Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Websites and blogs I recommend
Blog Archive
-
▼
2015
(360)
-
▼
January
(25)
- Bill's Favorite "Conservative-Paleo-Libertarian" O...
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, January 29, 2015
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, January 22, 2015
- Smacking Michael Tanner of NRO Around a Bit
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, January 21, 2015
- Die, Belichick, Die!
- To Borrow a Liberal Cliche, "It's For the Children!"
- Barker's Newsbites: January 20, 2015
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, January 19, 2015
- Danielle and Alexander Meitiv vs. "The Authorities"
- Renee Ellmers... Peter King... and Assorted Other ...
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, January 15, 2015
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, January 13, 2015
- Take Me Back to 1969
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, January 12, 2015
- The Technology Evolves... While Basic Good Manners...
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, January 9, 2015
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, January 8, 2015
- Mick Mulvaney (G-SC-5) (The "G" Stands for GARBAGE)
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, January 7, 2015
- The REAL Speakership Vote of January 6, 2015
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, January 6, 2015
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, January 5, 2015
- A New Speaker is a Step in the Right Direction
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., Jan. 3 & 4, 2015
-
▼
January
(25)
About Me
- William R. Barker
- Pearl River, NY High School Class of '81; Northeastern University, Boston, MA Class of '87.
11 comments:
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/7/french-islamist-mini-states-grow-into-problem-out-/
A backdrop to the massacre in Paris on Wednesday by self-professed al Qaeda terrorists is that city officials have increasingly ceded control of heavily Muslim neighborhoods to Islamists, block by block.
* PERHAPS THE PARISIANS SHOULD TAR AND FEATHER THEIR CITY OFFICIALS?!
France has Europe’s largest population of Muslims, some of whom talk openly of ruling the country one day and casting aside Western legal systems for harsh, Islam-based Shariah law.
“The situation is out of control, and it is not reversible,” said Soeren Kern, an analyst at the Gatestone Institute and author of annual reports on the “Islamization of France.”
* STUPID FRIGGIN' FRENCH...
“Islam is a permanent part of France now. It is not going away,” Mr. Kern said. “I think the future looks very bleak. The problem is a lot of these younger-generation Muslims are not integrating into French society. Although they are French citizens, they don’t really have a future in French society. They feel very alienated from France. This is why radical Islam is so attractive because it gives them a sense of meaning in their life.”
(*PURSED LIPS*)
While not a complete safe-haven for al Qaeda-type operatives, Paris and other French cities have become more fertile places for Muslim extremists in the past decade. City leaders have allowed virtual Islamic mini-states to thrive as Muslims gain power to govern in their own way.
“There are no-go areas not just in Paris, but all over France, where they are effectively in control,” said Robert Spencer, who directs JihadWatch.org, a non-profit that monitors Muslim extremists.
“They’re operating with impunity, apparently secure in the knowledge that authorities cannot or will not act decisively to stop them,” he said. “And with the universal denial and obfuscation of the clear motive for the Charlie Hebdo attack, they have good reason to think that.”
(*SIGH*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
The attackers who killed 12 people at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo claimed to be members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Witnesses said they spoke perfect French, a strong indication that they are homegrown terrorists who received help from AQAP or another group.
* HOME... GROWN... TERRORISTS...
Mr. Kern said the connection between the attack and the Islamization movement is that French jihadis are becoming bolder in trying to stamp out any criticism of Islam. “What they are trying to do is shut down any sort of criticism of Islam, any sort of speech, cartoons, discussion, anything,” he said. “Essentially, the French government and the other European governments have lost control over the situation. It’s a snowball that is growing bigger and bigger, in particular over the past 10 years.”
Last year, AQAP put Charlie Hebdo editor and cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier on a “Most Wanted” poster for lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. He was among the 12 killed by hooded assailants firing assault rifles Wednesday morning at a weekly staff gathering.
The Middle East Media Research Institute reported that French jihadis on Twitter were openly chattering about how to retaliate against Charlie Hebdo for its comic book biography of Muhammad. One idea was to immediately start killing French nationals.
While French jihadis were plotting a wave of violence, Mr. Kern and the Gatestone Institute issued a report on the Islamization of France in 2013, and a follow-up in December.
The think tank, led by John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the country’s Muslim population last year reached 6.5 million, or 10 percent of its 66 million people. That makes France the European country with the largest Muslim minority.
