Sarkozy, says enough of this

It’s only been a couple of years ago that I couldn’t get through a day without someone reminding me how much better the government was to it’s citizens in several different European nations, than the U.S. was. They would point to health care, retirement, vacations, and a 32/35 hour work week; add to that four to six weeks of vacation as standard. The work week has steadily been decreasing in parts of Europe and even Australia.

To good to be true, well yes and no.

In the United States, by contrast, the working time has actually been increasing. Many workers put in longer hours than the forty hour standard. Two weeks of paid annual leave is standard.

Sarkozy, says enough of this, who will pay for it all? Massive tax hikes are not in the distant future unless something is done.

“Since 2000, France’s GDP has grown just 1.7% a year after inflation. That compares with 2.1% for the rest of the EU and 2.4% in the U.S. Today, as France falls further behind, just over 40% of the adult population works. That share will soar to 70% by 2040 if nothing is done. Already youth unemployment is nearing 22%.”
Well today Sarkozyhas won round 1 of the battle with the 9 day strike by the transportation and energy workers union. Round 2 is likely to take place before the end of the year. Never-the-less, they underestimated Sarko’s resolve and political Capital. “”I have no intention to stop the reform movement, no intention to slow it down, no intention to forget my promises,” he said. “I made commitments. They will be kept.”
I think he deserves the Ronald Regan award, while facing similar union-made problems with air traffic controllers.
Anyway, to the point…do you think he will go on to win the game, and will that difference also be felt elsewhere in Europe where similar pension crises loom?

 

EDIT:

Washington, D.C.’s long standing ban on handguns is finally going to the Supreme Court. The ruling could change the way the second amendment is interpreted… the DC v. Heller handgun case. This will undoubtedly become another major issue in the Presidential campaign.

“The federal appeals court here, breaking with the great majority of federal courts to have examined the issue over the decades, ruled last March that the Second Amendment right was an individual one, not tied to service in a militia, and that the District of Columbia’s categorical ban on handguns was therefore unconstitutional.”

This will undoubtedly become another major issue in the Presidential campaign, or will it, and if so to what extent?

In view of what’s happening in France we may want to re-evaluate this whole “Gun” matter.

If Nicolas Sarkozy thought he was having problems with ‘Union Strikes’ he must be pulling his hair out over the “genuine urban guerrillas with conventional weapons and hunting weapons” in France today. After 3 days of ‘rioting’ I understand he was up all night trying to figure this one out.

Police warned they were dealing with “urban guerrillas” with guns. “Our colleagues will not allow themselves to be fired upon indefinitely without responding,” he said. “We are coming close to a catastrophe with the use of firearms,” said UNSA, another police union.

The rioters were using illegal guns according to their laws. As usual making them illegal does not prevent either their being obtained or used.

Constitutional liberalism vs. Socialism

Locating good Journalism in the blogosphere can be very time consuming, because there is such an extraordinary amount of bad Journalism.

Last Monday I recommended what I believe to be the best source for news about what is going on in Iraq. Yesterday I discovered what I consider the best source on Latin American Socialism and constitutional liberalism:
Two schools of thought exist running parallel with one another; one, Habermas’s theoretical system of the possibility of reason and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests [Constitutional liberalism].
The other, Bourdieu’s theoretical system argues that constitutional liberalism is a form of domination. The poor, pressed by the need to make a living, don’t have the luxury of developing the social and intellectual skills needed to participate in political deliberation.

“For Bourdieu, liberal constitutionalism’s promise of a public sphere where the only thing that matters is the strength of your arguments is inherently part of the system of domination.

In fact, Bourdieu goes even farther and argues that the poor, as a class, are incapable of forming truly independent political opinions. They cannot have a political position, because the system of domination bars them from the cultural capacities it takes to formulate one.

The distinguishing characteristic of chavista common sense is its radical rejection of deliberation as a way of arriving at political decisions and its flat out refusal to engage critically with those who dissent.”
“Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, which he has based in his theory of communicative action. His work has focused on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics — particularly German politics. Habermas’s theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.”

“At the center of Bourdieu’s sociological work is a logic of practice that emphasizes the importance of the body and practices within the social world. Against the intellectualist tradition, Bourdieu stressed that mechanisms of social domination and reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the social world. Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational Action Theory (Rational Choice Theory) as grounded in a misunderstanding of how social agents operate. Social agents do not, according to Bourdieu, continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria. Rather, social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic–a practical sense–and bodily dispositions. Social agents act according to their “feel for the game” (the “feel” being, roughly, habitus, and the “game” being the field).”

