Just when he thought he could relax and sit around giving oversight to his transition team it appears that President George W. Bush will be hosting an important meeting of the G20 countries before he can escape to Crawford Texas. Other reports I’ve seen give the idea, and insistence, for this most unusual meeting to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.  The meeting is set to take place on the 15^th of November and Bush is going to invite participation from the President Elect and his team. 

 

I find it interesting that the meeting is going on during the transition period, while power is being transferred from the Bush administration to either an Obama or McCain administration. 

 

It would seem that the major economies of the world are intent on diving into this as soon as possible without respect to major changes in the American political landscape.  I suspect this is a sign of just how desperate the world is about the economy and its infinite potential to get much worse in both the short and long term. 

 

The American President Elect will be up to his eyebrows in high stakes world diplomacy and in helping to set up the world principals if not the first true world institutions to control and regulate the global economy.  The President Elect wont have his cabinet or staff together yet! Consider the following from an article on CNBC.

 

President Bush will host a summit on Nov. 15 in the Washington, D.C., area to discuss the global financial crisis and ways to prevent it from happening again, the White House announced
Wednesday.

“The leaders will review progress being made to address the current financial crisis, advance a common understanding of its causes, and, in order to avoid a repetition, agree on a common
set of principles for reform of the regulatory and institutional regimes for the world’s financial sectors,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

 

 

I would like to be a fly on the wall as the Argentineans, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Indians, and even the South Africans indicate how thrilled they are to be at a summit caused by our flagrant mismanagement of the world’s principle economy.  I also find it fascinating that we’ll be sitting down with major economies run by Communism, Socialism, Gangsters and a “Moderate” Islamist nation while we, all evidence to the contrary, claim to represent a free market economy!  We’re actually going to be Europe Jr. but it’s going to take time for the denial to fade, and the realities to sink in. Some of these world leaders will not be in a proper frame of mind to appreciate the “American Way” or the glories of the market system. In fact if Obama wins the election it will make George W. Bush the only pro American leader at the summit!  Throw in the General Secretary of the UN, the President of the World Bank and the Director of the International Monetary Fund and all you need is popcorn for a serious Anti American Party.

 

In any event our ability to shape the forthcoming policy will be at our lowest because of the election and because of our perceived culpability in this mess.  We’re going to see the outcome directed by other leaders, I suspect European leaders, and I suspect we’ll lose many of our advantages in the new economic accords. So who are these guys that will be rewriting the global economies rule book about 10 days after our election? 

“G-20 members are: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union.

“The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, the President of the World Bank, the United Nations Secretary-General, and the Chairman of the Financial Stability Forum have also been invited to participate.”

 

These leaders are going to try to create a global system of economic governance that in the end will lead to a plethora of “global” institutions as national sovereignty becomes more and more irrelevant and obsolete in a global economy.  The world is going to be treated to the spectical of one nation state, the United States of America, toadmit that we cant solve this problem alone and invite the creation of new powerfull international agencys and regulation.  We’re going to join the world chorus in calling for a new world standard of value and banking that will be presented to the world as if it were the 10 commandments of God. 

 

If Barak Obama is President Elect than we’re going to be treated to any number of built in penalties for America based on environmentalism to economic imperialism that will resonate with the world view of the new President.  George W Bush will not be a player in this at all because he won’t want to be seen as a sore loser. Bush is now very much a lame duck and his presence will serve as a convienient excuse should they need a whipping boy.  The world leaders who will design the global financial system will reinforce the views Obama’s learned from his Communist Poet Buddy in Hawaii to his America hating preacher of twenty years to the hapless liberal academics infesting our nation’s colleges.  Obama will agree with the nations of the G20 and blame the Bush administration and Market Capitalism itself while agreeing to global economic protocols and institutions that will ensure the death of Market Capitalism. 

 

The world as we know it will never be the same.

 

In addition, we expect that the leaders will discuss the effects of the crisis on emerging economies and developing nations. The summit will also provide an important opportunity for leaders to strengthen the underpinnings of capitalism by discussing how they can enhance their commitment to open, competitive economies, as well as trade and investment liberalization.

 

Check out this fine article at CNBC.com: http://www.cnbc.com/id/27321251