Some Muslim activists gleefully predict that France will be a Muslim-majority country in the not-too-distant future. Gatestone reports that an intelligence document leaked to Le Figaro said Muslims are creating a separate public school society “completely cut off from non-Muslim students.”
Over 1,000 French supermarkets are selling Islamic books that call for jihad and the killing of non-Muslims.
A poll commissioned by the newspaper Le Monde last year found that 74% of French citizens view Islam as intolerant and as incompatible with French values.
* ARE THEY RIGHT? TO WHAT EXTENT? THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS THAT HAVE TO BE ASKED... AND ANSWERED.
Some French politicians are speaking out. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said last year, “We are fighting terrorism outside of France, but we are also fighting an internal enemy since there are those French who fit into this process of radicalization. This enemy must be fought with the greatest determination.”
* HERE'S THE PROBLEM, THOUGH:
Said Mr. Kern, “Europe is very committed to multiculturalism. So any speech critical of Islam is immediately branded as being Islamophobic or racist or something like that. There’s not really an honest debate about what’s going on in Europe because the European elite have so much invested in this multicultural society that they’re trying to build.”
* HONESTY, FOLKS... IT REALLY IS THE BEST POLICY...
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/7/andrew-napolitano-us-government-stealing-americans/
A British author, residing in the United States for the past 30 years, created a small firestorm earlier this week with his candid observations that modern-day Americans have been duped by the government into accepting a European-style march toward socialism because we fail to appreciate the rich legacy of personal liberty that is everyone’s birthright and is expressly articulated in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Os Guinness, the author of more than a dozen books defending traditional Judeo-Christian values and Jeffersonian personal liberty, argued that we should embrace individual liberty and personal dignity and reject the “no givens, no rules, no limits” government we now have.
* HEAR! HEAR!
He went on to opine that the government today is not the constitutionally restrained protector of personal freedoms the Framers left us, but rather has become the wealth-distributing protector of collective interests the Founding Fathers never could have imagined.
* ABSOFRIGGIN'LUTELY!
Yet the problem is a deep one. The Framers believed in the presumption of liberty, which declares that we are free to make personal choices, and the government cannot interfere with our liberties unless we violate the rights of others. Stated differently, the federal government cannot interfere with our personal choices by writing any law it wants; it can only regulate behavior or spend money when the Constitution authorizes it to do so.
* THAT WAS THE THEORY; WEEP AT THE (MAL)PRACTICE.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
For the past 100 years, the federal government has rejected the Madisonian concept that it is limited to the 16 discrete powers the Constitution delegates to it, and has claimed its powers are unlimited, subject only to the express prohibitions in the Constitution. Even those prohibitions can be circumvented since government lawyers have persuaded federal courts to rule that Congress can spend tax dollars or borrowed money on any projects it wishes, whether authorized by the Constitution or not. The courts have even authorized Congress to use federal tax dollars to bribe the states into enacting laws that Congress is powerless to enact, and Congress has done so.
* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... ALL OF THIS IS TRUE!
The Declaration of Independence defines our personal Liberties as inalienable aspects of our humanity, and the Constitution prohibits the government from interfering with those Liberties — such as thought, speech, press, association, worship, self-defense, travel, privacy, due process, use of money and private property, to name a few.
The teaching of these Founding documents is that our Liberties are natural — their source is not the government — and they are personal, not collective. We don’t need a government permission slip to exercise them; we don’t need to belong to a group to enjoy them; they cannot be taken away by a congressional vote or a presidential signature.
* YES, MY FRIENDS! PLEASE! RE-READ THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH! SHOUT THIS TRUTH FROM THE ROOFTOPS!
Even though everyone who works for the government takes an oath to uphold the Declaration and the Constitution, very few are consistent with what they have sworn to do. We know that because on the transcendental issues of our day — life, liberty, war and debt — the leadership of both political parties...
* B*O*T*H POLITICAL PARTIES...
* MOST SELF-DESCRIBED LIBERALS... MOST SELF-DESCRIBED CONSERVATIVES...
...and the behavior of all modern presidents have revealed a steadfast willingness to write any law and regulate any behavior or permit any evil, whether authorized by the Constitution or not.
Take liberty. Both parties support the Patriot Act and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act apparatus, which together invade privacy, infringe upon free speech, permit federal agents to write their own search warrants and allow domestic spying on all of us all the time. This demonstrates that our political leaders do not believe that our Rights are inalienable, but can be interfered with and regulated by them.
[These scumbags] have written laws that literally permit federal agents to undertake the very acts the Constitution was written to prohibit.
