#2
They essentially blame private debt not gov't debt.
The one thing I didn't notice anyone talk about is why letting individuals work there way out of their own mess. This seems just another iteration of the "privatize profit, socialize debt" mentality that mostly just screws the productive.
The Greek government took a lot of advice from Goldman Sachs on how to refinance their debt...hmmm
I'm giving Georgie Soros a pass on this one, he's too smart for most of the financial and monetary policy silliness and stupidity that brought us to this point. He's not pulling the levers on this one.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
12/23/2011 10:52 Comments ||
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This is one of those RTWT type of articles. Tip of the Christmas stocking to the Instapundit.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/23/2011 23:42 ||
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Link ||
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#1
Walter Russell "leftism is wrong, bankrupt, totally out the window, but no conservatism for me, thank you" Mead...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/23/2011 16:21 Comments ||
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#2
It has long been noted that Hungarians are very different in character from other Europeans. Being ruled over by Ottomans from 1526-1699 made the Hungarian Magyars and Slavs permanently testy, and they were much of the "muscle" of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
After Hungarian communists under Béla Kun seized power in Hungary in 1919, proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic and commenced Hungary's Red Terror (Kuns "Caravan of Death"), a counterrevolutionary government was formed. In late 1918, Romanian forces invaded Hungary and later overthrew Kun's government.
Through most of WWII, the *multi-party* fascist government of Hungary was in alliance with Nazi Germany, until the Germans invaded in 1944.
After many years of Soviet domination, I am not surprised in the least about the return of the "Double Arrow", the Hungarian equivalent of the swastika.
#3
My history prof from 30 years ago, a former instructor in tactics from the Hungarian Military Acad, described Hungary's policy in the 30s and 40s as "based on the national dance: two steps this way, two steps that way". A country had to be careful when sandwiched between the Nazis and Soviets. The Nazis staged a Putsch in 1944 because the Hungarian govt was making all the right noises but wasn't doing much to be especially helpful to the Reich.
[Dawn] ON Thursday the country once again appeared to be headed towards a nerve-racking crisis. Pakistain's worst-kept secret was out in the open: the government had no control over the army and ISI. The awkward truth came out late Wednesday night when the government bluntly informed the Supreme Court that it had no operational control over the army and its intelligence wing. In fact, replies given to the Supreme Court in the 'memogate' affair had already indicated the deepening distrust between the army and the civilian set-up. While the government pleaded that the PML-N chief's petition be dismissed, the army and ISI were keen on a thorough judicial probe -- with motives that can only be guessed. On Thursday, the prime minister, underscoring the supremacy of parliament, told the National Assembly in categorical terms that all institutions of the state were answerable to the people's representatives. Speaking at an earlier function at the Pakistain National Council of Arts the same day, he minced no words in telling his audience that conspiracies were afoot to derail democracy. The breach between the army and the government appears to have widened to dangerous levels.
The awkward truth came out late Wednesday night when the government bluntly informed the Supreme Court that it had no operational control over the army and its intelligence wing.
While even at this stage it is premature to assert that extra-constitutional means of removing the government are in the works, it would nevertheless be useful to recall that the army has usurped power four times in Pakistain's history to 'save the nation'. Each time the 'saviour' departed from the scene, he left behind him a greater mess. The truth given by the government to the SC and Mr Gilani's warning of threats to democracy can turn out to be a game-changer. But this can only be so if pro-establishment elements, including certain political parties and sections of the media, realise the dire consequences of extra-constitutional moves in the past and the damage caused as a result.
Meanwhile, ...back at the precinct house, Sergeant Maloney wasn't buying it. It was just too pat. It smelled phony... the current crisis is not just about the so-called memo and whether the latter was sanctioned by senior government members, as indicated by the military. No doubt, if such claims are verified the perpetrators must be taken to task. The larger issue, however, remains that of the undefined role of the security establishment in matters of governance as well as in shaping the country's security and foreign policies. The question that has never been answered is: are the security agencies truly under an elected government or, as indicated by the prime minister, are they a state within a state? Whatever the truth may be, we hope that better sense prevails as unconstitutional moves in this context can have devastating consequences for the country.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/23/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
I still say that Pakistan is a collection of places and ethnic groups that no one else wanted so they were set off like stray puppies and they formed a pack...so they called themselves pakistan...I don't care what Jennah and Ghandi agreed to, that's how it happened.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
12/23/2011 1:39 Comments ||
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In a crushing blow to academic freedom, Harvard University has censored and fired a prominent professor because university administrators didn't like what he said about Islam.
