The Latest European Con

The Firewall- An Irrelevancy

By Mark Grant

“Tough luck, Lonnehan. But that's what you get for playing with your head up your ass!”

                                                                          -The Sting

There is noise and fluff and soap bubbles floating in the wind but don’t be distracted. Like so many things connected to the European Union it is just hype. In the first place do you think that any nation in Europe is actually going to put up money for the firewall no matter what size that they claim it will be? Let me give you the answer; it is “NO.” The firewall is just one more contingent liability that is not counted for any country’s financials, one more public statement of guarantee that everyone on the Continent hopes and prays will never be taken too seriously and certainly never used. Any rational person knows that some promise to pay in the future will not solve anything and it certainly won’t create some kind of magic ring fence around any nation. Think it through; what will it do to stop Spain or Italy from knocking at the door of the Continental Bank if they get in trouble and the answer is clearly nothing, not one thing. The firewall is just a distraction to lull all of you back to sleep and all of the headlines and discussion about it makes zero difference to any outcome and so is nothing more than a ruse. “Look this way please, do not look that way, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, put up your money to buy our sovereign debt like a good boy and everything will be just fine.”

“Did you ever hear of a hustle called Two Brothers and a Stranger?”

                                                                        -The Color of Money

Reaching the bottom of the slippery slope.

Obscure Court Decision Gives Government Sweeping Power

By THOMAS SOWELL
When a 1942 Supreme Court decision that most people never heard of makes the front page of the New York Times in 2012, you know something unusual is going on.

What makes that 1942 case — Wickard v. Filburn — important today is that it stretched the federal government's power so far that the Obama administration is using it as an argument to claim before today's Supreme Court it has the legal authority to impose ObamaCare mandates on individuals.

Roscoe Filburn was an Ohio farmer who grew some wheat to feed his family and some farm animals. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined him for growing more wheat than he was allowed to grow under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which was passed under Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.

Filburn pointed out that his wheat wasn't sold, so that it didn't enter any commerce, interstate or otherwise. Therefore the federal government had no right to tell him how much wheat he grew on his own farm, and which never left his farm.

Is technology and industry good or bad?

Bicenntenial of Luddite Lawlessness

BY BRUCE WALKER   

Is technology and industry good or bad? There is no moral answer to the question. Certainly there are happy men and women who worked in old trades exchanging the material benefits of technology for the comfort and emotional satisfaction of keeping alive old ways of work. The delightful town of Williamsburg in Virginia or the equally happy Silver Dollar City in the Ozarks are filled with folks whose joy is preserving the making of horseshoes, candles, rock candy, and many other products whose manufacture is a part of our history.

Empires Then and Now

The American people are victims of the American empire

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources. The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.

In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.

They Can Force You To Buy Broccoli

Abolishing the diktat of a bunch of 18^th C. idealists

The case of Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida is one of the most important cases to ever come to the US Supreme Court. If the government wins, it can force you to do anything it wishes. Today’s arguments in this case do not exaggerate the threat.

We have not had a true constitution since FDR threatened to pack the court in order to get his New Deal programs adopted. The Court folded and the famous “switch in time that saved nine” (West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 1937) allowed the Court to make any interpretation it wanted to carry out an administration’s social policy. I was taught in constitutional law courses in college and law school that this marvelous thing was a “living constitution”, that we were not bound by the diktat of a bunch of 18^th C. idealists whose ideas didn’t favor an intrusive government. The important thing, I was taught, was to advance social policy for the benefit of the people.

Nothing is preordained. Time and the action of individuals will tell the tale

Old Game Plan Made Anew?

"Spain's economy contracts as recession fears grow ... The Spanish economy has shrunk for the first time in two years, increasing fears the country could be heading for a recession. The country's economy shrank by 0.3% in the three months to December, after stagnating in the previous quarter. Household spending fell by 1.1% from the previous quarter, while spending by public bodies dropped by 3.6%. The country has the highest jobless rate in the EU, with almost one in four people out of work. Spain's unemployment figure passed the five million mark in the last quarter of 2011. Figures showed 5.3 million people were out of work at the end of December, up from 4.9 million in the third quarter. The downbeat fourth-quarter economy figures come even before the impact of new austerity measures unveiled last month by new Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy." – BBC

Dominant Social Theme: Austerity is tough but builds character.

Free-Market Analysis: Did you hear that about half of Europe is in recession or headed that way? We can see from the above excerpt that Spain is certainly headed that way. Greece, Portugal and Ireland are also in various forms of economic collapse.

