Category Archives: EU

Soros Muscles Merkel

Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel (a former East German physicist) has refused to heed the hedonist B. Hussein Obama (an agitator from Chicago) who is urging her to print and inflate her country’s currency to Weimar-Republic levels.

“Financier- philanthropist” George Soros—also an all-round radical and BHO surrogate—has stepped in to muscle Merkel implying, writes Amity Shlaes, that,

“Germany should look to the U.S., where President Barack Obama has spent vigorously and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has created money for the greater good. Soros, the tutor again, underscored that Germany clearly “does not know what it is doing.”

There are reasons for the meddling:

Beyond Merkel’s personal memory there is the German national memory of the 1920s hyperinflation. That resulted from the decision of a desperate Weimar Republic to inflate its way out of war debts. That hyperinflation so punished middle-class savings and so weakened the 1920s economy that the average German became more susceptible to maniacs like Adolf Hitler and the communists.
Pressure on Germany from Soros, and for that matter, from the Obama administration, makes it harder for Merkel or other European leaders to heed their own sound instincts. Soros’s pressure also obscures a desirable policy path for Germany, one in which it practices fiscal discipline and growth creation so well that other euro nations emulate it.

Read Shlaes’ analysis.

UPDATED: Wilders Wins Big

Democracy, Elections, EU, Glenn Beck, IMMIGRATION, Islam

The malfunctioning media is compounding its always objective reporting with breathless adjectives—“huge,” “stunning,” “shocking” and “peroxide-haired politician”—all to express “subtle” dismay at the election victory of Dutch populist Geert Wilders. My mother, a loyal Wilders supporter, alerted me to this “huge” good-news story:

Wilders yesterday stunned the Netherlands by coming third in general elections – a historic vote that could see him enter a coalition government.

Best known for his strident attacks on Islam, Mr Wilders’ electoral triumph sent shock waves through the country’s large immigrant communities and sounded the death knell for the image of the Netherlands as a bastion of tolerance.

The shock-factor was all the greater as the peroxide-haired politician had appeared sidelined during the election campaign, as the mainstream parties focused on how to deal with the nation’s economic woes and immigration slipped down the political agenda.

Yet Mr Wilders made the strongest gains in Wednesday’s election, doubling the number of seats for his Freedom Party to 24. The pro-business VDD party – which Mr Wilders left to set up on his own – won 31 of the 150 seats up for grabs, pipping the Labour Party of former Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen by a single seat in the narrowest ever electoral victory.

Cohen’s platform, I believe, is in the tradition of the Judenräte.

Let’s hope Glenn Beck doesn’t repeat his affront to this Dutch patriot.

UPDATE: “How can the pitchfork folks who elected this man be so stupid as to imagine Islam poses any threat to the tolerant Dutch way of life?” Preposterous. That’s me paraphrasing the PBS’s apoplectic correspondent in the Netherlands.

The far-right Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, grew from nine to 24 seats in the 150-seat parliament following Wednesday’s vote. Wilders wants to ban Muslim face veils and the building of new mosques in the country of 16.6 million with a Muslim population of 1 million.

Paul Ames, GlobalPost’s Belgium-based regional correspondent, said Wilders built on people’s fears about the influence of Islam on the Netherlands.

Canucks Protest … Global Bank Tax

Canada, Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank

The Canadian government, not the American one, “will ‘resist’ a bank tax, Industry Minister Tony Clement said Tuesday as ministers fanned out across the world to raise opposition to the proposal for avoiding another financial crisis. ‘Canada is, and will remain, opposed to a tax that would penalize financial institutions that remained strong and prosperous while many of the world’s banks failed,’ Clement told a press conference with Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon.”

Clement said the bank tax would “encourage risky behavior” if it is used to create a bank bailout fund and “reward bad behavior” of those institutions responsible for the recent financial crisis in the first place.
As well, it would “unduly burden” Canadian banks and put them at a “competitive disadvantage” to other financial institutions.

