Category: Uncategorized

Michele Bachmann: Take Her Seriously

On Monday, Michele Bachmann declared she was a candidate for President of the United States.  Nobody was shocked but I — and several million other people — got real interested in American politics – real fast.  Ms. Bachmann brings huge flair to a GOP campaign that, so far, has lacked a discernable pulse.  John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are peeing their pants anticipating their autumn TV ratings.  The girls from The View are sharpening their claws.  And journalists from here to McMurdo Station, Antarctica are dissecting every word she’s ever uttered to find a “pants on fire” error.  The big gun personalities, however, are still waiting in the weeds, but they’ve put their assistants on bread and water until they come up with 2012’s defining “gotcha” question.  Chris Wallace seriously jumped the gun on Sunday when he asked her — point blank — “Are you a flake?”  Pure idiot – he probably won’t get another crack at her and will be sniping from the sidelines once the action really heats up next year.

If I sound jaded, I’m not.  If I sound like a supporter, I’m not.  I’m just very aware that Bachmann is being painted as Sarah Palin in a skirt; she’s not.  There are some similarities, certainly; both desperately need a full-time fact checker, for one.  But I’m warning you, folks: take this woman seriously.

Sarah Palin was (and still is) a Republican mistake.  She was supposed to be the sacrificial “hockey mom” to the ’08 Obama juggernaut.  Unfortunately, she didn’t shut up and go home after it was all over.  Instead, she hung on to the spotlight and the microphone (I think she likes them) and became Sarah Palin, sideshow.  Along the way, she changed politics forever.

Michele Bachmann is nobody’s sacrificial lamb.  She’s serious.  She has an army of resolute supporters.  She can raise money – lots of it.  She has a message that many people want to hear — “America was great once, and it can be great again.”  She’s guaranteed tons of press, mainly because Palin was such good copy.  And she has arrived at a time and a place where she (because Palin is unelectable) is the stand-alone candidate.  Plus, she is the most dangerous of all opponents; she believes in what she’s saying.

Up until now, the Republicans have produced a whole bunch of candidates that ordinary people can’t name (except Newt Gingrich.)  They’ve been busy playing musical chairs with who wants to lose to Obama.  Mitt Romney and Tom Pawlenty are apparently the front runners, but from what I’ve seen, it’s a terminal case of the bland leading the bland.  Not so suddenly, Michele Bachmann shows up in Waterloo, Iowa, with nothing on her mind but the Oval Office, and suddenly she’s tied in the polls with Mitt for 1st place.  This is the kind of momentum politicians scheme about.  Bachmann is a natural press magnet.  Her name recognition is already huge and she’s only been on the job, officially, for 48 hours. Primary season is eight months away.

What everybody — including Romney, Pawlenty and Huntsman — has to remember is the primaries are not about voters.  They are about galvanizing the party faithful; that diehard 15%.  These are the people the candidates have to turn into supporters.  You can’t win primaries without them, and you’re not going to be anything but yesterday’s news without primary victories.  This is where Republican moderates are stumbling around in the dark.  The Tea Party has the high ground.  They show up in numbers and can get their people front and centre.  They can raise huge amounts of money.  They are willing to stand up and be counted.  Unfortunately, they’re also willing to present unelectable candidates (Christine O’Donnell) rather than compromise their principles.

This is the problem.  A lot of people think Michele Bachmann is just Sarah Palin with one less “you betcha,” and they are not going to take her seriously.  This is a mistake.  Bachmann can ride the Tea Party to legitimately become the Republican nominee for President.

If she does, when she gets to the national stage, Barack Obama and the media are going to tear her apart.

European Economic Reality: It’s Not Sexy

One of these days, the Germans are going to get fed up and quit forking over Euros to every Juan, Liam and Spiros who comes wandering by with a sob story.  Lately, Angie Merkel has been shovelling money off the prosperity truck like it’s Weihnachten; unfortunately, the German taxpayers haven’t been told they’re Santa Claus.  When they find out, there’s going to be hell to pay.  Meanwhile, across the Rhine, Sarkozy is robbing Peter to pay Papandreou by convincing the French private financial sector to bankroll his vision of stability in the European Union.  This isn’t very smart.  Remember, up until recently, Les Trois Grands (Credit Agricole, BNP Paribas and Societe Generale) were all government institutions, so if things start to go bad for the banks it’s going to be the Palais Bourbon who gets to bail them out – on the backs of les taxpayers francais, I might add.  I’m not pointing fingers, but something is rotten in Europe and this time it isn’t in Denmark.

