Author: JC Ernharth

Ok… Wolfie’s girlfriend is an embarrassment, but I’m still a’wondering  — why is Wolfie at the World Bank?  What’s this cadre have cooking over there??

The World Bank is there for one little discussed purpose: to provide high risk / high return loans to countries that cannot afford to pay them off / will not pay off because their governments are (about 89% of the time) kleptocracies.  

Invariably the loans always go bad. Invariably the taxpayers of Western nations are stuck with the tab, paying-off the loans either directly, or — more often — indirectly via guarantees and freshly printed currency from their own central banks (e.g. inflation) which is contributed to the World Bank.
That said, the mega banking institutions behind these loans win no matter what. They get big profits on risk loans. When said loans go bad, we are all told “if we don’t bail them out, 1) we’re greedy Westerners, and 2) the economy will collapse if the banks actually have to cover the losses on the risky loans that they and their buddies at the World Bank financed because there will be an ensuing credit contraction.  Time and again it has happened, and under many different administrations (lest we forget the great Mexico… er… Wall Street Bailout of 1993 under Clinton / Rubin.)

NOTE: as you read we are seeing a distant cousin to this racket in the U.S. through mortgage market.  As anyone reading the financial press over the last few months knows, tons of ill-advised sub-prime loans financed via (and because of) a rapid expansion of money supply are going bad.  Originating banks and those dealing in the derivatives markets have made a ton of $$ on the transactions, but now the current holders of the debt are crapping their pants.  But don’t sweat it!!! There is talk in Congress of bailing out the sub-prime borrower who didn’t know any better. Who will cover the costs?  Not the Wall Street crowd who received record bonuses in 2006, I’ll guarantee you. It’ll be Joe six pack and Lucy lunch pail paying for it as prices continue to grow higher at the pump and at the grocery market.

All that said, surely my comments are tangential to the Wolfie’s girlfriend thing… but it should raise a trail as to why Wolfie was positioned at the World Bank.  Detractors of this administration pay lots of attention to the oil interest in the mid East, but very little to the banking / finance side of things.  It is not terribly elegant / original, but always follow the $$$ — and especially money of those who are capable of printing the stuff quite literally out of thin air…  

There used to be a few people in government who understood what that meant – and fought the whole idea, but now too many are hooked on its byproduct like crack.  

To quote Henry Ford, “It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

Maybe. But with all this lethargy and indifference to BushCo, et. al., probably not.

But you guys who are digging through the buried bones, don’t forget who finances this War, among so many other things.  Don’t forget where the current Treasury Secretary — and a few past ones — have been hired from… follow THAT money, too.

..Mum’s the word among the corporate media, the Democrats’ welcome challenge to the Bush administration in staving off a Bolton confirmation may prove to be good for little more than a couple of weeks’ of noisy entertainment that will keep the focus on John Bolton, the outrageous bully, instead of the outrageous reforms he and Paul Wolfowitz were selected to pursue in this, the newly-opening second front of the War for US Global Domination. And though Bush may yet be denied Bolton as his Ambassador to the UN, he will not abandon this second front. As the war’s most prominent and eager prisoner, the president can not turn from his insolvent and understaffed empire’s only open window.

Boo –I found that snip in this piece a few moments ago, and think its worth digging through — you’ve been very good at decoding this sort of stuff.. or at least integrating its material with some of your own in order to provide a more detailed explanation of the confusing mosaic that all this is.  

Generally, the piece is a good argument for, if reading between the lines, non-interventionist types to drop the quibbling over other differences (and respect the others disagreement…) and put a stop to the interventionist types’ policies.  

Also, note that the fingerprints of Clinton’s vision are on this mess, too.. perhaps not to the degree / way of Bush I and Reagan’s.. but the contribution is still substantial in terms of enabling the apparatus.  Really, once the apparatus is created, it is ready to be hijacked, no matter what great intentions the road was paved to accomplish. (really, 280 million people cannot be trusted to make such complicated collective decisions on the use of such power — its so susceptible to manipulation…)  Of course, that’s precisely the abuse libertarian types warn about when it comes to creating these honey-named behemoths.

Anyway, I’m interested in your thoughts on the piece, and of course the rest of the community…  Let ’em rip.

Over the last year in our email days, Boo repeatedly rebuffed one of my suggestions for the Democrats to weaken the republican lock on things as of late. I think its the key to democrat victory in 2008.  But once Boo got the site up and running here, I dropped the subject all together.

So, tonight I was reading some of the stuff I peruse occasionally and I get reminded of my own suggestion from a lefty over at antiwar.com.

