Is there anybody who doesn't already know that he's full of shit?
Once you get past the soaring oratory, to experience a speech by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is to be hit with an astoundingly lengthy list of promises."I don't know how any reasonable person" could think he'd really be able to accomplish everything he's pledging to do, said the mother-in-law of a colleague, a Missouri woman who intends to vote for Obama. She must just want "change". And "hope".
Just today in Sarasota, Fla., the Democratic presidential nominee said that he'd:
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#1
At the rate we're going the war is going to end itself before he can get sworn in.
So he wants to end the war, but increase our numbers of ground troops and military spending? That doesn't make any sense. Why do I feel like that isn't what he really wants to do to the Armed Services?
#3
There are a lot of informed thinking, people at R-Burg. RBs don't buy into the Camelot-like hysteria of BO's campaign. Hitler was a very effective spinmeister but look what the result was of buying into his megalomania.
#4
I don't think that all that many people over 21 buy into Obama's b.s. The major problem is that people hold the president more accountable than the congress and the current president is a republican. Like 1980 and 1992 voters want a change at the top.
A second problem is that McCain doesn't really excite that many poeple, myself included. He's conservative enough on security, but not enough on other issues (immigration, economy, etc.).
I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face of your T.V.
I'm the Cult of Personality
I exploit you; still you love me
I tell you one and one makes three
I'm the Cult of Personality
The Liberal Ideologue Could Be A Well-Meaning Failure; The Pragmatic Reformer Could Be A Great Leader.
When John McCain and many other Republicans ask, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" there is an implication that maybe he is somehow sinister or extremist.
I don't believe that. But I do think that there are two very different Obamas. Both are extraordinarily intelligent, serene under pressure, and driven by an admirable social conscience -- albeit as willing to deploy deception as the next politician. But while the first Obama would be a well-meaning failure, the second could become a great president.
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#5
Simple DLR, its an old derogatory label - Oreo, black on the outside, white on the inside. Just like being Asian is the new White(tm). The only authentic black is the one which believes what the Rev. 'God Damn America' Wright preached. Just like Gov. Palin is not a representative of female rights and achievement [because only true Socialist(tm) qualify], just ask the Women Studies Department at any Ministry of Truth major university. And they'll all get the 'Joe Routine'(tm) from the True Believers(tm). Remember, it's not about facts, it's about how you feel.
Beware the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
There should no longer be any dispute that Barack Obamas aim is to socialize the American economy as he vaporously puts it, to bring about redistributive change. The real question is how hell go about it. Very likely, the answer lies in a potentially cataclysmic treaty that has gotten virtually no attention during the campaign: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
To rewind, Obama expressly endorsed redistributive change in a 2001 Chicago Public Radio interview. Lamenting that the Warren Court (the tribunal that spawned a revolution in criminals rights) wasnt that radical after all, Obama sought to prove his point by citing the justices failure to take on the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.
It was an early iteration of the socialist philosophy Obama recently made famous in an exchange with Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber. Of course on the latter occasion, when Obama spoke of planning to spread the wealth around, it was a slip. The candidate is far more guarded now than he was in 2001, just as he was more coy in 2001 than in his mid-Nineties incarnation when he first sought to represent an extremely left-wing district and embraced his endorsement by the radical Chicago New Party (ACORNs electoral arm with ties to the Socialist International).
By 2001, as he eyed national office, Obama put on mainstream airs. He couched his radicalism in soothing euphemisms. Economic justice, however, is simply the finance angle of social justice, the idée fixe of Obama and his coven of Change-agents like Michael Klonsky, the communist educator who ran a social justice blog on Obamas official campaign website. Such radicals give the Warren Court high marks on non-economic rights, but flunk the justices on redistribution: the purported right of societys neer-do-wells to pick the pockets of its achievers through the coercive power of government.
OBAMAS ANTI-CONSTITUTION
As Obama sees it, the Warren Court failed to break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution. The judges instead clung to the hoary construction of the Constitution as a charter of negative liberties one that says only what government cant do to you. For Obama, economic justice demands the positive case: what government must do on your behalf (emphasis added).
