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Foreign Policy writes on Putin’s useful idiots – German environmentalists.
… Two decades of stringent environmental regulations have made Germany, Europe’s largest economy, increasingly dependent on natural gas from Russia, the world’s largest exporter. Of course, economic leverage translates seamlessly into political power, and Russia’s sway over German foreign policy has been conspicuous as the recent imbroglio in Georgia has continued to play out.
In fact, Germany has the means to power its economy without Russian natural gas, so energy dependence is unnecessary. For starters, it is home to the largest reserves of coal in Europe. But thanks to the European Union’s marquee climate-change mitigation policy—the continent-wide Emission Trading Scheme—the economics of power production have shifted decidedly against coal because its combustion releases the most greenhouse gases of any conventional fuel source.
Given that coal is currently taboo, Germany could meet its energy needs by expanding the use of nuclear energy, which emits no carbon dioxide when used to generate electricity. Yet the environmental movement in Germany opposes nuclear energy because its waste is difficult and dangerous to store. In 2000, environmentalists won passage of the Nuclear Exit Law, which commits German utilities to phasing out nuclear power by 2020. …
David Warren has a great column on the irreconcilable differences in our politics.
… To one side, it goes without saying that the crisis was caused by greed and conspiracy, in the absence of sufficient government regulation. To the other, it is self-evidently the accomplishment of a U.S. government that set the accounting rules and created the subprime monsters (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) to deliver mortgages to people who would never qualify under common-sense rules of banking.
The latter are right and the former are wrong on the history, but that is beside the point for the time being. The issue has instead found its way to the front line between two basically irreconcilable views of reality. Only in America are they so equally balanced. Elsewhere in the West, the true believers in the Nanny State have long since prevailed.
Democrats and Republicans have become two solitudes, and so, the result of the election will be ugly, no matter which side wins.
John Stossel says too bad the bailout passed.
… Steven Horwitz, an economics professor at St. Lawrence University, got it right when he wrote, “There will be short-term pain if we don’t bail out these firms, but that is the hangover price we pay for 15 years or more of binge lending. The proposed bailout cannot prevent the pain of the hangover; it can only conceal it by shifting and dispersing it among the taxpayers and an economy weakened by the borrowing, taxing and/or inflation needed to pay for that $700 billion. Better we should take our short-term pain straight up and clean out the mistakes of our binge and then get back to the business of free markets without creating an unchecked executive branch monstrosity trying to ‘save’ those who profited most from the binge and harming innocent taxpayers in the process”.
Sure, without the bailout, there might have been a severe recession. Bubbles must pop. But it’s important that we let bubbles pop. Markets would then find a floor and recover.
Now the politicians are blowing some new air into the bubble, but we may have a recession anyway. And with more intervention, regulation and ambiguity about what the real market prices for those government-supported securities are, investors won’t know where the real bottom is.
So any recession will last longer. And the moral hazard the bailout perpetuates will lead to new bubbles … and then demands for another bailout.
Free enterprise sounds nice. We should try it sometime.
Walter Williams has the real lessons of the bailout.
In my more cynical moments, I think that we Americans deserve what we get from our politicians, many of whom can be generally described as nothing less than loathsome. You say, “Williams, that’s a pretty heavy putdown.” My question to you is how else would you describe these congressmen who are now blaming the financial mess on the failure of the free market? Starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, that was given more teeth during the Clinton administration, Congress started intimidating banks and other financial institutions into making loans, so-called subprime loans, to high-risk homebuyers and businesses. The carrot offered was that these high-risk loans would be purchased by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have known that this was a prescription for disaster but there was a congressional chorus of denial.
Five years ago, Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) vouched for the “soundness” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and said, “I do not see any possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury.” In 2004 congressional hearings, where the Bush administration sought greater oversight over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said, “We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac and particularly at Fannie Mae,” adding that “the GSEs have exceeded their housing goals.” Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) said, “There’s nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” In these hearings Barney Frank said that he doesn’t see “anything in the reports that raises safety and soundness problems.” Earlier this year, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) praised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for “riding to the rescue” to help people get home mortgage loans, adding that they “need to do more” to help high-risk borrowers get better loans. …
Alvaro Vargas Llosa in the New Republic says we need to make sure we don’t take the wrong lessons from the credit crisis.
As was the case with the 1929 crash that ushered in the Great Depression, the current financial meltdown is giving rise to myths that will influence public policy for decades to come. It is imperative that those myths be debunked before the next U.S. administration starts to make important decisions, followed by many other countries. By far the most dangerous myth is that deregulation is the root cause of the problem.
Yes, Wall Street firms were greedy, irresponsible and, in many cases, downright stupid. But those are fairly constant features in any society and there is no reason to believe that investment bankers were any more greedy, irresponsible and stupid in 2007 and 2008 than, say, five or 10 years earlier.
As many authoritative economists are desperately trying to explain amid all the confusion, the culprit was a system geared toward loaning money to people who were not in a position to pay it back. Two policies underpinned that system: easy money by the Federal Reserve and the government-induced lowering of standards for approving loan requests. …
Karl Rove says the voters haven’t decided yet.
… Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain’s is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.
Mr. Obama’s test is that voters haven’t shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.
But here’s a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president.
Camille Paglia’s column this month builds from letters. She answers a great one about Sarah Palin.
… Yes, both Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.
Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin’s performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin’s digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn’t — judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.
The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin’s brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don’t we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality. …
Ann Coulter has fun with this year’s most outrageous candidate – Joe Biden.
If Sarah Palin had made just one of the wildly inaccurate statements smugly uttered by Sen. Joe Biden in last week’s vice presidential debate, there would have been 3-inch headlines in newspapers across America. (I can almost hear Katie Couric asking me, “Which newspapers?”)
These weren’t insignificant errors, such as when Biden said, “Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time, and you ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years.”
It turns out that Katie’s restaurant, where Biden gets his feel for the average American, closed 20 years ago. The only evidence that he spends any time in Home Depot is that it appears that a pipe wrench fell on his head one too many times.
Palin would surely have been forced to withdraw from the ticket had she said something like that, but most of Biden’s errors were not trifling mistakes like these. They were lengthy Lyndon LaRouche-like disquisitions that were pure fantasy from beginning to end.
For example, Biden said about Hezbollah: “When we kicked — along with France — we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon.” Hezbollah was never kicked out of Lebanon. …