So the latest “final” bailout is agreed upon, the Greek parliament passes the austerity measured decreed by their German overlords like good little members of the Eurocratic elite, and for their troubles Greek citizens (whose input on the issue is neither required nor desired) responded to these events with widespread arson and looting.
Here are some protesters expressing their displeasure with austerity measures via the now-traditional medium of Molotov cocktails:
Who are we supposed to root for, the Eurocrats who turned a blind eye to Greece’s spendthrift ways when they let them join the Euro, the Greek bureaucrats who went on an orgy of unsustainable welfare state spending with Germany’s credit card, or the Greek citizens who happily sucked at the welfare state teat as long as Uncle Helmut was paying for it and are now throwing a hissy fit because mean Aunt Angela wants to ween them away? It’s like trying to decide between the pusher who stops giving away free heroin after ten years, or the junkie suddenly denied their fix: There are no heroes or sympathetic actors. Keep giving me my heroin or the Acropolis burns!
Other burning Euro issues:
And those members of the Greek parliament who voted against the deal? 43 members of the socialist and conservative parties were were immediately expelled from their parties. That will teach them not to heed their master’s voice…
Those austerity measures are absolutely set in stone…except that they’re not. “Antonis Samaras, leader of New Democracy and likely the next prime minister, said the measures should be renegotiated after national elections expected in April.” What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.
Forbes spins scenarios. If Greece leaves the Euro, things get slightly worse. All the PIIGS leaving is a bit more serious. Germany leaving the Euro? It makes the the housing bubble aftermath look like a clear blue sky of deepest summer by comparison…
As long as Germany wasn’t complaining, others could make free with Germany’s credit card. Once in the euro, Greece, Italy, Spain, and other countries that bankers used to consider reckless or unstable could borrow at the same rates. (The treaties that bound all these dissimilar countries together stipulated that there would be no bailouts for those who borrowed too much, but bankers obviously didn’t believe that.) A boom in lending pushed up wages and prices in those “peripheral” countries, rendering them uncompetitive. After the financial crisis of 2008, the countries that had overborrowed were saddled with more debt than they could comfortably repay. The eurozone’s Mediterranean members have come to think that Germany ought to rescue them. But the Germany to which they are addressing their petitions is not the penitent, diffident, and easily browbeaten land that they came to know over the last three generations. Germany has its own ideas about economics and morality, and it is ready to insist that its weaker neighbors adhere to them.
(snip)
The German public was dragged into the euro reluctantly and would never have consented to it had they been consulted. “The euro has always been the ‘Golden Calf,’ so to speak,” says Barclays’s economist Thorsten Polleit. “It was forced upon Germans.” There is still a lot of debate about how it was forced upon Germans. The most common explanation is that French president François Mitterrand insisted on the euro as a condition of Germany’s reunification. A number of Germany’s top politicians and economists assured citizens that the new currency would hold prices stable. That turned out to be right. They also promised that this would not mean sharing wealth and bailing out laggards. That turned out to be wrong—and perhaps catastrophically, apocalyptically wrong. In the late nineties, “many chief economists did a lot of client presentations where they told people the euro would be as stable as the German mark,” says Jörg Krämer, chief economist at Commerzbank. “I am quite happy I was young enough not to have had to do this.”
How the latest deal could trigger a crisis “rivaling anything yet seen.”. Also: You know which bank isn’t taking any haircut at all he latest debt deal? The European Central Bank.
The latest blogroll addition is UrbanGrounds written by Robbie Cooper, “a conservative, a biker, a Veteran, a professional writer, and a blogging enthusiast in the heart of uber-Liberal Austin, TX.” It has a nice mix of local and national news that’s well worth checking out.
This is good news: “A consortium of utilities in the South won government approval Thursday to construct two new atomic energy reactors at an estimated cost of $14 billion, the strongest signal yet that the three-decade hiatus of nuclear plant construction is finally ending.” The new reactors are going in at reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Or its good news except for “massive federal loan guarantee and other incentives.” The only incentive they should get is shielding from the inevitable frivolous lawsuit from those segments of the green community who oppose the only practical zero-emission power generating technology available.
Though not in that story, the two reactors appear to be using Westinghouse AP1000 duel-loop pressurized water reactors, which is a significant improvement over current working American reactors (and the Fukishama reactors). Personally I would have liked to see a move to a more inherently safe reactor technology like pebble bed (it’s too early to expect commercialization of the molten salt design), but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
I’ve been meaning to update the blog roll for a while, so now’s as good a time as any.
Today’s addition is An American Housewife, Formerly in London. She spent five years in London, then moved back to Houston, and blogs about a variety of issues, both personal and political, from the expat (and repat) life and mothering to the latest Obama idiocy.