* YEAH... "THESE SCUMBAGS"... MY SUBSTITUTION FOR THE AUTHOR'S "THEY"
(*GRIN*)
Take the lethal combination of war and debt. Both parties support perpetual war and perpetual debt. The leadership of both parties has permitted every modern president to kill whomever he pleases in foreign countries without lawful declarations of war and to do so by going into a $17 trillion hole of debt, with no end in sight. Today, 20 cents of every tax dollar collected goes to interest on pre-existing government debt. Today’s taxpayers are still paying interest on the $30 billion Woodrow Wilson borrowed to finance World War I in 1917.
The British author is correct. Unless we have a radical change in the direction of government — its size, cost, focus, intrusiveness and rejection of first principles — and unless we elect people to the government who truly believe the Declaration and the Constitution mean what they say, we will continue our march toward the federal destruction of the presumption of liberty.
It is a slow march, but a steady one.
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-08/iranbacked-militias-are-getting-us-weapons-in-iraq
U.S. weapons intended for Iraq’s beleaguered military...
* WHICH FRANKLY ON ITS OWN DOESN'T FILL ME WITH JOY...
...are winding up in the possession of the country’s Shiite militias, according to U.S. lawmakers and senior officials in the Barack Obama administration. These sources say that the Baghdad government, which was granted $1.2 billion in training and equipment aid in the omnibus spending bill passed last month, is turning hardware over to Shiite militias that are heavily influenced by Iran and have been guilty of gross human-rights violations.
(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)
One senior administration official told us that the U.S. government is aware of this, but is caught in a dilemma. The flawed Iraqi security forces are unable to fight Islamic State without the aid of the militias, who are often trained and sometimes commanded by officers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. And yet, if the U.S. stopped sending arms to the Iraqi military, things would get even worse, with IS overrunning more of the country and committing human-rights horrors on a broader scale. The risk of not aiding them was greater than the risk of aiding them, the official said, adding that this didn't mean the administration was unconcerned about the risks involved.
* OL' BARACK HAS LEFT THE WORLD IN A MESS, HASN'T HE.
* AGAIN... I SAY LET THE ISRAELIS DEAL WITH IT... LET OUR ARAB ALLIES DEAL WITH IT... LET THE TURKS (PART OF NATO SUPPOSEDLY) DEAL WITH IT...
* FOLKS. WE'RE IN A NO-WIN. IT'S WAY PAST TIME TO CUT OUR LOSSES. PROTECT OUR FRIENDS. PERIOD. LET THE REST KILL EACH OTHER TO THEIR HEART'S CONTENTS.
The official added that while the government in Baghdad under new Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi has been more responsive to U.S. concerns about weapons transfers than the previous government of Nouri al-Maliki which has not been vigilant enough.
* YEAH. REMEMBER. OUR LAST ALLY IN IRAQ WAS... er... OUR ENEMY. (OR AT LEAST ONE OF THEM.)
On Facebook, members of Iraqi Shiite militias proudly display American arms, such as this photo from October of an M1A1 Abrams tank draped in a Hezbollah flag:
* TANKS...??? WE'RE GIVING THESE SAVAGES TANKS...?!?!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
Washington was hopeful that new regime would be more capable and responsive to its concerns, but already there have been some obvious red flags. For example, Iraq’s new interior minister, Mohammed al-Ghabban, was a senior official in Iraq’s Badr militia, an organization U.S. officials have privately suspected of launching attacks on hundreds of Sunni Iraqis over last decade.
(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)
Senator John McCain, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, traveled to Baghdad last week and met with senior Americans and Iraqis, including Abadi. He told us that officials from both countries informed him that the Iraqi government was handing over American weapons to Shiite militias connected to Iran.
“The Iraqi military is a long way from being prepared to act in an impactful fashion, meanwhile the vacuum is being filled by Shia militias that are Iranian backed. And I was told … that some of those arms came from the United States of America,” McCain said. “The Iranians are now, to a large degree, through the Shia militias, in the absence of a capable Iraqi military, doing most of the fighting against ISIS. That cannot be in the U.S. interest.”
* YA THINK, JOHN...?!?!
McCain and other U.S. officials said it’s difficult to track the exact weapons the Iraqi government is giving the Shiite militias, and it is also unknown whether the militias are receiving weapons that the U.S. gave Iraq long ago or have been sent to since the U.S. re-engaged in fighting in Iraq over last summer.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
White House spokesman Alistair Baskey disputed the assertions by other administration officials and McCain...
