Happy Hannukah from your Grant Wood mid western relatives!---
It has become increasingly evident we have the best corrupt Congress money can buy. Many of of the Senators and Representatives are more interested in feathering their own nest, passing legislation they are not subject to and, were they and their staff outside Congress would be in jail for their failed trusteeship. Now it is becoming increasingly evident they and their staff have been engaged in insider trading.
Yet, these same Congress persons and their staff preside over government agencies which hunt down and incarcerate American citizens for actions they, so far, have gone Scott free for allegedly committing. No wonder Congress is held in such low repute and if they do not begin a concerted effort to address our nation's welfare , rather than their own. the reputation of Congress will continue sinking lower.
Everyone has a right to petition their Congressperson. Yhe real battle is between lobbyists, representing special interests, and the overall public. Unless you have a constant and active public sending in their views and making them constantly known the lobyists win hands down and that is reality.
Lobbyists live and breathe their job. They wine and dine, they contribute money, they do all kinds of favors, offer all kind of freebies and that gives them the upper hand over Joe and Jane Citizen. As I have said repeatedly, we have the best Congress money can buy.
Let's see what Congress does regarding Rangel? (See 1 below.)
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What is killing Western culture? Surely it is in decline and under attack? (See 2 below.)
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Get ready for the redistribution of fault by Liberals. (See 3 below.)
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N Korea is prepared to supply Iran with nuclear bomb parts according to Sarkozy who faults Obama's naval strategy.
Sarkozy is apparently applying pressure on Saudi family members to do the same on Obama.
Will it work? Hardly when you have The State Depoartment, The Sec. of Defense and The Joint Chief of Staff in favor of doing nothing. (See 4 below.)
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The PA uses Israel's new decision to build more homes on their land in Jerusalem as a basis for claiming Israel is not interested in peace. Obama gave the PA the stick and the PA continues using it for blame shifting and ducking their own responsibility.
Every day that passes evidence mounts regardiing Obama's naivety and incompetence which appears almost boundless.(See 5 below.)
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Hanson turns to Gov. Brown and asks what will he do come Jan. 1, to stave off the collapse of California? Can Gov. Moonbeam shed his image and govern in a constructive manner or will he simply do what California Liberals elected him to do - spend and tax? (See 6 below.)
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Is Rep. Waters in more hot water as two House Ethics Committee staff members are placed on leave because, allegedly, they pressed too hard to further their investigation of improper behaviour on the part of one of Water's staff (her grandson) with Barney?
Even connecting the word 'ethics' to a Congressional Committee is an oxymoron. (See 7 below.) ---
DeBorchgrave on Wikileaks and possible consequences. (See 8 below.)
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Dick
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1)Is Congress Guilty of Insider Trading?
By Richard Rahn
Stock or commodity trading on "inside information" has been illegal since the early 1960s. Yet there is one group that frequently has access to nonpublic information that can greatly affect stock prices, to the extent of making or breaking a company or even an industry, and these "insiders" are considered exempt from prosecution by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The insiders I refer to are members of Congress and their staffs.
They have prior knowledge about which companies or industries will or will not be "bailed out," have their taxes raised or lowered, be subject to costly new regulations or exempted from such regulations, receive government contracts, etc. However, because the members of Congress and their staffs do not obtain their information from employees of the companies affected, they are not considered insiders.
There have been a number of recent news stories about how the average member of Congress showed an increase in net wealth over the past couple of years, while the average American was losing net wealth. The obvious conclusion is that members of Congress knew things the rest of us did not and acted on this knowledge to their own advantage — no surprise.
A new study that empirically demonstrates this, "Capitalizing on Capitol Hill: Informed Trading by Hedge Fund Managers," has just been published by the Social Science Research Network. The authors of the study, Jiekun Huang and Meng Gao, found that hedge funds connected with lobbyists, relative to non-connected ones, outperform by 1.6 percent to 2.5 percent per month in politically sensitive stocks compared to nonpolitical stocks. These results suggest that hedge-fund managers exploit private information, which can be an important source of their superior performance.