At a meeting of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty members voted with an "overwhelming majority" to remove two economics courses - 'Quantitative Methods in Economics and Business' and 'Economic Development in India and East Asia' - that Mr Swamy teaches at the three-month Harvard Summer School session.
Harvard has dropped economics courses taught by a Hindu professor, Subramanian Swamy, president of the Janata Party of India and a former Union Cabinet minister, because of something that had nothing to do with economics: he wrote an editorial that Muslims find offensive.
The Harvard Crimson newspaper said that Swamy's op-ed was "inflammatory" and complained that he "calls for the destruction of mosques as retaliation for terrorist attacks in India, as well as the disenfranchisement of Indian Muslims who refuse to acknowledge Hindu ancestry."
The Crimson claimed that "Swamy's op-ed clearly constitutes hate speech, by even the most lenient definition. As a matter of principle, there is no place for hate speech in the Harvard community. ... The faculty's decision to remove Swamy from the teaching roster was wise, just, and reasonable."
The history of India is filled with Muslims such as Timur the Terrible, who paraphrased the Koran: "'O prophet make war against the infidels and treat them severely.' My great object in invading Hindustan (India) had been to wage a religious war against the infidel Hindus."
And he did. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus were beheaded and towers made of their skulls. The warrior Babur was particularly fond of raising higher and higher towers of Hindu heads that the Muslims had cut off during and after every battle. He loved to sit in his royal tent and watch this spectacle. On one such occasion, the ground flowed with so much blood "and became so filled with quivering carcasses that his tent had to be moved thrice to a higher level." (from The Koran and the Kafir, by A. Ghosh.)
He only missed the "merit" of demolishing temples and breaking symbols and images because his predecessor Firuz Tughlak hardly left any for him in the territories he traversed.
The record of jihad in India is extremely and unimaginably bloody. Mahmud of Ghazni, Mohammed Ghori, Firuz Tughlak, Timur, Muzaffar Shah, Mahmud Begarha, Mahmud Khalji, Ilyas Shah, Babur, Sher Shah Suri, Akbar the Great, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzib, Abdali, Tipu Sultan, Siraj-ud-Daula, and so many others all persecuted, humiliated, tortured, terrorized, and slaughtered the Hindus throughout Islamic history in India.
But Harvard is embarrassed and critical of Swamy's op-ed on how to save his people who today suffer from resurgent jihad. They stand behind their firing of Swamy. The Harvard Crimson says: "Although Swamy's words alone would be reason enough to revoke his permission to teach, there is the further concern that his publications may incite religious violence." June 16, 2010 - Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, noted Harvard University accepted a $20 million gift from Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz in 2005 that was used to establish a center for Islamic Studies in his honor.
Several major US universities have accepted such grants under the tacit understanding that Islam will be given preferential treatment, and that no criticism of Islam will be tolerated. In addition to grants, some are offered extension schools in Saudi Arabia, as long as no other religions are even mentioned, nor anything else offensive to Saudi sensibilities, and no Jewish personnel are permitted.
The essay below is excerpted from the December 2011 issue of Stansberrys Investment Advisory.Its author, Porter Stansberry, examines the question of whether America is growing richer or poorer based on an analysis of its per-capita gross domestic product (GDP). Said simply, is our economy growing faster than our population? As individuals, are we becoming more affluent? Or is the economic pie, measured on a per-person basis, growing smaller? Its a hard question to answer, and this article provides Porter Stansberrys insight.
#1
Excerpts:
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Even today, our governments nominal GDP figures are greatly influenced by inflation. The influence of inflation is particularly pernicious in GDP studies. You see, inflation, which actually reduces our standard of living, drives up the amount of nominal GDP. So it creates the appearance of a wealthier country while the nation is actually getting poorer.
The only real way to accurately measure per-capita GDP is to build our own model. The need to build our own tools tells you something important the government doesnt want anyone to know the answer to this question. It could easily publish data far more accurate than the indexes it puts out. But government doesnt want anyone to know. And it wants to be able to say those arent the real data when studies like ours produce bad news.
--- a few days later [July 2008] what did [then-SecTreas] Paulson tell those hedge-fund managers?
