Barrel Strength

About a year or more ago I made a number of $50 bets that Obama would be a one term President.

The rising tide of revulsion towards the man and his performance is so manifest, and the economic policies the United States is pursuing are so catastrophic, that everyone else is starting to say the same thing.

Let us review the events which are driving Americans to a frenzy of rage:

• appealing the Arizona immigration  law whose effect is merely to enjoin the state officials to enforce existing federal law;
• bowing (more than a civil nod, but a deep from-the-waist bow) to Mulsim leadership, such as the King of Saudi Arabia, while being rude to traditional allies (removing Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and actually returning the bst to the British embassy);
• a policy of ruinous inflation;
• ignoring the Muslim aspect of terrorist attacks on US bases;
• hindering the  Armed Forces  by forbidding terms like “Islamic jihad” in their planning;
• continuing the policies whereby white Americans are prevented or dissuaded from competing for student placements or jobs, saying truths about other races, or competing for contracts from government (affirmative action);
• supporting the Ground Zero victory mosque;
• a divisive and possibly unnecessary health care reform.

You will be able to add your own issues to this list, and I invite you to do so.

The farrago of politically correct attitudes that let Obama rise to the top of the Democratic party, and which sustain the basis of his support, are beyond my capacity either to amend or to tolerate. But a mighty judgment is coming, and the political elites willl be eating shit pie for their deluded arrogance soon enough. That many Americans believe Obama to be a Muslim reflects merely the correct perception that we do not have a President who is on our side.

In case you need confirmation of what the problem is, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s excellent “Intellectuals and Society”. A regime of intellectuals has been put in power. A group of people without wisdom, practical experience, or courage has been selected to govern. The consequences are that government will be returned to adult supervision as soon as possible.

Watching the Globe work its way towards a true understanding of current events is like waiting for a slowly developing child to form a complete sentence. Today’s leader, ‘The call of jihad rings far and wide’, is a look at the recent arrests of suspected terrorists. Unfortunately (and I suspect you were waiting for that qualification) the very last sentence betrays a dangerous depth of intellectual immaturity. “But that trust is what makes Canada work, and a few accused terrorists should not be able to ruin it for everyone else.” In other words, if only the student who wrote the saucy word on the blackboard would come forward, everyone else could go for recess.

I know what the problem is. We have seen what happens when terrorists succeed and do ‘ruin it for everyone else’.  I know the solution. I think the Globe does, too.

The Liberal blogosphere is rumbling that the Harper government will “go after” the CRTC. The stated reason for this animus, according to Lawrence Martin, is that the CRTC has not been sufficiently cooperative in relation to the bid for a national must-pay television licence for the Pierre-Karl Peladeau/ Kory Ten Eycke conservative television network.

The CRTC has sent a letter to Peladeau, owner of Videotron and Sun Media,  saying that the Commission is reviewing must-carry rules, and that he will not get a must-carry, that is, be required to be carried by regulatory fiat in the meantime. The entrepreneur is free to expand his current Toronto television station’s reach by working out deals with the incumbent cable carriers across Canada: Shaw, Rogers,etc. Fat chance of that.

I think most conservatives would favour an explicitly Canadian conservative politics channel. But would they also favour another must-carry ruling from the CRTC? The CRTC has already established several must-carry channels and they reach into your pockets every month. Remember APTV – aboriginal people’s television? CTV’s newschannel? CBC’s Newsworld? TV5, the French-language thing you probably don’t watch? Do you want another?

The CRTC’s own statistics for 2010 show that the growth of payments we make for cable television exceed all the rates of growth of other payments we make for telecommunications, the consumer price index and the Internet. (Table 5.1.10, on page 121). Only cellular phone industry revenues show a greater increase than those for cable television, industry-wide (Table 3.1.1, on page 16). That rate of increase of revenues  for them and payments by consumers is fuelled in part by the de-regulation of cable rates by the CRTC. Another large portion of that increase consists of the fees imposed by the CRTC on consumers for must-carry channels.

And consider this: how conservativeis it to ask for a must-carry? In effect you ask for government intervention to cause Canadians to pay for a “conservative” newschannel? Can you really be conservative if you live off a state subsidy?

Two questions for you conservatives and libertarians.

