Stratfor is reporting a rumor that the head of China’s Central Bank has left the country, apparently one step ahead of the sheriff.
Rumors have circulated in China that People’s Bank of China (PBC) Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan may have left the country. The rumors appear to have started following reports on Aug. 28 which cited Ming Pao, a Hong Kong-based news agency, saying that because of an approximately $430 billion loss on U.S. Treasury bonds, the Chinese government may punish some individuals within PBC, including Zhou.
I’m not sure what to make of the report – particularly the bit about a $430 billion loss on US Treasuries. China reportedly has about $2.5 trillion in foreign exchange and such a loss would amount to about one-fifth of its total holdings. If true, it’s an incredible loss. Stratfor seems to discount the rumor, but stay tuned.
I attended the Glenn Beck rally on August 28th with about 300,000 of my closest friends. I went more or less as an observer – I am not a hard-core Beck devotee, although I often watch his Fox News program when the 5-6 pm hour is free.
While I think there is a good deal of kookiness about Beck, I also think he’s rendered an invaluable service by openly discussing the historical and philosophical roots of the Progressive movement and how it is diametrically opposed to the vision of our founders. My only quarrel with the service is that he’s trying simultaneously to learn and teach. The quality is somewhat uneven.
As to the rally itself, I came away puzzled – and I suspect I wasn’t the only one. In chatting with members of the crowd before the rally, it was clear that people were fired up politically and they viewed themselves as members of a vanguard ready to storm the ramparts. The talk was not introspective but rather a “November is Coming” passion – a purging of the temple, if you will.
As the rally went on, however, I sensed a puzzlement. Thematically, the event had all the internal consistency of a pot luck supper but what we got in the end was not politics but a good, old fashioned revival meeting – heavily Christian in emphasis but fairly generic in outlook nevertheless.
Most of the speakers – Beck included – preached sermons emphasizing personal renewal as a foundation for national repentance and revival. While there were people around me who swayed and raised their hands to the prayers and music, most were subdued. I don’t think it’s what they were expecting. As the crowd slowly dispersed, there was not much animation and little chatter – due, probably, to heat and fatigue. The sun was very hot and most people had stood for over three hours.
In short, I sensed disappointment. But Beck is certainly not the first guy to fail to meet expectations – and he won’t be the last. Our own history is full of examples – Lincoln’s last public address on April 11, 1865, is one such instance. The crowd expected Lincoln to beat the drum of victory and what they got instead was a puzzling talk on the generous policy he intended to pursue toward the South.
This is not to say that the Beck rally was a failure – only that it failed to comply with the crowd’s expectations. There are also abundant instances where a speech or event was labeled a “failure” and it is only later that we understand its true meaning in context. Again, Lincoln’s story is apt: his Gettysburg Address was widely derided at the time and Lincoln himself thought it a failure, remarking to his friend Ward Lamon that the speech “won’t scour . . . It is a flat failure and the people are disappointed”. Yet, the speech endures in the national psyche.
In the end, I think the message of the event was the event itself. There were far more than 300,000 people at the rally and for each person present, there were 20 more who didn’t attend. These people are sober and serious. And that’s what’s terrifying the country’s ruling class.
I thought Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie provided a good summary and many of his observations parallel my own. He’s more skeptical about the religious aspects of the event than I am, however.
Pat Caddell recently opined that the American peoples’ mood – after being repeatedly shoved by the radical left – is ‘pre-revolutionary’. Ordinarily, I’d be inclined to dismiss Pat’s comment as hyperbolic but these are certainly not ordinary times. If you doubt me, simply consider Texas and the EPA.
As we know by now, the EPA has decided that it will implement ‘cap and trade’ by regulation in the absence of Congressional action. And the EPA has wasted no time in accosting states on the new regulations it intends to implement.