Bad Journalism

 

I was talking with a long time internet friend of mine this morning who is a political scientist, and the subject was today’s report that the military may arm Pakistani tribes. I commented that according to Michael Yon it was working in Iraq. He commented back that he would like to nominate Michael Yon for the Pulitzer Prize. That, “He has been one of the best primary sources to what is really happening in the war against jihadistan.”

I agreed with him about Michael Yon and went on to give an example of what is wrong with so much journalism:

“With the increased security situation we have finally been able to provide essential services to the community. For the first time since 1-5 CAV deployed to Iraq last November, the beladiyah is routinely providing trash clean up. We have fixed numerous water pipes, pulled out destroyed car hulks and are working to clean out the sewer system. Likewise the local economy is gaining steam with over one hundred stores opening up the last two months.”

Contrast what Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl writes above, and the author of the quotes below about the same situation and person, Abu Abed. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in the Guardian writes:

“Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a big man named Bakr with a bandolier of bullets over his chest. He squatted next to Abu Abed, laid his big BKC machine gun down and spoke to him conspiratorially, covering his mouth with his hand like a schoolgirl.

Bakr was Abu Abed’s head of intelligence. “I was told that someone from al-Qaida is in the area,” Bakr said. “We will go out, develop some intelligence and then raid the house.”

The only vehicles in the streets belonged to our screeching convoy. A few shops were open and people walked past carrying plastic shopping bags. All around us were the traces of battle: craters in the road from improvised bombs, facades pockmarked with bullet holes, a pile of rubble that had once been a building.

“Ameriya is a closed zone, surrounded by high concrete walls. Only pedestrians are allowed through the two Iraqi army checkpoints out of the suburb. The “knights” are the only authority inside.”

What he writes not only sounds like something out of a fiction fantasy novel; at least in one place, by Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl account, he writes an out and out lie:

Please, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, I don’t know how you missed the fact that Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl was there, because I don’t believe you did. What I believe is that you purposely kept the truth from the public…shame on you.

Human rights vs. national security

Take for instance MoveOn.org…inspired human rights position and one of the adherents to its philosophy, Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter abandoned our ally the Shah of Iran because he was insufficiently democratic, and the results: An even less democratic government that wants to destroy us.

Apply that lesson to Pakistan today. There is an outcry from the human rights crowd for Bush to do something about bringing democracy to the people in Pakistan, and abandon Pervez Musharraf.

What is wrong with these people, I think they are blinded by idealism to the extent they close their eyes to what just happened in Palestine with Hamas as a legally democratly elected government.

What are the odds of this happening in Pakistan, pretty good I think. The consequences however are much more threatening in Pakistan…the possibility of an al Qaeda/Taliban democratically elected government with nuclear power.

So again I ask: What’s more important, human rights or national security?

As it turns out this was a question in CNN’s Democratic presidential debate last Thursday night, and both leaders in the Democratic race failed to answer correctly.

“I mean, the first obligation of the president of the United States is to protect and defend the United States of America,” Sen. Hillary Clinton answered. But she had a big “but”:
“There’s absolutely a connection between a democratic regime and heightened security for the United States.”

What do you think; is their a connection between, …”[A] democratic regime and heightened security for the United States.”

I don’t think so, any more than a National ID will add a heightened security for the United States.

Why, because in either case you just don’t know what people will do with democracy or a national ID.

Economics.

A great piece I discovered with a summation on Economics.

Scroll to the bottom of the page in the link.

 

 

“There is a difference between money and wealth. Wealth is the capacity to satisfy the wants of people who have something of value that they are willing to trade for that satisfaction. Wealth resides in the world’s farms, forests, mines and fisheries, and in the complex web of transporters, processors, fabricators, distributors and retailers that turn raw materials into finished and intermediate goods and offer them for sale in convenient locations and at a moment’s notice. Wealth also resides in the less-tangible but equally real capacity (tools and expertise) to provide a desired service to a satisfactory standard of performance, and in a timely fashion.

