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The Piracy Failed- Now What?

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, April 13, 2009 10:54:26 PM
Kudos to this President for going past the international lawyers and sanctioning force to end this stupid incident. Absent any other action, the piracy will continue, but they will let American flag ships pass unscathed.

What is the next step? The rules of international law have handcuffed frigates of all countries. They may be able to carry weaponry on board at sea, but the rules of every port forbid them to dock anywhere with them. Long gone are the days when ships at sea would carry a few deck mounted cannons to deal with this.

There is no impetus as yet for Obama to take the lead on this. Other countries seem to have resigned themselves to paying the ransom as a price of trade around the Horn, and there are quite a few European hostages in Somalia proper. This will be allowed to fester until the traffic interruptions going toward the Strait of Hormuz cost more dearly than a few million $ for the Somalis.

This is yet another case for the utter fecklessness of the U.N., as if the response to North Korea wasn't enough. The United States is the only nation left that has any answer for this crap. 

There was a time when a man was safe anywhere they travelled, if they announced upon confrontation that they were a citizen of Rome. The Romans had a deserved reputation for chasing after anybody who gave them s**t and running over them with whatever they could muster. The world has come to that with us. 

Obama wanted to "reboot" our relations with the world, and present a "diplomatic surge" to grow past the "Bush unilateralism". Look what he got at the G-20 meeting. He asked for help with economic stimulus in Europe. He asked for help with North Korea and Afghanistan. He asked for help with trade relations and his cap & trade proposals. He got bupkus.

That's the dirty secret. Bush didn't polarize, loose talk or force his way out of getting any help from these people. They weren't going to help anyway! The European continent is filled with ingrates. There is some understanding coming from here because they have their own problems, but they make no effort at all. 

They just pretend the problem isn't there. You took our ship, and all you want is ten mil? Chump change. Now go away, and we'll pray you pick on somebody else tomorrow. 

Is it any wonder the U.N. has become as useless as it is?
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The Barbary Coast Comes Alive Again

Posted by Bill Crawford on Thursday, April 09, 2009 12:55:20 PM
The Somalians have been at this stuff for a while now. And, because of the feckless nature of most of the governments on this planet, they have been making a good living at it.
 
But their luck probably ran out when they went after an American flagship. Like Edward Horton's character said in American History X, "you've picked on the wrong young buck".
 
They hit on the only country left on the planet that still uses the military in the way it is taught in the textbook. To protect, not to torment or annoy. Or, in the case of NATO and Europe, to stand around and do nothing while their leaders pose anger and threaten to go to the U.N. Which, come to think of it, is what they are trying to do here.
 
Now they will be dealing with a few warships that are far beyond their capability. Soon a flock of planes will be buzzing them like hornets, up to the edge of their international airspace. And if this President has the stones for it, there may even be some strikes in Somalia proper.
 
If that happens, the rest of the world will condemn us- publicly. Privately, they will breathe a sigh of releif that the traffic going through the Stait of Hormuz will start flowing unimpeded again.
 
The American military, even when set on missions by the naive or held up by the even more naive here, is the most feared power in the world. There is nothing in history to match it. It is the glue that is holding the remainder of Western civilization together. Europe should bow down and kiss our buttinsky daily.
 
Instead, they deride us, and pose us as some sort of new imperialism. We should try bringing everybody with dog tags home for the Summer and see how they like what happens. Our folks in uniform deserve the R&R, and the world needs a serious lesson in reality.
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We Trudge To The U.N. Once More...

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, April 06, 2009 7:45:02 PM
...To do what? This is another exercise in one handed clapping, motion without any results.
 
North Korea launches a "communications satellite" that falls a couple of atmospheric layers short of orbit, but manages to cross over Japan. Do we go back to the six party talks, the only thing that North Korea even pretended to respond to over the last decade? No, Obama and Hillary roundly condemn the action, and promise to go to the United Nations.
 
To which China, in their Security Council catbird seat, has already objcted to the use of the rather benign word, "concern" over the missile launch.
 
And then Obama comes out the next day to announce defense cutbacks, with specific ones in missile defense. Isn't that sort of like sending invitations to a bar bash out to a neighbor whose parents died in a DWI crash the previous weekend?
 