* OF COURSE HE DID. (HE'S LYING!)
Likewise, Commander Elissa Smith, a Pentagon public affairs officer, insisted that the U.S. government complies with American laws regarding end-use monitoring and that all foreign military transfers for Iraq must go through the Iraqi government. “The government of Iraq has committed to provide substantially the same degree of security protection that the U.S. Government would provide. Routine end use monitoring of U.S. provided items is also conducted by the U.S. Government,” she said in a statement.
* SERIOUSLY...??? IT'S A MIRACLE IF THE PENTAGON CAN LOCATE THE 6TH FLEET! COM'ON... WE'RE TALKING TOTAL INCOMPETENTS. (POLITICIZED TOTAL INCOMPETENTS AT THAT!)
Mike Flynn, the retired general who left his post as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency last year, said Iraq's military has a very weak tracking system for its weapons. "We can account for every single weapon in the U.S. military," Flynn said. "In Iraq, despite the great work by our soldiers, there is nothing like that. How can we account for money, weapons and even training in Iraq?"
He added: "The accountability of weapons systems, once turned over to any Iraqi, is at best weak and it may be nonexistent."
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... OOPS...!!! MAKE THAT "FOUR-PARTER" (Part 3 of 4)
Since the U.S. joined the Iraqi government in its fight against IS over the summer, it and other allied governments have provided a wide array of military assistance, training and arms to the Iraqi security forces, some of which was supposed to be disbursed to other fighting groups such as the Kurdish peshmerga forces. The Kurds allege that Baghdad hasn’t given them most of the weapons Washington wanted them to have.
* I BELIEVE THE KURDS...
U.S. weapons aren't supposed to be transferred to the Shiite militias, which not only have a long track record of human-rights violations, but of killing U.S. forces during America’s occupation of Iraq. More broadly, these militias stand accused of ongoing ethnic cleansing in Sunni areas, further harming the chances for the political reconciliation that will be needed to achieve stability in Iraq going forward.
Lawmakers in both parties are now calling on the Obama administration to provide better accounting for U.S. weapons in Iraq. There are laws on the books prohibiting America from sending arms to foreign militaries guilty of atrocities.
* AS IF OBAMA GIVES A SHIT FOR U.S. LAWS!
“I am concerned by reports that U.S. weapons have ended up in the hands of Shi’a militia forces - all the more so, given their history of committing atrocities with impunity,” Senator Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Senate state and foreign operations subcommittee told us in a statement.
The so-called Leahy law applies only to military forces of a foreign government, not non-state actors. But in Leahy’s view, the prohibition should extend to the Shiite militias in Iraq because they are at least partly funded and under the supervision of the Baghdad government. Last year, the Obama administration determined that the Leahy law legally did not apply to the Iraqi tribal militias or Free Syrian Army. Nonetheless, the administration also determined that, as a matter of policy, it would vet these units for human-rights abusers as if they were foreign militaries.
* IN ENGLISH? (*SNORT*) OBAMA JUST TOOK BOTH SIDES OF THE ISSUE.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 4 of 4)
The situation is all the more murky because the omnibus budget legislation passed last month allows the secretary of defense to waive legal requirements for “end use monitoring” of new weapons and equipment that are sent to Baghdad as part of the new Iraq Train and Equip Program. The budget bill also extends the secretary's existing authority to waive the Leahy law itself in “extraordinary circumstances.” (To date, no waivers have been officially invoked.)
* FOLKS... PERHAPS IT'S TIME TO END THE FARCE AND SIMPLY DISBAND CONGRESS. BASICALLY EVERY LAW CONGRESS PASSES NOWADAYS SEEMS TO HAVE AN ADDENDUM STATING "UNLESS THE PRESIDENT OR A SUBORDINANT EXECUTIVE BRANCH OFFICERS SAYS OTHERWISE."
Tom Malinowski, the assistant secretary of state whose bureau is in charge of Leahy law compliance, told us late last year that he anticipated the State Department was equipped for the challenge of vetting of the Syrian and Iraqi unites.
“It worked in Colombia and I think it can work in Iraq and Syria,” he said. “It’s designed for situations where we have a strong interest in engaging with a foreign security force, but where human-rights abuses are also an obstacle to achieving our objectives. It gives us better choices than complicity in those abuses or cutting the country off completely. It also provides an incentive for our partners to improve.”
