A reader of this blog, Nicolas
Nilsen sent me an interesting video where, a couple of years before it
happened, stockbroker-agent-provocateur, Peter Schiff,
in Roubini mode, correctly predicted the disaster we are entering into
now. The video appears to be a montage of Schiff predicting and other
"prestigious" analysts literally laughing in his face.
Let's look a the video:
Wow.
Bang on.... and the best parts are all these jerks laughing at him.
I have always suspected that instead of "change", Barack Obama's real mission
is to keep America's emetic reaction to clumsy, ugly, tongue tied,
George W. Bush and all his works from derailing globalization and all
those who profit from it.
As The One is careful to point out, he is the change, as for the rest, aside from his morphology, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Moises NaímisaVenezuelan born, American resident who is the director of Foreign Policy Magazine and a very perspicacious and well connected observer of America's (both north and south's) political scene indeed.
Among Naím's many activities he writes a column in his native Spanish in the Madrid daily, El País. On Sunday he wrote
a very interesting piece that I have not found published anywhere in
English called "The 23rd of January Brigade" referring to those who
will be disillusioned with Obama before he has been in office more than
three days.
As we wait to finally discover who
actually organized this bloodbath in Mumbai, I would like to point out
something obvious: the Indian economic "miracle" has been more than
tempting fate to have created such a growing number of exuberant and ostentatious nouveau riche in a country where hundreds of millions of people are as scandalously poor...
Islamist, Maoist or things as yet undreamed of are bound to grow in the
gigantic, bubbling petri dish. globalization has created in India.
So
if all we had to go on was potential rage and resentment themselves, we
would be looking for a needle in a haystack. It would probably be more
profitable to look at the wide effects of this attack as a way of
narrowing down the list of possible culprits.
"That's how we got here -- a near total breakdown of responsibility at
every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the
people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash." Thomas Friedman - NYT "Excessively cheap money in the US was a driver of today's crisis,"
(Angela Merkel, the German chancellor) told the German parliament. "I
am deeply concerned about whether we are now reinforcing this trend
through measures being adopted in the US and elsewhere and whether we
could find ourselves in five years facing the exact same crisis." - Financial Times
A link at Doonesbury led me to this fascinating information.
Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks - The Big Picture (...)If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let's give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history. Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures - combined:
IIf a currency is supposed to
have any relation to actual value, when I see these numbers it seems
obvious to me that the dollar is entering the territory of the Wiemar Republic Deutsch mark: meaningless paper.
The
fear, of course is deflation, but a dollar that once bought victory in
WWII and trips to the Moon, but today cannot save a few banks, must be
a ticket to coming hyperinflation.
It is impossible to escape certain unpleasant realities of world power
No matter how seductive the figure of Barack Obama might be, glamor
cannot offset the drag of worthless money combined with military
impotence.
Joseph Nye's "soft power" is just that "soft". The brutal truth is that
candy and flowers, a thoughtful word are important rites of seduction,
but after these rites are performed, something hard is expected. If the
USA cannot "cut the mustard", other, perhaps ruder suitors will be
sought and found.
To me these numbers mean that we are living suspended over an abyss, held only in the slippery hands of a fraudulent system.
"Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States!" Porfirio Díaz
O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, An' ev'n devotion! To a Louse - Robert Burns
Every so often some irate reader
who lives in the states asks me how I can know anything about the USA
if I no longer live there.
To this I reply that the USA is everywhere,
all the time, intruding into people's lives in endless ways all over
the world: it is outside the United States where people really
understand the USA. It is the Americans who have a totally
fictionalized view of themselves.
Don't
you think by now that any inhabitant of Baghdad is an expert on
Americans, their foibles and their reality, the space between their
words and their actions?
But
of course this deep and intimate knowledge of the USA is new to Iraqis
and most Middle Easterners. Where Americans are really known, where the
USA has bent everything and everyone out of shape for nearly 200 years,
is south of the border, in Latin America in general and in Mexico, most
blatantly, in particular.
Barack Obama is extraordinarily intelligent and yes he
probably is the best man to be president right now... but that
probably wont make a bit of difference. It is the system and the
ideology on which it rests that are in a blind alley. When the people
of a huge and powerful country think that the solution to their
problems is a leader, that makes me very nervous.
The United States is in a systemic breakdown
and people think that Obama is going to fix it. It reminds me about how
people in the West viewed Gorbachev before the USSR collapsed. Not
Lincoln, not Gandhi, not FDR: Gorbachev.