True to form, Obama has twisted the most elementary points. First, the Framers viewed government as a necessary evil: required for a free peoples collective security but, if insufficiently checked, guaranteed to devour liberty. The purpose of the Constitution was not to make the positive case for government but for freedom. Freedom cannot exist without order, and thus implies some measure of government. But it is a limited government, vested with only the powers expressly enumerated. As the framers knew, a government that strays beyond those powers is necessarily treading on freedoms territory. It is certain to erode the very Blessings of Liberty the Constitution was designed to secure.
Relatedly, the Constitution does state the positive case for government in its opening lines. Government is required to safeguard the rule of law and the national security. These injunctions are vital: there is no liberty without them. Why, then, do Obama and other Leftists ignore them? Because they dont involve picking winners and losers; they eschew social engineering. These guarantees, instead, are for everyone, uniformly: Government must provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare (emphasis added). The Blessings of Liberty are to be secured to ourselves and to our posteritynot to yourself at the expense of my posterity.
The question isnt what government must do on your behalf. It is what government must do on our behalf. In general, the positive power of government is for the body politic, not the individual. Of course individuals have rights. But those rights comprise a sphere of personal liberty against government. In that sphere, each individual Joe the Plumber is free to work hard, or not; to make of his life what he will, bearing personally the consequences of his choices. Freedom, after all, includes the freedom to fail. Pace Obama, failure is a part of life there is no right against it.
The framers understood that there is no societal good in a government that must do for individuals and factions. Doing is a zero-sum game. Government does not inherently have anything to give. What it awards you it must seize from me. What it gives one faction it must deny to others. Such an arrangement is inimical to the Constitutions purpose to form a more perfect union. It is, in fact, a prescription for disunion, for a house divided.
Freedom accepts that we are different. The endless variety of life assures that. I had every opportunity to become just as good a basketball player as Michael Jordan, but he has natural gifts and worked harder. If we played a hundred times, he would whip me a hundred times by about 500 points. No Change, no matter how rapturously framed, could alter that result without chaining him to the bench and rendering the game no longer recognizable as basketball. That would be perversion, not justice.
Yet, this is just what Obamas economic justice envisions: that the government can hamstring Michael Jordan and give me enough freebies that, despite his talent and industry, he can only play me to a tie, destroying his incentive to excel while the Bulls go out of business, no longer able to afford even my mediocrity. Naturally, such an absurd system requires change. Redistribution smothers the freedom our Constitution is designed to foster. It is therefore antithetical to our law.
Obama knows this. Consequently, as he said in 2001, he is not surprised that courts saddled with such a Constitution have not been a useful route to economic justice. What is surprising, at least at first blush, is that Obama doesnt fret too much about that. As a matter of fact, in his estimation, the civil rights movement was too court focused.
This is because Obama is a true revolutionary. Its not that he doesnt want socialist economic policies; he does. And its not that he doesnt think the courts should impose economic justice just as the Warren Court imposed social justice; again, he does. Its that he believes the Warren era reliance on the judiciary as principal change agent led to the atrophy of more forceful and promising methods: namely, the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.
Political and community organizing activities on the ground? Think of ACORN, Obamas old comrades at the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now: engaged in massive (often fraudulent) voter-registration efforts to over-represent societys bottom-dwellers; handing Leftist politicians a ready-to-enact legislative agenda of confiscatory taxes, laws forcing banks to make home-loans to unqualified borrowers, living wage laws that kill jobs, corporate exit visas to trap businesses in urban areas enervated by governments central planning, sustainable development regulations to redistribute wealth from the suburbs to the cities, global poverty relief to redistribute wealth from American citizens to the third-world dictators, and Leftist political indoctrination in the public schools.
REDISTRIBUTIVE CHANGE: THE DEATH OF FREEDOM
Obama, the Leftist community organizer schooled in the radical methods of Saul Alinsky, recognizes that in the current legal landscape legislation will be necessary to impose the injustice he calls economic justice. Lawmakers neednt do all the work. Politically unaccountable judges, many favorably predisposed toward Leftist schemes, can be a force multiplier. First, however, they must be given just enough legislative license.
As luck would have it, a President Obama may be well positioned to give that license at the very start of his term, without the political risk inherent in proposing his own detailed economic justice program. The solution is ready to hand: all it needs is an election-day tide that swells the Democrats Senate majority.