1. Do you want the CRTC to force you to pay for a conservative TV channel?
2. And is that position consistent with your views on the long-form census?

This isn’t surprising given the previous behaviour of civil servants in Greece.

Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) — More than 11,000 Greek state-school teachers have asked to retire before changes are made to the pension system, raising the threat of a shortage of educators for the new school year.

A total of 11,466 elementary and high-school instructors applied for retirement, the Athens-based Education and Religious Affairs Ministry said in a statement yesterday. That compares with 4,355 at the same time last year.

The US is bankrupt. Canada is not. Therein lies a remarkable possibility for this country in the next twenty years.

Two books should be part of the reading of Canadians of all political persuasions, especially conservatives. The first was Brian Lee Crowley’s “Fearful Symmetry”, which explained what went wrong in Canada under Trudeau and successive governments until Mulroney introduced North American free trade and then Chretien (yes, Chretien) fixed our public finances. The second is “The Canadian Century”, by the same Brian Lee Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis. Both are examinations of the public finances of Canada, and to read these books is to understand, at the highest level, what has gone right and wrong with our society. Crowley never ceases to set out the moral dimension of excessive public expenditure: the electorate drunk on government services, the cost of which is deferred to future generations; the creation of pseudo-jobs; the electoral blocs of state dependents which prevent the correction of the very problem that their existence creates, and so forth.

Crowley and his co-authors make it abundantly clear that:

1) Laurier, not MacDonald, should be attributed the credit for a low-tax, free-trade policy – the classic hallmarks of what we now call “conservatism”, and

2) Bill Clinton waged a successful campaign to get the US fiscal house in order, and that both Bush the elder and the younger, to say nothing of Obama, have run the US into massive debt. In other words, Bush the younger squandered the legacy that Clinton handed to him. (Canadian Century, at pp 116-117) Clinton: bastion of fiscal probity. We conservatives need to absorb that.

Now peace upon all those partizans of conservative government who think that mentioning any merit in any liberal, no matter how long dead, is akin to “deserting the cause, that gave us our freedom, religion and laws.” The points I am making here are twofold.

First, these two books are a rapid and painless education in the essential facts of politics: how we finance government is as much a moral as it is an immediately monetary question, and it gives insight behind the squabbles in Parliament, which are of little account in the history of nations. No wonder the people who really  understand money are not fussed by whether the Liberals take over; they are only concerned with how public finances will affect the value of their investments. Conservatives do not have a better penchant for fixing them than Liberals, in both Canada and the United States, according to these writers.

Second, the Canadian Century establishes the current Conservative government in Canada is not doing a great job in sustaining the gains that Chretien and Martin made in fixing our public finances. Why conservatives should care about this issue is explained in The Canadian Century. It is a must read for the politically literate.

A scoop by Forbes magazine or idle conspiracy making?

As much as I tried to pin [CIA director Leon] Panetta down on who the culprits were, he wouldn’t name names, but indirectly hinted that the main hacker-in-chief was China. This comes on the heels of General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Chinese cleaned out the web connected mainframes at both the Pentagon and the State Department in 2007. The Bush administration kept the greatest security breach in US history secret to duck a hit in the opinion polls.

The Obama phenomenon will be recalled as one of the greatest bait-and-switch in the history of US presidential campaigns and this is already leading to some somber reassessment as noted in this article.

The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

On the policy front it continues to be more of the same.

Bill Clinton is on record stating that he got bad advice from Rubin and his handpicked successor, Lawrence Summers, on derivatives regulation: “On derivatives, yeah, I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take it,” Clinton told ABC News last April 10…

Rubin and Summers were responsible for forcing Brooksley Born out of the Clinton administration because as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission she had the temerity to suggest regulating the mortgage-backed securities that eventually proved to be so toxic. Instead, Rubin and Summers pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton signed into law in his last month in office, categorically exempting those suspect derivatives from any government regulation.

