Posts Tagged ‘Bush’

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The Collusion story is becoming clear now.

Thursday, March 8th, 2018

I was a little late coming to the trump supporters, but it was interesting almost back to the beginning.

Then it began to form a preference cascade.

Can the GOP really be so out of touch with the legions of out-of-work Americans — many of whom don’t show up in the “official” unemployment rate because they’ve given up looking for work in the Obama economy? With the returning military vets frustrated with lawyer-driven, politically correct rules of engagement that have tied their hands in a fight against a mortal enemy? With those who, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino massacres by Muslims, reasonably fear an influx of culturally alien “refugees” and “migrants” from the Middle East?

April 206:
Trump is a coward, four time bankrupt loser, con artist, bully, 12 time business failure, WWE character, hypocrite, liar, dullard, loose cannon and has very poor character. He will lose in November and people need to wake up to that fact. Otherwise, hello President Hillary.

A year later, that commenter is a supporter.

Trump was in touch with them.

The result was “Deep Confusion.”

I left Queens for Brooklyn to meet Dany L. Esquilin, a Republican I met in the first week of this assignment, aboard a train to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Mr. Esquilin was not a stereotypical Trump supporter. His parents were born in Puerto Rico, he is black and he had once been a Democrat. (Then again, so had Mr. Trump.) A retired private investigator, Mr. Esquilin worked to marshal Republican votes from Jews, Russians and Chinese-Americans.

Oh Oh.

Shortly after the election, The Hillary team came up with an explanation for her loss.

It was the Russians.

The book (Shattered) further highlights how Clinton’s Russia-blame-game was a plan hatched by senior campaign staffers John Podesta and Robby Mook, less than “within twenty-four hours” after she conceded:

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

The Clinton camp settled on a two-pronged plan — pushing the press to cover how “Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by the contents of stolen e-mails and Hillary’s own private-server imbroglio,” while “hammering the media for focusing so intently on the investigation into her e-mail, which had created a cloud over her candidacy,” the authors wrote.

The Russia Collusion story is till going although a bit weak these days.

Andy McCarthy has pretty much demolished these arguments.

To repeat in closing, I believe it is specious to claim that a president can be found guilty of an obstruction offense, under federal criminal statutes, on the basis of acts that are within his lawful authority, even if the acts spring from malign motivations. Contrary to my friend Gabe Schoenfeld’s claims, this is not because I believe that the president is above the law. It is because our law’s check on presidential maladministration is impeachment, not criminal prosecution. If Congress concluded that a president committed acts that interfered with FBI investigations, and that were corruptly motivated even if technically within the president’s lawful authority, Congress could impeach the president. Were that to happen, it would not matter that the acts were not indictable obstruction crimes under the federal penal code.

More is now coming out about the real story.

Following close on the heels of those two pass-through DC-based “scoops,” Entous was lead byline on an April 3, 2017, story reporting a meeting in the Seychelles between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian banker, reportedly to set up a back channel between Trump and Putin. After publication of the story, Prince said he was shown “specific evidence” by sources from the intelligence community that his name was unmasked and given to the paper. “Unless The Washington Post has somehow miraculously recruited the bartender of a hotel in the Seychelles,” Prince told the House Intelligence Committee in December, “the only way that’s happening is through SIGINT [signals intelligence].” Recent news reports suggest that Prince’s meeting has become a key focus of the Mueller investigation. If those reports are accurate, it seems even more likely that classified intelligence was purposefully being leaked to put pressure on Prince.

These are felonies. We will see if anyone goes to jail.

Th real story is as follows.

At the same time, there is a growing consensus among reporters and thinkers on the left and right—especially those who know anything about Russia, the surveillance apparatus, and intelligence bureaucracy—that the Russiagate-collusion theory that was supposed to end Trump’s presidency within six months has sprung more than a few holes. Worse, it has proved to be a cover for U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement bureaucracies to break the law, with what’s left of the press gleefully going along for the ride. Where Watergate was a story about a crime that came to define an entire generation’s oppositional attitude toward politicians and the country’s elite, Russiagate, they argue, has proved itself to be the reverse: It is a device that the American elite is using to define itself against its enemies—the rest of the country.

We are in a lawless era. I recently read Pat Buchanan’s book, “The Nixon White House Wars.”

I highly recommend it. The press and the FBI managed to drive Nixon and Agnew from office. I doubt they can do so with Trump.

I am more worried about assassination.

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The Sunni war on America.

