Category Archives: Economy

Stop Shopping Till You Drop, Or Till A Terrorist Drops You

Britain, Economy, Europe, Homeland Security, Islam, Terrorism

THE NEW COLUMN is: “Stop Shopping Till You Drop, Or Till A Terrorist Drops You.” It’s currently on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

“Another attack in London by a loser terrorist, “tweeted President Trump. “These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard.”

Prime Minister Theresa May and the mad media fumed over the president’s insinuation that the Parsons Green “bucket bomber” was a “Known Wolf,” and not a lone wolf. But Donald Trump was entirely on the mark. May and her men knew Yahyah Farroukh (whose information the British press is protecting).

The “Known Wolf,” left free to hunt for prey, is the rule more than the exception in a country, Britain, that will do nothing to stop the likes of the little snot who struck in a London underground train, on September 14.

The same authorities find the will and the legal wherewithal to jail Englishmen for thought crimes, say, reciting verbatim anti-Islam verse from a book by Churchill.

Where President Trump went wrong was in calling the hissing snake “sick and demented.” The snake, taken in and housed by a tenderhearted, stupid British couple, was just being a snake; doing what his ilk has done since the seventh century.

The “sickest and most demented” of the lot are the British authorities.

Scotland Yard? MI5? All are MIA.

When it comes to protecting the lives of innocents, British security is missing in action, habitually, and some say intentionally.

Khuram Butt, one of the London Bridge attackers, starred in a Channel 4 TV documentary, The Jihadis Next Door. Butt was not on the lam during the shooting. He was not being investigated by the security forces, or hunkering in a bunker in Iraq. He was parading around in Barking, east London, broadcasting his intentions to the British people and their protectors. Why, even the Imam at the local mosque had expelled Butt for his murderous lust. But to his British groupies, within and without government, Butt was fit to be filmed living among them, scheming against them.

Twenty-two-year-old Salman Abedi murdered 22 youngsters in the Manchester Arena. He packed his bomb with shrapnel, ball bearings and nails. With such a fiendish device, surgeons must slice open the surviving victims, picking from the flesh and burrowing in the bone for embedded shards. To most decent people, Abedi was detritus. He ought to have been watched, segregated from civilization, deported, and, hopefully, dispatched one day.

But to the security service MI5 Abedi was part of the terrorist “assets” they had cultivated in Manchester “for more than 20 years.” The sanctimonious Ms. May has the audacity to scold President Trump for cryptically hinting at her culpability in enabling terrorism, when May was the home secretary under whose imprimatur Manchester’s resident terrorist cell was developed as an MI5 asset. (“Terror in Britain: What Did the Prime Minister Know?”)

The London tube attack was the fifth attack in Britain this year. Naturally, the state sluggards of British counterterrorism are seething over any leaks of information to their lowly subjects. Leaks reveal their ineptitude, their dereliction of duty and the elaborate protections they put in place for their privileged wards.

If not complicit, as veteran journalist John Pilger has convincingly contended, the British government and counterterrorism outfits are certainly criminally negligent. …

… READ THE REST. “Stop Shopping Till You Drop, Or Till A Terrorist Drops You” is currently on Townhall.com.

You can find the Mercer Column weekly on the Unz Review, Daily Caller, WND.com, frequently at  American Thinker, Townhall.com, and other fine outlets, where The Column generally appears. And it’s always posted, eventually, on IlanaMercer.com, under Articles. Please share.

UPDATED (12/6): Trump Tax Plan Neither Fair Nor Flat, But Based On Faction & Class Warfare

Business, Debt, Donald Trump, Economy, libertarianism, Private Property, Taxation

Whatever happened to the promise of “reducing tax rates on individuals,” Mr. President? Whatever happened to “lowering tax rates, simplifying the tax system” and overhauling the nation’s tax code? You know, to benefit ALL Americans?

President Donald Trump said Wednesday the emerging Republican tax proposal won’t cut taxes for the wealthy, and they may go up, an assurance that appeared to contradict the plan that his administration and GOP leaders are drafting.

… “The wealthy will be pretty much where they are,” Mr. Trump, a Republican, said. “If we can do that, we’d like it. If they have to go higher, they’ll go higher, frankly.”

Who are the wealthy? Two income families bringing in 100K?

Naturally, “Trump wants to lower the 35% corporate tax rate to 15%, though most analysts think that is nearly impossible.”