That is not just assinine, it s downright dangerous. I do not use that word casually. I look around at the dangers we face as a nation, and I'm having trouble keeping this President off the list.
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It's Not Your Money We Want

Posted by Bill Crawford on Sunday, April 05, 2009 9:29:50 PM
So it seems that when Henry Paulson dredged up all the top bankers in the country and told them that the Treasury Department was going to become their partners, some of them balked. They were told summarily that they didn't have a choice. They were threatened with all sorts of audit things.
 
The reasoning behind this was that Treasury didn't want the public to know which ones of them were really in serious trouble last September, and this may have had more than a little sense behind it- then.
 
Even though the banks haven't been really open about showing their use of the bailout money, the market has a transparency of it's own. It doesn't take much effort to pick them now. All you have to do is follow the trail of pieces being sold off, or follow the share values. There is a reason why it won't be long before it costs more in broker commissions to buy stock in CitiGroup than it does to actually buy the stock.
 
Here's the real horror story now: the banks that didn't want to take the money don't want to have their boards chosen by Rahm Emmanuel, and they are asking to give it back.
 
AND THE WHITE HOUSE REFUSES TO LET THEM. Are we clear on that? Time has passed, and everybody knows which banks are the nut cases. Obama WANTS to be partners. He wants to direct traffic.
 
How nuts is this? The government created this crisis by herking and jerking banks to lend mortgage money to people who never should have gotten any, and now the government wants to take over the industry so they can save us- from themselves, I guess.
 
I don't know what kind of medication you have to mix before that makes any sense. I really don't. Can anybody out there show me what I am missing out on?
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The Real Schism

Posted by Bill Crawford on Friday, April 03, 2009 3:00:53 PM
The great divide in this country is not about Democrat vs. Republican, or conservative vs. liberal (although that one is closer). It is about culture versus counter culture.
 
In Gertrude Himmelfarb's mighty tome on the subject, she showed how the advocates of culture were reduced to an opposing voice today. She called this "dissonant culture". This is because the core of the counter culture, the older Baby Boomers, owned the mainstream media and had the biggest mouths.
 
The great divide here is about personal values. It is a public and political projection about a series of personal decisions about issues like abortion, the environment, child rearing, gay issues, the use of military force, etc.
 
These issues comprise a host of unbridgeable gaps between Americans. Obama, like Clinton, campaigned on being able to connect the Hatfields and the McCoys, but they both proved to be too far on one side to even start.
 
Many are tired of the eternal bickering, but once you get a handle on what is causing all of it, you get an idea on how it will not end until one side wins.
 
In 1865, the abolitionists won, and wrote the history. In 1945, the internationalist New Dealers did the same.
 
Who will win the great culture war? The answer lies in the fantastic anomaly: counter culturists are very likely to raise their children in many of the same ways culturists do. I ask you, what are the implications of that?
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"Not One Thin Dime"

Posted by Bill Crawford on Friday, April 03, 2009 2:45:56 PM
To my readers who seem to be tracking this stuff from California, Nevada, Florida, Maine and other places (ain't the internet a wonderful thing?), I apologize for coming back to the daily political snapshots, but the degree and speed with which this President seems to want to turn the American supertanker in the water is nothing short of astonishing.
 
Obama needs money to fund all the things he wants to do, and if he has smart people working for him that can do remedial math, he must know that taxing the rich is not going to get him what he needs. Not only aren't there enough of them, but most of them have the skills and resources for effective tax abatement.
 
Obama the candidate was clear as a bell in some of the lines he drew on the campaign trail on this. "95% of all American taxpayers will see a tax reduction" was one. When he was cornered on whether he was simply referring to income taxes, he named a whole host of taxes and said that these Americans would not see their taxes raised by him, "not one thin dime" was the tag line.
 
Obama's people beat me to death with this one last year. There was no question.
 
Until now, I guess. Now if you buy tobacco, as of this week, you pay more, no matter what your income is. Will Obama get tagged for the inconsistency? George Bush, Sr. certainly did in 1990 after doing the U-turn on "read my lips...". It was the main cause of his lack luster GOP support two years later.
 
Obama's people don't give a rip. They are moral relativists, and they only use consistency as a bludgeon for detractors.
 
