An Emerging Threat Throughout Pan Africa-Arabia

The latest attacks on American Embassies throughout the world remind older readers of the very late 1970′s when U.S. embassies in Kabul, Tehran were overrun by Islamists while Cuba exported its militancy throughout west Africa and Central America. It was a time of American decline, where American allies throughout the world questioned both American political resolve and its reach to grapple with an expansive nuclear atheist Marxism. Absolutely no one was prepared to witness the rise of Reagan, Thatcher, Wjoltya and untold numbers of faceless, voiceless people dubbed “the power of the powerless” by Vaclav Havel. Unaligned were literally hundreds of millions of humans “unaccounted for” by liberal media. Reagan and Wjoltya implicitly knew that Christian fortitude underwrote those huddled masses; the appeal that characterized freedom for the American founding never left the heart of man.

The question(s) animating recent events throughout the Near East require a clarity of insight not found in most contemporary media, most certainly not television. Only print media can grasp the requisite insight unlocking the confounding impact the Islamists seek.

What we are witnessing in the display of manipulated outrage and misplaced fury is an organized political effort by militant Islamists to displace American hegemony.

Why?

Because the Islamists, not the billions of suffering Muslims that sought and continue to seek reform that has become the Arab Spring; remain the most organized seeking the revolutionary overthrow of secular rulers. Rulers that rule kleptocracies! What we are witnessing throughout the land of Arabia is impotence and rage unmoored from any display of civil society. A totalitarian grasp distinct from the peaceful mass protests that characterize the Arab Spring. We are witnessing a concerted effort by Islamists to garner support and mobilize their base by exacerbating anti-western sentiment. All under the cover of an appeal to piety.

Husain Haqqani said it best when he reported that “Islamists stoke resentment of the West, and anger over the long decline of Muslim influence, only to serve their own violent ends.”

Does the west have another Reagan or Wjoltya? Time is running out. My guess is this election will align the interests of the west to fortify the humanist desire that underwrote the need for Arabic reform. No matter what, elections have consequences!

Presidential Abdication & The Imperatives of a Dominant Pax Americana

Never before in American history has any President subordinated the political imperatives underwriting American hegemony to the confines of personal ambition. Even Lyndon Johnson and Nixon implicitly understood the limits of an aggrandized self.

Not with Barak Obama, we’re dealing with a far more dubious, less exalted grasp of both ambition and responsibility. We’re about to witness the conflagration of an overly weened political persona come unhinged from the impact that is realism. Does team Obama think he’ll be accommodated by rival ambitions throughout the Levant and Near East?

The challenge that unveiled itself throughout the Magrib, South Asia and Syria has been misread by entrenched politicos devoted to ideals unmoored from the expressions of power. Remember the time when America rose to challenges and shaped outcomes benefitting indigenous aspirations? Does the self determination of people resonate with American liberalism? A deficit of moral insight, of fortitude has gone missing. Can it be reclaimed?

I firmly believe that declarations of an American decline are premature and misplaced; American liberalism is in retreat as evidenced in its unwillingness to grapple with the political demands of leadership.

Elections have consequences.

The Balkans, A New Birth of Freedom & The Rise of Arab Militancy

Bismark, like any instrument of autocracy, embodied a harbinger of what was to unfold under the aegis of a resurgent Third Reich; but looking further back, this land and its memory of past afflictions of Empire, now welcomes an old militancy unalloyed from the convictions of defeated superior foes, all prostrate before an ever expanding Caliphate. While the west hampers through an intramural fight the Balkans burn from an unwelcomed yet familiar alliance with Arabia; a new dark age is upon Europe for those with the fortitude to discern the contours of an emerging threat.

The Balkans and its newly liberated nation states remain a place of sorrow and pained memory, for this landscape and its politics were always dependent on Empire, always thwarted to remain bound to a harsh rubric; the ruthless realism that underwrote the reach and grasp of Palmerson, Salisbury and Disraeli ran right through this hinge separating the east from the west. Even after the Cold War, we can discern that geography alone cannot explain the difficult determinism that has become ‘The Balkans.’