Gotta keep the Familia prosperous.

MORE at:

“GOP to Release Tax Overhaul as Trump Says Rich Won’t Benefit; Republicans prepare for legislative sprint on a plan they expect would cut taxes for the wealthy.”

“House, Senate Tax Proposals Likely to Diverge“:

The document will include a specific corporate tax rate and details on the deductibility of corporate interest, Mr. Mnuchin said at a separate appearance at the same event. He said news reports suggesting the six negotiators are far apart are untrue.

Corporations above all.

SEE FACEBOOK THREAD.

UPDATE (12/6):  Hands off Our Loopholes. Alas, It’s too late.

To Please The Deep Statists, POTUS Signs A Russia Sanctions Bill He Opposes

Donald Trump, Economy, Foreign Policy, Russia

Signing a punitive bill against another people for “the sake of national unity” is a terrible thing to do. Yet that’s just what President Trump has done.

What happened to the famous veto? President Donald Trump promised his base to restore relations with Russia, but has succumbed, instead, to all the pressure ploys levied against Russia by America’s deranged lawmakers.

POTUS is signing sanctions into law against Russia to curry favor with an establishment that hates him and wants to trip him up. These sanctions don’t benefit the American people; only the sinecured statists in DC. Most of the president’s administrative and cabinet appointments have followed the same logic: pleasing the Deeps Statists.

[POTUS] said he signed the bill for “the sake of national unity” and hopes there will “be cooperation between our two countries on major global issues so that these sanctions will no longer be necessary.”

You can’t stick it to a country, however defanged economically and militarily (Russia), and expect goodwill to follow.

The bill limits the president’s ability to lift or waive sanctions against Russia and keeps in place sanctions the Obama administration imposed last year. It allows the U.S. to deny entry and revoke visas for individuals who have engaged in certain activities, such as selling arms to the Syrian government and abusing human rights.

The always plain-spoken and perceptive Russian Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, described “the move as a humiliating defeat for Trump. … “The hope for improving our relations with the new U.S. administration is now over,” said Medvedev, who served as Russian president in 2008-2012 before stepping down to allow Vladimir Putin to reclaim the job.”

For his part, “Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Russia will expel 755 US diplomatic staff and could consider imposing additional measures against the United States as a response to new US sanctions.”

Putin said in an interview televised on state television on Sunday that he ordered the move because he “thought it was the time to show that we’re not going to leave that without an answer”.

He, however, ruled out any immediate measure against the US. “I am against it as of today,” Putin said in an interview with Vesti TV.

Moscow ordered the US on Friday to cut hundreds of diplomatic staff and said it would seize two US diplomatic properties after the US House of Representatives and the Senate approved new sanctions on Russia.

Russia said the US had until September 1 to reduce its diplomatic staff in Russia to 455 people, matching the number of Russian diplomats left in the US after Washington expelled 35 Russians in December.

How is this good for Americans? For Russians? How is this good for anyone but the John McCain foreign policy posse?

John Maynard Keynes’ Influence At Harvard Business School, And Beyond

Debt, Economy, Political Economy, Socialism

Interesting points about what the procession of Harvard Business School elites has wrought on the American economy were made on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Making them was Duff McDonald, author of The Golden Passport.

Nothing in the interview was said about the baleful contribution of John Maynard Keynes’s credit and consumption-based voodoo economics on the entrenched thinking at Harvard Business School, and on world political establishment. (That’s not to say Keynes’ “politically inspired economic theory” is not covered in the book. It could well be.)

Because consumption is its be-all and end-all, consumer confidence is crucial to the Cult of Keynes. If the consumer is not crazy confident—even when he ought not to be—goes the “thinking,” he’ll quit consuming until he drops. In short, Keynesian economic animists hope that the holy spirit of “confidence” will enter the once bitten, twice shy lender, and make him lend. The same spell is supposed to mysteriously move the unemployed and penniless to spend.

In his wonderfully learned book, The Failure of the ‘New Economics, Henry Hazlitt summed-up the essence of Keynes’ General Theory: “The great virtue is Consumption, extravagance, improvidence. The great vice is Saving, thrift, ‘financial prudence.'” Duly, Keynes’ acolytes in all administrations are always vowing to make credit flow “the way it should.” Never mind that “all credit is debt,” and that, in Hazlitt’s words, “proposals for an increased volume of credit are merely another name for proposals for an increased burden of debt.”