In 1966, with key help from the Soviet Union, the United Nations began promoting a monstrosity of a treaty known as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). It is chockablock with exactly the things Obama would say government must do on your behalf: provide housing, clothing, education, health care, employment, a living wage that accounts for comparative worth (meaning the government, under the guise of preventing discrimination, determines what you are paid), limited labor hours, paid vacation and holidays, paid parental leave, nearly unrestricted trade unionization, social security (including social insurance), equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need, and so on.
This economic-justice compact was so patently socialist that, even at the height of his Great Society and War on Poverty, President Lyndon Johnson declined to sign it. So did Presidents Nixon and Ford. But alas, there is always Jimmy Carter. Thirty years ago, he signed the ICESCR, but it has languished ever since, never ratified. President Clinton lauded the treaty but shrank from prodding the senate, where staunch Republican opposition made the required two-thirds approval margin a pipedream.
Obama, by contrast, expects to have the wind at his back, at least for a time. Gone is the Republican Congress of the Clinton years. Despite their appalling performance and historically low approval ratings, cocky Democrats expect to pad their congressional majorities. They anticipate inching close to 60 seats, or beyond. With an assist from the usual GOP moderates whod no doubt be anxious to join a charismatic new president in a bipartisan effort to improve Americas image in the world the 67 votes needed for ratification could be attainable.
The Constitution stipulates that, once ratified, a treaty becomes the supreme law of the land. No longer would Obama need to worry about the essential constraints that relegate our fundamental law to a charter of negative liberties. Federal judges would now be unleashed to direct the redistributions necessary to ensure a living wage and the ICESCRs remaining laundry list of economic rights. Congressional Democrats, egged on by ACORN and its hard Left allies, would craft legislation to further codify, explain and expand on them.
Change will have arrived. At long last well have realized Obamas ideal of economic justice. But freedom, the ideal that makes America America, will have perished.
National Reviews Andrew C. McCarthy chairs the FDDs Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).
#2
Very insightful. Obama is simply a 'tool' of the TN Elites, as is his feckless constituency. If elected, he'll be pushed onto the foreign affairs and international stage very quickly while the democratic congress deals with the day-to-day business of "cleaning up the republican years" and restoring left-leaning judges to the courts. Justice Ginsburg example follows:
Addressing an audience at the Constitutional Court of South Africa on Feb. 7, the 73-year-old justice, known as one of the court's more liberal members, criticized various Republican-proposed House and Senate measures that either decry or would bar the citation of foreign law in the Supreme Court's constitutional rulings. Conservatives often see the citing of foreign laws in court rulings as an affront to American sovereignty, adding to a list of grievances they have against judges that include rulings supporting abortion rights or gay rights.
#3
That's why I went to writing books about what Americans are, and where we came from, and what a unique place these United States are... we have to remember, and to reclaim our history, not let it be smothered over by great crashing mounds of politically correct ignorance. (BTW, thanks for ordering your copies of the Trilogy, Besoeker! You'll enjoy every page, I'm sure!)
#4
This doesn't surprise me at all. I've been thinking that the idiocy that led to a "multicultural" America was going to have a serious backlash at some point against minorities. I've never seen so many white people who are so angry at the anti-white racism and prejudice that is showing through in the Democrat campaign. One really big proof of this is the almost complete disarming of the word "racist." Whites have seen themselves injured too many times by this slander and it's to the point now where they just say, "yep, I am, and if you don't like it, screw off. Everybody else is just as racist if not more so."
Whites are getting to the point where they're not going to be pushed around anymore and avoiding having this whole racial/ethnic issue come to armed conflict is going to be a very, very touchy matter. Affirmative action will have to go or it WILL come to armed conflict.
#1
Why am I not surprised. Goldman Sachs employees pony'd up over $260,000. for The One. But to be fair and balanced, on the other side we've got Ben (I must have $750B tomorrow) Bernacke, Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc. working feverishly to put us all in an American goy Kibbutz.
#4
So have Henry Kissenger and many others, but they're still active, very connected and vocal. Please do not equate the State of Israel with the wealthy Amish, Hollywood, New York, D.C. cabal who secretly hate America and look down their noses upon the Joe Plumber's and the The Forgotten Man .... who pay RETAIL!
#5
Besoeker -- you're coming very close to crossing a line. Step back.
AoS
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/31/2008 9:59 Comments ||
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#6
#2 and the "American goy Kibbutz" means what exactly? From each according to his ability, to each according to his needThe Gotha Program The phrase made famous by the activist son of Herschel Mordechai, summarizes the principles that, under a communist system, every person should contribute to society to the best of their ability and consume from society in proportion to their needs, regardless of how much they have contributed. In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.