The problem with economics is it’s not sexy.  A bunch of old men sitting around a conference table dividing up the spoils, just doesn’t make headlines the way a good riot does.  Bombs make better copy than balance sheets because, in general, people think economics is dull, complicated and just a little bit icky.  The stereotypical international banker is not somebody you want to spend an isolated weekend in the country with.  The result is most people don’t know how money works.  They believe it’s some magical thing that rich people use to get richer.  Not so!  International billions work the same way as your lunch money.

All economics is based on faith.  Here’s the beer league version.  You don’t have to push a wheelbarrow full of money around because you’ve got a credit card.  It’s a wallet-sized, unsecured short-term loan.  (By the way, despite rumours to the contrary, that’s all it is.)  McDonald’s gives you a Big Mac and fries because they believe the credit card company is going to give them money.  The company, in turn, pays McDonald’s because they believe you’re eventually going to repay the loan.  You get your lunch, McDonald’s get its money and you pay the accumulated bill at the end of the month.  Everybody’s happy.  The whole system is based on everybody’s rock solid faith in your ability to pay.  It’s that simple.

Chopped down to its core, international finance works the same way.  The world monetary system is based on everybody’s faith in the local taxpayers’ ability to pay.  Countries borrow money.  They repay it back over several years from the taxes they collect.  (That’s the only income they have.)  Again, everybody’s happy – as long as the system works.  When it doesn’t, things go bad — real fast.

The situation in Europe these days is several countries have been basically buying too many Big Macs.  They’ve been using their national credit cards promiscuously — way beyond the ability of their citizens to pay.  For example, this current crisis in Greece stems from the fact that they owe nearly half a trillion dollars — with no foreseeable way to pay it back.  The banks have lost faith in the Greeks.  They want their money — yesterday.  This is where things get complicated because — if Greece goes bust — nobody’s going to repossess the Acropolis and call it square.  No, the money disappears: along with several huge banks, the financial structure of Europe and possibly the Euro itself.  The sub-prime mortgage crisis in America will be a surfer’s wave compared to that tsunami.

Enter Merkel and Sarkozy, who have a vested interest in keeping Europe afloat.  They’ve told the banks, “Okay, you don’t have faith in the Greeks anymore, but you still trust us.  We’ll guarantee the loans and we’re backing that up with our taxpayers.”  This is great – problem solved — except for one small flaw.  The EU has already done this twice.  In November, 2010 Ireland went bust (to the tune of 100 billion) and in May, 2011, Portugal did the same (with a 78 billion debt.)  Both times, the EU, led by Merkel and Sarkozy, stepped up and bailed them out with guaranteed loans.  French and German taxpayers woke up this morning on the hook for over 50 billion dollars in other people’s debts.  Not only that, but their banks have guaranteed the same amount again.  And that’s just in the short term.  There’s more to come later.  Trust is not an infinity commodity.  Even the stupidest of the profit-and-loss boys are getting gun shy about throwing more Euros at this mess.  But here’s the real kick in the ribs.  Waiting in the wings is Italy, up to their Armani suits in unsecured loans, and Spain (Europe’s fourth largesteconomy) equally in hock, with a 27% unemployment rate.  Their taxpayers couldn’t pay even if they wanted to.

Bluntly, the ship is about to hit the sand in Europe.  At some point, financial institutions are going to lose faith in even the Germans’ ability to pay.  Long before that happens, the Europeans are going to have to tighten their belts — buckles to the backbone.  The quaint idea that you can eat Big Macs all day on somebody else’s Euro is over.  The Europeans have been out to lunch for a long time, and now the bills are coming due.  They need to become financially responsible first thing tomorrow morning because one of these days the German taxpayers are going to wake up and say, “Was ist los?  I didn’t sign on for this.” And that will be the end of everything.

