Category Archives: Media

CNN Bimbo Holds Out Hope For Socialism

EU, Europe, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Socialism

This week, CNN’s ERIN BURNETT, HOST of OUTFRONT, and “a valued member of the OUTFRONT Strike Team,” whatever gimmick that stands for, entertained the possibility that President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party might just “save Europe’s economy and ours.”

Burnett’s babbling was boosted by “striker” Bill Gross, CO-CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER of PIMCO, who positively spun the political platform of Francois Hollande by describing France’s manifestly socialist agenda as “pro-growth,” and as “a different way forward.”

I listened to the Gross man live on TV. CNN’s transcriber failed to transcribe Gross’s salutary reference to France’s founding principles of “liberté, égalité, fraternité, writing in their place: “(INAUDIBLE)”

But here is Mr. Gross(out)’s verbatim nod to the blood-drenched, illiberal French Revolution and its legacy:

I think what [Hollande] is trying to do is favor labor as opposed to capital. Remember the (INAUDIBLE) [Gross actually said “liberté, égalité, fraternité”] and you know he’s moving in that direction. To the extent that he moves only gradually, I think that’s a positive. What France needs, what Euro land needs is growth. And to the extent that they can prevent a continuing recession, then the growth is going to be positive.

An “anti-austerity vote in France” Erin’s strike-man has conflated with a “pro-growth” agenda.

The Law is a pamphlet published in June, 1850, by Frédéric Bastiat, a great classical liberal “economist, statesman, and author.” Bastiat castigated his countrymen for becoming “the most governed, the most regulated, the most imposed upon, the most harnessed, and the most exploited people in Europe.”

In 1860, Bastiat saw France as a society that “receives its momentum from power”; a passive people who “consider themselves incapable of bettering their prosperity and happiness by their own intelligence and their own energy.”

“So long as they expect everything from the law,” he warned, “their relationship to the state [would be] the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd.”

Moreover, Bastiat, who had a mind like no other, did not share Mr. Gross’s fondness for French “fraternity.” “Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty,” he proclaimed.

“In fact, it is impossible for me,” wrote the great man, “to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot.”

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Roubini’s Odd Reasoning

Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Media, Political Economy, Russia

“The cable commentariat is a cog in the sprawling American comitatus. They all feed off Rome.” In this context, it’s hard not to notice just how hard the commentariat is working to create the illusion that America’s economic situation is better than Europe’s, and is the fault of Europe.

Not if you ask Vladimir Putin, who seems to have a reasonable grasp of matters monetary. In July of 2011, “Putin raged over the second plague of quantitative easing, QE2, unleashed by the Federal Reserve Bank, lambasting the Unites States for acting ‘as if they were ‘hooligans’ because they ‘flood’ the entire world with dollars … They start the money printing presses and throw dollars throughout the world in order to solve their immediate responsibilities. They say monopolies are bad but only if they are foreign – their monopolies are perfect. So they use their monopoly to print money until the whole world is flooded.’

This once-avowed communist congratulated his fellow Russians for not being like the Americans: ‘Good for us that we do not print reserve money.'”

In “One Nation Under Inflation,” I observed that “America’s debt-to-GDP ratio is larger than the European Union’s.”

I was wrong.

The US debt “is greater than the combined debt of the entire Eurozone and the U.K.”

At 15.6 trillion dollars of government debt, everyone should know by now that, from the fact that the US keeps loaning billions for bailouts to Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund—it doesn’t follow that we are richer. Or that we have this money. We aren’t and we don’t.

Alas, according to the “logic” of Keynesian macroeconomics, solvency is not a precondition for prosperity.

