While the government meddlers aim at the impossible (“stimulating the economy”) with the aid of the unethical (appropriating tax payer funds for their interventions), the much-maligned market is doing its best to sweeten the pain the only way it knows – providing new buyers at prices that turn the old buyers into sellers. Joel Bowman at The Daily Reckoningreports (June 12, 2010):
“For a growing number of well-to-do, geographically mobile Chinese citizens, property investments abroad are becoming a popular store of wealth, and a hedge against an increasingly precarious market back home. Continue reading →
“White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, WND has learned, lived rent-free in Washington, D.C., for years, thanks in part to a friend under contract with oil giant BP.
While the White House approaches “day 50” of the environmental disaster caused by an explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, unable yet to stop the flowing crude in the Gulf, several media sources have questioned the administration’s efforts to regulate BP prior to the incident. Continue reading →
Video 1: An interesting interview by Maria Bartiromo of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild on the financial crisis (December 2008). Here’s a quick break down of his main points: Continue reading →
This is a brief but candid glimpse into the mind set of the power elite.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the major technocrats of US dominance in the last twenty years and President Carter’s foreign policy advisor, candidly assesses the world in the light of two new developments:
1. The challenge to the Atlantic world (US-Europe), which constitutes the current global political leadership, from a more diverse group – the developing countries, as well as the second world
2. Greater political awakening among the masses than at any other time in history, which obstructs the ability of the leadership to deal effectively with world-wide turmoil Continue reading →
“Those who escape thought-reform at the end of history may trace our decline back to 1886, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that corporations are legal persons whose life, liberty and property are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Ratified to protect freed slaves, it took railroad-company lawyers less than two decades to turn this amendment into a loophole. By 1904, corporations controlled four-fifths of the nation’s industrial production. Today transnationals control the world’s cultural and economic production as well, and generate most of its pollution. Continue reading →
“The threat of legal action from mining giant Barrick Gold has forced Vancouver-based Talonbooks to postpone publication of a book about the Canadian mining industry.
Publisher Karl Siegler calls it a clear case of “libel chill” by one of Canada’s largest mining companies.
The book, Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries, was to be published in spring 2010, but in February, the publisher and everyone else involved with the book got a threatening letter from Barrick lawyers.Continue reading →
Think of it this way: as classical liberals, we understand that a bureaucrat in Washington could not possibly have enough information to correctly regulate the price or quantity of a good or service. This applies to labor markets, and immigration is essentially a function thereof. There’s no way Washington or the state of Arizona can know how much immigration we really need.Continue reading →
A leading Israeli security expert thinks the new full body scanners are a waste of money, reports the Vancouver Sun :
“A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install “useless” imaging machines at airports across the country.
“I don’t know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.”
Unfortunately, Sela seems to think the “trusted traveler” program is better:
“Sela testified it makes more sense to create a “trusted traveler” system so pre-approved low-risk passengers can move through an expedited screening process. That would leave more resources in the screening areas, where automatic sniffing technology would detect any explosive residue on a person or their baggage.”
Unfortunately for privacy advocates, this is a move from the frying pan to the fire. “Trusted traveler” is the name for the biometric ID program. Just recently, on April 14, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the US and Germany would be integrating their respective biometric travel programs.
“According to US data, the OCTG tradecase is the largest in US history against China imports valued at more than $2.6 billion in 2008 and about $1 billion last year.”
“China has imposed anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on a U.S. specialty steel product, and also hit Russia with anti-dumping duties in the same case, its customs administration said.
U.S. producers will be assessed anti-dumping duties of up to 64.8 percent and anti-subsidy, or “countervailing,” duties of up to 44.6 percent on the grain-oriented electrical steel, it said on its website on Monday.
Grain-oriented electrical steel, also known as grain-oriented silicon steel, is used for the cores of high-efficiency transformers, electric motors and generators.
The state-backed China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals and Chemicals Importers and Exporters hailed the Ministry of Commerce’s April 10 ruling, which the Ministry has not yet publicly announced, state news agency Xinhua said.
“During the investigation the Ministry found that U.S. producers had received subsidies by the U.S. government, and their unfair competition hurt Chinese producers,” Xinhua said, quoting an unnamed person at the chamber of commerce.”
“According to the statistics from the General Administration of Customs, China’s exports were valued at US $112.11 billion in March, up by 24.3 percent year on year, while the imports were up by 66 percent to US $119.35 billion, trade deficit were US $ 7.24 billion. This is the first monthly trade deficit for China since May of 2004.”
What’s interesting is that this trade row with the US isn’t necessarily a sign of rising protectionism in China, as the media often reports. It seems to signal a move toward more trade with emerging markets in Asia and elsewhere. Thus at the recently concluded Boao Forum for Asia, (the Chinese Davos), the Chinese Vice-President called for open markets and not protectionism. Of course, this isn’t free trade, by any means, but state-driven mercantilism. It remains to be seen whether that is any better than state-driven protectionism.
As Russia has hardened its position and moved closer to the European and US stance, the Chinese move has become crucial for Iran. Iran continues to be the fifth largest exporter of crude in the world, but US sanctions have meant that its refineries have suffered from lack of foreign investment and it now relies on the world market for its gasoline needs.
Sir James Michael Goldsmith, Anglo-French financier and corporate raider of the 1980s, is most infamous for taking over Goodyear Tires and restructuring it, thereby putting its many employees out of work.
In this deeply prophetic interview with Charlie Rose in 1994 he discusses his book about globalization, The Trap, and displays a more humane side of his complex intelligence.
In the earlier part of the interview (not shown here), Goldsmith gets into a heated debate with Clinton economic honcho Laura Tyson over the benefits of NAFTA and GATT in which Tyson comes off as both naive and uninformed.
In another part,Goldsmith calls Indian physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva “remarkable” and asks why it is that global “free” trade, supposedly so beneficial to developing countries, was protested widely and vigorously by huge numbers of people in India.
Take away points from the interview:
*This (globalization) is the establishment against the rest of society
*I am for big business until it devours society
*Big business loves total access to unlimited give-away labor
*In every developing nation you have a handful of people who control everything, the oligarchs
*This (globalization) is the poor in rich countries subsidizing the rich in the poor countries (Lila: I’d add that the poor in poor countries are also subsidizing the rich in rich countries)
*Free trade within homogeneous regions is to be preferred to global trade
(Lila: This coincides with something I’ve advocated for a while, on the principle of subsidiarity)
*The European parliament is a force for pseudo-democratic institutions
*It’s already fixed by the two main parties, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists
*The people have a right to vote on the single most important economic decision of their life times
*Here in the USA we’ve had no debate on it (GATT) while we’ve had a huge debate about NAFTA which was a pimple
*GATT is going through because business wants it
*It’s a fix here (the US), as it is in Europe
*We’ve allowed instruments that are supposed to serve us to become our masters
*GATT is an example of how an economic doctrine is going to destabilize our society
*Nuclear is another example. Here in Europe, we’ve not been allowed to discuss this disastrous form of energy, disastrous in terms both of economics and in terms of security
*Corporate agriculture is a third example of how we are destroying our societies
*The ruling machinery of government power in Europe is imposing this (GATT) without a debate