So the question reverts to, what would it take for Democrats to turn on this guy? Clinton answered that a long time ago: they never will. It is a deeper issue- at once generational and cultural.
 
So the answer is, so what if he is a liar? Marxism taught us that lying for a good cause is a constructive thing, right?
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Europe Beckons With All It's Farce

Posted by Bill Crawford on Wednesday, April 01, 2009 11:18:32 AM
Our new President goes overseas for the first time. It's too bad that it's one of those economic summits, the ones that attract the large groups of unbathed, unruly, ungrateful morons. There are simply more of them on call in Europe than any other place in the world.
 
It will be a good edumacation for Obama, too. He is used to a pliant party and media here. The political and journalistic classes there do not carry the racial guilt baggage they do here, and are less shy about lecturing him on his shortcomings, as evidenced by his takedowns from the other G20 leaders on his budget.
 
Much as I agree with the gist of the European arguments about what a disaster Obama's economy priorities will create, I disagree that the Europeans are eligible to play that trumpet.
 
That continent owes us more than they will ever be able to repay. We brought an end to the two largest wars in history there, wars that THEY started and couldn't finish. The only land we annexed from all that was small plots to bury our dead.
 
After WWII, when the Soviets loomed over them and held a good chunk of their countries as satellite states, they continued to expand their social spending while we maintained a defense umbrella for them.
 
They deserve their economies, their ungrateful mobs and their Muslim immigrant problems. How they have the cuevos to live under all that and lecture US on economic affairs is beyond me.
 
 
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And Now For Something Even Crazier....

Posted by Bill Crawford on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 9:33:26 PM
With all the things passing from the TV into my living room this week to put me into shell shock, the living end was Tim Geithner telling us what kind of "super regulator" was needed at Treasury.
 
The Treasury Department is trying to hide the man behind the curtain by saying that the Federal Reserve is not really part of the Executive branch, but then why on earth would it's head be coordinating policy with the White House?
 
Consider what they are contemplating here: choosing executives to run companies (talk to GM about this one), setting pay levels and craziest of all, having the government step in and renogotiate or abrogate standing contracts between private parties? Even after you digest how directly unconstitutional that is, if the government has the power to do that, what is to stop them from coming after your job? Your pension or IRA? Your small business?
 
This is just nuts. The left doesn't have a problem with this, because they regard the Constitution as a 'living document', and only use it as a defense mechanism when policy proposals contradict their priorities. This explains why the two most dangerous Presidents in history (from a libertarian stand point) were both Democrats: Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
 
Obama is a dangerous man, and he must be stopped. If I sign a contract and it can be redone or revoked at the will of the White House, somebody has way too much power.
 
 
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Carbon Dioxide- The New Evil

Posted by Bill Crawford on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 9:11:07 PM
So the EPA has declared CO2 a "pollutant". Of course, this is a policy declaration as a precursor for setting up a cap and trade market for carbon credits. Nobody at EPA disputes this.
 
Understand, there is no contradiction in the minds of those passing this off with Obama's stem cell lecture on how policy should not get in the way of science. These people think that global warming is anthropomorphic, and the debate is over.
 
And if it isn't, so what? You can talk to people like that until you are blue in the face, and you get nothing back but blank stares and reiterated conclusions.
 
It doesn't matter what you bring up. The lack of tropospheric computer modeling, the continuous underestimation of the power of the environment to recover from sudden changes, the immense measurable power of the sun to affect us in comparison with our hydrocarbon emissions.
 
Where is the science on global warming? Some will say it's a "consensus", others, like Al Gore, will announce that those who aren't on board are "flat earthers".
 
The warming itself is not in dispute. We have been in a warming period for twenty years that rivals the middle of the twentieth century, although this winter may show that is changing. The big question is, what is causing it and how much of it is us? It's one thing to have a robust debate on that, it's entirely another to reach a conclusion anyway. And it adds to the error when you fund policy based on said conclusions.
 
That's MY money, too, and I have a problem with that. This isn't policy based on science. It is dogma, and it is the height of irresponsibility.
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We Apologize To Mexico

Posted by Bill Crawford on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 8:26:25 PM
Mexico's problems have been building for years. Their government structure is inept and their police and judicial systems are corrupt as hell. If you discount their tourism economy and the transfer payments wired there by immigrants working in America, they are essentially a third world country.
 