Gorbachev was and is a very decent and intelligent man who just happened to be standing on the bridge when the Titanic went down.
As anyone who has read my posts
over the last few months can testify, I have been notably
unenthusiastic and irritated by Obama worship. I have been called "Mr.
Wet Blanket", the "glass half empty" guy, and decorated with other much
less flattering labels that have been pinned on me as I tried to point
out how precarious were the foundations upon which this new church was
built. But today reading the news I had a little epiphany and suddenly
my heart melted and I was filled with warm compassion for the Obamite
devotees as they adored at The One's Lotus Feet.
Fareed Zakaria has written a very interesting article
that tells us more about what is really happening to the USA and the
rest of the world, than anything that I have read in the MSM in quite a
while:
For weeks
the world has eagerly awaited word from the Obama transition team about
the people who will head up the next administration -- the new
secretaries of state and treasury, the attorney general. But one of the
more crucial positions in the Obama administration probably isn't going
to be filled for months and is likely to get little attention when it
is -- the post of U.S. ambassador to China.
China has become the
key to America getting through the worsening economic crisis. The
American ambassador in Beijing (okay, this is a metaphor for all those
officials who will be managing this relationship) will need to make
sure that China sees its interests as aligned with America's. Or else
things could get very, very ugly.
Then it gets really interesting, but before reading more Zakaria, let us read a little Chinese:
The world is shifting towards a multi-polar system with a less dominant US and a more powerful China and India, and a "historic" transfer of wealth from west to east, according to a new US intelligence report. Financial Times In the NIC's view, the rise of China, India and the rest will mean that by 2025 the US will be "one [my emphasis] of a number of important actors on the world stage, albeit still the most powerful". For more than 200 years, even when challenged, the US has been a rising power. The adjustment will not be easy. Philip Stephens -FT
This week's news of a drop in consumer prices may sound on the surface like a good deal for financially strapped U.S. households. But economists warn that sustained deflation -- a period of falling overall prices -- would deepen the nation's economic troubles. Such a period would make it harder for people to repay debts and would prompt consumers to delay purchases in anticipation of lower prices and harder times. "Everyone is having these huge sales, and consumers know if they wait longer, the chances of them not having a good selection is fairly small and the chances are that the prices will be lower," said Charles McMillion, an economist who runs MBG Information Services. "So why buy today? This is exactly why economists are always scared to death of deflation." Washington Post When Obama takes office in two months, he will find a number of difficult foreign policy issues competing for his attention, each with strong advocates among his advisers. We believe that the Arab-Israeli peace process is one issue that requires priority attention.(...)The major elements of an agreement are well known. A key element in any new initiative would be for the U.S. president to declare publicly what, in the view of this country, the basic parameters of a fair and enduring peace ought to be. These should contain four principal elements: 1967 borders, with minor, reciprocal and agreed-upon modifications; compensation in lieu of the right of return for Palestinian refugees; Jerusalem as real home to two capitals; and a nonmilitarized Palestinian state. Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski - Washington Post
"Deflation as a
metaphor" compares the perception of America's relative decline as a
superpower to economic deflation, where people hold off from making a
purchase because, with prices falling, they think that they can get a
better deal if they wait longer. When this happens, prices fall even
faster as frantic sellers try to attract reluctant buyers with even lower prices and the
potential buyers become even more reluctant to buy. Finally the economy
seizes up and only those with great cash reserves benefit.
Deflation is a process, a self-fulfilling prophecy that feeds on itself: falling prices make prices fall faster.The National Intelligence Council's report, "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World"
postulates that by the year 2025 the United States will be dramatically
less powerful than it is today. If we take deflationary process as our
guide, the universal perception of America's decline should quickly
accelerate that decline.
"A mountain had gone into
labour and was groaning terribly. Such rumours excited great
expectations all over the country. In the end, however, the mountain
gave birth to a mouse." Aesop
"The
Americans who voted for Barack Obama as president were promised change
they could count on, but it rather looks as if they may actually be
asked to make do with a mildly refurbished Clinton Administration, with
many of the same officials and nearly all of the same policies. The
policies are drawn from the same centrist Democratic Party sources as
those of Bill Clinton, and Obama's admirers might even find themselves
with Hillary Rodham Clinton as Secretary of State -- which makes no
sense whatever. Are there no significant differences of view on war and
peace between the two of them? Why did the American (and international)
public have inflicted upon it a year and a half of Democratic party
primaries in addition to the national election contest if the
Democratic race could have been settled by the flip of a coin between
people who believed in the same policies and thought the same
thoughts?" William Pfaff
There is a saying in Spanish, "did we need such big saddlebags for such a short ride?"