We were not fortunate in our alliances nor ideas of governance as evidenced in the trajectory and dominant personages that made the Second World War. For if the ‘self determination peoples’ mattered, so did Kim Philby and his self-governing nefarious scheme enveloping Albania. Both failed miserably. Both remain an earnest from which to shape a contemporary response to the character of bilateral relations between nation states of the Balkans, NATO and the west. What newly liberated nation states throughout this region now understand is that the past is not prologue. New ideas of man characterizing his sovereignty and reason have emerged to displace both Marxist atheism and a profound ideological militancy imported from the land of Arabia. Both deny man his true place in this world. Both are lies.

To understand how the Balkans became a ‘sobriquet of sorrow’, we need to understand the place of Islam in the social, political trajectory that characterizes our late Medieval period and the violent displacement that occurred under ‘The Congress of Berlin,’ for both denied, as superpowers often do, the necessity that accompanies growth.

Prior to the arrival of the modern period (1500 A.D.), the late medieval period witnessed an emerging Caliphate advancing a pincer movement up from North Africa through Spain running concurrently with an adjacent column moving northward from the eastern Mediterranean Bosporus toward Vienna. Both ended in disaster! When the Catholic infidel autocracies of Spain and Portugal discovered the new world and an opening around west Africa embracing the far east, the Mediterranean became a Muslim lake!

The secular ideas of nationalism that promoted a threatening pan-slavism met an expansionist Russia threatening London’s jewel of India. Much to chagrin of Downing Street in its failure to provide a bulwark throughout Afghanistan, imperialists throughout western Europe knew the soft calculus that constituted the power keg that erupted at Sarajevo with the murder of Archduke Ferdinand. It was nothing less than the return of the repressed.

With the end of the Cold War and the demise of Marxism the Balkan region is bifurcated between the appeal of a materialist west and militant Islam. The ideas of liberty, commerce, separation of church and state and numerous other political ideas that promulgate the western triumph of secularism have been checked by a faith, by moral norms that transcend an archaic appeal to fanaticism.

A resurgent Crescent will not have the last word, nor will a militant secularism that actively promotes an unnatural vision of life in radical autonomy, nominalism and an ever expanding welfare state. There is an alternative.

The alternative to relativism, nihilism, autocracy and militancy are discovered within the hearts and sound consciences of an indigenous catholicity (universalism) intrinsic to the Balkans: a Solzhenitzen, Havel, Wjoltya, Teresa.

Vladimir Lenin was Precocious

“Germany will militarize herself out of existence,
England will expand herself out of existence, and
America will spend herself out of existence.”

What’s Behind The Entitlement Crisis

Demography as a discipline is resurging like geography, especially its traditional interdisciplinary emphasis as a fulcrum of politics, history and culture. Most people don’t study demography for the simple reason that its components are not measured or conformed to contemporary need for instantaneous solutions. Given how demography is similar to geology regarding time, most students are not exposed to how demography is crucial to understanding how politics, history or culture is embodied along chartered trends that are nearly irreversible.

Vienna and Washington, D.C. remain the premiere institutes for studying demographic change. I am referring to the work of Ben J. Wattenberg, Joel Kotkin, Nicholas Eberstadt and the infamous Walter Laqueur, although Lacquer is not a demographer by training his writings demonstrate the social, political impact of our political economy on the nature and meaning of the conjugal act, especially its relative standing to how each society or civilization views the family as the foundation for civilization.

At the heart of our identity politics, especially how its expression is philosophically tethered to an idealist view of radical autonomy, whether it be medical ethics or taxation, at the heart of the crisis of western civilization is a social deficit.

What plagues the west is low fertility. This is the bane of modernity and it affects policy, the lifeblood of govmint.

Never born babies are the root cause of a monolithic deficit expressed fiscally. What plagues the west fiscally and macro-economically is a dearth of working age people to underwrite the benefits of liberal political economies. Although economists and politicians like to explain away this reality by referring to either massive spending deficits or deep cuts in govmint programs, nevertheless, at the heart of this political, social, fiscal problem is an intractable philosophical reality: the meaning of human identity and personhood, and its embodied foundation in the conjugal act as marriage.

