By the usual gauges America’s Depression-era president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a failure. With few exceptions, nothing he did helped the crippled US economy very much. His policies lurched from one failed experiment to another: price controls, make-work employment, destruction of agricultural crops (to raise prices) in the midst of starvation. His modest increases in federal spending didn’t even compensate for the contraction of state and local spending. Yet Roosevelt won the presidency four times, uniquely in US history, and...
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the world should hope for the election of Donald Trump next Tuesday. American policy has become a fetid morass in which ideology and influence-peddling jointly serve to insulate its leaders from the real world. It is not simply that America's leaders are out of touch, but that they are in continuous touch with a fictitious construct of the world that excludes the possibility of policy course correction. America's policy elites are sleepwalkers, in the way that...
Today's US GDP report is dodgy in almost every respect. It's not surprising that bond yields fell on the news. The biggest disappointment relative to the consensus forecast was personal consumption, at 1.47%, the lowest vs. 2.6%. Even more disappointing is the composition of personal consumption. Services consumption contributed 1% of the overall 2.9% growth. Most of this was health care (hardly a contributor to long-term growth) and housing services (more rentals from homeowners who cannot afford to buy). Neither...
Small-ball conservatism dominates mainstream Republican thinking. It finds expression in the writing of Ramesh Pommeru, Ross Douthat, and Yuval Levin, whose “conservative governing vision” sees a kind of: ... American life in which government does not use society as an instrument to advance progressive aims but rather sustains and strengthens the space in which society can thrive and enables all Americans to take part in what happens in that space. "Such a government would no doubt be much smaller, more restrained,...
The most extreme misstatement of the Oct. 9 US presidential debate was Hillary Clinton's proposal for a no-fly zone in Syria. The Democratic candidate declared, "I, when I was secretary of state, advocated and I advocate today no-fly zones and safe zones. We need some leverage with the Russians, because they are not going to come to the negotiating table for a diplomatic resolution, unless there is some leverage over them." Neither Donald Trump nor the debate moderators mentioned...
Deutsche Bank's plunging share price raised fears of a new financial crisis on the order of 2008 in the United States or 2011 in Europe. Deutsche, Germany's largest lender, lost slightly over half its market value this year, and declined by 30% since Sept. 9. German media quoted unnamed Berlin officials warning that there would be no bailout for Deutsche Bank, and the stock price fell sharply this morning. That's the bad news, and very bad news indeed if...
The presidential election was over the moment the word "deplorable" made its run out of Hillary Clinton's unguarded mouth. As the whole world now knows, Clinton told a Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender fundraiser Sept. 10, "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.” Hillary is road...
The canonical definition of the Yiddish word chutzpah involves a man who murders his parents and then asks for clemency because he is an orphan. An unprecedented degree of chutzpah informs the machinations of radical Muslims, who engineer humanitarian disasters and then demand that the West intervene to save them. In his recent book Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University points to the first instance of this tactic: the Kosovo Liberation Army persuaded Bill Clinton's Secretary of State...
The first step to finding a solution is to know that there's a problem. Donald Trump understands that the Washington foreign-policy establishment caused the whole Middle Eastern mess. I will review the problem and speculate about what a Trump administration might do about it. For the thousand years before 2007, when the Bush administration hand-picked Nouri al-Maliki to head Iraq's first Shia-dominated government, Sunni Muslims had ruled Iraq. Maliki was vetted both by the CIA and by the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. With...
Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. "We were sorry that...
The outcome of tonight's apparent coup attempt in Turkey remains unclear, but the motivation for regime change in Turkey has been building under the surface for years. Turkey faces a perfect storm of economic, political and foreign policy problems. First, Turkey's much-heralded economic growth spurt of the 2000's has come to a grinding stop. The Erdogan boom, which inspired predictions that Turkey might emerge as another China, resembled the Asian experience less than it did the Latin American credidt bubbles...
Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this. The terrorists, though,...
"We are not as divided as we seem, President Barack Obama told a Dallas memorial for five police officers killed by a black sniper enraged at the alleged mistreatment of African-Americans by white police. But a different Barack Obama hosted rapper Kendrick Lamar at a White House barbecue last July 4. Details of Lamar's performance are not available, but it is unlikely that he repeated this line (from a recent Saturday Night Live appearance): "I put a bullet in the back of the...
Britain's "Leave" camp argues that the deciding issue in the Brexit vote was sovereignty, not immigration. The two issues, though, inevitably will become linked. The continental members of the European Community, especially Germany, are on a slippery slope which will lead to mass absorption of migrants and eventually the free movement of many of those migrants within the European Community. Britain's interests in the matter of migration differ markedly from Germany's, and that divergence is the most pressing reason...
Along with all the pundits, I underestimated the British--a common enough error, which puts me in the distinguished company of the whole of the mainstream media, the vast majority of hedge funds, not to mention Philip II of Spain, Napoleon, and Hitler. In a May 2 dispatch from England I wrote that the British had lost their appetite for risk, as a modest post-Imperial power with a lot to be modest about. On the contrary, the British took the plunge, and that...
Contrary to all expectations, including last-minute voter surveys, Britain voted to leave the European Community by a margin of 52-48, or more than 850,000 votes, BBC and Sky News forecast at 5:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Midnight trading in financial markets produced record swings in currency and security prices, with gold up nearly $100 just before 5:00 a.m. and the British pound trading at just $1.33 to the dollar, down from $1.50 before the voting began. This is NOT a...
A “Russian-Chinese axis” will dominate the Middle East with Israel as its western anchor: That scenario was floated June 15 in Russia Insider, a louche propaganda site that often runs the work of fringe conspiracy theorists and the occasional anti-Semite. But the author in this case was the venerable Giancarlo Elia Valori, president of Huawei Technologies’ Italian division, a veteran of past intelligence wars with a resume that reads like a Robert Ludlum novel. Writes Prof. Valori: A Russian/Israeli axis could...
(This article first appeared in PJ Media) The world was anti-Semitic in 1944, when Ben Hecht wrote A Guide for the Bedevilled. The majority of educated, civilized, and rational people believed that the Jews in some fashion had brought their own problems upon themselves. Hecht began fighting anti-Semitism after an unsettling exchange with a New York hostess, who explained to him that Jews had to acknowledge their own responsibility in the matter of their persecution. This polite Gentile lady explained: The Jews...
American employers have been hiring more and selling less during the past three years of putative recovery. That's why they stopped hiring in April and May, when the US economy added fewer jobs than at any time since the Great Recession. Economists point to the lowest productivity growth since the 1970s, but a simpler measure of productivity--sales per employee--has declined in most sectors of the economy during the past three years. That is a really dismal result, and points...
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that Turkish women abandon contraception in a televised address May 30, Reuters reported. "We will multiply our descendants. They talk about population planning, birth control. No Muslim family can have such an approach,” Erdogan said. The Turkish leader has denounced Turkish women for refusing to have more babies on many earlier occasions. Erdogan has played every side of every issue, alternately courting and rejecting the European Union, claiming the United States as an ally...
asia times EST 1995