We are in the process of finding out what actually was in the 2,000-page-plus healthcare bill and financial "reform" bill. Those bills have many winners and losers — which previously were known only to the lobbyists and the members of Congress and their staffs who put in the specific deals.
This is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." It will never be known who gained financially from the inside information that was acted on as these bills were being passed, but you can bet the gain was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
A bill was introduced early in this current Congress (H.R. 682: Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act) which would prohibit the sale and purchase of securities or commodities' futures based on knowledge gained from a member of Congress, an employee of Congress or other federal employees. The proposed legislation is so broad and at points so vague as to be unenforceable in a consistent manner.
This proposed act makes the same mistake that the SEC often makes in dealing with "inside information," in that there is an underlying assumption that the uncontrolled dispersal of information about the health or prospects of companies is bad and that known information can be controlled.
The recent release of highly classified information from Pentagon sources by WikiLeaks again shows the near impossibility of controlling even the most sensitive information.
Time and time again, the U.S. government has shown that it cannot protect sensitive information, from atomic secrets to sensitive financial data held by the Internal Revenue Service. Those who tell us that any information is safe when held by the U.S. government are both supremely arrogant and ignorant of history, including the news of recent weeks.
The SEC has a long history of not knowing what it should have known (e.g., Enron, Bernard Madoff) and at the same time trying to stop the dispersal of information about companies that is necessary for markets to operate properly. The SEC is in the process of trying to find ways to criminalize those who (outside a firm) find better ways of doing research or modeling what they think is going on in a firm, even though they have received no direct, nonpublic information from real insiders.
This approach eventually could kill the whole field of securities analysis. Only government employees at the SEC could dream up a scheme to try to keep everyone ignorant and call it "progress."
Professor Henry Manne, dean emeritus of the George Mason University Law School and arguably the nation's greatest scholar on "insider trading" issues, observes that the decades of failure at the SEC show that enforcement of insider-trader laws is not feasible and often is counterproductive.
Also, there has never been a clear definition of insider trading either from Congress or the SEC. Mr. Manne says it is time to "rethink any current policies based on a view of pricing in which we exclude the best-informed traders."
Because insider or informed "trading clearly makes the market process work more efficiently, it aids capital allocation decisions and informs business executives through market-price feedback of the best predictions about the value of new plans."
Outsiders are best served in making their buy and sell decisions when all of the information about a company is incorporated in its market price, even if it comes from insiders.
As for Congress and their staffs, given that a prohibition of the use of inside information is nearly impossible, the effort should focus on more transparency. This, in part, would mean legislation being passed in small, understandable increments so that outsiders would be able to determine who benefits or loses when the legislation or regulation is proposed.
Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.
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2)The Bourgeoisie, Egalitarianism, and the Death of Culture
By Larrey Anderson
Three crucial points underlie our crisis of culture in the Western world:
1) There is no culture, at least as we know it in the West, without the bourgeoisie.
2) The notion of egalitarianism, which in the last few hundred years has come to dominate our thinking, is wreaking havoc on Western culture.
3) By embracing the concept of egalitarianism, the bourgeoisie is precipitating the dissolution of our culture and the self-destruction of the middle class.[i]
1) Culture and the Middle Class
The middle class has supplied most of the innovators in Western culture, science, and economics. The philosopher David Stove, who does the math, puts the percentage of important philosophers, historians, artists, scientists, inventors, etc. who have emerged from the bourgeoisies at 97%.
The reasons for the amazingly high number of cultural and economic contributions from members of the middle class are simple. The upper classes already have political and economic power. Stove describes the intellectual motivation of the aristocratic classes thus:
An aristocrat is someone with more opportunity than other people to indulge his or her mere will. Most people, if given that opportunity, will flow into the typical aristocratic activities -- war, government, conspicuous display....