He told them the same thing I had written in my [June 2008] newsletter. He told them the opposite of what hed said publicly to Congress. He told these billionaire investors that Fannie and Freddie were a disaster They would require an enormous, multibillion-dollar bailout The U.S. government would have to take them over And their shareholders would be completely wiped out.
Here you had a high-government official, explicitly lying to Congress (and by extension, the general public), while giving the real facts to a group of people who represented the financial interests of the worlds wealthiest folks. The story didnt come to the publics attention for two years.
This was the most outrageous example of graft and corruption I have ever seen.... The Bloomberg story about a crooked Treasury secretary handing a room full of crooked billionaires inside information worth billions of dollars hardly caused a ripple. As far as I know, no actions are being planned against Henry Paulson or any of the hedge-fund managers involved. No other major media outlet picked up the story. I saw nothing about it from the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission....
It seems like everyone in our country has lost his moral bearing, from the highest government officials and senior corporate leaders all the way down to schoolteachers and local community leaders... Nope, that is not the case. It does seem to be true that people who are have a strong moral bearing & the ability to articulate and carry out same, are not allowed anywhere near the reins of power or influence. One of the strongest complicating factors is the degradation of public discourse (which became obvious to me in the early 1990's) which was predicted by George Orwell decades earlier.
Our political leaders, our business leaders, and our cultural leaders have made a series of catastrophic choices. The result has been a long decline in Americas standard of living.
For decades, we have papered over these problems with massive amounts of borrowing. But now, our debts total close to 400% of GDP, and America is the worlds largest borrower (after being the worlds largest creditor only 40 years ago) And the holes in our society can no longer be hidden
The article is a good summary of why we are in the mess we are in. Now I know why the Democrats (= socialists) want to try to circumvent the 2nd Amendment and control guns. They are afraid the citizenry might decide to use them on out-of-control Federal and local governments.
#5
His two recommended cures - personal fiduciary responsibility for representatives and senators, personal financial and criminal exposure for CEOs and board directors of corporations - seem unlikely to be enacted by a political process as corrupted as he suggests is the case. The combination of this, the Iraq implosion, and the ongoing SOPA mess has got me in a pretty damned pessimistic place this morning.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
12/23/2011 10:29 Comments ||
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#6
I'm not particularly optimistic about these changes that are needed either. About the only way to bring about such change is the vote out the current crop of Congresscritters and keep voting them out until they start to get it right.
This whole social security two month tax holiday extension is just total bull$hit. The Congresscritters are sticking their fingers in the dike--just kicking the can down the road. We need some fundamental changes that along the magnitude of what our founding fathers did.
I shouldn't demonize the Democrats only for this mess although they seem to be the most culpable. I also fault the progressive Republicans for what we are in. Currently we have a bunch of gutless wonders who are only interested in re-election. Those that we put in the last election cycle are limited by the burden of the existing structure.
I would not mind someone like an Alan West for Speaker of the House. Reid is one of the bottlenecks in the Senate although there are others. He was up for re-election last time and does not come up again for awhile.
I don't even have confidence in the election process. It has become corrupted. Maybe that is just me on this particular day and reflects a dismal and dark mood.
#8
I don't even have confidence in the election process. It has become corrupted.
Eric "Place" Holder has read your mind, and come in right on cue, late on a Friday afternoon just before the Christmas holiday: WSJ: WASHINGTONThe Justice Department blocked South Carolina's new voter identification law, citing concerns about the law's disproportionate effect on African-American voters and setting up a new conflict between the Obama administration and Republican-led state governments.
The South Carolina proposal would require voters to provide state-issued or military photo identification in order to cast a ballot.
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.
ON Thursday the country once again appeared to be headed towards a nerve-racking crisis. Pakistain's worst-kept secret was out in the open: the government had no control over the army and ISI. The awkward truth came out late Wednesday night when the government bluntly informed the Supreme Court that it had no operational control over the army and its intelligence wing. In fact, replies given to the Supreme Court in the 'memogate' affair had already indicated the deepening distrust between the army and the civilian set-up. While the government pleaded that the PML-N chief's petition be dismissed, the army and ISI were keen on a thorough judicial probe -- with motives that can only be guessed. On Thursday, the prime minister, underscoring the supremacy of parliament, told the National Assembly in categorical terms that all institutions of the state were answerable to the people's representatives. Speaking at an earlier function at the Pakistain National Council of Arts the same day, he minced no words in telling his audience that conspiracies were afoot to derail democracy. The breach between the army and the government appears to have widened to dangerous levels.