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015

Angelo Codevilla, who has some of the most interesting things to say about America has a new column out in Asia Times.

For more than a quarter century, as Americans have suffered trouble from the Muslim world’s Sunni and Shia components and as the perennial quarrel between them has intensified, the US government has taken the side of the Sunni. This has not worked out well for us. It is past time for our government to sort out our own business, and to mind it aggressively.

To understand why hopes for help from the Sunni side are forlorn, we must be clear that jihadism in general and Daesh in particular are logical outgrowths of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s (and the Gulf monarchies’) official religion, about how they fit in the broader conflict between Sunni and Shia, as well as about how the US occupation of Iraq exposed America to the vagaries of intra-Muslim conflicts.

I have believed this for some time and am happy to see him agree with me. I spent an evening listening to him talk about our foreign policy and how the War on Terror became a war on Americans.

The U.S. government does not understand how to combat international terrorism or respond to its threats. In an exclusive interview with Ginni Thomas of The Daily Caller, Codevilla highlighted the failure of both administrations to understand the enemy, explaining that it makes national security decisions based on a flawed paradigm.

“After 9/11, the U.S. government instituted a system of homeland security based on the proposition that any American is as likely as anyone in the world to commit terrorist acts — and that therefore, all Americans must be screened and presumed to be terrorists until the screening clears them,” Codevilla said.

Certainly, the government has been engaged in a faux security system with the TSA that pretends it will stop an airline hijacking or bomb threat, while allowing 90% of false bombs and guns to escape surveillance.

“These people who attacked us had reasons, which are widely supported — in fact, vigorously promoted by the regimes from which they came,” Codevilla said. “The Saudi regime, which we count as an ally, does in fact harbor the most virulent strain of Islam, the Wahhabism. This movement inspired most of the hijackers in 9/11. The others, some of the leaders, were inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, which the Obama administration has been courting and favoring.”

Rather than confronting the movement of Islamic radicalization, Codevilla says that both Barack Obama and George W. Bush blamed acts of terrorism on the perpetrators themselves, instead of viewing them as the incarnations of a murderously ideological movement.

I am a little less conspiracy minded but I agree that we face a militant ideology that is as yet unacknowledged.

US foreign policy in the Middle East had moved to the Sunni side in 1979 after the Shia Islamic Republic’s overthrow of Iran’s secular Shah. For the previous quarter century, the Shah’s Iran had taken care of US interests in the region while muting its Persian Shia people’s perennial tensions with the Sunni Arab world.

But Iran’s Islamic Republic has been as aggressively Shia and Persian as it has been anti-American. Fatefully, rather than answering in kind the Islamic Republic’s warfare on America, all presidents since Jimmy Carter have searched the Sunni Arab world for counterweights to Iran, as well as for the kind of support that the Shah had given us.

This attempt to outsource America’s security concerns by entering into the Sunni-Shia conflict on the Sunni side has been counterproductive because the Sunni, 85% of the Muslim world, are also the nursery of its most contagious plagues — the Wahhabi sect and the Muslim Brotherhood. Above all, it has been disastrous because it has led the US government to lose sight of our own interests by confusing them with those of Sunni states and potentates.

Here, I agree completely. I think Bush’s attempt to see if an Arab country could rule itself was a reasonable thing to try. The disaster was turning the policy over to Arabist Paul Bremer who decided to become a viceroy and alienated the Sunnis of Iraq. Saddam began the crisis by invading Kuwait.

The main Sunni monarchies’ congenital worse-than-uselessness is why, in the decade after Iranian Islamic Republic’s establishment, US policymakers vigorously courted Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who ruled mostly-Shia Iraq with a bloody hand through its Sunni minority. The US policymakers who helped Saddam prevail in his war against Iran believed that, by so doing, they could strike a blow at Iran while weaning Saddam away from his reliance on the Soviet Union.

Too clever. No sooner had Saddam established his power over the head of the Gulf than he used it to conquer Kuwait, after which the Gulf’s monarchs were helpless before his disciplined army and frightened by their own peoples’ support for Saddam. They asked the United States’ help.

I am a bit skeptical here but he might well be correct. What we have now is a president who has elected to join the Shia and Iranian side in this Muslim civil war.

But instead of choosing any version of America’s own interest, US statesmen confused that interest with the self-contradictory demands of the Saudis, etc. — the Sunni world’s weak reeds: Please, make war on Saddam, but not so hard as to break his Iraqi Sunni empire. This way we can all win without dealing with the consequences of victory. We can have our cake while eating it too.