At the other extreme sit the poor. Stove bluntly describes their situation:
It is very obvious why people of the abyss play no part in culture. They are too tired, or too sick, or too hungry, or too drunk, to acquire even elementary education. And no one can contribute to physics, philosophy, music, or whatever, unless they have not merely elementary education ... but a good grasp of what others before them have done in that field.
In between the elite and the indigent are the members of the middle class. The motivations of the bourgeoisie vary. For the purposes of this discussion, I will divide the members of the middle class into three constituents:
(A) Those who seek a comfortable life. This is the bulk of the middle class -- people who work at salaried positions.
(B) Those who take greater risks and attempt to become entrepreneurs. The motivation for this section of the middle class is money and/or prestige. The risks for this group are high because there are no "safety nets" for the enterprising bourgeoisie.
(C) Those who seek recognition or fame, or are driven to significantly add to either the sciences or culture. Their goal is to make a name for themselves -- and sometimes a living -- through a legitimate and lasting contribution in some culturally related field. (E.g., philosophy, mathematics, or one of the arts.)
Notice that the numbers in each group dramatically decrease as we move from (A) to (B) to (C) and that within each group there are degrees of success (both financially and in terms of public recognition). Within group (B), for instance, there are more failed and/or struggling entrepreneurs than there are flourishing ones. And the number of highly successful businesspeople is a very small percentage of (B).
What most of us fail to recognize is that the number of people in (C) is, in terms of a percentage of the members of the middle class, almost nil. These are the Einsteins, Mozarts, Shakespeares, and Freges. All were middle-class. All are very rare.
There are, for example, thousands of physicists in the world. Most of them fall within group (A). They are salaried professors or work as specialized employees in some large business. Less than a handful of physicists can claim to have made legitimate and lasting discoveries in their chosen field, and only these would fall into category (C). The same is true in most of the sciences and of culture of any consequence.
This is the great, and little understood, paradox of the bourgeoisie. Culture is a creation of the middle class -- but only of the best (and rarest) of the bourgeoisie.
2) Egalitarianism and the Middle Class
Contrary to what most of us have been taught, egalitarianism is a curiously modern notion. Equality before the law is a concept that stretches far back in time. Leviticus 19:15 calls for equal judgment between the rich and the poor. It does not declare the rich and the poor equal in any status -- except before God's law. In fact, the scripture relies on the given of economic inequality to make the case for legal equality. [ii]
But egalitarianism, the concept of absolute equality among human beings, did not exist until about the sixteenth century.[iii] This truth, as Stove reminds us, is hard for most of us to grasp:
Most of the elements of the Enlightenment can be traced back to classical antiquity, but its egalitarianism cannot. ... This is a fact about the ancient world which is extremely difficult for us to accept. In us, the idea that everyone should be equal is so deeply ingrained that we think everyone should be of the same opinion.
Where, then, did this notion of the absolute equality of all human beings come from?[iv] The answer is this: overenthusiasm combined with a misunderstanding of human beings.
The leaders of the Enlightenment knew that they had uncovered a new and vitally important idea in the scientific method. Many thought that their mathesis universalis (universal science) would rapidly change not only the world, but also human nature. Some, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Denis Diderot, literally guaranteed such advancements. Diderot, for example, claimed that the new French Encyclopédie would have the power to "change men's usual ways of thinking." By "men," Diderot obviously meant "all human beings."
History has shown us that it takes more than an encyclopedia to alter human nature. It takes revolutions and guillotines. The first major effort to impose perfect equality, and change human nature, was attempted not with the Communists' Russian Revolution -- it happened in the French Revolution. (Some fifty years after Diderot and D'Holbach published the Encyclopédie.) Perhaps the most extraordinary, but least discussed, discovery by the leaders of the French Revolution was that for total equality to be achieved, the destruction of the middle class was more important than the abolition of religion or the elimination of the aristocracy.
Sylvain Maréchal in his Manifeste des Égaux (Manifesto of Equals, 1801), stated, "Let the arts perish if needs be. But let us have real equality!" Antoine Lavoisier, the "father of modern chemistry," was executed during the French Revolution in 1794. The revolutionary judge who sentenced Lavoisier to death proclaimed, "The Republic has no need of chemists."