Call it recession, depression or simply cataclysmic economic conditions. But one way or another Southern Europe is in a terrible state. Greece is in a meltdown; half the young people in Spain aren't working and Portugal and Ireland aren't far behind.

Heck, let's just call it a continental depression. And one that is as unnecessary as it is terrible. The elites that set up the European Union by subterfuge bribed the Southern government PIGS with funds.

The Great Escape

Delivering in a Delevering World

By Bill Gross

About six months ago, I only half in jest told Mohamed that my tombstone would read, “Bill Gross, RIP, He didn’t own ‘Treasuries’.” Now, of course, the days are getting longer and as they say in golf, it is better to be above – as opposed to below – the grass. And it is better as well, to be delivering alpha as opposed to delevering in the bond market or global economy. The best way to visualize successful delivering is to recognize that investors are locked up in a financially repressive environment that reduces future returns for all financial assets. Breaking out of that “jail” is what I call the Great Escape, and what I hope to explain in the next few pages.

Black Rednecks and White Hispanics

Look over there, a shiny thing!

Here’s a new bright and shiny thing from the NYT, calculated to energize the base against its evil enemy, serve the chosen narrative of the moment (in spite of inconvenient facts), and to draw your attention away from how much you paid to fill your gas tank, etc., etc.

"The White Hispanic" Progressive Racial Narrative 

The west has lost in Afghanistan

The number three in al-Qaeda has been killed at least five times

By Gideon Rachman

Five years ago the Americans were refusing to speak to the Taliban. Now the Taliban are refusing to speak to the Americans. That is a measure of how the balance of power has shifted in Afghanistan. The western intervention there has failed. As Nato prepares to withdraw from the country in 2014, it is only the scale of the defeat that remains to be determined.

A senior Pakistani official comments sardonically: “I remember when the Americans used to say that the only good Taliban was a dead Taliban. Then they talked about separating the reconcilable from the irreconcilable. Now, they say, the Taliban are not our enemy.” In fact, Nato and Taliban forces are still enemies on the battlefield. But in a desperate effort to leave behind a stable Afghanistan, the US and its allies are also battling to include the Taliban in the political process. However, the Taliban are in no rush to negotiate – and recently broke off talks. With western troops on their way out, there is little pressure on them to compromise now.

Complex Societies Need Simple Laws

The anti-Canutes of today

We need to end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America’s founders envisioned.

By John Stossel

“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total. 

Nobody Knows Anything

Telling Tales About Money

“With the US economy showing signs of recovery and fears about the eurozone sovereign debt crisis easing, investors are putting their money into equities and other assets geared towards economic growth rather than havens such as gold.”

     — Jack Farchy, Financial Times, 23^rd March.

 “Growth gloom bolsters government debt"

 “Reminders of the risks to the global growth outlook put equities and commodities on the back foot and helped government bonds in the US, Germany and the UK recoup more of their recent losses.”

     —Dave Shellock, Financial Times, 23rd March.

By Tim Price 

Screenwriter William Goldman famously began his autobiography, Adventures in the Screen Trade, with three telling words: Nobody Knows Anything. The same logic would seem to apply to much conventional reporting of the financial markets. Any investor looking for informed analysis of market developments can therefore save themselves a few minutes every day by choosing to not read any of the “Companies and Markets‟ section of the FT, which typically constitutes a fantastic piece of fiction. If there is a more thankless task in finance than trying to explain why certain markets did what they did yesterday, we don’t know what it is. (Unless it’s working in the PR department at Goldman Sachs.)

NYPD Should Leave Muslims Alone

The 14th Amendment clearly gives equal protection under the laws to all people, no matter their religion or politics 

by Ivan Eland

Attorney General Eric Holder is to be lauded for looking into the constitutionality of the New York City Police Department’s wholesale snooping into the lives of people based purely on their Muslim faith. Because Holder is a busy man, he could save a lot of time by just pulling out the U.S. Constitution and reading it.

Unfortunately, in the hysteria after 9/11, the executive branch, Congress, and the courts have allowed police agencies—federal, state, and local—to conduct extraconstitutional surveillance, search, and seizure. These actions have muddled what spying should be considered clearly unconstitutional.

Saving a little something for Southern European Elites

Berlin's Poor Collect Bottles to Make Ends Meet

By Helen Whittle

Many pensioners and unemployed people in Berlin are turning to an unusual means of supplementing their meager incomes: collecting discarded deposit bottles. They can return them to stores or supermarkets for a few cents per bottle. But as the activity becomes more popular, competition among collectors has intensified.