Our bipartisan ruling class, from the Bush and Clinton families to the Dick Cheneys and Colin Powells to Washington’s think tanks considered this counsel to be sophistication, and themselves to be sophisticates for accepting it. Far too clever.

The ensuing bellum interruptus was meant to tweak the balance among the Mid-East’s Sunni forces. But the result was that Saddam, who’d not been an enemy of the United States, subsequently led the Muslim world to new heights of enmity to America. Few remember that the longest and most impassioned part of Osama bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa which preceded the wave of anti-American terrorism that crested on 9/11 was a denunciation of America’s actions against Saddam’s Iraq.

Here I tend to agree with Codevilla. Clinton was not immune to this misapprehension of our interests. “Foreign Affairs,” a journal that I used to subscribe to, ran a cover story during Bill Clinton’s feckless presidency on “Foreign Policy as Social Work.”

the Sunni states — which had opposed the invasion strenuously — convinced Bush 43 to occupy Iraq indefinitely. That involved taking care of their business. He agreed to confuse others’ business with America’s despite having been elected in part by promising never to engage in “nation building.”

Bush promised to build “a united, democratic Iraq.” That was always an absurdity because, since Iraq’s constituent groups loathed and feared each other, Iraq’s unity could result only from one group’s despotism over the others, whereas “democracy” — i.e. the will of the people — meant that Iraqis would go their separate ways.

The occupation’s day-to-day practical objective however, was to hold the 83% of Iraqis who were not Sunni into a state structure in which the Sunni would salvage at least some of the privileges they had held under Saddam. That is what the Sunni states wanted, and that is what they had convinced the US government was in America’s interest as well. It was also impossible. Immediately, the occupation started a Sunni war on America that is yet to end.

This is an interesting point of view and could explain why Bush chose Bremer over the far more capable Jay Garner.

He has another installment coming this week. I will read it with interest.

Here is a section I agree with.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, however, chose to make his country the Islamic State’s indispensable logistical partner out of a welter of reasons and through a calculation of risks that make sense only to him. Erdogan, a Sunni Islamist and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, sees support for Daesh/ISIS as serving his personal and sectarian opposition to Syria’s Bashar al Assad. This, along with his desire to reduce Kurdish enclaves on both sides of the Syria/Turkey border.

The kurds are our only friends, if any, in the middle east except Israel.

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Where we are going and how we got here.

Wednesday, September 30th, 2015

I have posted a number of previous opinions on how and why we invaded Iraq. The most recent is here.

There are other explanations that cover this question.

From late 1998 onwards, the sole inhibition on Saddam’s WMD programme was the sanctions regime. Iraq was forbidden to use the revenue from its oil except for certain specified non-military purposes. The sanctions regime, however, was also subject to illegal trading and abuse. Because of concerns about its inadequacy – and the impact on the Iraqi people – we made several attempts to refine it, culminating in a new UN resolution in May of this year. But it was only partially effective. Around $3bn of money is illegally taken by Saddam every year now, double the figure for 2000. Self-evidently there is no proper accounting for this money.

Because of concerns that a containment policy based on sanctions alone could not sufficiently inhibit Saddam’s weapons programme, negotiations continued after 1998 to gain re-admission for the UN inspectors. In 1999 a new UN resolution demanding their re-entry was passed and ignored. Further negotiations continued. Finally, after several months of discussion with Saddam’s regime this year, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, concluded that Saddam was not serious about re-admitting the inspectors and ended the negotiations. That was in July.

All of this is established fact. I set out the history in some detail because occasionally debate on this issue seems to treat it almost as if it had suddenly arisen, coming out of nowhere on a whim, in the last few months of 2002. It is an 11 year history: a history of UN will flouted, lies told by Saddam about existence of his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes, obstruction, defiance and denial. There is one common consistent theme, however: the total determination of Saddam to maintain the programme; to risk war, international ostracism, sanctions, the isolation of the Iraqi economy, in order to keep it. At any time, he could have let the inspectors back in and put the world to proof. At any time he could have co-operated with the UN. Ten days ago he made the offer unconditionally, under threat of war. He could have done it at any time in the last eleven years. But he didn’t. Why?

This is from Tony Blair’s speech to Parliament.

There are too many people who don’t remember what happened. This really goes back to the end of the Ottoman Empire.

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Why Bush Invaded Iraq.

Friday, May 15th, 2015

usa-politics-bush

There is quite a series of Republican politicians declaring that they would not invade Iraq if they knew then what they know now. JEB Bush is not the only one. Ted Cruz has made Talking Points Memo happy with a similar declaration.