Adding to the confusion is economist Nouriel Roubini. When asked by RT whether he thought “the US has the risk of seeing the same situation as in the Eurozone, Roubini said something curious:

For now I don’t think there will be a fiscal crisis in the US. Their deficit and debt are large and rising in part because the US can print money to finance its deficit, something the Europeans and their banks are unwilling to do, in part because the US dollar is still a reserve currency, so the foreign demand of China and the rest of emerging markets is financing the large US fiscal and current account deficits. Now, no country should be complacent. Over time, if the US were not to deal with their fiscal problems, if it’s not going to deal with its still low competitiveness, eventually we could see a fiscal train wreck, a sudden stop of capital. And then financial turmoil could happen in the US. Whatever is the result of the election next year, whoever is going to be a president, starting a plan to build a fiscal discipline, a fiscal consolidation, is part of what the US has to do in order to avoid the risk of something bad happening. This can happen later in the US than in other countries, but it can happen eventually.

Is he suggesting that US counterfeiting operations and reserve-currency status are magic amulets against economic realities?

Surely running the printing presses and gulling other governments to buy our worthless bonds serves only to mask the inevitable reality?

UPDATED: Who’s Worse: Bashar’s Babe Or ‘Obama Girl’? (There’s A Boy!)

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Jihad, John McCain, Media, Middle East

“Who’s Worse: Bashar’s Babe Or ‘Obama Girl’?” is my latest, weekly column, now on RT. It gets to the bottom of why we Americans are rooting for the Sunnis of the Middle East.

Here’s an excerpt:

A dictator known as Barack Hussein Obama has a devotee known as “Obama Girl.” In better days, Bashar Hafez al-Assad, another tyrant, had his own babe to do his bidding.

“Obama Girl,” Amber Lee Ettinger, is the toast of the town; Bashar’s babe, Sheherazad el Jaafari, is being chased out of town.

The 22-year-old el Jaafari, the daughter of Syria’s UN ambassador, was admitted to Columbia University, in the City of New York, on the recommendation of a veteran of American broadcasting.

Haya Dweidary, another Syrian student at Columbia, wants el Jaafari expelled from the University. Evincing the sort of reasoning we’ve come to expect from our Ivy League students, Dweidary calls el Jaafari “horrible and supporting the [Syrian] regime.”

Dweidary further alleges that el Jaafari is a close associate of Assad and was involved in human-rights violations in Syria. But, in the main, Dweidary’s case against el Jaafari rests on envy, directed at “privileged people getting access to everything.”

Syrian squabbles imported; that’s cosmopolitan diversity (or the “melting pot”) at work. …

… On the support-for-statism scale, “Obama Girl” got to first base with Obama, and beyond. … Is Assad’s sidekick so much more reprehensible than “Obama Girl,” who has worked her bootie off for America’s killer drone?”

Read the complete column, “Who’s Worse: Bashar’s Babe Or ‘Obama Girl’?,” now on RT.

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UPDATE: There’s a boy too.

‘Flesh-Eating, Zombie Apocalypse’

Ethics, Etiquette, Media, Morality, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The West, The Zeitgeist

The plethora of piss-poor, potty mouthed writers, who’ve attempted unsuccessfully to satirize contemporary cannibalism in the West, attest to what Thomas Fleming diagnoses as,

…partly the fault of a very sick popular culture that dotes on the perverse movies of George Romero, Anne Rice’s novelistic gushings over vampires, and the teen-exploitation books, movies, and TV shows in which ghouls, werewolves, and vampires are basically not bad creatures who just need a little understanding. We are teaching ourselves not just to celebrate evil but to elevate it. Good people trying to muddle through in a difficult world are boring: Evil is way cool.

Of course, I would not use the word “exploitation” to describe the maladies afflicting the Millennials, who’ve been allowed by errant adults to turn feral.

Millennials are a generation of youngsters that reveres only itself for no good reason. They have been unleashed on America by progressive families and educators (Democrat and Republican alike) who’ve deified their off-putting offspring and charges, and instilled in them a sense of self-worth disproportionate to their actual worth.

One can disagree with Dr. Fleming on this or the other point or perspective. But his erudite, highly intelligent and cultured perspective in “Eating People is Wrong”—whereby he eviscerates the smarmy “Amateur philosophers and pop culture critics,” who rushed “to ascend their cracker barrels and deliver their explanations for the hysteria”—strikes the right tone, avoiding stupid spoofs on the one hand, or platonic theorizing on the other.