But the EPA hadn’t reckoned with Texas. As Richard Fernandez recently wrote, Texas has responded to the EPA in “language that is just short of grapeshot and gunpowder.” In a letter to the EPA, the Texas Attorney General and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality refused to “pledge their fealty to the Environmental Protection Agency”. In case you missed the subtlety, “fealty” is what a medieval vassal pledged to his feudal lord.
The letter’s language is choice. Some excepts:
On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions. … You have declared that EPA’s decision … renders such gases immediately “subject to regulation” … simultaneously, however, you recognize that permitting greenhouse gases under the Act is “absurd” …
In order to avoid the absurd results of EPA’s own creation, you have developed a “tailoring rule” in which you have substituted your own judgment for Congress’s … the State of Texas does not believe that EPA’s “suggested” approach comports with the rule of law. The United States and Texas Constitutions, United States and Texas statutes, and EPA and TCEQ rules all preclude …
We start with the constitutional difficulties … each of these objections to EPA’s demand for a loyalty oath from the State of Texas would suffice to justify our refusal to make one. Indeed, it is an affront …”
As Fernandez observes, this is language from an almost forgotten past. I agree. It’s the kind of blunt talk used by an aggrieved man under the Code Duello, stating his grievance and demanding satisfaction. It’s the step just before the choice of seconds and selection of weapons.
It means a direct confrontation of a kind we cannot now guess.
The chief visible product of leftism is a feigned egalitarianism. While Marx and his disciples claimed to create a classless society, the reality was of course quite different. There are always the insiders, the ones who scheme and maneuver, who look out for themselves and their friends.
While this behavior is part of a universal human condition, it’s most pronounced in socialized economies where the state is the gatekeeper from which all blessings and curses flow. And the “new class” loitering by the gate always takes care of itself – first.
Milovan Djilas had the temerity to identify these loiterers in The New Class, his 1957 book about Communist hierarchy. Djilas, a Yugoslav communist, rose through the ranks to become Tito’s second in command in postwar Yugoslavia before falling from favor for his dissident views about communism and the Nomenklatura running the show. Tito imprisoned Djilas in 1954 after Djilas publicly expressed his views and Djilas later smuggled the manuscript of The New Class from prison where it was eventually published in the West.
Djilas’ message – as fresh today as in the 1950s – is that overreaching government creates a new class, the select few who position themselves to dispense all largess while living far above the masses. And as Djilas observed, the Nomenklatura and the bureaucrats surrounding them become the reason for the government’s existence, thereby pitting themselves against the great mass of people in a smoldering civil war of privilege and resentment.
Can we see the seeds of the new Nomenklatura in our own day? Oh, yes. Just take a look at the British Parliament, which was recently wracked by scandal surrounding the perks and privileges enjoyed by its members. As reported in the UK media, the scandal cost the Parliamentary speaker his job and the members’ right to regulate their own affairs. As noted by the UK blog Samizdata, there is an ‘enemy class’ at work:
This whole saga demonstrates the truth of the thesis that politicians increasingly have come to regard their own interests as set apart from the country as a whole. It adds to the notion, put forward by Sean Gabb, of an “Enemy Class” that is quite consciously at odds with the more conservative (small – c) values of the country. Of course, there has always been an element of this – it is naive to imagine that Parliament ever quite met some Greek ideal – but it is now in a particularly bad way.
Let’s hope Mr Martin sees sense and takes the proverbial bottle of whiskey and the loaded revolver into his study. He will be the first Speaker to be ejected from his role in more than 300 years. Not a record to be proud of.
And in our own country, it’s all out in the open now. As Angelo Codevilla noted in his recent essay on the ruling class, we’re in the midst of a cultural and political confrontation the likes of which we’ve not seen since the 19th century.
The Cambridge Chronicle reports that City Councilor Marjorie Decker is not amused with the behavior of her subjects over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Commissar Decker and the Cambridge City Council issued a fiat in April ordering MIT to maintain full employment, “to halt layoffs and any cuts in hours, salary or benefits for employees.” MIT, however, faced a budget shortfall and was forced to cut $125 million from its budget, of which 10% came from job layoffs.