Earlier in the week, Kelly asked Bush if he would have authorized the invasion, and he said he would have. On Tuesday, Bush told Sean Hannity that he hadn’t heard the question correctly and wasn’t sure what he would have done. Cruz, on the other hand, said he knows what he would have done.

“Of course not,” Cruz said in response to Kelly asking if he would have authorized an invasion. “I mean, the entire predicate of the war against Iraq was the intelligence that showed they had weapons of mass destruction and they might use them.

Of course, the “WMD” argument is a more recent addition to the story. Nobody talks anymore about why Bush was forced to invade in 2003. WMD were a small part of it. That is forgotten, of course.

Mr Speaker, thank you for recalling Parliament to debate the best way to deal with the issue of the present leadership of Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Today we published a 50 page dossier detailing the history of Iraq’s WMD, its breach of UN resolutions and the current attempts to rebuild the illegal WMD programme. I have placed a copy in the Library of the House.

At the end of the Gulf War, the full extent of Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes became clear. As a result, the UN passed a series of resolutions demanding Iraq disarm itself of such weapons and establishing a regime of weapons inspection and monitoring to do the task. They were to be given unconditional and unrestricted access to all and any Iraqi sites.

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The Kurds and the Israelis are our only allies in the middle east.

Wednesday, September 24th, 2014

The growth of terrorist state ISIS has taken all the attention lately. This is just a resurgence of al Qeada in the vacuum left by Obama’s withdrawal of all US troops. Maybe, if we had kept a significant force in Iraq, something could be saved of all we bought at such terrible cost. Now, it is too late.

We do have allies worth helping but they are not in the Iraqi government. It is Shia dominated and dependent on Iran for support. They have alienated the Sunnis and the growth of ISIS is the result. We still have the Kurds as allies and they know we were their only hope in 1993. Jay Garner did a great job working with them once we decided to protect them after the First Gulf War. I have never understood why he was dismissed by George W Bush.

The Kurds have been an embarrassment for us for decades in the middle east because they occupy parts of three nations two of which were at one time our allies.

contemporarykurdistanmap2005

Kurdistan includes parts of Iraq, Turkey and Iran. They have never had a modern nation and the neighbors are enemies. Only the mountains have protected them. Now, it is time we did something. Iran is certainly no friend. Iraq has dissolved and it is time to allow it to be broken up into the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish provinces it should be. Turkey is increasingly Islamist and has not been an ally at least since 2003 when they blocked our 4th Infantry Division from invading Iraq from the north.

The 4th was initially ordered to deploy in January 2003 before the war began, but did not arrive in Kuwait until late March. The delay was caused by the inability of the United States and Turkey to reach an agreement over using Turkish military bases to gain access to northern Iraq, where the division was originally planned to be located. Units from the division began crossing into Iraq on April 12, 2003.

The Kurds know this is their opportunity and Dexter Filkins piece in the New Yorker makes this clear.

The incursion of ISIS presents the Kurds with both opportunity and risk. In June, the ISIS army swept out of the Syrian desert and into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. As the Islamist forces took control, Iraqi Army soldiers fled, setting off a military collapse through the region. The Kurds, taking advantage of the chaos, seized huge tracts of territory that had been claimed by both Kurdistan and the government in Baghdad. With the newly acquired land, the political climate for independence seemed promising. The region was also finding new economic strength; vast reserves of oil have been discovered there in the past decade. In July, President Barzani asked the Kurdish parliament to begin preparations for a vote on self-rule. “The time has come to decide our fate, and we should not wait for other people to decide it for us,” Barzani said.

The Kurds were surprised and routed by ISIS mostly due to limited weapons and ammunition. We could supply the deficit but Obama seems to be oblivious to the true situation. The Iraqi Army will not fight, a characteristic of all Arab armies. To the degree that the Iraqi army is Shia led, the Sunni Arabs will not cooperate or will join the enemy.

The present situation in Kurdistan is desperate.

Erbil has changed a lot since I was there last. In early 2013, on my way into Syrian Kurdistan, I had stopped off in the city for a few days to make preparations. Then, the city had the feel of a boom town – shopping malls springing up across the skyline, brand new SUVs on the road, Exxon Mobil and Total were coming to town. It was the safest part of Iraq, an official of the Kurdish Regional Government had told me proudly over dinner in a garden restaurant.

A new kind of Middle East city.