To see Günther rummaging through trash cans in Berlin, you might assume he was homeless. But the 61-year-old is actually one of a growing number of pensioners looking to earn extra cash through bottle recycling.

Minimum pricing means minimising choice

Squeezing just a little more freedom out of our lives.

by Patrick Hayes 

‘We will put a stop to the easy availability of cheap booze that has blighted Britain for too long. This is a comprehensive strategy to take back our town centres from the drunken thugs and to restore them to the law-abiding majority.’

Abu Qatadas Freedom Might Be the Price We Pay for Ours

A Champion For His Own Human Rights

 

He doesn’t have a hook. He does have a big, bushy beard, and eyes that don’t look all that friendly, but Omar Mahmoud Othman, who’s also known as Abu Qatada, doesn’t have a hook. It’s Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, who’s also known as Abu Hamza, who has a hook instead of a hand.

It’s quite easy to get them confused. Both men live, when they’re not in prison, in big houses, with their wives and children, and both men seem to think that the British taxpayers who pay for those houses, and their children’s food, and their lawyers, and their food in prison, and the specially adapted taps you need in your cell if you have a hook instead of a hand, are infidels who should be slaughtered.

The happiest man in England

Qatadas brother boasts preacher's delight as he is given a more expensive home (funded by the taxpayer, of course)

 

New home has more bedrooms, a bigger garden and more fittings. 51-year-old had requested a move from previous home worth £400,000

By TOM KELLY

Abu Qatada has been upgraded to a larger taxpayer-funded home since his release from jail last month, the Mail can reveal.

The terror suspect has told relatives in his native Jordan that he is the ‘happiest man in England’ after he was rehoused to the more expensive property.

His wife and five children are also said to be ‘delighted’ with the move, because their new home has more bedrooms, a bigger garden and more modern fittings. 

Taming the EPA monster

Supreme Court ruling strikes a blow in ongoing battle

By Robert Knight

Slowly, inexorably, the monster is being driven back to its lair. Its days of terrorizing villagers may soon be over. I wish I were talking about the federal government, but it's the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), better known as the Environmental Protection-or-else Agency.

Superman is unimpressed by what Everyman wants

Weeding Out the "Socially Not Useful"

... a service is profitable if Everyman, the businessman and the final consumer, buys it. Buying it is the one indisputable way he has to show that he wants it. But Superman is unimpressed by what Everyman wants. He wishes Everyman to get what he needs. For only what he needs is "socially useful" ...

by Anthony de Jasay

In his classic essay "What is seen and what is not seen" (written in 1848 and published in July 1850) the shamefully underrated and neglected French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801- 1850) declares that what distinguishes a bad economist from a good one is that the bad one can only see what is to be seen, while the good one also discerns the as yet unseen consequences that are bound to follow the visible effect of an action. Present benefits must be painfully paid for in future costs, while present sacrifices tend to be generously rewarded in the future. The good economist must, of course, weigh up the merits of a law, a policy or an institution by taking account both of the effects he (and others) can see and the future consequences he foresees (and others do not).

Europe’s bailout bazooka is proving to be a toy gun

Welcome back to the crisis

By Wolfgang Münchau

And it’s set to get worse once the markets discover that the eurozone is about to fudge the increase in the European rescue umbrella. The argument I am hearing is a wonderful example of circular logic: we don’t need a bigger umbrella because market pressure has eased.

Well, the market pressure has gone up again recently. Investors are concerned about Spain. Over the weekend, Angela Merkel was preparing for one of her celebrated U-turns, by letting out a trial balloon in the German press that she would, after all, be ready to accept an increase in the rescue operation.

The Toxic Transition in Venezuela

A narco-state emerges in Venezuela

By Roger Noriega 

Contrary to statements by Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chávez, a cancerous tumor discovered in his colon late last month has not been removed, according to my sources. Heeding the self-serving advice of Cuban doctors, Chávez has rejected surgery so that he can return to his public duties as soon as possible and bolster his regime’s ongoing succession strategy. The Castro brothers need him back on the political stage in Venezuela, not in a hospital bed. Meanwhile, back in Caracas, corrupt military leaders are consolidating their power and plotting their political survival as if Chávez were already dead.

Non-Cuban medical specialists insist that the larger-than-expected tumor must be removed before resuming last-ditch chemotherapy and radiation. They believe that Chávez’s decision to refuse surgery will hasten his death. Members of Chávez’s family and some close friends are furious that the Cubans are manipulating his megalomania to convince him that sustaining his “revolution” is more important than extending his life.