I’ve been sick this weekend, so here are a few random link of interest before they get positively antique:
LinkSwarm for December 4, 2011
December 4th, 2011Fast and Furious Update for December 1, 2011
December 1st, 2011I’m feeling a bit under the weather, so here are some random and no doubt woefully late updates on Fast and Furious just to prove that I’m not totally out of it:
EVERYBODY in ATF and DOJ along the border knew, and they knew it before the murder of Brian Terry, for it obviously is no surprise to the highly-placed AUSA Cook, and he doesn’t mind using this common knowledge to achieve the desired result from Phoenix.
Texas Senate Race Update for November 29, 2011
November 29th, 2011Ten Days to a EuroZone Collapse?
November 28th, 2011So says a piece in the Financial Times, here excerpted from behind the paywall.
Things are moving very fast indeed on the Euro front:
From the beginning, the Brussels elites made it clear that, to adapt Abraham Lincoln, their paramount object was to save the Union. Never mind if that meant imposing epochal poverty and emigration on the southern members, and unprecedented tax rises on the northern. Never mind if it meant toppling the elected prime ministers of Italy and Greece and replacing them with Eurocrats (respectively a former European Commissioner and a former vice president of the European Central Bank — two perfect specimens of the people who caused the crisis in the first place). They were prepared to pay any price to keep the euro together — or, more precisely, to expect their peoples to pay, since EU employees are generally exempt from national taxation.
The only beneficiaries of the State’s assumption of [Anglo Irish Bank]’s liabilities are taxpayers in the countries whose banks were the reckless lenders to Anglo. Anglo, for all the guff at the time of the bank guarantee, had no systemic importance to the Irish economy. Irish taxpayers had no moral or other liability for its debts.
The sole reason for saving it was the ECB’s insistence that no euro zone bank should fail. Had Anglo failed, the costs would have been borne primarily by European banks and consequently by European taxpayers.
So the undertaking by the Irish State to stump up €47 billion to pay those private debts is an act of extreme (if extremely demented) euro-altruism. We are Europe’s ragged-trousered philanthropists, bailing out the euro with money we don’t have and that our European partners are kindly lending us at penal interest rates.
And this single act of insane generosity wipes out every red cent we’ve got from Europe since 1973.
[snip]
And for what? For less than nothing. For a moment of panic, a daft notion, a stupid indulgence in bluster and bravado. Some bleary-eyed fools decided, in the middle of the night, that they could bluff the markets by throwing all the chips we might ever have on to the table. It didn’t take long for the markets to realise that their hand contained nothing better than a pair of deuces.
But the gamble failed for Europe too. There might be some kind of (very expensive) pride in being able to say that little Ireland took the hit to save the euro zone, like the starry-eyed gal who takes a bullet for the outlaw in a corny western. But we saved nothing. All we managed to do was to buy the euro zone leaders more time in which to delude themselves that there was no real crisis.
France Recognizes Syrian Rebels
November 24th, 2011“In a direct echo of previous events in Libya, France has formally recoginsed the opposition Syrian National Council and proposed that international troops should protect civilians.”
Meanwhile, those rebels are calling for international air strikes against the Assad regime.
It’s quite possible that the Assad regime could unravel much faster than Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya did, since whole army units have already defected, and Assad is much more isolated from his country’s Sunni majority that Gadhafi was (at least ethnically) from his.
France Pushing Intervention in Syria?
November 23rd, 2011Alain Juppe, France’s foreign minister, has raised the possibility that western powers could intervene directly intervene [sic – LP] to protect civilians in Syria from the Assad regime.
He suggested that “humanitarian corridors or humanitarian zones” could be established to protect those under attack.
As the Assad regime presses ahead with its attacks on Syrian rebels, Mr Juppé has become the first senior western figure to raise the possibility of such an intervention. He said the issue would be discussed by European Union foreign ministers at a meeting next month.
Of course he goes on to say that “full scale military intervention by the west in Syria was not being considered.” But I remember hearing much the same thing about the intervention in Libya, and we all know how that turned out.
France’s sudden belligerence may seem out-of-character, but they’ve been pissed at Assad ever since he had Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri assassinated in 2005. France has a long history of ties with Lebanon, and the Hariri assassination was just the most overt act in Syria’s semi-successful attempt to turn Lebanon into a puppet state. I have no doubt that France would be happy to knock off Assad if they were sure they had NATO (or at least American and UK) backing and could be sure the job was done right.
In other news, UNSECO’s executive board unanimously elected Syria to a committee dealing with human rights—even though the U.S. has a representative on the committee. Must be more of that Obama Administration “smart diplomacy” we keep hearing about…
Now Even German Bonds are Toxic
November 23rd, 2011Now investors are even shying away from German sovereign debt:
A “disastrous” sale of German benchmark bonds on Wednesday sparked fears the debt crisis was beginning to threaten even Europe’s biggest economy, with the Bundesbank forced to hold on to record amounts to ensure the auction did not fail.