What bankrupt liberalism promises is a view of human identity and liberty completely at odds with nature and history. Although individually attractive to the impulses of an adolescent, collectively it’s disastrous.

Just ask Larry Summers. What he discovered at Harvard recently has become the norm throughout America. Women understand that fertility delayed is fertility denied. As a formidable economist, Dr. Summers refused to view reality synoptically, meaning he could not connect the dots regarding the social impact of confiscatory taxation. A young man today can never get to equity formation or capital formation with such devastating taxation. The result? Massive cohabitation. Children born out of wedlock or worse still, the undeniable reality that a women must face, infertility and aloneness.

Walter Laqueur takes a far greater swath of insight, for what he admonishes is an ideal already impending, a total crisis of the west!

Socially, we see this crisis engulfing all of Western Europe, especially in the inner cities; in Europe’s southern bankrupt periphery and the Israeli West Bank. Large Muslim populations with limited social integration, high unemployment, rapidly aging populations tied to paralyzed political economies with existential anomie.

The failure of Europeans to reproduce makes them extremely vulnerable to internal schism, a Balkanized Europe cut along racial, ethnic, fiscal templates.

Are there alternatives?

The American Conservative is grounded in limited, enumerated government because it firmly believes in individual sovereignty. A return to the moral imperatives that underwrite the Founders statesmanship is a good place to start.

The Ignorant & Govmint

Nicole Gelinas has resided as an authority on macro-economic and fiscal matters for the better part of fifteen years, she currently resides as a Senior Contributing Editor to the Manhattan Institute’s “City Journal”‘ a publication that scrutinizes the fiscal health of States. Although she often curtails her subject to examining New York City, she often widens her take to include regional industries.

Recently Dr. Gelinas has proposed a novel reading of the relationship existing between northeastern states and the financial industries that dominate Wall Street.

It was brutal!

As every economist worthy of his/her mettle knows regarding the latest unemployment numbers, State governments throughout the northeast, specifically New York have not taken advantage of this recession to reform themselves. Fiscal reform is anathema to Hartford much to the detriment of our citizens. A closer look at the details will reveal the mindset of a dominant minority unwilling to confront reality, an intransigence worthy of rebuke.

Wall Street profits are currently around $15 Billion or twice last years levels! This symbiotic relation between the federal government as the repository allocating credit and Wall Street remains un-reformed. States like Connecticut don’t demonstrate a political leadership worthy of our heritage. I am specifically referring to the moral and fiscal statesmanship that underwrote the Founders! Spendthrift States like Connecticut and its political class aren’t interested in reform, they’re interested in promoting their careers!

As of this writing, Wall Street never recovered nor replaced the jobs it shed to stay competitive after the calamity of 2007. Employment is down over 20,000 jobs to 172,000. At its height in 2000 Wall Street had 195,400 jobs, a number it was never to regain again. Bonuses are down 43 percent. Revenue is down 57 percent, this does not include the disastrous currency depreciation that has become both failed Fed policy and a lame duck Congress.

This regional industry was responsible for filling state coffers annually in the billions. Even with revenue down and jobs lost the political leadership in both Congress and State Capitals never concede the impact that is confiscatory taxation.

The private sector must innovate or die, but the dominant political class dosen’t have to adjust.

The mentality that dominates the political class of Hartford is ripe to be overthrown. A dominant minority that ceases to lead in numerous crisis’ is unfit to govern.

The election of 2012 is not cyclical. November will usher in a tectonic shift of alignment consistent with the political ideals of our founding; the American Republic will elect leadership to pursue policies that fortify individual sovereignty, limited enumerated government. In a sentence, a government that understands the moral foundations of liberty.

If not, then the war of ideas begins. . .

My monies not on fat boy govmint.

Inflation, Productivity & Wages

The last election cycle revealed a badly needed tutorial on macroeconomics, especially considering the social impact of digital technology on production, inflation and wages.

Productivity increases (chiefly through implementing digital technology) allow for the intensification of the division of labor, which with a stable currency (read The Federal Reserve Mandate) results in lower prices for consumer goods and services and lower production costs. Under these conditions, wage growth outpaces inflation affecting nominal GDP; hence wealth creation.

