Group items tagged

Sweden's Finance Minister Anders Borg is proving that Krugman and all those Keynesian big time stimulous spenders are wrong.  Reagan supply-side economics works every time it's tried.  And Sweden is proving it every day.  Instead of borrowing to stimulate, Borg flattened and cut taxes while gutting unsustainable government welfare spending.  Put the productive resources in the hands of those who are productive, and magic happens.  Capitalism has a home in Sweden, of all places. excerpt: "When Europe's finance ministers meet for a group photo, it's easy to spot the rebel - Anders Borg (pictured above) has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden's finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His 'stimulus' was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result. Three years on, it's pretty clear who was right. "Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus," he says. "Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt." Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.

Assange justifiably fears that if he submits to extradition to Sweden, that nation would in turn hand him over to the U.S. for prosecution under the Espionage Act. It is known that a grand jury handed down indictments in the case involving a leak of massive numbers of State Department cables by Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. Wikileaks received and published those documents. Soon after, a prosecutor in Sweden began a rape investigation, despite both women involved saying that they were not raped. No rape charges have actually been filed. The British courts later granted Sweden's extradition request, despite there being no charges pending, at which point Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador and has been effectively imprisoned in that nation's London embassy ever since.

Regarding the "everyone does it" excuse for bulk surveillance being used by the Obama Administration (which every parent learns to ignore when a teenage child wants something the parent ain't gonna' let happen), note the following statement from the E.U. report: "'It appears unlikely that the programmes of EU member states such as Sweden, France and Germany come close to the sheer magnitude of the operations launched by GCHQ and the NSA,' says the report." So the "everyone does it" excuse, in addition to ducking the question of whether *anyone* should be doing it let alone the U.S. with its constitutional limitations, also ignores qualitative differences in what "everyone does." 

Indeed, it is too late. The two-state solution is deader than a dooknail. 

Lengthy but truly amazing resolution now goes to Parliament for a vote. A lot of very tough love for the U.S. in there. Highly recommended reading if you have the time for a lengthy document. It's an action plan for what Parliament intends to do about privacy violations by the NSA, GCHQ, Norway, Sweden, and Germany. If this passes, the U.S. and U.K. will be forced to give major ground. Gist of the document: civil liberties including privacy rights in correspondence trump national security and anti-terrorism. The E.U. would bow out of an Orwellian future.

"... the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group's publication of the Afghanistan war logs." Sweden promptly launches an alleged rape investigation and Assange is forced by the UK courts to take refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador. Because of urging by the Obama administration aimed at chilling the the First Amendment rights of journalists. That should be grounds for impeachment.  

Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.

More than 60 years overdue, but better late than never. We're not there yet, but apartheid Israel is definitely approaching the point where it must bow to the anti Palestinian Boycott, Sanctions, and DIvestment movement, just as the apartheid South African government had to. A boatload of European nations joining the BSD movement is a powerful message to the Izzies that the era of them occupying and colonizing Palestine is quickly approaching its end.