As we have seen, artists and chemists rarely emerge from the aristocracy, the priestly class, or the poor. In order to have "real equality," it is the bourgeoisie who must be extinguished. The middle class is the engine that produces the artists and the chemists who distinguish themselves (making themselves unequal to the masses of humanity) through their contributions to culture.
3) The Death of Culture
In Die Deutsche Ideologie,[v] Karl Marx made one of the most revealing statements about the relationship among culture, egalitarianism, and the middle class:
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
The nub of the allure of egalitarianism is lassitude. This is a pledge of laziness. It is the slow execution of the middle class and a vow to murder culture. Notice what is missing from the promise of egalitarianism: the nobility of growth, struggle, specialization, and pursuing one's dream.
The middle class has a choice to make. We can continue stumbling blindly down the road to our own destruction. Or we can wake up to the fact that if we choose egalitarianism, we sign our own death warrant.
All people are not equal. A child is not special (not yours, not mine) unless the child is gifted, educated, and driven to pursue his or her dreams.
Let's close this piece by getting down to the nitty-gritty. Does your child play in a soccer league that doesn't keep score -- in order not to hurt the feelings of the kids who have no talent? If so, shame on you. Your child will end up in a society in which he can do, as Marx promised, whatever he wants, just as he has "a mind."
Except your child will not have a mind of his own. Public schools -- in the name of egalitarianism, but in what amounts to a cost-cutting procedure -- are mainlining special needs students and reducing programs for gifted students. The chances are getting lower and lower that the brightest students will be able to excel at being outstanding scientists, inventors, writers, etc. No matter. There is little need to contribute to a culture that no longer exists.
Understand that it is not my intention in writing this essay to épater le bourgeoisie. The middle class doesn't need another shock. We bourgeoisie need to wake the hell up. Now.
Larrey Anderson is a writer, philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. He is the author of The Order of the Beloved, and the memoir Underground. His next book, The Idea of the Family, will examine the role of procreation in human self-awareness.
[i] This bewildering predicament occurred to me while rereading "Did Babeuf Deserve the Guillotine?" This is the first essay in David Stove's On Enlightenment, Transaction Publishers, 2003. All references to, and quotes by, Stove are from this article. Also see Thomas Lifson's excellent article, "Progressive Feudalism"; André Glucksmann's Les Maîtres Penseurs (The Master Thinkers), 1977, Grasset & Fasquelle; and Stanley Rosen's Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay, Yale University Press, 1969.
[ii] See Aristotle, Politics, 1287a. (Compare Exodus 23:3 with Exodus 23:6.)
[iii] Plato's Republic is today mistakenly taken to be a communistic or egalitarian work. But the system presented by Socrates in the book is a strict tripartite caste based on intellectual merit -- not equality. The fact is that almost no ancient thinkers toyed with the idea of equality. The scant few who might have are of little historical or intellectual significance. If I remember correctly, Cicero and Plutarch both briefly mention Gaius Blossius as an incipient egalitarian. Blossius was, apparently, an advisor to Tiberius who pushed land reform for the Roman plebs.
[iv] Stove, in his article, pins too much of the blame for egalitarianism on Christianity. Many of the most prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment were atheists, agnostics, or deists. Most of those had a profound disdain for Christianity. Furthermore, there is little historical evidence to support Stove's contention. In America, for example, efforts to achieve absolute equality by various Christian sects all ended in failure. The Shakers and the Perfectionists come to mind. The Mormon Church was bankrupted and nearly collapsed when it instituted the "United Order" -- an early effort by that church at enforced collectivism.
[v] The German Ideology was written in the spring of 1845. The book was co-authored by Friedrich Engels.
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3)Liberals and the Coming Redistribution of Fault
By J. Robert Smith
It's coming. Expect it. Liberals blaming everyone and everything but themselves for the nation's continuing economic crisis. And the mounting crisis of government. It's already begun, in fact, over at U.S. News and World Report, where Mortimer B. Zuckerman dusts off Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West to mull over the notion that the West -- including the United States -- may be reaching the end of the line.