Ms. Decker wasn’t having any excuses: “What we said to you, to MIT, was ‘Don’t contribute to the destabilization of families in our community.’ And we got zero response … For me, that is just an incredible level of arrogance that not only does the council not matter, but this question of really who they impact doesn’t matter.” This is a classic case of projection; Councilor Decker herself exhibits a level of arrogance one might expect to find in the nomenklatura of a totalitarian society. “How dare you disobey me?” she appears to be asking. “Don’t you know who you’re messing with here?”
I think Milovan Djilas would instantly recognize Ms. Decker for who and what she is. And in Djilas’ world and ours, the petty bureaucrats imitate the manners and mores of apparatchiks greater than themselves. The current tone is being set by Hope ‘n Change himself – an instinctive bully. When he fires the chairman of GM, lesser bullies like Ms. Decker behave accordingly.
As reported in the UK Telegraph yesterday, it appears that the Fed is considering opening the money supply spigot once again with a gargantuan round of quantitative easing, which is the fancy term for printing money.
The reason? The economy is not “rebounding” as Tim Geithner told us last week in the New York Times; rather, it’s slowing. Productivity is slipping and unemployment is far worse than anyone in the government is letting on. Even with $2 trillion of easing since 2008, credit is elusive and consumer confidence and business investment is low. For Ben Bernanke, this raises the ugly specter of deflation and the Fed chief apparently thinks we’re circling that particular drain right now.
And his solution? Print more money and continue buying up US Treasury debt. After all, no one else is going to buy it. The Chinese economy is both slowing and turning inflationary. So, after pledging that we’d have no further purchases of debt or GSE securities, we’re now apparently going to continue the same course.
Needless to say, the markets reacted negatively yesterday, forcing the Fed into a hasty retreat. Now the Fed is pursuing “quantitative easing lite”:
But rather than allocating new funds to the effort, the central bank said it will use the proceeds from its first $1.7 trillion (£1.1 trillion) quantitative easing (QE) cycle to buy the government bonds “in order to help support the economic recovery in a context of price stability”. The proceeds are estimated to be $200bn to $300bn over the next 12 months, allowing it to keep its balance sheet at close to its present $2.06 trillion.
It’s this sort of madness that puts me in a Churchillian frame of mind.
For the last twenty years I’ve blown hot and cold on Newt Gingrich. I’ve admired his fertile mind and his ability to articulate great conservative principles. He’s a natural teacher and it shows. I’ve also admired him for the ‘Contract with America’ – the successful strategy to nationalize local congressional races that resulted in the [...]
I had the privilege of attending Americans for Prosperity’s “RightOnline” event in Las Vegas last weekend. I flew in on Thursday the 22nd and met up with mates from Maine at the Venetian Hotel, the conference location. The conference began on Friday morning and concluded late Saturday afternoon with a “practicum” – working a phone [...]
It’s curious, is is not, that while Britain’s National Health Service is decentralizing itself and eliminating much of its bureaucracy, we’re going in exactly the opposite direction? In fact, we’re creating a jumble of new agencies whose function, size and complexity beggar the imagination. Courtesy of Coordination Problem, here’s a flow chart illustrating our bureaucratic [...]
By most accounts, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is the most politicized department in the last hundred years. There is little in Holder or his conduct to inspire much confidence and his unwillingness to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a racially neutral way merely adds luster to his reputation. The current scandal involving the [...]
Given the highly uncertain state of the world, I’ve been re-reading Churchill’s multi-volume Second World War memoir. I’ve just finished The Gathering Storm (covering the run up to war) and Their Finest Hour (covering the Battles of France and Britain in 1940). To understand the background involved, note that Churchill was out of power for [...]
A recent Forbes blog post got me thinking more about this little-noticed provision in the so-called “jobs bill” that was recently defeated in the Senate. The provision would have extended the FICA tax to S-corp dividends. Let’s delve a little deeper into the history of the S-corp to better understand why this is a horrible, [...]