In one of the least successful debt sales by Europe’s powerhouse economy since the launch of the single currency, the low returns offered — just 2 percent annually over 10 years — deterred investors made uneasy by the escalating cost of the crisis to Germany.
That meant the central bank had to pick up 39 percent of the 6 billion euros of debt Germany had hoped to sell after commercial banks bought just 3.644 billion euros of the issue.
This isn’t Greece or Italy or Portugal. This is Germany, the strongest economy in the Eurozone, and the fourth largest economy in the world. There shouldn’t be any question about Germany’s ability to pay it’s debt, and there wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the fact that debt is denominated in Euros. If they were in Deutschmarks, Germany wouldn’t have any problem selling them.
This just confirms what Euroskeptics have been noting for a while now: Once the defaults start, there’s no way to firewall the stronger Eurozone economies from the weaker ones while maintaining the same currency.
Germany may soon be faced with the question of wrecking the Euro, or wrecking their own economy.
Could All Of Europe Declare Bankruptcy?
November 22nd, 2011That’s the option being openly talked about:
Europe may need to pull a Chapter 11 – a US-style bankruptcy, which would permit a market shutdown and Euro Zone reorganization before reopening for business.
The EU desperately needs a break from market pressures in order to allow the political apparatus to really gather its forces and finally move Europe and its debt crisis ahead of the curve. Here we are just a couple of weeks after the feeble attempt to apply an EFSF plaster on the problem and we’re already back to Square One: the EU debt crisis has reached the point at which none of the readily available tools or institutions are sufficient to match the magnitude of the crisis. This dictates the need for an out-of-the-box solution.
EU policy makers played the extend and pretend game for as long as they could – but now the writing is on the wall: popular outrage is on the rise and putting increasing pressure on the political process – as we are seeing increased demonstrations and grass-root activity taking over both the political agenda and the media. And markets are now balking as empty promises and now a real lack of funds are seeing bond yields beginning to spike out of control. The self-reinforcing cycle of downgrades and austerity and recession are taking us to the very brink of a full scale Crisis 2.0.
Or, alternately, the EU could just jetison all that inconvenient democracy to keep the Ponzi scheme going just a little bit longer, trying to hide the fact that Europe has run out of money.
Says Walter Russell Mead: “Right now the world’s largest economic bloc is running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
So how could Europe possibly display the terminal bankruptcy of the high tax, high spending, highly unionized, cradle-to-grave welfare state, European/Blue State social model? How about if EU staffers went on strike?
Dear Greek Citizens: I hope you weren’t so foolish as to believe that the Swiss bank accounts containing the money you earned actually belong to you, do you? You’re going to have to return them to Greek banks so we can steal them. Love, the EU.
The Euro may have been great for Greek elites, but not necessarily great for average Greeks.
How are things in the rest of Europe? In Spain, unemployment is 22.6%.
The EU may crack before the Euro.
China is not coming to the rescue, as China is suffering from the same demographic maladies afflicting Europe: “A population that is no longer growing very fast and is quickly aging. The proportion of the population that depends on the state for pensions and medical care is overwhelming the proportion that works and pays taxes to the state.”
Plus, Chinese rating agencies just downgraded Greek debt.
The IMF has quitely changed its rules to make it easier to bail out Europe. With your tax dollars.
(Hat tips: Ace, Insta, and the usual suspects.)
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Takes Credit for Occupy Wall Street
November 20th, 2011Sometimes different stories you’re following twine together in weird and unexpected ways. Today it’s news from MEMRI that former mujahideen commander, Islamic radical, and all-around-asshole Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is taking credit for inspiring Occupy Wall Street.
If you don’t remember Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, he first rose to prominence as commander of the Hezb-i islami faction of the mujahideen fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Fighting the Soviets was pretty much the last decent thing Hekmatyar ever did, and he wasn’t very good at it, especially compared to his chief rival, Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of Jamiat-i Islami, who was one of the greatest guerrilla warfare commanders of the 20th century. If “Hezb-i islami” sounds an awful lot like “Hezbollah,” that’s because they’re both different branches of the same transnational affiliation of radical Shia Islamic fundamentalism. Hekmatyar the sort of guy who thought the Ayatollah Khomeini was too much of liberal softie. Hekmatyar spent almost as much time fighting Massoud as he did fighting the Soviets, and after the Soviets left he changed sides so many times in the various Afghan civil wars that followed (in the government, out of the government, with the Taliban, against the Taliban, etc.) that it’s hard to keep track. He was also one of Osama Bin Laden’s drinking buddies in the 1990s. Pretty much anytime he showed up was bad news for Afghanistan, and now he’s one of the head jerks fighting the Afghan government.
Now he’s taking credit for “inspiring” Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, right. I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone at Occupy Wall Street that had even heard of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (or even any foreign political figure before Bush43 that isn’t featured on a t-shirt).