Now they are maturing a new signature cottage industry: gangs exporting drugs across our southern border, guarded by mercenaries that are comprised in part by Mexican military. Since we have increased border security here over the last decade, the power of these junkets have become a border horror show.
 
So our new Secretary of State goes down there to talk about this, and her response is to make a public statement expressing apology for it all being caused by A) our insatiable appetite for drugs and B) our export of illegal guns.
 
How on earth is this any sort of encouragement for them to work to solve this problem?
 
Even if this is all a concession required to allow us to cross border with our military and solve the problem for them, what kind of diplomatic precedent do they think self-flagellation will accomplish?
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Ode To Brian Lamb

Posted by Bill Crawford on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 10:48:37 PM
Thirty years ago, Brian Lamb's great idea took off- a public affairs channel, funded by the fledgling cable services across the country, and offered as part of everybody's basic cable package. And so it was that C-SPAN came to life.
 
Newt Gingrich was one of the first to take advantage of the new forum- using his empty chamber special order speeches to rail against the world, talking as if he were taking on a full house of Congressmen. This act infuriated Speaker O'Neill so much that one day he ordered the cameras to pan the empty chamber while Newt was railing on.
 
Brian was the prototype moderator, being the ultimate poker face. He has hired others who man the desk in a similar style, holding expression no matter who was talking or what they said.
 
Except for the one eyebrow. Brian would pan stoically through the Left and the Right screaming at each other, but every now and then a true lunatic would make it past the screeners and one of his eyebrows would go up, announcing to the world that he thought a straight jacket was needed.
 
I first realized this sometime in 1994, when somebody from Arkansas droned on about how Bill and Hillary were having people killed at Mena Airport. He moved to the next call and the eyebrow just set me off. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw.
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Our Children's Debt

Posted by Bill Crawford on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 10:32:59 PM
When FDR and the New Deal Brain Trust around him set to winning World War Two, they showed tacit respect for the Federal Reserve by reining in most of their own domestic programs, limiting them to the rate of GDP growth or outright freezing them. This elicited many complaints from pols all over the country, on the national and state levels.
 
Fast forward two generations: Obama inherits a credit crisis that he wants to attack, but first he has to find a few trillion dollars for funding everything his party wants, including; as Chucky Schumer refers to, "those porky things".
 
If he held the line on spending while he responded to the dried credit markets, his support for killing the Bush tax cuts next year would driven Republicans into hiding. If he truly wanted to be the post-partisan President, that would have been a hell of a place to start.
 
By the end of 1945, we had racked up what will soon be the second highest percentage of our debt in history. How did we grow out of it? With large parts of the globe decimated by the war, we owned about half of the economic activity on the planet. The recovery had to start with us. Does anybody here see something like that happening now?
 
Obama is not a dimwit. What is he trying to accomplish? He's trying to turn us into Europe, that's what! He WANTS the public sector to be the healthiest part of the economy.
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Geithner Gets Thrown To The Lions Again

Posted by Bill Crawford on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 8:33:20 PM
Why is it that this President drags his teleprompters out every time there is a policy inititative, but Po' L'il Tim has to offer the Treasury policies on his own?
 
Well, TARP II has arrived, and it's a simple rehash of what Paulson was offering up last year: a willingness of the Fed to print more money and keep it in abeyance as security, while offering T-bills for auction for the private sector to bite into the toxic, er, that is "legacy" assets.
 
The market reacted well for one day because at last there was SOME sort of plan, but then waded back into the sludge of non-moving mediocrity when the market bidding petered out after 24 hours.
 
So here we are folks. This administration sends out Turbo Tax Tim to tell us that our bankers have to pick up the slack to save themselves, so they can then resave us all. Meanwhile, Congress can go on an unprecedented spending spree to galvanize us all from the other direction.
 
That's the Obama Economics school: capital formation is being held up by health care costs, non-green energy use and our abominable failure to invest more in education. Which just happens to be the biggest policy priorities of his. Gosh, that isn't any sort of reverse engineering logic, is it?
 
So, it all comes down to how many votes ths man can conjure. Will this economy reverse itself despite them, or will he gather up enough votes to try and turn us into Europe, guaranteeing that the only functional sector of the economy for years to come will be the government sector?
 