What a difference a year makes. Now, Erbil is a city under siege. The closest lines of the Islamic State (IS) forces are 45 kilometers away. At the distant frontlines, IS (formerly ISIS) is dug in, its vehicles visible, waiting and glowering in the desert heat. The Kurdish Peshmerga forces are a few hundred meters away in positions hastily cut out of the sand to face the advancing jihadi fighters.

The problem and a solution are both clear. Obama is not serious about doing anything in Iraq or Syria and the Kurds may have to fend for themselves. Interesting enough, there are Jewish Kurds. Israel may have more at stake here than we do. We are an unreliable ally with an anti-Israel president and party in contra, right now.

The phrase “Kurds have no friends but the mountains” was coined by Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the great and undisputed leader of the Kurdish people who fought all his life for Kurdish independence, and who was the first leader of the Kurdish autonomous region. His son, Massoud Barzani, is the current president of Iraqi Kurdistan. Other family members hold key positions in the government.

Barzani1Barzani

Perhaps the Israelis and Kurds can work out an alliance. The US, under Obama, is untrustworthy. We will see what happens.

The Yazidi minority we hear about in the news is not the only Kurdish minority. The Jews of Kurdistan, for example, maintained the traditions of ancient Judaism from the days of the Babylonian exile and the First Temple: they carried on the tradition of teaching the Oral Torah, and Aramaic remained the principal tongue of some in the Jewish Kurdish community since the Talmudic period. They preserved the legacy of the last prophets — whose grave markers constituted a significant part of community life — including the tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul, the prophet Nahum in Elkosh and the prophet Daniel in Kirkuk. When the vast majority of Kurdish Jews immigrated to Israel and adopted Hebrew as their first language, Aramaic ceased to exist as a living, spoken language. Although our grandparents’ generation still speaks it, along with a few Christian communities in Kurdistan, Aramaic has been declared a dead language by the academic world.

Israel might be an answer to the Kurds’ dilemma.

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The Coming Election

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

I don’t think that a more important election has occurred in 75 years than the one later this year. I am not all that enthusiastic about any of the current candidate in the primary. Mitt Romney will probably win but he has been wounded seriously by attacks from other Republican candidates which alleged that his career as a venture capitalist and management consultant was an ethical issue. One expects this sort of thing from Democrats, about 53% of whom prefer Socialism.

53% of Democrats feel positively towards it.

Romney has defended himself with some vigor, which is a positive development. Others have defended him with a more effective argument.

We are now in an election campaign that may well be centered on our country’s economic system. Is capitalism (or free market economics as preferred by some) the best way for our economy to work? History has been written by people who are not positive about capitalism. Recently, revisionist history has appeared that tries to balance the story. Academic studies have been published that suggest that the Depression was a result of Roosevelt’s policies.

The writings of John Maynard Keynes have been quoted in support of leftist economic policies. The problem is that his policies have never been tried. He advocated countercyclical programs which ran deficits in times of economic slowdowns and recessions but surpluses in good economic time. The net result was zero deficits, a marked contrast with policies followed since 1960.

In fact, politicians of both parties have never been willing to run the surpluses that Keynes advocated. In good times, spending rose whether taxes were raised or not. Jimmy Carter said he would balance the budget with higher taxes. Instead, his compatriots (not allies) in Congress spent even more, leading to an inflation and stagnation crisis.

Ronald Reagan reinvigorated the economy with a large tax cut in 1980. The beneficial effect was delayed to 1982 when Bob Dole, the Senate Majority Leader, succeed in delaying the tax cut. The result was a predictable delay in economic activity as taxpayers waited for the lower rates, and the loss of the Senate majority in 1982.

Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1994 (His wife, Hillary, avoided the higher tax rates by taking her bonus prior to January 1, 1993, when the higher rates took effect. The result showed her prudence but also suggested hypocrisy in the Democrats’ enthusiasm for higher taxes.

George Bush I raised taxes in 1992 in spite of a promise not to do so. He lost the 1992 election, mainly because of Ross Perot’s candidacy splitting natural Republican voters. I was interested in Perot at the time but he started acting strangely before the election and I voted for Bush with reservations. Had he not raised taxes, I think he would have been re-elected. I have had some suspicion in spite of denials, ever since that the Democrats extracted a promise to raise taxes in return for voting for the first Gulf War. It is well known that All Gore required concessions in return for his vote for the war.

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Why I liked Coolidge and why we are not recovering

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

I spent the past six months reading about Calvin Coolidge. I was interested in why the 1920s were a period of great prosperity and why the severe recession/ depression of 1920-1921 was so short. At its peak, there was 25% unemployment. Gross domestic product dropped by 6.9% in one report.