Japan's air force chief has released an essay saying that the nation was not the aggressor in World War II, in comments likely to anger Asian neighbours.
The essay was authored by General Toshio Tamogami, chief of staff of Japan's Air Self-Defence Force, and won the top award in an inaugural contest aimed at describing "true views of modern history."
"Even now, there are many people who think that our country's 'aggression' caused unbearable suffering to the countries of Asia during the Greater East Asia War," said the English-language version of the essay.
"But we need to realise that many Asian countries take a positive view of the Greater East Asia War," it said.
"In Thailand, Burma, India, Singapore, and Indonesia, the Japan that fought the Greater East Asia War is held in high esteem," it said.
"It is certainly a false accusation to say that our country was an aggressor nation."
The Greater East Asia War was a term used by Japan to describe the conflict in the Asia-Pacific theatre, emphasising that it involved Asian nations seeking independence from the Western powers.
The essay, entitled "Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?," was posted on the website of a Japanese hotel chain which organised the contest.
Mr Tamogami argued that Japan was drawn into World War II by then US president Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he said was being manipulated by the Comintern.
Mr Tamogami also rejected the verdicts of an Allied tribunal which convicted Japanese wartime leaders as war criminals after Tokyo's defeat in 1945.
The thesis also runs counter to a 1995 statement issued by then prime minister Tomiichi Murayama and endorsed by his successors, which apologised for Japan's past aggression and colonial rule in Asia.
The statement acknowledged that Japan, through its colonial rule and aggression, "caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations."
But there has been a persistent nationalistic argument in Japan that the Murayama statement was part of the country's "masochism" aimed at accommodating Asian neighbours.
Japan renounced the right to wage war after World War II and calls its de facto military the Self-Defence Forces.
#1
Actually ran across a guy in the local bar who was dribbling something like this. Well dressed, liked to share very personal opinions with complete strangers in a strange land - obama supporter, this was back when obama was making headway against clinton but clinton hadn't broke into tears yet. Went on and on about how the US was the aggressor by denying the Phillipines' resources to the Japanese. So I let him talk on and on. After I finished my beer asked him, "So what about the Japanese army already in China at the time." Didn't matter. "So the Japanese attacking the German fleet in WWI wasn't the beginning of Japanese military expansionism as policy?" They did, didn't know that. "When did the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor." Didn't know. "Rape of Nankieng?" Didn't happen, so on and so on. Left fairly soon afterwards, especially when the bartender was openly laughing at his answers.
#2
(there is a term for this type of advertising, its along the lines of astroturfing but I forget the proper name of it; something like moling? Anyone?)
#3
I don't care about the "apologies" which often arise in these discussions, and the "masochism" comments rings very true as well, but simple truth is a standard which must be met, or "acknowledged" if you will, and for a Japanese airmen to disassociate the empire from aggression pretty clearly misses the historical record.
All the excuses and provocations and anti-colonial analysis is well and good, but for a country which arguably pioneered the development of long range air attack tactics to deny their "aggressor" nature is an assertion too far.
#4
I don't care about the "apologies" which often arise in these discussions, and the "masochism" comments rings very true as well, but simple truth is a standard which must be met, or "acknowledged" if you will, and for a Japanese airmen to disassociate the empire from aggression pretty clearly misses the historical record.
All the excuses and provocations and anti-colonial analysis is well and good, but for a country which arguably pioneered the development of long range air attack tactics to deny their "aggressor" nature is an assertion too far.
#5
ION JAPAN > WORLD MIL FORUM - JAPAN APPLIES TO UNITED NATIONS TO EXPAND CONTINENTAL SHELF? China encroachment? as iff approved Japan's move will likely have effect on both Japanese and Chin econ development efforts.
ALso from SAME > FAS EXPERT: CHINESE ANTI-SHIPPING BALISTIC MISSLES MAY CARPET-BOMB US AIRCRAFT CARRIERS FOR REGIONAL ANTI-INTERVENTION [long-distance Point Saturation/Massed MisStrike], + GERMANY: CHINA'S SUSTAINED ECONOMIC ABILITY WILL DETERMINE FUTURE OF HAMBURG CITY [Hong Kong, China's largest trading partner = "sister city"].