By then, Rubin had moved on to a $15-million-a-year job at Citigroup, which became a prime exploiter of the subprime housing market. As a result of its massive involvement with toxic securities, Citigroup, with Rubin in a leading role until early 2009, had to be bailed out by the federal government with a $45 billion direct investment and a guaranteed Fed protection for $306 billion in potentially toxic assets…

There is much more, and I haven’t even touched on Rubin’s shameful role in Enron’s shenanigans. Enough said, though, to question not only Zakaria’s journalism but, far more important, Barack Obama’s leadership in first turning to Rubin as a key campaign adviser and then putting his disciples in charge of the U.S. economy.

It started with Roger Scruton, naturally. A review of his book, “The Uses of Pessimism”, by Ed West in the Telegraph got me going, Oban responded, and Rebel Yell got into it.

Here is a quote from Scruton’s book:

“As Scruton notes: “Since the 1960s western countries have adopted policies in the matter of immigration that no person schooled in the elementary truths of pessimism would have endorsed. Anybody who has studied the fate of empires, and the difficulties of establishing territorial jurisdiction over communities that differ in religion, language and marital customs, knows that the task is all but impossible, and threatens constantly to break down in fragmentation, tribalism or civil war.”

Ed West continued in his Telegraph review:

Like Communism, mass immigration was based on a denial of human nature, and an inability to distinguish between what might work in individual human relationships and in society as a whole. Just because people of different groups are capable of getting on perfectly well as individuals, becoming friends and falling in love, it does not mean that a multicultural society (and one as diverse as ours will be multicultural as well as multiracial, whatever the Government does) can become a racism-free paradise; anymore than the willingness of people to give money to perfect strangers means Communism can work.

There were other comparisons with Communism: thought crimes were created, and eventually passed into law; dissidents were made public enemies (it was Scruton who published Ray Honeyford’s article about multiculturalism in Bradford, for which the headmaster was victimised and vilified); history was rewritten to educate the next generation in the new realities of their multicultural history; and children were indoctrinated “to embed a culture of equality in our schools and communities“. Even the language was changed, so that holders of non-revolutionary opinions could not express their opinions without becoming outcasts.

Contrary to what was said after Communism fell, we did not reach the end of history, merely a new chapter in the endless story of human stupidity.

This set me going on a rant of agreement and Oban responded:

This sent Rebel Yell into orbit:

To which Oban replied:

-Oban

Roger Scruton’s speech to Vlaams Belang  has touched upon the essential beliefs of the ruling sectors of the liberal intelligentsia, whose ideas still govern us even if conservatives are in power.

(If you doubt their ideas still rule, then why are there still human rights commissions and mass immigration of people unqualified to become Canadians and who will forever be a source of dissension, social dysfunction and underachievement?. Why the policing of thought to prevent accurate discussion of immigration and race?)

It is worth reading the whole speech that Scruton gave. I have extracted key points for the sake of brevity.

“For a long time now the European political class has been in denial about the problems posed by the large-scale immigration of people who do not enter into our European way of life. It has turned angrily on those who have warned against the disruption that might follow, or who have affirmed the right of indigenous communities to refuse admission to people who cannot or will not assimilate. And one of the weapons that the élite has used, in order to ensure that it is never troubled by the truths that it denies, is to accuse those who wish to discuss the problem of ‘racism and xenophobia’. People of my generation have been brought up in fear of this charge, just as the people of Salem were brought up in the fear of being denounced as witches….

“Every society depends on an experience of membership: a sense of who ‘we’ are, why we belong together, and what we share. This experience is pre-political: it precedes all political institutions, and provides our reason for accepting them. It unites left and right, blue-collar and white-collar, man and woman, parent and child. To threaten this ‘first-person plural’ is to open the way to atomisation, as people cease to recognize any general duty to their neighbours, and set out to pillage the accumulated resources while they can. Without membership we risk a new ‘tragedy of the commons’, as our inherited social assets are seized for present use….

“Members of our liberal élite may be immune to xenophobia, but there is an equal fault which they exhibit in abundance, which is the repudiation of, and aversion to, home. Each country exhibits this vice in its own domestic version….

“This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites….

“I call the attitude oikophobia– the aversion to home – by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested….

“The domination of our national Parliaments and the EU machinery by oikophobes is partly responsible for the acceptance of subsidised immigration, and for the attacks on customs and institutions associated with traditional and native forms of life. The oikophobe repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals againstthe nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed from on high by the EU or the UN, and defining his political vision in terms of cosmopolitan values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community. The oikophobe is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of oikophobia that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it….