The recession of 1920–21 was characterized by extreme deflation — the largest one-year percentage decline in around 140 years of data.[2] The Department of Commerce estimates 18% deflation, Balke and Gordon estimate 13% deflation, and Romer estimates 14.8% deflation. The drop in wholesale prices was even more severe, falling by 36.8%, the most severe drop since the American Revolutionary War. This is worse than any year during the Great Depression (adding all the years of the Great Depression together, however, yields more severe deflation). The deflation of 1920–21 was extreme in absolute terms, and also unusually extreme given the relatively small decline in gross domestic product.[2]

The Harding-Coolidge administration took office in March 1921 and the recession was over in months. Why ? Governments were smaller then and had less influence on the economy. The Wilson Administration has been widely described as the equivalent of a fascist regime with its war time controls and economic meddling. Again from the Wikipedia article:

Interpretations of the end

Austrian School economists and historians argue that the 1921 recession was a necessary market correction, required to engineer the massive realignments required of private business and industry following the end of the War. Libertarian Austrian School historian Thomas Woods argues that President Harding’s laissez-faire economic policies during the 1920-21 recession, combined with a coordinated aggressive policy of rapid government downsizing, had a direct influence (mostly through intentional non-influence) on the rapid and widespread private-sector recovery.[12] Woods argued that, as there existed massive distortions in private markets due to government economic influence related to World War I, an equally massive “correction” to the distortions needed to occur as quickly as possible to realign investment and consumption with the new peace-time economic environment.

Daniel Kuehn’s recent research demonstrates that Woods gets many of the facts of the 1920-21 recession wrong.[13] The most substantial downsizing of government was attributable to the Wilson administration, and occurred well before the onset of the 1920-21 recession. The Harding administration raised taxes in 1921 by expanding the tax base considerably at the same time that it lowered rates. Kuehn also points out that Woods underemphasizes the role the monetary stimulus played in reviving the depressed economy. Since the 1920-21 recession was not characterized by any aggregate demand deficiency, fiscal stimulus was entirely unwarranted.
[edit]

I would tend to doubt the “recent research” that tries to include Keynes’ theories in the explanation. The issue of Fascism is more interesting. The National Recovery Administration was probably the most openly fascist bureaucratic organization that the US government ever instituted. It was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court, prompting Roosevelt’s “court packing” scheme. (A very sympathetic version by PBS).

What then, led to the Depression and what is leading to the present frightening echo of 1933? Here is a very frightening chart.

Here is a chart showing the price/earnings ratios of cyclical stocks vs “defensive stocks.” What it shows is that cyclical stocks, that can be expected to respond to economic conditions, are very, very cheap. That looks like most people do not expect recovery any time soon. Why ?

This is a very frightening chart. It has been for months as no prior recession has shown this deep a fall in employment and this slow a recovery. Now, if you look at the end of the red line, you see that employment is not recovering at all. The line is flat.

Calvin Coolidge has been criticized in history for his pro-business sentiments expressed in words. He is alleged to have said, “The business of America is business.” In fact, that is not an accurate quote but the sentiment he expressed was similar. He was also quoted as saying something like “A man who builds a factory, builds a temple and those who work there, worship there.” He has been widely criticized for those statements, as if praising business was immoral.

What we have now is a president who makes statements like, “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

We have a president who tells would-be entrepreneurs that “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

Does anyone still wonder why the economy under a president who seems hostile to business is failing while the economy under a president who supported it and wasn’t ashamed to say so, boomed.

Some have blamed Coolidge for the 1929 crash but it is pretty clear that the problem was similar to the problem of the real estate bubble in 2005. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long. In 1928, Coolidge did not feel he had the right to intervene with the Fed and Benjamin Strong who was the president of the New York Fed died in October of that year. The Dow doubled in 1929. That was the speculative blow-off that ended in the crash. In 2005, Alan Greenspan still believed that a real estate bubble was preferable to a correction from the 1990 internet bubble. George Bush may have had more ability to intervene but all the safety mechanisms, which had not existed in 1929, still failed.

We are on the path to another Depression. One small indication. I do reviews of workers compensation claims. One would expect that, early in a severe recession, claims would go up as workers anticipate layoffs and try to file claims. There was a bit of that but it is over. Employment in California is down so far that the State Compensation Insurance Fund is laying off doctors and closing offices. Claims are way down because employment is falling rapidly. Workers may be afraid to file claims now.