* SEE WHAT I MEAN? IT'S ALL DONE "OFF THE CUFF."
But the scale of the effort in Iraq is daunting. The omnibus package specifies that the U.S. will send the Iraqi military more than 600 mortars of various ranges, 1,200 anti-tank missile launchers, 43,000 M4 carbines and 45,000 body armor kits. On Tuesday, the State Department announced that it was sending Iraq’s military 250 mine-resistant vehicles.
* GEEZUS...
* NOT ONLY ARE WE PUTTING DANGEROUS WEAPONS IN THE HANDS OF... (*SHRUG*)... BUT WE'RE SPENDING BORROWED MONEY TO DO SO!
Human rights groups are concerned. In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Amnesty International called on the U.S. to drastically increase its monitoring and assessments of groups it is arming in Iraq and Syria. “No arms transfers should be authorized until such robust risk assessments are completed. It must first be determined that there is no substantial risk of any further arms supplies being used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international human rights or humanitarian law,” it reads.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/barack-obama-free-community-college-114094.html
President Barack Obama will need the approval of Congress to realize his proposal for making two years of community college free for students.
* FOLKS... AS YOU KNOW, OBAMA IS A SCUMBAG. THIS IS ISN'T A REAL PROPOSAL. (RECALL... OBAMA AND THE DEMS CONTROLLED THE WHOLE ENCHILADA DURING 2009 AND 2010.) THIS IS PR... MARKETING... GRANDSTANDING. IT'S AN ATTEMPT TO MANIPULATE PEOPLE AND DIVIDE. WHY COVER IT THEN? BECAUSE THERE ARE ACTUAL ISSUES I'D LIKE TO ADDRESS.
So far, that plan doesn’t have an official price tag — other than “significant,” according to White House officials.
* AND WE TAKE THIS MAN SERIOUSLY...? REALLY...? HOW SAD. HOW SICK.
“What I’d like to do is to see the first two years of community college free for everybody who’s willing to work for it,” Obama said in a White House video posted Thursday evening.
* IF THEY'RE "WORKING FOR IT" THAT MEANS THEY CAN AFFORD IT. COMMUNITY COLLEGE IS CHEAP!
“It’s something ... that will train our workforce so that we can compete with anybody in the world.”
* NONSENSE. K-12 FAILS MOST AMERICANS. LET'S FIX K-12 FIRST!
* IN ANY CASE, THE AMERICAN WORKFORCE USUALLY "TRAINS ON THE JOB." (THUS... "ON THE JOB TRAINING.")
* IF ANYTHING, WE NEED MORE TECHNICAL SCHOOLS... MORE APPRENTICESHIP PROGRAMS!
The president’s proposal would make two years of community college free...
* NOTHING IS FREE...
* AGAIN... OBAMA... AND THE PRESS... TREAT AMERICANS AS FOOLS.
...for students of any age...
(*SNORT*)
...with a C+ average who attend school at least half-time and who are making “steady progress” toward their degree.
(*HEADACHE*)
White House director Cecilia Muñoz said Obama aims to make college “the norm in the same way high school is the norm now.”
* IF HIGH SCHOOLS WERE DOING SUCH A GREAT JOB... WHY THE NEED FOR UNIVERSAL COLLEGE?
* FOLKS... ALL OBAMA WANTS TO DO IS WASTE TIME AND MONEY.
The Institute for College Access and Success, which is typically in step with the Obama administration, called the proposal “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Among the problems, TICAS says, is that the more substantial costs of college — living expenses, textbooks and transportation — are typically left out of the deal.
(*SMIRK*)
And Bryce McKibben, a former Association of Community College Trustees policy analyst who recently became a policy adviser to Democrats on the Senate education committee, has noted potential flaws. For instance, the program could end up doing more for less needy students than those who need it the most, because low-income applicants may already be covered by Pell grants and other federal aid.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/david-stockman/the-deflation-howlers/
The calamity howlers of deflation are out in force this morning owing to an absolute economic non sequitur. Namely, that year-on-year consumer prices in the EU came in at negative 0.2% in December, implying that ECB printing presses need to go into immediate overdrive.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
Well, of course the CPI has momentarily weakened. Crude oil has experienced a monumental plunge of more than 50% since mid-2014. That has temporarily dragged down the euro zone’s reported CPI and the math isn’t all that complex. During the last 12 months, euro zone energy prices have fallen by 6.3%, and everything else is still 0.6% higher than a year ago.