“It is in the light of these double standards that the charge of ‘racism and xenophobia’ should be assessed. It is a charge almost invariably levelled at members of the indigenous communities of Europe, and in particular against those at the bottom of the social scale, for whom mass immigration is a cost that they have not been schooled (and through no fault of their own) to bear. It is levelled too at political parties that attempt to represent those people, and who promise them some relief from a problem that no other party seems willing to address. Those who level the charge are almost invariably in the grip of oikophobia….

“It is vital that the European states achieve an effective integration of their immigrant communities; but if the liberal élite will not discuss the matter, and continue to put all blame for the growing anxiety on the xenophobia of the indigenous population while ignoring the oikophobia which is an equal contributory cause, then the likely long-term effect will be a popular explosion, and one from which no-one will benefit, least of all the immigrant communities.”

Conrad Black and Julius Caesar have something in common. Both live or lived in legally rough times. Justice in republican Rome was arbitrary, partial, prejudiced, and infected with political vengeance.

It was said that a Roman governor had three years to make a governorship profitable: one year to pay back the bribes that got him his office, another year to make the profit, and a third year to make enough to pay the lawyers to defend him through the inevitable trials which would accompany his return to Rome.

Conrad Black was sentenced to six and a half years on the basis of a law that was recently quashed by the US Supereme Court. The prosecution had alleged that revenues from a non-competition clause in his contract of sale of his shareholdings in his company, a clause which was approved by tax lawyers, accountants and his own board of directors, was a crime of failing to offer his shareholders his “honest services”. His conviction is an ongoing scandal. Unable to prove anything criminal by recourse to ordinary statute law, the prosecutors had to rely on a badly worded paragraph that allowed prosecutors to invent what can be called “common-law crimes”, which is a polite way of saying: making it up as you go along. 

The legal risks of doing business in the United States are enormous and not sufficiently appreciated by outsiders.

The United States has a culture of rough politics, and it is getting rougher. It bears comparison with the politics of the late Roman republic. Law has become an instrument of oppression of members of the “senatorial” as well as of the knightly and plebeian classes. Prosecutions follow no principle. The risk of being a member of the board of a corporation are so high that a great deal of money must be spent on litigation insurance.

The near obsession with legal considerations in the United States is not the sign of progress or enlightenment that Americans think it is. Rather, it is the sign that the powers of one privileged class of people, the lawyers, are becoming so great that normal human or business considerations are being subordinated to the purely legal issues of litigation and prosecution risk. The more the uncertainty, the greater their powers as a class.

It would not take a genius to reckon that the powers of priests in 17th century Spain were too great; that the whole society was becoming distorted by religious fanaticism. Likewise in the United States, and increasingly in Canada, the lawyerly class is exercising too much power. Social and business relations are being driven into a narrow legal focus, where the question becomes “what is legal”, rather than “what should we do?”.

A society built on laws is becoming lawless, and I would argue it is becoming lawless because it constantly turns to law for solutions that should come from social consensus, trust, and host of other personal and political virtues. Any partial truth held to be the whole truth becomes a lie.

Conrad Black’s contention is that about a quarter or more of the intelligent labour of the United States is unproductively employed in finance, law and accounting. The reduction of legal risk would liberate many of these people for more productive employment. For the first time in my life, just this past weekend, I started to wonder about the safety of the republic, and its future. The lesson from Julius Caesar is that when the politics get too rough, when the stakes both personal and financial get too high, then some man of talent will eventually say “enough!”, and neutralize the Senate.

Facts.

1. But while 76% of Mainstream voters think the United States should continue to build the fence, 67% of the Political Class are opposed to it.

2. Missouri Health Care Freedom, Proposition C aims to block the federal government from requiring people to buy health insurance and bans punishment for those without health insurance.  It was approved by 72.7% of the electorate.

3. A Rasmussen Reports survey “finds that just 28% of voters believe increased government spending is good for the economy….  This suggests that for 72% of voters, asking about a trade-off between cutting spending and helping the economy doesn’t make sense. A look at the demographics shows that the trade-off makes sense for only one group– the Political Class.  Among that group, 67% believe increased government spending would be good for the economy.”