Sic Semper Tyrannis

China Frets About US Treasury Holdings

nathanjmorton — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:19:30 +0000

A quote followed by some discussion:

BEIJING – China’s premier didn’t say it in so many words, but the implied warning to Washington was blunt: Don’t devalue the dollar through reckless spending.

Premier Wen Jiabao’s message is unlikely to be misunderstood at the White House, which responded by asserting there is no safer investment in the world than the United States. It is counting on Beijing to help pay for its stimulus package by buying U.S. bonds.

Link to full article: China Frets About US Treasury Holdings

Washington’s glib response and arrogant assumption[s] underscores a deeper problem – namely, that of narcissism, frivolity and dissolution with which our culture has become affected.

Radical spending at this juncture would be a bad idea for many reasons, not least of which include higher taxes which will hurt jobs (when corporations have less to spend on hiring new talent or retaining the talent they already have). Notwithstanding lessons from history in that government does have a role to play in restoring/maintaining economic vitality, there is a line to be drawn in the proverbial sand. This line represents the break even point in our analysis.

The most recent ’stimulus’ bill is worth almost a trillion dollars, much of which is comprised of pork. The difference between banking ‘bailouts’ and pork projects is thus: The former actually have investment value in that monies are due (i.e., the government is a creditor), while the latter are instances of blowing cash out the expense column. These are grants-in-aid thank you to the state of California for my education by the way. California cannot support its budgets. America cannot support the POTUS’ budget. We are planning to spend like a Sub-Saharan African nation, without any fear of God or inflation before us. Zimbabwe has an expected rate of inflation that exceeds a million percent. A million percent. This is not uncommon in that locale. People, what can I say here?

I will say this: Big government schemes got us into the crisis in the first place; to suggest that big government is the answer to get us out defies logic. That is to say, Johnson’s great society project in the nineteen sixties could not suffice without taking FNMA and FHLMC out of the budget; these entities were thusly privatized to an extent (established as public-private partnerships, which granted capitalist gains and socialized losses). This, in turn, had the effect of taking these home mortgage giants off the government’s books and welfare rolls, public works, etc. were commensurately expanded. Moreover, in the Clinton era, chokeholds, or extortionist headlocks were put on banks to lend to unqualified borrowers by means of regulatory burdens (e.g., Affirmative Action loans with the threat of lawsuits for noncompliance). See Community Reinvestment Actwith a view toward the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992.

Is it our fault the Chinese have built their entire economic model around exports to rich countries and primarily to the United States with cheap lending and a devalued currency? Of course not. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to follow an unqualified chain of presumption to the conclusion that the United States can maintain its superior bargaining position* indefinitely. It cannot.

A foreign principality will neither challenge militarily, politically or economically the power of the United States now nor in the forseeable future. The United States, however, poses its own greatest threat. That threat is within.

*superior bargaining position. This alludes to China’s BATNA or ‘Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement’, which is most likely a combination, at this time, of: GBP, Euro, and Gold, none of which provide a greater degree of stability or [risk weighted] returns than the US dollar.

The night we waved goodbye to America… our last best hope on Earth

nathanjmorton — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:06:28 +0000

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/11/the-night-we-wa.html
This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column
Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.
I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.
It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.
Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King – in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama’s election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn’t. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.
I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.
They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.
These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.
They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

Obama as an antidote to self-indulgence

nathanjmorton — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 23:40:47 +0000

Obama is ageing baby boomers’ justification for lives of inaction and disreputability.

Muslim Policies on Democracy in the West by Mohammad Nazeeh (Toronto, ON) – Facebook

nathanjmorton — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:04:19 +0000

I wanted to continue the conversation we were having regarding voting to bring it in a slightly different direction. As you all know, the muslim brotherhood released a memorandum in 1992 I believe stating that we needed to destroy the west from within so that we could establish Islam as the dominant religion. The words are below taken from an islamophobic webpage lol just for fun so you coudl see how pathetic they are. Islamophobes, ha what racists.

eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions.

Anywho, I see voting as the perfect way to do this. For those of you who do not, let us say we become 60% of a population through our birthrate inshallah. Now, we get to that point and then what? Do we consider to live under kafir law? do we continue to get robbed because the punishment is light?

For those who do not vote- what do you suggest we do when we are in a position of power and can place an Islamic government in power. We could form OUR own party and just vote them out.

‘Progress’ slogan

nathanjmorton — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 16:11:31 +0000

Progress of redistribution is regression of liberty as these two ends are mutually exclusive. Or in other words, liberty and redistribution are negatively correlated in that an increase in one predicates a decrease in the other.

Liberals decry reality as a stereotype.

nathanjmorton — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:59:45 +0000

I was waiting in line with gaggles of youth to vote absentee in Arlington County and the following came to me: Liberals decry, “Reality is a stereotype.”

Cowboys and Muslims (humour)

nathanjmorton — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 21:33:23 +0000

At a small terminal in the Texas Panhandle, three strangers are awaiting their shuttle flight. One is a Native American passing through from Oklahoma. Another, a local ranch hand on his way to Ft. Worth for a stock show. The third passenger is an Arab student, newly arrived at the Texas oil patch from the Middle East.

To pass the time they strike up a conversation on recent events, and the discussion drifts to their diverse cultures. Soon the Westerners learn that the Arab is a devout Muslim. The conversation falls into an uneasy lull.

The cowpoke leans back in his chair, crosses his boots on a magazine table, tips his big sweat stained hat forward over his face. The wind outside blows tumbleweeds and the old windsock flaps, but no plane comes.

Finally, the Native American clears his throat and softly, he speaks: ‘Once my people were many, Now we are few.’

The Muslim raises an eyebrow and leans forward, ‘Once my people were few,’ he sneers, ‘and now we are many. Why do you suppose that is?’

The Texan shifts the toothpick to one side of his mouth and from the darkness beneath his stetson says, ‘That’s ’cause we ain’t played Cowboys and Muslims yet.’

US-BUSINESS Summary (Reuters)

nathanjmorton — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:16:58 +0000

Central banks poised to act

SINGAPORE/LONDON (Reuters) – Central banks are likely to launch new coordinated emergency action this week to calm panic in financial markets, which could be rocked further by data pointing to global recession. The U.S. Federal Reserve is expected to cut rates sharply following share selloffs and currency collapses in developed economies and the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America.

KeyCorp, Capital One to receive cash infusion: source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – KeyCorp (KEY.N), Zions Bancorp (ZION.O) and Capital One Financial Corp (COF.N) are some of the banks that will receive cash under the U.S. government’s second round of capital infusions, a source familiar with the Treasury Department’s thinking said on Sunday. Four banks, including PNC Financial Services Group Inc (PNC.N), have already announced they are participating in the second round of capital injections.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/26/AR2008102600292.html

Politics – ‘08 Election (Just Giving It Away)

nathanjmorton — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:56:57 +0000

The right’s response to 9/11 was Iraq. The left’s response to 9/11 is Barack Obama. Need I say more? The financial crisis is one of confidence; the solvent for our present malaise is merely increased due diligence on future initiatives (e.g., conservative capital budgeting decisions). The government should continue to guarantee lines of credit.

The next four years is goinng to be rough; we will be set back even further than we were in the sixties.

Barney Frank’s Bankrupt Ideas

nathanjmorton — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:01:13 +0000

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, October 06, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Financial Rescue: Democrats created the mortgage crisis by forcing banks to give loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Now Obama and Biden want bankruptcy judges to bail out the same deadbeat homeowners. And once again, Barney Frank is helping.