At its two-hour emergency meeting in Vienna on October 24, the Organization of Oil Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decided to lower crude production by 1.5 million barrels/day (b/d), effective next month.
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#2
Does this help or hinder the Second Coming of the Twelveth Iman?
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
10/31/2008 13:08 Comments ||
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#3
Maybe they can get a bail out from Congress.
They can try calling back later next week.
Posted by: Kelly ||
10/31/2008 14:47 Comments ||
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#4
So their options involve making trouble in Iraq, the Gulf or Israel. They've threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz before, which would hurt us and others, but how long could they keep it closed? OTOH, if the Straits were closed or if they were blockaded as a result of making trouble in Iraq or the Gulf how long would they last without any revenue at all?
#5
The Saudis may actually have to make some choices after a long while, especially since they've basically only made two in their history - sign up with the US post-WWII, and the embargo in the 70's.
1 - cast their lot with China, and/or India, but that seems a bit premature.
2 - make a deal with Iran, which is possible, but not likely permanent; or
3 - make peace with Israel, which has both huge risks and huge benefits.
Persian seems to be everyone's oldest historic enemy, from the Aegean to the Indus, and present circumstances can hardly inspire confidence.
Making peace with Israel only requires undoing 60 years or so of intensely ugly acts, and requires unusually decisive leadership, both unlikely, but would skewer both the Persians and the Russians as competitors to Europe, let alone beyond. A grand deal would also need to include African neighbors, and uproot Chinese influence there.
Doing nothing will probably prevail, but calling Iran's bluff will someday not work.
. . . We had a keen sense of the future then; we knew the toys we had today would be the tools of the future. You know how you put your hand out the window when you were going fast, and undulated it up and down like a dolphin, riding the oncoming wind? The future felt like that. . . . The future was going to be awesome.
I still get impatient with people who insist that it cant be. Pessimists can be such bores, and its lazy to believe the worst. Whats the line about Scaramouche: he was born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad. I dont think thats the best modus vivendi, but it beats teaching yourself the curse of scowling and the sense that its all a grind to be endured until the tomb gapes wide, and the only respectable intellectual pose is a Menckenian disdain for those who refuse to see how shallow, small, vacuous and contemptible they are.
I blame the boomers, of course. ;) If youre going to make a fetish out of the Authentic Values of Adolescence, with its withering critiques of humanity, then youre going to value the slouch and the sneer as signs of a Deep and Serious Person. The Boomers were handed a Utopian ideal practical, technocratic, rational, with silver wheels in the sky tended over by engineers and scientists - and they abandoned it for a Dionysian version based on wrecking and remaking the world theyd inherited. Their patron saint: Holy St. Caulfield, who identified the greatest sin in the human soul: being a phoney. Better to be an authentic bastard than someone who cannot successfully convince a teenager that some ideas have an importance that transcend the ability of the individual to manifest them 24/7.
Of course they got sour; if you believe a Utopia is possible if we just retinker human behavior to eliminate greed and dress codes and football and anything else that reminds us of Dad, be it the specific one or the unseen National Dad that rules the boardrooms and bedrooms and cloakrooms of DC, then the failure of this world makes it a dystopia, the worst of all possible worlds.
Some suggest that the great disenchantment began with the assassination of JFK, and I see the point. But its strange that it led to a loss of faith in us, given who shot the President. (Yes, Im one of those lone-gunman wackos. Im a freethinker! I refuse to accept concensus!) If Oswald had been a card-carrying Kluxer or a dead-ender Bircher or some sort of far-right-wing nutcase, I wonder if we would have accepted the Warren Commission and moved along. But no, he was a Communist. Well obviously there has to be more to it, then. Same with Sirhan Sirhan: his motivation will forever be a mystery, wont it?
Once you start to believe in the dark shadowy forces, youre done with the world. Youre done engaging it, youre done enjoying it. Theres no point. Its a sham, a shell, a shiny façade erected by the Jews / Bilderburgers / Trilateral Commission/ Council on Foreign Relations / Project for a New American Century / Masons / Knights Templar / Illuminati / Federal Reserve / Rockefeller-Royal Family Nexus / Bush Crime Syndicate / League of Grim Intent, and all you can do is post on the internet and call talk radio to argue with the hosts who think were free people.