Our principal source for the inner workings of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 is James Madison’s Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. The Debates are the actual minutes of the convention. After leaving the presidency in 1817, Madison revised and annotated his papers, including the Debates. In the Introduction to the Debates, Madison gave [...]
Compliments of the The American Observer (the magazine of the American University J-School), here’s a rather effective flash presentation showing the spread of the current recession. With Hope ‘n Change and the current Congress in charge, I don’t see this turning around anytime soon. Share and Enjoy:
This is the same guy who arguably launched the tea party movement with his rant last year from the floor of the Chicago Exchange. Now he’s done it again in another brilliant improvisation, spewing on Steve Liesman, CNBC’s financial correspondence who was reporting from the White House lawn. Liesman is known for his book, The [...]
The day after the 2008 election, we noted the New Black Panther video that even then had gone viral – you know, the video that had baton-wielding thugs intimidating voters outside a Philadelphia polling place. We noted that the ‘mainstream’ press seemed uninterested. And they were. And over the last two years the media’s disinterest [...]
While I agree with many commentators that the Elena Kagan hearings have begun to resemble a rather bad Gilbert & Sullivan production, there was one very revealing moment during yesterday’s hearing. It came when Tom Coburn explored with Kagan the reach of the Commerce Clause, the vehicle for so much Congressional mischief over the past [...]
While the Obama Administration struggles to contain the Gulf oil spill, the Administration has succeeded in capping the private sector. Today the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released new personal income data for the first quarter of 2010. Unfortunately, this brings more bad news for Americans. As shown in Chart 1, America’s [...]
My family is filled with men who wore the uniform. These include my father, father-in-law, uncles, cousins, grandfathers, great-great grandfather and others. By way of a Memorial Day remembrance, however, this post is a specific tribute to my uncle, First Lt. Alfred C. Chamberlain, who died on March 13, 1944, near the hamlet of Wrentham [...]
At the end of World War II, the US Navy possessed the largest fleet in the world, but one that was mass-produced to fight the current war. All the services faced massive demobilization at war’s end but the cuts hit hardest at the Army and Navy. The new Air Force was the darling of defense [...]
David Horowitz spoke at UC San Diego on May 10th about Israel, Islamic terrorism and freedom in education. In the question and answer, Horowitz was confronted by a young member of the local Muslim Student Association. If any of us had any doubts about the genocidal impulse in radical Islam, wonder no more. Here it [...]
Give it to me loud and dirty, I always say. And that’s precisely what Gov. Chris Christie does in a recent press conference, shoveling it right back in the face of prissy lefty columnist Tom Moran of the Newark Star-Ledger. Where do we find pissants* like Moran in this country? Gov Christie calls S-L columnist [...]
Welcome to readers of Jonah Goldberg’s blog at the American Enterprise Institute. During his contretemps with Scott Galupo of US News concerning Woodrow Wilson, Jonah quite generously linked to my March posting on Wilson and the Administrative State. Thanks, Jonah. Appreciate the link – and the recognition. Share and Enjoy:
Hidden beneath the uproar of electoral politics, oil spills and the like is a mini-uproar over the EPA’s new lead paint rules, which will probably double the cost of every renovation job on any older building other than your own residence. First promulgated by the EPA in 2008, the regulations took effect last month, prompting [...]
In watching all the Sturm und Drang about Arizona’s immigration bill, one would have thought that Arizona had descended into outright fascism. We’re hearing the usual rhetoric bandied about, replete with National Socialist imagery. Have any of Arizona’s critics actually read the bill? What Arizona did was adopt existing federal immigration law. It’s a crime [...]
This is one of the creepier videos I’ve seen in a while. The Pennsylvania Department of Revenue is advertising a tax amnesty program, encouraging its citizens to pay back taxes by waiving penalties and halving the interest. The usual. What’s unusual is the ad itself, which adopts a “we know where you live” theme, complete [...]
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