Money is to economic activity as motor oil is to an engine. Its role is to reduce friction so that the many moving parts can function without generating excessive heat and wear. It serves as a temporary storage medium for wealth, and as an efficient means for converting one form of wealth into another. That’s all. Money does not have and does not need to have any intrinsic value. The one and only thing that money absolutely must have in order to serve its lubricative function in the economic engine is the confidence of (almost) all buyers and sellers that its value will be reasonably stable for a reasonable period of time. When that confidence disappears, economic activity reverts to barter, which is exceedingly cumbersome and inefficient.

”Like oil in an engine, there can be too much or too little money in circulation. The “right amount” of money is the amount that exactly matches the needs for today’s transactions to move real goods and services from producers and providers to users and consumers. There is no necessary relationship between the right amount of money to have in circulation in the world’s economy and the amount of gold or other precious metals that may exist in the world, whether as refined bars in a vault or as ore still in the ground. Precious metals are valuable for a variety of reasons to a variety of people, but they are not money, they are commodities.

The rate at which goods and services are produced has a necessary inertia built into the process and can’t change too suddenly. If the amount of money increases faster than the rate of production and consumption, a larger number of dollars will be divided up between a lesser amount of actual value created, so the price per unit of value has to go up. That’s inflation. If the amount of money is increased slower than the rate of production and consumption, some transactions are delayed, inventories build up until the cost of holding them begins to be burdensome and sellers must reduce prices in order to move product. That’s deflation. If producers have to reduce prices below a profitable level, they will reduce production levels for awhile. That’s recession. If the reduction in the rate of production and consumption is large enough and persists long enough, many producers will go bankrupt. That’s depression.

”The role of the central bank is to dispense the “right amount” of money to properly match the rate of production and consumption in the economy. If they get it right, there is an acceptable degree of (not perfect) price stability, without recession or depression. Of course they occasionally get it wrong, sometimes knowingly, but more often out of ignorance or incompetence.”

Western Liberal and the Left.

 

There is a great deal of difference between the ”Western Liberal” and the “Left.” The distinction I draw, or to phrase it differently, the inference I draw is that the western liberal’s agree with the foreign policy of Carter and Clinton, as opposed to Reagan and Bush. The western liberal is not anti-Capitalist or anti-America.

 

What I do not understand is why the delay in the war on terrorism. Terrorism started in the Carter years during 1979 with the kidnapping of our embassy personnel in Iran. However, the war against international terrorism did not begin until Reagan came along, when he sent American bombers against Libya, because of the attack on American soldiers in a West Berlin nightclub.

 

“Iranians “criminals and kidnappers,” he sent out the warning, “the Iranians should be prepared that this country will take whatever action is appropriate.” Ronald Reagan’s tough talk succeeded where Carter’s reliance on persuasion failed.”

 

Clinton came along, cut eight divisions and reduced intelligence drastically; spending the money saved on social programs…remembrances of Rome?

 

 

On February 26, 1993, terrorist exploded a bomb with the intent of bringing “Tower One of the World Trade Center” on nearly 100,000 people.

 

Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for that bomb, fled to Iraq where he was given sanctuary. It was not until Bush came along that anything was done about it.

 

“There was no significant counteroffensive against terror during the entire eight-year term because Clinton wanted it that way. Bill Clinton chose to avoid the political risks of averting Middle Eastern terror. Consequently, he left the whole population at risk. National security suffered for the sake of his presidential legacy. During his term as leader of the free world, he gladly passed the responsibility of Iraq over to the UN, resigned our country to “co-existing” with terrorism, and even strove to cover up the full-scale assault underway by Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. The full story has yet to be told concerning the Oklahoma City bombing and Flight TWA 800.”

The quotes are from here

Illegal emigrants voting

Fred Lucas, CNSNews.com Staff Writer reported:

“New York Democratic Gov. Elliott Spitzer pushed the policy, enacted last month, as a “common sense change” to give illegal aliens “the opportunity to obtain a driver license in a responsible and secure manner.”
But opponents of the plan immediately cited homeland security concerns, recalling that 9/11 hijackers had obtained 13 licenses.

However what he didn’t report was that the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote.
This brings another serious problem that a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, “This Will Make Voter Fraud Easier” by John Fund does bring to light and, that is voter fraud. I wonder if this will pass the “Bull Test.”

Who, he asks, are for granting a drivers license to illegal emigrants?
Democrat’s, he answers and uses Hillary Clinton as an example along with New York governor Eliot Spitzer.