Arab Spring/Chaos Summer

In a fortified bunker somewhere in Tripoli, Muammar Gaddafi is saying, “What’s the deal?  I shoot a couple of protesters, who were probably Al Qaeda anyway, and NATO goes berserk.  Meanwhile, over in Syria, Assad’s gunning down civilians like there’s a deposit on them.  What happens?  Nothing!  All Bashar gets is a couple of nasty e-mails from Ban Ki-moon, and he walks away smilin’.  Where’s the justice?  And that’s not all.  In Iran, Ahmadinejad is building a bomb the size of Baltimore.  In Bahrain, Al Khalifa called in the Saudi tanks five minutes after CNN turned its back, and nobody even knows who’s killing who in Yemen – or how many!  So why am I the goalie on the Cruise Missile team?”  Actually, Muammar has a point.  Protecting civilian populations seems to be a selective process at the UN these days.  I’ll grant you, NATO can’t bomb everyone they’d like to, but just exactly what is the UN mandate?  Something is going disastrously wrong in North Africa and the Middle East.  The Arab Spring that started out with such hope in Tunisia is rapidly deteriorating into Chaos Summer.

The rebels in Libya aren’t going to win anytime soon – not without a lot more help than they’re getting.  NATO’s been blowing up everything bigger than a Safeway cart for nearly three months now.  Some countries are actually running out of ordinance, for God’s sake.  Yet, all I see on TV are smoke plumes in the distance and some scrubby guys with automatic weapons, firing wildly into the desert.  No offence, but what are they shooting at?  One would think, Gaddafi couldn’t have enough hardware left to defend himself against my nephew’s hockey team.  Not so.  Apparently, Muammar is just as nasty as he always was and about twice as defiant.  Again I ask, what is the UN mandate?

The Canadian commander of the mission, General Charles Bouchard, has called this Libyan adventure “a knife fight in a phone booth.”  I have never been in a knife fight — either in or outside a phone booth — but common sense tells me the object would be to stick the other guy.  Unfortunately, the UN won’t let anybody do that: regime change is not on the table.  I hate to keep asking obvious questions but…  what, then, is the purpose of this Libyan debacle?  Honestly, it’s beginning to look like the only way to get a favourable result is if NATO somehow manages to kill Muammar – accidently.  Pack a lunch, folks: we could be here for a while.

Of course, the unforeseen side effect reality of sixty missions a day in Libya is every other dictator within F-18 distance of Tripoli can do as he damn well pleases.  Bashar al-Assad isn’t really too worried about shooting protesters out of season in Syria when NATO is otherwise engaged.  He knows the Western powers aren’t going to launch anything more than a stern warning in his direction, and he’s acting accordingly.  The same goes for whoever is trying to be in charge in Yemen.  The extra added attraction there is Al Qaeda already has a firm presence.  Fortunately, Ahmadinejad in Iran has his own problems.  He’s just one magic lamp away from getting charged with sorcery or cavorting with genies or some other such madness.  Otherwise, he’d be putting the boots to his dissidents, as well.

What’s happened here is the West has squandered its power to influence events by actually using it.  It has always been the threat of unleashing unlimited Hell that has kept the more petty of the dictators in line.  They knew they could only go so far, dishing out nasties to their own people, before Hillary, Cameron and Sarkozy said enough is enough.  The problem is power is not what you do, necessarily; it’s what you’re willing to do.  If dictator A knows you’re willing to blast him out of his jackboots, he tends to tiptoe.  Once he knows you’re not, he’s kinda got you over a barrel.

Everybody knows that the West can’t disentangle itself from Libya now without looking like jackasses.  If Gaddafi’s still there when NATO goes home, Bashar and the boys aren’t going to worry about the UN, NATO — or anybody else, for that matter.  Syrian dissidents might as well be put on the Endangered Species List.  The best bet is for NATO to forget about UN Resolution 1973 and get rid of Muammar as quickly as possible.  From there, the West could relax and rearm and tell guys like Assad to shape up and fly right — or there’s a good possibility they’re going to get the same treatment as the last guy who pissed us off.  Maybe then the West could start directing traffic again — instead of standing on the curb watching the world go by.