You'd
think I'd be happy to have all my past cynicism proved right... and so
quickly, but I'm not... maybe if I lived on another planet, or if I
were a future Chinese historian lounging in my comfortable study in
Beijing a hundred years from now, chuckling as I read about the
absurdity of America's slow motion drop into inanity, I would, but I'm
not, so I wont.
As negotiations started for the release of a Saudi-owned supertanker
seized by pirates off Somalia, the Indian Navy said on Wednesday that
one of its warships fought a battle at sea with would-be hijackers in
the Gulf of Aden, sinking one suspect vessel and forcing the pirates to
abandon a second as they fled.(...) Cyrus Mody, of the International
Maritime Bureau, which monitors global piracy, said in a telephone
interview from London that the shipping industry had been urging
stronger naval measures against the pirates' "mother ships" for some
time and would approve of the Indian Navy's action. "This is the sort
of action which should be taken to try to deal with the situation," he
said. Peter Hinchliffe, the marine director of the International
Chamber of Shipping in London, said in a separate telephone interview
that the Indian Navy's action "is going to start to bring the message
home" to pirates "that the international community really is ranged
against them."(...) This year, at least 92 ships have been attacked in
and around the Gulf of Aden, more than triple the number in 2007,
according to the International Maritime Bureau. At least 14 of those
ships, carrying more than 250 crew members, are still in the control of
hijackers. New York Times
With all the speculations about new
presidential appointments, readers may have missed one of those news
items that alert the watchful to the arrival of a new era.
An Indian Navy warship has engaged and destroyed a Somali pirate vessel.
Barack Obama's serious
flirtation with his one-time rival, Hillary Clinton, over the post of
secretary of State has been welcomed by everyone from Henry Kissinger
to Bill Clinton as an effective, grand gesture by the president-elect.
It's not playing quite as well, however, in some precincts of
Obamaland. From his supporters on the progressive wing of the
Democratic Party, to campaign aides of the soon-to-be
commander-in-chief, there's a sense of ambivalence about giving a top
political plum to a woman they spent 18 months hammering as the
compromised standard-bearer of an era that deserves to be forgotten.
"These are people who believe in this stuff more than Barack himself
does," said a Democrat close to Obama's campaign. "These guys didn't
put together a campaign in order to turn the government over to the
Clintons." Ben Smith - Politico
In
a sense Barack Obama naming Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State
would be as if George W. Bush had named a pro-choice feminist to the
Supreme Court: an insult to his base. All
the youngsters that rang the doorbells and manned the phones and
computers, expecting a change they believed in, are now learning what
the word "sucker" means.
You might have thought that an emergency gathering of
leaders from the world's 20 main rich and emerging economies, with the
global economy poised for its worst slump since the Great Depression,
would have aroused some interest. The event was deemed unworthy of the
main section of Saturday's New York Times. (Room was found on the front
page for a story about how hard it is to open the "clamshell" packaging
of toys and electronic gadgets. The summit, "A crisis in finance", made
page 3 of the business section.) On television news, world leaders'
efforts to stave off disaster were displaced by speculation about
Hillary Clinton's next job and by fires in California (four firemen
injured).(...) neither the new president nor the Congress will
seriously contemplate anything that might be seen as a surrender of
sovereignty to international bodies. Desirable though it may be in
principle to create some kind of supranational financial regulator, for
example, this is not going to happen. In the regulatory sphere, as with
fiscal and monetary policy, US policymaking will remain national for
the foreseeable future. Clive Crook - Financial Times
It
is notable that two major centers of power issued statements on the
geopolitical scene that were quite forthright. Both the European Union
in a unanimous statement and President Lula of Brazil said they looked
forward to renewing collaboration with the United States, but this time
as equals, not as junior partners. (...) Can Obama accept the fact that
the United States is no longer the world's leader, merely a partner
with other power centers? And, even if he can, can he somehow get the
American people to accept this new reality? Immanuel Wallerstein
The ground breaking "Bretton Woods II" meeting in Washington last weekend was strangely absent from American media. Why?
"Brothers should pull up their
pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear
is showing. What's wrong with that? Come on. Some people might not want
to see your underwear. I'm one of them."-- President-elect Barack Obama - Quoted on Doonesbury
"That's how we got here -- a near total breakdown of responsibility at
every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the
people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash." 
"Brothers should pull up their
pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear
is showing. What's wrong with that? Come on. Some people might not want
to see your underwear. I'm one of them."