Meanwhile Arnold Ahlert a columnist for the NY Post for the past seven years enters the fracas, or farces, which is yet to be determined; with the question.
“What could be more threatening to our democratic republic than voter fraud? Nothing. What could be more threatening to the ambitions of the American Left–MoveOn.org, Code Pink, George Soros, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, et al–than fraud-FREE elections? Nothing.

In the 2008 election, two political parties will be vying for your vote. It is worth remembering which party is willing to make a complete mockery of your one opportunity to participate in our democratic process. As a conservative, it is somewhat annoying to realize that a liberal “cancels out” my vote.
That an illegal alien–or a terrorist thug–could do the same thing is an absolute outrage.”

How many of the 12-20 million illegal aliens in the country do you want voting?

Foreign Policy

If America has Foreign Policy wrong, who’s got it right?

The idea of missionizing transcends Right and Left, but the essential difference that I’m interested in pointing out is that the Left does it in the name of humanitarian intervention, and the Right in the name of freedom; using the term Freedom as an explicit appeal to religious motivation. When George W. Bush came to power he set free the, Religious Right, to use overt religious language, missionizing language that actually moves from “freedom” to “salvation,” as a justification for American power. We cast ourselves against Saddam Hussein and the “Axis of Evil” entirely in terms of a binary evil-versus-good contest, and in doing so set into action two negatives forces: the “eating away” if you will of the ‘Wall of separation” between politics and religion, and our relationship with other religions.

 

American fundamentalisms…

conversion or death; however the first seeds of descent, during the first generation of Colonist, was spread by Roger Williams and his concept of a “wall of separation” between the magistrate and the religion. Thomas Jefferson would latter use that phrase to describe the distinction between the church and the state. “Go forth and teach all nations,” Jesus commands and that mandate is still fundamental to American fundamentalisms.

Today it is perpetrated by Mr. Bush and his chosen administration where the word freedom is equated with the concept of salvation. Holding to the tradition of Abraham Lincoln…“The last best hope of mankind.” The United States of America is justified by the virtue of its mission… the “manifest destiny” of a free people extending freedom. A key doctrine in what I am calling American fundamentalisms.

So that today whether it be a Liberal or a Conservative, in the matter of Iraq, the destruction of Iraq was an act of purification and the failure is not on Americas but rather on the Iraqis failure to yield on their “sectarian” agendas. These people won’t get together and form a cohesive government. America is a city on a hill, exceptional and virtuous. If we’ve gone to Iraq and it turned out to be a fiasco, it can’t be our fault because we were motivated by good intentions.

Immigration

 

Thomas Paine once alluded to the concept that, in one respect, he was not a member of only one community, but rather all communities. It seems clear enough to me that his reason for believing so is because all communities, to one degree or another, affect one another.

In the very broadest of terms “a community is a social group of organisms sharing an environment…” Hence, the very reason for government, geographical boundaries, and politicians; that is, to intermediate between all the various communities.

The great majority of my life has been spent in two geographical areas, what is loosely termed “North County Coastal,” where I attended primary and secondary school, and San Diego proper where I attended post secondary school.

There is not a great deal of difference between the two geographically, or in the context of “values”. I’m a registered Republican and probably to some extent because the two areas have traditionally held Republican values; although it has been argued that the margin of difference has lessened for San Diego County, California in recent years.

Am I a Republican…more than a few people have labeled me a neo-liberal because my position reflected a sort of Neoliberalism.

Given that I am not a politician or an activist I have not been active in any of the many communities that have surrounded me for more than half a century; I suppose that in one respect my beliefs are similar with those of Thomas Paine…I am ‘not a member of only one community, but rather all communities’.

There is however a new community that I have been heavily involved with these past eight years. In fact I devote approximately fifty hours a week to it, and that community is a virtual community, or online community; although some people are contentious as to whether it is a community. Is that public speaking, not really but there is always an unseen audience, and believe me they are not hesitant to comment if they see an opening or feel slighted.

It is there that I engage in the political process; it is there that ideas are exchanged; it is there that I do my research; it is there that I get my news; it is there that I both influence, and am influenced on every aspect of government and values. One of the most important values that I have come to realize in all of this is that diverse perspectives each have an argument to be made in its favor; what is important is to discover the “best argument”.