Let's congratulate Zuckerman for pointing the way in the coming attempt to foist blame on Western civilization for what is, essentially, a failure of leftism. Let's acknowledge, though, that Zuckerman appreciates that the United States and Western nations can no longer sustain profligate government. But Zuckerman's angst is misplaced. American and Western civilizations deserve no general indictment.
Leftism deserves the indictment. The left's failure -- here and abroad -- may just prove stupendous, and that's something that American liberals and European socialists can't abide. Hence the coming compassionate redistribution of fault.
If the United States and the West ever decline and are eclipsed, the root cause will be the failure of peoples to throw off and marginalize leftism -- intellectually, culturally, and politically. Leftism is a cancer that needs to be excised; doing so is critical in restoring societal health, here and in Europe.
The immediate crisis isn't with Western civilization, however; it's with a deviant strain in the West called leftism. Leftism's fullest manifestation is in the state. Leftism is deviant in that it's a marked departure from the notions of natural rights, individualism, and liberty that germinated in the Renaissance, began flowering during the Enlightenment, and reached a fuller realization in American civilization with American independence. Leftism is a denigration of the highest virtues of western life.
Zuckerman writes:
[Spengler's] thesis was that civilizations had an underlying trajectory, an organic rise and fall; his metaphor was to compare the stages of this process to the stages of our seasons.... In the 19th century we were, he suggested, in the winter of the West, witnessing the triumph of materialism, socialism, and money and that the era of individualism, liberty, and humanitarianism was nearing its end.
Civilizations have an organic rise and fall? Perhaps due to natural cataclysms -- widespread and prolonged droughts, floods, earthquakes, and so on. But the rise and fall of many civilizations are the result of free will and choice. Rome fell due in large measure to Roman will (or lack thereof) and fateful choices. The German powerhouse emerging at the dawn of the 20th century was undone by misperceptions and the reckless choice of the Kaiser and German elites for war.
Zuckerman, as he understands Spengler, is right that Westerners began to imperil Western civilization in the 19th century with the embrace of materialism (the rejection of Providence) and socialism (the rejection of natural rights and liberty in favor of collectivism with a practical concentration in state power). Zuckerman is wrong about money, if by that he means capital. The embracing of materialism and socialism has been a choice -- a choice that departed from the abundant, demonstrated successes in human freedom, faith, and limited government. These, of course, are the hallmarks of Western civilization -- American civilization, particularly.
Zuckerman continues:
The global prosperity of much of the 20th century would seem to belie the pessimists, but I don't think there is much doubt the moral authority of the West has dramatically declined in the face of the financial crisis. It has revealed deep fault lines within Western economies that have spread to the global economy. [Italics added.]
What are the "deep fault lines in Western economies?" What is Zuckerman referring to? Is there something inherently missing in those elements of free enterprise and capitalism that Western economies have retained? Or are the widening fissures that are destroying economies due chiefly to the excessive interventions of governments in marketplaces? To monetary manipulations? Parasitic government? Cronyism? To the centralization of economic decision-making in Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, and Berlin?
The economic crisis that began in the United States toward the close of 2007 had more than one cause, assuredly. But government's apologists cannot wash government's hands of its role in precipitating the crisis. The housing boom and bust in the United States, which helped kick off the global economic crisis, was fueled by Washington's meddling in mortgage lending practices beginning in the 1990s and made worse over time.
The West's moral authority has eroded to varying degrees, and at varying rates, since near the beginning of the 20th century, with the advent of socialism (fascism and welfarism being variants) and statism. It's the unmooring from the truth of liberty -- in its many expressions -- that is undermining the West's moral authority. Restore the primacy of natural rights and limited government, and the West would go a long way toward restoring its moral clout -- and its economic health.