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I am worried about the next political killing. Not that Tucson was political.

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

The shooter in Tucson is an obvious paranoid schizophrenic, uninterested in and ignorant of political rhetoric.

Ashleigh Banfield said that Loughner “disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right,” according to an interview on “Good Morning America.” Loughner wasn’t shooting at people, “he was shooting at the world,” Banfield said, according to the report.

The next shooter will probably be very interested in the hate-filled rhetoric coming from the left and directed at talk radio and Fox New, plus of course, Sarah Palin.

I fear that the torrent of hate and slander that has poured from the left, including the “paper of record” the New York Times, will agitate some leftist radical and we will have an ugly incident. Libertarian (and gay) Dutch politician (and professor), Pim Fortuyn was assassinated three weeks before the next election by a Green and “animal rights” activist.

However, words have power and if someone is called a racist often enough, an impressionable mind may decide that saving the world from the latest Hitler will require that person’s murder.

Some version of that scenario appears to have taken place in the Netherlands on May 6, 2002, with the political assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a rising star in Dutch politics who could possibly have become the next Prime Minister. A man identified only as an “animal rights activist” shot him down in the street near a radio station.

Certainly Professor Fortuyn’s notoriety played a part in his being targeted. Both the media and Dutch politicians in the ruling party attacked him mercilessly in the most disparaging language. Prime Minister Wim Kok called him a fascist, as did the European press. Anyone who objects to massive Muslim immigration is branded automatically as a racist, xenophobe and fascist. Mr. Fortuyn was regularly compared with real right-winger Jean Le Pen, although aside from the immigration issue, the men had nothing in common.

The assassin was a typical leftist activist.

A vegan animal rights activist accused of the murder of the controversial Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn has confessed, public prosecutors said on Saturday.
Volkert van der Graaf is reported as saying he saw Mr Fortuyn’s far-right views as a threat to vulnerable sections of society.

Note that Fortuyn’s speeches were principally concerned about Muslim immigration. For that position, he was called “far right” and a fascist. This person who did the killing that was obviously being called for by leftist politicians and the media, had nothing to do with Muslims. He was responding to the rhetoric from the political left.

I fear we may see a similar attempt this year as the next election begins to raise the temperature of political speech. I hope Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin have good security. She is probably the most vulnerable and I really worry about her safety.

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Posted in Europe, immigration, media, politics, social issues | 5 Comments »

The myth of Scooter Libby

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

UPDATE: Even the Washington Post complains about the lies and distortions in the movie. Given the Post’s history, that is severe criticism of the movie’s writers.

The Hollywood left has now released their version of the Valerie Plame affair. It is a movie called “Fair Game” and it perpetuates the myth that Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby told columnist Robert Novak that Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent. In fact, Novak got his information, and so testified before a grand jury, from Richard Armitage, a State Department assistant secretary and no ally of Bush and the White House. Armitage, typically, does not appear in the movie. This article in World Affairs Journal reviews the movie and provides a succinct account of the story.

Joe Wilson had gone to Niger in 2002 at the request of the CIA after Cheney had asked the agency about reports that Iraq bought yellowcake from Niger. According to a declassified CIA memo, Wilson found that Iraq had sent a commercial delegation to Niger to expand trade and that the only Niger export Iraq would care about was yellowcake. So there was an attempt, but it proved fruitless. In his 2003 State of Union address, Bush said the British had reported an effort by Iraq to buy “significant quantities of uranium” in Africa. In his July 6, 2003, Times op-ed, Wilson suggested that that statement was evidence the administration was manipulating intelligence to push the war. But Bush said only that the British reported that Iraq “sought” to purchase yellowcake, which was precisely what Wilson had found and reported, according to the CIA. Still, the op-ed caused a furor, and the White House quickly backed off the statements about Iraqi efforts.

My opinion is that the Bush White House made a catastrophic error in not defending the “sixteen words” in the State of the Union address. They were later shown to be correct as he did not assert that Saddam obtained the yellowcake but did make an unsuccessful attempt. The failure to defend those words began the myth that “Bush lied us into war.” It was a disastrous mistake.

Valerie Plame says in her memoir that she read the report that the CIA wrote immediately after debriefing Wilson on his trip and also read his column before it was published. She added that she thought the column was accurate. She said the report was only a few pages long. No one, let alone a professional intelligence officer, could have missed the part about Iraq trying to buy yellowcake. She had to know the column was wrong, but evidently said nothing. So she was anything but an innocent bystander as her husband created a political firestorm.