That is the choice we are facing. Obama has dealt his cards. His party is taking the "middle class tax cut" off the table, because we can't afford it. I warned all of you. Obama wants the power to choose comanies at will and step in and renegotiate contracts. Obama wants to pretend that terrorists are something of a different name, open to talk.
 
All this stuff was passing out of McCain and his people last October. CNN laughed at him the same way Jon Stewart did. No, we were told- Obama is a centrist that has to placate his left wing. Now he is rapidly losing the swing voters he garnered to win in November, and is left to hold on to the House and a total of sixty Senators. That is where our immediate future lies.
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Policy By Focus Group

Posted by Bill Crawford on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 12:07:19 AM
Back in the glorious Nineties, the Clinton White House sold their initiatives by packaging them together in words and phrases tested by focus groups. This is how government spending became "investments" and Republican policy became "schemes".
 
We elected a talker last year, in part because the swing voters got tired of Bush the "plain spoken man".
 
So now we have "toxic" assets turning into "legacy" assets. And there is no more mention of "terrorists". It is now a "man-caused disaster". The global war on terror? It's now an "overseas contingency operation". This is Orwellian doublespeak at it's best.
 
You can't make ths stuff up, folks. Hillary goes to Moscow and her gift is a remake of the Staples "Easy" button, labeled "Reset". Aside from the hokey nature of the gift, she presides over probably the largest contingent of foreign officer translators in the world, and she can't manage to translate the one word correctly on the button.
 
So tonight, Obama sells America anew on how he is changing out of control government spending "borrow and spend" into even more out of control "investment". Even the networks are seeming to tire of this, but they aren't hammering him yet. Who knows, maybe they never will.
 
But his poll numbers continue to slowly degrade, so somebody is noticing.
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Baby Boomer "Retirement"

Posted by Bill Crawford on Friday, March 20, 2009 2:46:49 PM

This is an article that was printed in the Raleigh News & Observer last week. A few of my readers in the far flung regions of the country requested that I reproduce it here. Evidently the hyperlink on the newspaper has it's occasional bugs.

For Boomers, a new age of retirement

By Bill Crawford

Published: Wed, Mar. 11, 2009 02:10PM

PITTSBORO -- Everybody is waiting for the great ticking time bomb to go off, when the Baby Boomers all retire and drain the next generations through taxes and government services.

Here is the unholy surprise: they won't. The older end of the Boomer generation is already at a classic retirement age, and they show no signs of leaving the work force in significant numbers. There are a number of reasons why they won't retire.

They can't afford to. Many Boomers are working in jobs with no pensions. Even those who have pensions coming aren't optimistic about their monthly checks being generous enough to quit working entirely. These Boomers also have lifestyles that demand more than the modest levels that the Depression babies retired into several years ago, and Social Security won't begin to cover these.

They won't want to. You won't find hordes of Boomers shuttling off to retirement villages, passing the time with golf and tennis. They want to stay in power. They want to be needed. They want their lives to have meaning, and shuffleboard does not bring this.

The labor force will need them. Boomers are not having enough children to fill the work force as the World War II generation did. There will be many places in the evolving information economy that will be clamoring for anybody with English language and computer skills to fill in. A healthy 80-year-old who isn't looking for a career will do quite nicely, when there aren't a lot of 20somethings looking for work.

They don't want to be a drain on their children. The famous messianic zeal of the Boomers will translate into their last mission in life, which is to stay healthy and not be a burden on the health care system, and to keep working so they will not need their children's government transfer payments to live independently.

Add to this picture the fact that the Boomers grew up healthier than any previous generation, and are entering their senior years in better shape than their forebears. They are, as well, doing so when medical breakthroughs are happening all around them.

Baby Boomers will not go into their golden years working 50 weeks a year; they will not need that much money when their children grow up. They will take jobs for a few months to a year, and then take a few months off when they feel they can afford to. They will do this until they no longer can.

This is what they will call retirement.

There are many things government planners should worry about when forecasting 20 or 30 years down the road. The Baby Boom generation is not one of them.

Bill Crawford, a restaurant manager, is writing a book about Baby Boomers.

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