Its nice to see hope abroad in the land again, but I wonder who will be to blame when human nature asserts itself and the manna shipments fall behind. Someone has to be blamed, after all. Its not the task thats a fools errand. Its the fools who refuse to believe in the task.
Posted by: Mike ||
10/31/2008 08:02 ||
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#1
It's not the task that's a fool's errand. It's the fools who refuse to believe in the task.
And when the utopians arrive at that conclusion, the guillotines start to thump.
Posted by: Jonathan ||
10/31/2008 9:10 Comments ||
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The global shipping crash continues to get worse and this mornings GDP data shows the US recession is already deeper than 2001 and probably 1990-91 as well.
Meanwhile the International Monetary Fund seems determined to make the whole thing worse by imposing the most ruinous strictures on supplicant nations.
Yesterday the Baltic Dry freight rate index fell below 1000 for the first time in six years and last night it fell another 40 points to 885. In June the index was 11,900, so it has fallen 93 per cent in a few months a crash far worse than anything ever seen in the stockmarket.
The spot daily rental for a Capesize ship is now $6365, down from $234,000 per day over the space of a few weeks. Maybe that previous price was absurdly inflated, but at $6365 it is just $365 above the average daily cost of crews and fuel.
As a result the worlds ports are filling with empty ships because shipowners cant afford to run them, as well as some full ships because the owners of the cargo wont unload without a bank letter of credit, which banks are refusing to supply.
Shipping companies are starting to file for bankruptcy in increasing numbers as they breach loan covenants, and a shipping researcher, Andreas Vergottis of Tufton Oceanic has told Bloomberg that a fifth of the worlds dry bulk companies may soon have negative net worth because the market for second hand ships has collapsed and the value of their fleets is below outstanding debt.
Like property-based loan agreements, shipping companies debt covenants have loan to value ratios that are typically 70 per cent. As the value of their fleets decline, banks are making margin calls.
Meanwhile, as expected, US GDP fell in the September quarter by 0.3 per cent. The only reason it wasnt worse was government spending, which added 1.1 per cent to the rate of GDP change. There was another 0.6 per cent from private inventories that is, unsold goods.
In any case, US economic data is always rushed out quickly, based on guesswork, and then revised later. Most of the guesses in this mornings figure look optimistic, so it is very likely to be revised downwards.
Even on this mornings optimistic estimate, it is the first year-on-year decline in GDP since 1991, so this recession is already worse than 2001 and clearly has a long way to go.
And remember that in 1990-91 and 1980 and 1973 and 1961 for that matter the monetary and fiscal authorities were more or less in control. Or rather they started it.
Those recessions were caused by central bank and government efforts to control inflation. This time its all about a spontaneous collapse in private sector credit and governments around the world are desperately trying to counteract its effects with interest rate cuts, liquidity injections and fiscal stimulus.
That is all except the IMF. It is imposing the most horrendous conditions on bailout loans to bankrupt countries.
As the rest of the worlds official interest rates come down, Icelands this week went up 6 per cent, from 12 to 18 per cent, as a condition of its $US2 billion rescue package.
Hungary, Serbia, Belarus, Pakistan and Ukraine are now facing the most excruciating choice: default on their debts or ask the IMF for money at the expense of crushing their economies under the weight of a massive increase in interest rates.
As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in last night's London Telegraph: A deflationary strategy of this kind could prove counterproductive or worse if applied in enough countries simultaneously. It would defeat a key purpose of the rescues, which is to stabilise the global financial system.
Meanwhile China, the worlds greatest creditor nation, is now cutting interest rates as its economy slows.
The emerging world in general has recoupled (if it was ever decoupled) and the removal of hedge fund investments in their currencies, government debt and sharemarkets will, in many cases, result in deeper recessions in those countries that in the US where it all started.
Which is why global shipping has collapsed: it is the harbinger of the end of the era of trade, in which third-world labour costs kept first world inflation down and allowed interest rates to fall and stay low and debt to be increased to an historic degree.
That process of importing deflation (or, more precisely, disinflation) from developing nations especially China and India relied on trade: raw materials in; finished goods out.
The fall in freight rates for both dry bulk carriers and container ships is telling us that its over.
#2
Thanks for posting these. Very interesting. I assume that his freight index is normally a good forward indicator in the way that the Dow Transports index is usually watched closely for the early signs of likely declining future economic activity.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Beware the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights.
By: Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli * 