As the AP reported a while back, “while the U.S. has seen 81 banks fail in 2009 alone, Canada has not experienced the failure of any major financial institution. There has been no crippling mortgage meltdown or banking crisis north of the border, where the financial sector is dominated by five large banks.”

I’ve often contended that if it cut back on its interventionist policies, Canada could become an economic giant. It has natural resources and a highly educated population. And as David Frum (another Canuck) reminds in this excellent piece (via alternativeright.com): Canada has an immigration system that doesn’t tolerate a tsunami of illegal alien illiterates, as does it adhere to a strict point system that benefits the country.

More HERE about the global regulatory regime debated by our oracular governors.

Updated: Land of Moussaka, Moochers and Looters

Debt, Democracy, EU, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Welfare

COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU. The excerpt is from “Land of Moussaka, Moochers and Looters,” which you can read on WND.COM:

“The public sector and its syndicates will collapse a country before they accept “austerity measures” – the focus of disaffection among Greece’s gritty street fighters is the requirement that they begin to exercise frugality.

Against the better judgment of the people in member EU states, the Eurocrats have committed to rescuing the profligate Greeks. The International Monetary Fund (for which Americans are liable, too) will assist. In exchange, the slackers striking out on city streets and against their compatriots will have to watch their public-sector wages slashed, pensions cut, pay frozen. And, horrors, Greeks will have to live with ‘liberalized labor laws,’ in other words, allow some economic freedoms to the few workers who carry the welfariat. …

The defaulting Dionysians, on the other hand, are fueled with the righteousness of the wronged. From the janitor to the journalist, they blame their politicians who, in exchange for power, only gave the demos what they demanded at the time. …

The Grecian wilding is a minor event compared to the events that’ll unfold should China quit funding our federal behemoth’s bacchanalia, and the Moody’s credit-rating agency downgrades U.S. Treasuries to junk bond status, befitting a banana republic.” …

The complete column is “Land of Moussaka, Moochers and Looters,” now on WND.COM.

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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Update (May Eighth): Pat Buchanan on the Greek welfariat:

“… consider what brought Greece to where she is – running a deficit of 14 percent of gross domestic product with a debt approaching 100 percent, with Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Great Britain not that far behind.
All of Europe adopted universal health care. All voted in a shorter workweek, a higher minimum wage, greater job security, earlier retirements and munificent pensions.
As the cradle-to-grave welfare states rose, an ever-increasing share of the labor force left the private sector for the security of the public sector.
Tax-consumers, the beneficiaries of the welfare states and the bureaucrats that ran them, grew in number, as taxpayers declined as a share of the labor force. Though Greece was far from the most productive nation in Europe, Athens led the parade. …
And America is not all that far behind.
While the federal deficit is not 14 percent of GDP, it was 10 percent in 2009 and may reach 11 percent in 2010. Trillion-dollar deficits are projected through the decade, bringing the public debt – held by citizens, companies, foreign governments and sovereign wealth funds – close to 100 percent of GD
And the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare and federal pensions rival those of Western Europe.
States like California and New York, larger than Greece, look a lot like Greece. Were it not for the scores of billions dished out to them by Obama’s stimulus, some of these states would have come close to the brink New York City went over in 1975.
Many of these states are today laying off teachers, letting felons out of prison and looking hard at the salaries and pensions of civil servants. While the temptation is great for Washington to bail them out again, the United States government itself has now begun to attract the concerned notice of holders of U.S.debt.” …

[SNIP]

Keynesians still manage to surprise me. Fox News’ Neil Cavuto helped disseminate ignorance and immorality when he entertained an “economist,” or just a shyster, who advanced anti-gravity claims: austerity measures were the wrong thing for Greece. National bankruptcy could never happen in the US, because we have a printing press with which to create prosperity. Just like that.

By that logic, why work? Why produce? Why not just print magic money at that paper Pantheon, and hand it out to Americans who can then sit idle on the beaches?