Basically, what I’ve been telling Booskie is that the Dem coalition is losing its appeal and that it needs to go on the offensive the to fractionalize the current republican coalition that has pulled away many fence sitters from the D party for reasons I’ll not elaborate on now.

Here is my suggestion:  Don’t sink all your cash into another “I’ll fight the war smarter because I have a plan” democrat.  Instead, sink serious money into the Libertarian party so they can get out of their canyon of anonymity with some serious advertising that would chip away at the fiscally conservative vote that the R power structure pisses on every time it is in power.  

A solid 15-20% of the Republican Party is not the whack jobs you guys lump them into being. They are, however, fiscal conservatives and small government advocates. They will NEVER vote democrat because you guys think Teddy Kennedy makes sense, you generally have never met a tax you don’t like, or a collectivist redistributionist program you didn’t think would solve the countries problem…and you have really no respect for private property.   They hate FDR and Johnson precisely for bringing socialism to the US and cloaking it in the flag, and pawning it off as “the American Way” (as if)

Ok… The point is not to debate the pros or cons of their assessment of you. It is to take advantage of it, right? How?  Republican spending is out of control, making them long for Clinton – Imagine!. Plus Iraq was a lie, and now a growing quagmire…

You see, this group votes republican only because they don’t think they have a choice.  They don’t want to waste their vote, but just the same they are holding their nose each election thinking, if I don’t do this.. then the democrats will win, and it’ll be worse.

So your job as democrats is to convince them to vote third party. Convince them that libertarians are serious about being fiscally responsible and would never take their vote for granted. Convince them that if they keep on voting republican instead of Libertarian, they will get pissed on again and again.. That the republican think of them as fringe with no other choice, and will always take them for granted – as they did under Bush I and Bush II…Convince them that they better start now because it will just keep getting worse.

In the long run you need a functioning third party that hurts their core but not yours. Let’s face it, your core is getting you in trouble with patriotic Nascar fence sitters whose Pabst blew through their noses when they heard John Kerry confess, “who amongst us does not care for NASCAR.”  You will not lose votes to the libertarians… Republicans will because they are fiscal hypocrites and the veneer is thin / easy to expose.

So there it is…  The key to the next election: start writing checks to libertarian fund raisers.  It’s a bit of a deal with the devil, I’ll agree. But as I said first off in my piece, I was reminded to post this up by a lefty with whom I agree. To break this coalition of the NeoConned, anti interventionists / anti empire building types need to bond together pronto before this madness creeps into Iran and Syria, and who knows where else.  

As for the lefty, its Robert Paul Wolf, who posted up on AntiWar.com the following:

Some while ago, a fellow leftie put me on to Antiwar.com. I took a look at the site, bookmarked it, and have ever since been a regular visitor, sometimes clicking on it two or three times in a day. I have even on occasion donated money to keep it afloat. I find there a broad array of factual reports and opinions consonant with my distressed and outraged view of an America seemingly gone mad with imperial hubris and pathological self-delusion.
Being somewhat dim about such things, I did not at first notice that the site is hosted and sustained by right-wing libertarians whose position on the conventional political spectrum is as far from my own as it is possible to get without falling off the other edge of the world from my own. Whereas I look to Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Said for intellectual simulation and solace, reaching back, when I desire some historical perspective, to Karl Marx, the managers of antiwar.com are more likely to reach out to Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, with obligatory obeisances to the authors of the Federalist Papers. [Read it all here]

Anyway, you should read his entire comments. I think the era of the necessity for three major parties has arrived. Lord knows; our economy sure could use the sobriety it might bring.

BooMan — howdie to you and your community….  

I’ve posted only a few times here, but before the BooMan went off and became a famous blog-daddy, he and I spent the better part of two years debating among a small group via email, essentially banging our heads against the other’s wall for farrrrrrrr too much of the day. Literally, dozens of emails in a day would fly back and forth between our small group of about six, but mostly they were between “The Boo” and me.  I like to think I was his final test before going live here!

Anyway, this is certainly a more productive outlet for that sort of energy. Well done, Boosky.  And I certainly get much more work done now that you spare me your frequent shots across the bow.

Which I suppose leads to who -or rather what I am -I am a libertarian consensualist.  That means, I’m sympathetic to rants against BushCo / the dangerous empire building NeoCon nuts, and agree they need to be stopped. However, I’m also of the opinion that while BushCo needs to go, I don’t much care to have a new group in power who will not allow me to say “no thanks” to their own brand of “this is how the world should be designed according to our noble vision”. Pu-leeeese!  This is the land of the free… or is it?

Anyway, I hope to contribute on these issues. I will also be prone to disagree with many of your prescriptions for solving the problem, but perhaps a little outside perspective from a non-Troll will be valuable.