Another way of reiterating this empirical reality is to explain that the wealth of nations is related to growing output in a competitive environment driven by increased productivity and market expansion through trade. Govmint policy has a constructive role in this process, although it is not what progressives advocate. Politically driven expenditures either through explicit taxation or the hidden tax of inflation cannot be identified as the principal source generating wealth creation.

Fortunately, with the arrival of digital technology, the west has supplanted an intractable problem advertised by Marx, namely the adversarial relation between capital and labor. Digital technology used in a decentralized political economy identifies human capital as the fulcrum of the wealth creation process.

Madison beat Marx!

The Collapse of State Budgets: The Rise of Succession, Federalism & Transforming Sovereignty

Throughout the entire western world we are witnessing the implosion of government. No longer are threats primarily extrinsic in nature. Mass is no longer the dominant component in lethality, we don’t need to expect invasions of multitudes; for the arrival of digital media encapsulates power along lines of engagement outside perception. Just witness the minimum inflation with trillion dollar deficits, how is that possible? Digital money is not physical! A few clicks on a computer screen and creation ex nihilo!

How else to say it, the Victorians discovered sex, the Americans discovered credit! Government is the primary agent in credit allocation. This is the source of our calamity.

Recently Paul Vockler scrutinized the balance sheets of several state governments, his conclusions make clear that the west has arrived at a turning point. Insolvency looms.

The State Budget Crisis Task Force has identified the incriminating source: growing healthcare costs, unfounded pension liabilities, massive administrative costs that are completely unsustainable!

A good question would be to identify where state tax receipts have gone? The answer is found in a worthless currency, unsustainable taxation and inflation. Govmint has been on autopilot far too long; let’s examine the incriminating sources, for they all reside within the corrupting influences of failed liberalism, namely over-centralization shaped within a flaccid understanding of federalism.

Medicaid: currently state budgets are structured to account 25 percent of their net to this failed reimbursement program. This does not account for the annual 7 percent cost increases. As it now stands, this program is insolvent. This massive structural imbalance cannot be absorbed without significant cuts to other state programs like education or massive punitive tax increases on an already exhausted polity.

I firmly believe that better ideas regarding currency depreciation, wage growth, inflation, block grants, competitive bidding, even an nominal look at the 10th Amendment; not to mention a classical application of Federalism; all these policy tools primarily informed from the Republican premise of individual sovereignty can RESOLVE this intractable problem. As it stands now, the policy tools of an enabled liberalism will only grow to threaten the natural bonds of our Union.

Currently, states continue to expand their costs by deliberately choosing to INCREASE enrollment creating new benefits rather than reform underlying membership and cost.

Why?

Liberals think they can create a politicized wedge issue to benefit their own chances of cyclical election by punting on reform while simultaneously blowing up enrollment.

We didn’t even get to the disaster called Obamacare.

Unfunded Pensions: state pension obligations are constitutionally protected, this means that they are non-modifiable contracts, not merely political promises. Wait it gets better. The six states Vockler and his team examined have un-funded pensions over $400 billion with no plan allotted to defuse this time bomb.

The real news is not the nominal state constitutional protection afforded to these fiscal liabilities, but HOW they were contractually written. Most state pensions were structured by previous legislators and remained unreformed. This means that these contracts were written absolving the state. They’re punting to the Fed. This reader must be reminded that their exists previous federal statutory authority going back to our Founding articulating law to the effect absolving Congress from saving profligate states. Although this was surmounted with federal bailouts from our current crisis, it does not resolve an intrinsically political problem. Federal law has articulated that state governments are not permitted to declare bankruptcy because they have both taxing authority and hold assets that can be put into receivership.

Budget Gimmicks: Team Vockler found insurmountable fiscal problems originating from obscure bookkeeping. This means that legislators are deliberately running bookkeeping cons that disguise UNPLEASANT fiscal realities. This is performed by using arcane language permitting contempory legislators authority to raid other state funds or shifting current spending to future years. By permitting a fiscal category titled “on-going-budget strategy” state legislators are given a pass on confronting politically difficult realities.