So what’s the emergency? This is the very same CPI blip that occurred when oil collapsed in the second half of 2008. As is evident below, that episode did not generate some cascading plunge into economic darkness. In fact, the Eurozone CPI was back running above 2.5% in no time.
The truth of the matter is that the EU-19 is in clover because it’s consumers get a big break; and, on the other side of the economic equation, it produces almost no oil. Europe’s production is mainly in the UK and Norway and they have their own currencies. Accordingly, the ECB should be putting its printing presses on an extended sabbatical and declaring victory on the achievement of its “price stability” objective.
* AMEN!
Indeed, the notion that the hairline puncture of the zero inflation line shown above is a precursor of a deflationary calamity amounts to economic voodoo. There has been no structural change whatsoever in the Eurozone economy since 2008 when the last oil-driven CPI drop occurred, and therefore no empirical basis for the notion that wages and prices are about to descend into an accelerating downward spiral. If anything Brussels’s dirigisme regime has made prices and wages even more “rigid” and “sticky” owing to its avalanche of new regulations, subsidies and other economic interventions.
(*NOD*)
The plain fact is that the euro zone like the rest of the DM has an inflationary bias that is embedded in six decades of history during which the euro and its predecessor currencies lost purchasing power month-in-and-month-out.
Households are finally getting what will undoubtedly be a short respite from the inflation tax, but that is the extent of it. There is not one rational reason to believe that the relentless upward march of the price level shown below will not presently resume its well-worn path.
The euro zone deflation story is pure cock and bull, and that proposition doesn’t take much investigation to document. First and foremost, there is no sign of a wage collapse; how do you get a deflationary spiral if wages continue to rise?
(*SMILE*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Owing to heavy unionization and protectionist labor laws, euro zone wage rates have been on a long-running one-way escalator, and show no sign of “deflation”. Total compensation per worker is up 1.3% during the last twelve months - an identical rate to the 1.3% recorded during the year before that, and not much below the 1.7% annual rate of gain that has been recorded since mid-2010.
If you take purely euro zone produced items the story is the same. In the case of total services, the December LTM price change is 1.25% - a figure that has been visited twice before this century without untoward effects.
In the specific case of housing services and rentals, the LTM inflation rate is not much under 2% - a level which has prevailed for the past several years.
Likewise, the inflation rate for euro zone produced recreation and personal services shows no signs of plunging into the abyss. It’s LTM rate of increase is about 1.5%, and is in the general zone that has prevailed for most of this century.
The same is true of transport services. The index is still rising at a 1.5% rate, and while below the 2.5% trend of the last decade or so, the larger point is self-evident. Isn’t it a good thing for productivity and growth that the euro zone’s inflation rate for transport of people and goods is abating slightly? Where’s the fire?
In short, the euro zone’s momentary spat of year-over-year price stability is almost entirely owing to the global decline of commodities since the China bubble driven peaks of 2012; and also the lagged effect of the Euro’s strength prior to mid-2014.
In the case of non-food commodities including energy, for example, the producer price index is down about 25% from it 2011/12 peak. Since the euro zone imports a heavy share of its energy and industrial commodities, isn’t this decline a welcome development?
Commodity prices are still double their pre-2005 level. In other words, the giant global commodity bubble generated by the runaway credit boom in China, the BRICs and their EM satellites has finally started to cool, and this relief is now washing through the euro zone price indices. Rather than an existential crisis, the cooling of euro zone inflation is mainly a welcome surcease from the utterly aberrational credit bubble that was foisted on the global economy by central banks over the past decade.
Even in the case of food commodities, the sharp decline since 2012 is a menace only to the French farmers - at worst. (How can it be said that a 20% reduction in food costs is harming the living standard of 350 million euro zone consumers or is a causing the macro-economy’s chronic underperformance?)
Finally, where prices are falling outside of imports, commodities and the processed industrial goods which embody them, this result has nothing to do with short-term monetary policy. The price index for euro zone communications services, for example, is negative 2.5% on an LTM basis - but that is nothing new. Owing to the communications technology revolution and a modest degree of deregulation, prices in this sector have been falling for the better part of two decades, and it has been a boon for economic growth and consumer welfare, too.
(*NOD*)
In short, the euro zone deflation scare has nothing to do with empirical reality or common sense economics. Instead, it is pure propaganda emanating from the policy apparatchiks in Frankfurt and Brussels, and aped and amplified by the casino’s stock peddlers who claim to be “economists” and “strategists.”
Post a Comment