Anyway, she’s been linking and dropping into BattleSwarm with useful comments for a while now, so I’m happy to return the favor. Do drop by when you get a chance.
This piece by Dan McLaughlin encapsulates why the Tea Party exists, and why it has to fight a willfully heedless Republican establishment, so well that I’m going to quote whopping great chunks from it:
As anyone with a passing familiarity with Republican politics over the past four or five decades knows, conservative magazines and think tanks have been making detailed entitlement reform proposals for most of those years, and Republicans running for offices high and low have been running on platforms of reducing the size and cost of government for just as long. And then nothing happens.
That’s why Congress’ battles over the debt ceiling and related issues provide such a potent example. Basically all Republican Senators profess to be in favor of smaller government, and yet so few are willing to go to the barricades to make it a reality. Now, I’m a realist – there are limits to how much we could expect even a completely united GOP to bring home as long as Obama is the President and Harry Reid the Senate Majority Leader. But the repeated spectacle of leading pundits and Beltway Republicans tut-tutting Boehner and company for even trying to use their leverage to exact real concessions is a sign that the message Republican voters have been sending is not getting through to everyone.
(snip)
The related point here – and one that says much about why RedState has put so much energy into intra-party primary battles rather than the production of white papers – is that personnel is policy. The ideas are already there; what is lacking is the necessary corps of people with the will to fight for them.
(snip)
The point of my essay was not to denounce anyone, but to explain the history and depth of the current popular distrust on the Right of leaders who seem unwilling to lead. The battle to restrain runaway government spending is so much smoke and mirrors unless the people who profess to support it in word are dedicated to it in deed. No wealth of position papers, endorsements and Power Point presentations can demonstrate that. Voters and activists who have figured this out are rightly skeptical of those who don’t seem to “get it”. And they are more than willing to embrace flawed champions – even such a creature of the Beltway as Newt Gingrich – if they demonstrate the willingness to actually do something to stop the runaway train of federal spending. Every time some Beltway figure calls Newt or some Tea Party candidate crazy, voters think again, “he might actually be crazy enough to upset some applecarts to get things done.”
Paul Burka covers it as well. Ignore the usual Burka liberal hand-wringing and there’s actually a lot of useful information here. (Hat tip: Texas Iconoclast, which has stopped updating the main page, but still puts tidbits in their sidebar.)
The Texas Tribune offers a handy overview of the their tax returns.
Cruz wins another straw poll, this one at the Tarrant County Republican Party Candidate Fair.
Joe Holley profiles James. The most interesting takeaway for me is learning that James has two of Rick Perry’s longtime financial supporters backing him: Houston investor Jim Lee and Dallas insurance executive Roy Bailey. And the fact that James only set up Texans for a Better America in April, after his name was already floated as a potential Senate candidate.
Another Perry supporter, campaign manager Rob Johnson, lands a gig working for David Dewhurst’s Super PAC “Texas Conservatives Fund” to support his Senate campaign. That’s not the only Dewhurst PAC: “Former Harris County Republican Party chairman Gary Polland and San Francisco-based political consultant Bob Wickers recently formed the Conservative Renewal PAC.”
The Dewhurst campaign is crying foul on Cruz hitting them over the Super PAC, pointing out Cruz’s support from the Club for Growth PAC. The Cruz campaign retorts that The Club For Growth PAC has been around for years to help various candidates, while Dewhurst’s PACs exist only to serve David Dewhurst.
James calls for Eric Holder’s resignation, and says that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott should be the next U.S. Attorney General. That’s interesting, because I got the impression that Abbott was pretty close to Cruz, though I don’t think he’s formally endorsed him.
Speaking of which, Paul Sadler appeared on WFAA, they of the crappy video embedding:
Salder raised $5,000 in Q4. Granted, he didn’t join the race until December 19, but that’s still pretty poor for the Anointed Democratic Establishment Candidate.
Even Daniel Boone raised more money, in Q4, raising $5,401.
David Dewhurst loaned his campaign another $2 million of his own money, according to his Q4 report. That’s a considerable chunk of change, but I imagine the Cruz campaign is breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t 5 times that much.
Another thing that strikes me about his Q4 report (which I have only given a cursory glance to, given there’s more than 800 pages to it) is Dewhurst’s incredibly high burn rate. He’s already spent $4,397,491. Some examples of what he’s spending money on:
He seems to be spending $500 a day each on Facebook and Google advertising. I’m not sure that’s money well spent at this stage of the campaign. Last two weeks? Sure. Now? Not so much.
Campaign manager James Bognet seems to be pulling down a cool $35,000 a month, plus reimbursement expenses.