In case you thought it gets better, just wait until Vockler details how numerous states are SECURITIZING FUTURE tax revenue; meaning borrowing with bonds that must be serviced by selling their projected tax collections to an investor. How’s that for skipping out on being responsible.

What’s happening is simple to understand and anticipate, namely liberalisms attempt to conjure wealth through obscure credit instruments backed by a political promise, that in the case of insolvency would permit one social group to criminalize another leading to anarchy and the need for more centralizing authority.

States are replicating the social, philosophical and fiscal dysfunction of Washington.  I will examine in future posts the underlying political philosophy that engenders this anarchy. For now, the federal fiscal calamity that is embodied in unreformed entitlements that crowd out lasting wealth creation is obscured by a leadership deficit.

Get ready for the local mayhem.

Buzz Lightyear Meets Ben Bernanke

The single most significant aspect of The Federal Reserve’s meeting is the giant yawn it solicited as a response to its policy initiatives. No one cares anymore.

The most frightening aspect of Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing scheme to increase employment through the monthy purchasing of $40 Billion of security instruments is both the open ended nature of this commitment coupled with his intransigence to make no allowance for failure.

The previous “stimulus”, actually two previous rounds came to a dud. So he doubles down? This is similar to the Socialists and other unreformed liberals who are so ideologically fervent they are immune to discovering or recognizing empirical reality. QE3 PLUS will not work, but the debt will rise anyway without any discernible impact on the policy objective of increasing employment.

Two historical points of interest. The myopic vision of Keynesian technocrats permits them to curtail their view of history permitting the “lost decade” of Japananese failure in QE throughout the 1990′s as their only valid source for this arcane monetary policy. They ignore the hyperinflation of the Wiemar republic that ushered in Democratic Socialism under the aegis of Hitler. They also ignore numerous other Civilizations that tried to devalue its currency to prosperity only to usher in unmanageable inflation.

Let’s leave that for the historians to ponder.

As of this writing the Federal Reserve is committed to purchasing $40 Billion worth of toxic mortgage backed securities while continuing Operation Twist, the formal policy of aggressively pushing down US interest rates to the desired hope that dollars will be spent on riskier market bets bringing in tax revenue.

What we’re looking at here is a reckless monetary policy aggressively disguised as a “whatever it takes” mentality in light of a non-existent Congressional fiscal policy. We’re on the road to hyperinflation!

How does QE3 work?

In addition to purchasing toxic mortgage backed assets, the Federal Reserve believes in two distinct channels/levels it can manipulate to get borrowing costs lower stimulating people to either spend or borrow.

The first level is called portfolio balance. The second level is called wage hiring channel. Both depend largely on Federal Policy to affect much higher unexpected prices faster than workers or lenders can respond. In other words, Ben Bernanke thinks that by pursuing QE3 and Operation Twist in tandem he can conjure federal revenue(inflation) faster than the market can respond. He specifically wishes to drive up the prices (value) of assets signaling to producers to increase output. This means an increase in employment.

It will not work for the simple reason that the American citizen is deleveraging debt coupled with the arrival of an completely digital decentralized political economy. If the American economy were completely centralized it may work. It never worked in Japan throuout the 1990′s!

The only thing that can stop this madness is an election.

November will usher in a tectonic shift in the American political economy, chiefly a return to a single mandate for the Federal Reserve (price stability) and a far more engaged Congress.

In the meantime, Ben Bernanke has become Buzz Lightyear. “To Infinity and Beyond.”

The Moral Foundations of Liberty

Its a bit exhausting watching ANY debate in light of a persistent refusal to ground policy initiatives outside an articulated synoptic governing philosophy. Are we so enamored to pursue the undifferentiated concerns of the public that candidates are missing the opportunities afforded in debates.

The absolute failure to defend the morality of the markets/capitalism and the sanctity of individual rights cedes the battle of ideas to Socialists and media errand boys who advance the morality of economic equality at the expense of liberty.

The absolute unmitigated failure of contempory liberalism (read indentured servitude in the guise of tax fairness & redistribution) rather than any loss of faith in human freedom is the evidentiary cause why so many in the GOP cringe at having to defend the moral foundations of liberty.

Freedom demonstrated as liberty is never an adversary to the needs of either true equality or the common good.