The Obama administration knew that it had this rot in the middle of the process on offshore drilling – yet it empowered an already discredited, disgraced agency to essentially be in charge."
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Jonah Goldberg for Commentary
Barack Obama’s neo-socialism is neoconservatism’s mirror image. Obama is a firm believer in the power of government to extend its scope and grasp far deeper into society. In much the same way that neoconservatives accepted a realistic and limited role for the government, Obama tolerates a limited and realistic role for the market.
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The Reactionary
Sometime in the last 25 years banks stopped looking at their customers as clients and began seeing them as counterparties...and at that point all pretension to ethics or a moral compass in the industry were annihilated...it is every man for himself, devil take the hindmost, and all fiduciary responsibility for your customer base be damned...welcome to 21st Century Finance.
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Thomas Huckleberry Spartacus for The Reactionary
The system - the entire edifice of US finance - is completely corrupt, and the rest of the non-financial fortune 500 are right on their heels. This is what happens when your entire economy is managed for Wall Streets' quarterly expectations game.
We can’t know the timing of the impending monetary catastrophe, but it is coming. Smart investors will minimize their dependence on the dollar before it crashes. At this late date, no one should trust the government and media experts” who assure us that the worst is over.
by Delroi T. Pusser for The Reactionary
A broad premise: as a nation, the United States of America is transmogrifying into a land of men, not laws. Of vested interests ready to discard democratic principles when they inconvenience a buck. With an economy premised on politically-connected authoritarian finance, not accountable capitalism.
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Alexander Ackley R.A. for The Reactionary
The once-mighty Emperors walking naked down the plank – their flaccid buttocks exposed to derision – were once the Masters of the Universe. They managed to take the greatest wealth-creating vehicle ever devised by man – laissez-faire Anglo-Saxon Capitalism – and through sheer avarice and blind arrogance crashed it into a stone wall of debt and multifactorial fraudulent schemes. What is left is a shipwreck-version of free-market Capitalism...dashed and ditched.
by
APOCRYPHA for The Reactionary
I view the ceaseless plunge in revolving credit as folks up against a wall or at the least, suffering from job insecurity or other financial-related anxiety or even caution. And eventually, this will come home to roost in an ugly fashion. Because there can be no doubt that many used the credit card as supplemental income. Read: they need to hang on to it just as desperately as they need to hang on to their other income-producer, their job. So they will do all in their power to keep that credit line available. Because with that gone, there is a finite number of ways that you can kite your monthly obligations. But unless jobs begin to be created, this, too, will backfire.
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James K. Glassman for Commentary
Europe supported its welfare state with borrowed money, a practice that can be perfectly healthy as long as both welfare state and debt are modest and loans can be serviced by diligent workers. Europe, however, is not nearly as wealthy as it thought it was, or as wealthy as its national way of life indicated.
by
Oliver Rothschild for The Reactionary
Ever increasingly we begin to realise our economy is based on the natural world. But our ecology conscience warns us that the very same economy is destroying the natural world. Steadily we all come to the realization that we’ve been living an unsustainable lifestyle. We’re using resources far faster than the planet can replenish them and expelling waste much faster than the planet can absorb.
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APOCRYPHA for The Reactionary
The Interior/MMS cesspool of Bush was merely extended to his successor. These guys are as thick as thieves. Crony capitalism. It was business as usual at MMS after Obama took over. “Categorical exclusions” were issued to BP by Salazar. The hypocrisy, then, of all the rabid vitriol and far-out demands for up-front billions, ring as hollow as ever. It’s a show. A damn show.
Between 2008 and 2010, several things went wrong in Europe, the biggest of which was Greece’s financial crisis. For years, Greek fiscal policy had been unsound. Although private debt had been rising, the country’s overall debt-to-GDP ratio had not ballooned, because the Greek economy was growing. But that growth turned out to be unsustainable. When the global economic crisis hit, Greece’s deficit more than doubled. The problem was compounded by revelations that the government had grossly falsified and padded its budget in the run up to the 2009 parliamentary elections.
by Dr. William Mallinson for The Reactionary
In 2002, a bunch of bankers from Goldman Sachs came to Greece and sold their services to the government of Kostas Taperman (otherwise known as Simitis), explaining how to legalistically flout EU regulations and borrow bad money, hoodwinking the European Commission into the bargain, using the by now infamous derivatives. When these derivatives mature, Greece is likely to owe so much that it could end up paying more interest than it apparently bargained for.
Today, academics have drawn the focus away from the immorality of the monetary debasement component of quantitative easing by refocusing discussions on the useless debate of whether or not QE assists economic recovery. This type of useless debate only serves as a distraction tactic to draw attention away from the more paramount issue of whether QE destroys the wealth of citizens and therefore is an enemy of freedom.
by
Steve Forbes for Forbes
Almost every action Obama officials take underscores their belief in the stereotype that businesspeople are mostly amoral, corner-cutting, consumer-shafting, pollution-loving menaces.
American conservatives, particularly the fiscal variety, tend to hold up the European Union as a model of irresponsible, big-spending economic policy. But consider this: According to E.U. rules, member countries cannot maintain budget deficits above 3 percent of gross domestic product; nor can their total debt rise above 60 percent of GDP. The U.S. budget deficit in 2009 was three times the E.U.’s limit, and total debt will zoom past the 60 percent threshold sometime this year. Washington makes Paris look frugal.
Russian “Illegals” Not Alone in Trying to Seal U.S. Secrets
Anyone who underplays the perils that Russia and its tactics presents to the US in... more