The book “Shaddow Warriors” makes the assertion that Wilson and Plame were actually working for French intelligence. France, of course, opposed the Iraq invasion and France, under Jacques Chirac, was deeply invested in Iraq and in the “oil for food” scam that corrupted the UN and a number of other organizations that helped Saddam evade the sanctions.

The other interesting story in the article concerns Libby’s attempt to obtain a pardon from Bush before he left office. It is to Bush’s discredit that he did not pardon Libby.

Even at the end of the long ordeal, poor memory — and irony — continued to played a role. Libby called White House counsel Fred Fielding as the clock was winding down on Bush’s term to ask if he could meet with the president to make his case for a pardon. Fielding mentioned he had received a call from a senator who had defended Libby. That surprised Libby, who knew the senator but had not considered him an ardent supporter. And Libby suggested it might have been another senator who Libby knew had spoken to Fielding.
Libby, who answered questions for this article, asked Fielding three times if he was sure it was the senator Fielding mentioned, and Fielding insisted that it was. But a little later, Fielding realized that he had made a mistake and that the senator Libby had mentioned was the one who had called. “Fred,” Libby said wryly, “you could be indicted.” The incident evidently didn’t convince Fielding that Libby may have made a similar memory error. Fielding didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Shame on Bush and Fielding for refusing to help an innocent man who had been wronged. The evidence against Libby was weak and the prosecutor knew throughout the entire process that Armitage had been the source for Novak.

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Posted in corruption, politics | Comments Closed

Republicans and immigration.

Sunday, November 7th, 2010

The recent election said little about illegal immigration. Sharon Angle, according to this LA Times piece, may have come off too harsh on illegal immigration. Nevada has a large Hispanic population and elected a Republican governor who is Hispanic. Ken Buck may have gotten some backlash from a reputation as an enforcer of laws against employing illegals. However, the Republicans won Arizona where illegal immigration is an issue and Hispanics are a large sector of the population. What does this mean ?

Republicans are in favor of legal immigration. Democrats try to mix the legal and illegal sides of this issue to confuse voters. Many Hispanic voters oppose illegal immigration but may worry about harassment of legal residents. There is no question that California has been devastated by the demands of the illegal population. Texas has escaped some of the negative effects because its state government is funded by sales tax, not income tax which may be avoided by illegals.

What is the solution ?

One is to build the fence and control the border. So far, 600 miles have been constructed and the “virtual fence” advocated by George Bush has been shown to be useless.

The Obama administration is preparing to scrap plans to extend the high-tech “virtual” border fence along vast stretches of the 1,969-mile U.S.-Mexico border, ending a troubled and politically contentious security measure inaugurated in 2006 by then-President George W. Bush, the Houston Chronicle learned Friday.

The decision, expected to be announced shortly by the Department of Homeland Security, comes after federal authorities poured nearly $1 billion into a four-year, post-9/11 demonstration project to show that state-of-the-art remote cameras and ground sensors could help U.S. Border Patrol agents intercept undocumented immigrants, drug smugglers or potential terrorists surreptitiously crossing the border.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona keenly familiar with the technical problems afflicting the project, first signaled plans to scrub the “invisible fence” with a series of internal decisions in recent weeks that shifted the year-to-year contract with the prime contractor to a month-to-month contract due to expire on Nov. 21.

It was a waste of money and time. The real fence, however, has been effective where built. That is why most illegals are coming through Arizona now. There is a fence in California.

Once the fence is built, then what ?

Many of the workers compensation claims I review, about 70%, are for workers with Spanish surnames. Of these, about half are Spanish speaking only. When reviewing these cases, I note that the vast majority claim two years of education. Two years ! They are illiterate in Spanish, let alone English. They have no skills and can work at manual labor only. They tend to become injured and disabled by age 40. Then, they are a drag on the economy as they live on disability.

Legal immigrants bring education and skills. Canada requires that immigrants have assets and education. Very few countries permit illegal immigration as we do. Certainly Mexico does not permit immigration. There is no naturalized citizenship in Mexico.

What about illegals who have been here for years and have families who are citizens ? We can develop a policy toward these people once the border is secure. Right now, we have the significant possibility of a violent failed state on our southern border. That will accelerate migration and may well lead to violent confrontations between criminal gangs, who are learning tactics from Islamist groups, and US authorities.

Close the border and then worry about the illegals residing in the US with significant ties here.

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Posted in corruption, economics, immigration, terrorism | 3 Comments »

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