Finance director Rebecca McMullin is pulling down a respectable $9,480 a month, plus expenses. Kevin Moomaw, an old Dewhurst hand he lured back from his cushy job as a UT professor, is making about the same, which is a goooooooooood salary. (Inside joke.)
He gave pollster Michael Baselice just over $24,000.
The nice thing about being the “bank” in the race is that you don’t have to worry about funding a top-heavy campaign if you’re getting results. Is he? So far the Dewhurst campaign hasn’t knocked me out with its organizational skill. It’s competent, but I think both the Cruz and Leppert campaigns have been more obviously focused and effective at communicating. But I’m probably not the type of voter the Dewhurst campaign is trying to reach (as far as I can tell, Team Dewhurst reachout to bloggers and new media (beyond the obligatory Facebook and Twitter accounts) is non-existent).
Greece and the EU are having their final showdown (I tell you final! This time we mean it! Lather, rinse, repeat!) over the Greek debt crises. Until they do it all over again two months from now.
Some people wonder just what all this has to do with the U.S. economy? Well, the one good thing about having a crack house at the end of the street: No one worries about how crappy your own house looks, because it’s great by comparison. But once the PIIGS start defaulting, getting kicked out of the EuroZone, or both, people are going to start to notice that Obama hasn’t mowed the lawn in months…
Metaphors! I mix them! Now back to all that exciting Euro-defaulting action:
Europe tells Greece take the deal or else. Of course, as Bob Dylan once noted: “When you got nothin, you got nothin to lose.” At this point, who does throwing Greece out of the EuroZone hurt worse: Greece, or Europe? Alternate metaphor: Maybe you should have cut off that gangrenous toe before it spread to your thigh…
And what’s this unacceptable demand Europe is making? To cut deficit spending by…1.5% of GDP. For a country running a deficit of, what, 9% of GDP? “Son, you’ve got to promise you’ll cut down on shooting smack by one-sixth.” Hey Greece (and, for that matter, Europe. And Obama): How about you (and try to keep up with me here) stop all deficit spending? That would take care of the problem, no?
The real reason Germany is asking for total control of Greek finance in exchange for the next bailout? To make Greece say no so they don’t have to bail out the rest of the PIIGS: “How do you preclude Portugal, Ireland and, indeed, Spain from asking for the same deal as Greece, if the negotiations succeed? Answer; you can’t. So the Germans throw a politically impossible demand in front of the Greeks, in effect saying, “No more money unless you effectively surrender your national sovereignty.” And that’s the implied warning ahead for the other periphery countries which look to secure the deal currently on the table for Greece. In effect, the Germans (behind the auspices of the troika) are saying, “It’s fiscal austerity on our terms. You try to renegotiate like the Greeks and we take you over. The other alternative is that you leave.”
This article goes into detail about how exactly they lied.
The leader of the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left says the EU won’t dare kick Greece out. And he also wants a three-year suspension of all payments by Greece to foreign creditors. He may be on to something. When you owe the bank $3,000, you have a problem. When you owe the bank $30 billion, the bank has a problem. The OJ Simpson/Clevon Little technique of holding a gun to your own head just might work. “Do what he says! He’s crazy!”
Spain’s fourth largest airline collapses. “The airline was seen as a flagship of the regional government of Catalonia, which had helped it stay afloat with more than 150m euros of subsidies. The government refused to provide more funding on Friday.”
Over on Facebook, a lot of people have their knickers in a knot over this picture of Super Bowl parking rates from WTHR:
The irony is that most of the people who are shocked, shocked at expensive pricing for Super Bowl parking are the same people who were caterwauling a few months ago about how it was unfair that the 1% had so much money. Well, guess what folks? The vast majority of people who can afford to attend the Super Bowl in the first place are among the 1%, or within spitting distance of it, So on the one day when local businesses can make a killing rooking Mr. Big Shot 1% because he wants to park his Ferrari or Escalade within walking distance, you get all outraged over “price gouging.” I guess because someone’s actually making a profit off Mr. 1% rather than the government stealing it from him to pay off the debt from your Masters in Women’s Studies.
A parking space has no “intrinsic value.” It’s worth whatever people will pay for it. (And while we’re on the subject Marx’s Labor Theory of Value is bunk. Just in case you hadn’t figured that out yet.) Why should you care that a guy who’s already paid $1,200 for tickets has to cough up another $200 for parking? No one’s forcing Mr. 1% to park there. The market pays what the market will bear.
Over at Shall Not Be Questioned, Sebastian talks about a review of Adam Winkler’s Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, an excerpt of which Clayton E. Cramer was kind enough to examine here. This particular post is notable as both Winkler and Cramer chime in in the comments. I would be most interested in reading a full-length review by Cramer of Gunfight, but I don’t think he’s done one yet.