Leviathan governments in the West have relied on the free portions of their economies to feed their insatiable appetites for resources. Big governments have incurred big debts and made extravagant promises of entitlements, thereby ensuring jaw-dropping deficits, all the while gambling that cash-cow capitalism will continue to produce even more cash to meet government obligations -- and permit governments to spend and borrow more.
But capitalism and free enterprise have their limits; their shoulders aren't sturdy enough to indefinitely sustain the ravenous, elephantine governments that perch and feed on them. Nor can capitalism and free enterprise be harassed and stripped of their vitality in the name of fairness and equality and be expected to keep yielding wealth.
Zuckerman notes Western consumers' taste for debt as a contributor to the current economic crisis. In the United States, where did this indifference to debt originate? Is capitalism's success in spreading affluence the culprit? Easy access to credit? Perhaps affluence and easy credit have made some contributions to the debt problem, but the deeper problem lies in the left's ethos.
In the 1930s, liberals began to undermine the virtue of thrift in the big-government, big-spending schemes of Franklin Roosevelt. In the 1960s, the counterculture, which was part of the left, challenged -- with startling effectiveness -- the virtues that had long governed American culture. Out were the old virtues of self-discipline and restraint; in was permissiveness.
The counterculture's rallying cry was "If it feels good, do it." Over the decades, that sentiment has seeped into American culture. Is it really surprising that today, Benjamin Franklin's simple admonition that "a penny saved is a penny earned" is considered quaint?
A last word from Zuckerman: "In the United States, gloom has spread to our policymakers on how to deal with our economic dilemmas."
Washington's policymakers are gloomy and lacking because they share a liberal mindset. They can't reach beyond their beliefs and experiences to reject the left's failed systems. They cannot embrace what has proven to work and represents the best of Western civilization: liberty and the virtues therein.
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4)Sarkozy: North Korea to supply Iran with nuclear bomb components
French President Nicolas Sarkozy warns that North Korea is using its crisis with the South to cover up its planned transfer to Iran of nuclear weapons systems parts and extra-fast centrifuges for uranium enrichment that could help Tehran go into bomb production in the first half of 2011, intelligence sources report. The French president has asked pro-Western Persian Gulf leaders to try and persuade President Barack Obama to take strong military action against North Korea – not just because of its aggression against the south, but to hold back Pyongyang's nuclear aid to Tehran.
Sources report urgent secret calls from the Elysée to the New York hospital where Saudi King Abdullah is recovering from surgery, to his foreign minister Prince Saud Al Faisal and intelligence chief Prince Moqrin Bin Abdul Aziz as well as to the Emir of Kuwait, Shaikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah. He asked them to use their influence and lean hard on Washington for urgent action. In Sarkozy's opinion, Iran only agreed to meet the Six-Power representatives on December 6 for talks as a gambit to play for time until the North Korean nuclear supplements are in hand. He told the Gulf rulers that he had been informed by highly credible sources that the items from North Korea would help Iran solve the technical problems plaguing the program and holding up its progress.
Sarkozy held a closed briefing session the French president held in Paris a few days ago for high officials in his government in which he enlarged on his warning. He found fault with President Obama's tactic of massing air and naval strength around Iran's shores in recent months to keep the Islamic Republic under military pressure ahead of nuclear talks. Those units, he said, would have been better employed surrounding North Korea in order to block its export of nuclear components to Iran. The sea is Pyongyang's only consignment route to Tehran, Sarkozy explained. If we all work together (US, France, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf emirates), he said, we can still abort it.
Meanwhile, military sources add that the US-French naval and air deployment opposite Iran numbers two American and one French aircraft carrier, the USS Truman, USS Lincoln and the Charles de Gaulle and their strike forces. Several British and German warships have joined this armada. Sources familiar with the Sarkozy briefing quote him as maintaining that the USS Lincoln should have been sent to the Yellow Sea before the crisis erupted over North Korea's shelling of a South Korean island in the third week of November. He would then have ordered the Charles de Gaulle to join the US carrier at the Korean scene.
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5)PA: Pisgat Ze'ev plan proves Israel doesn't want peace
Abbas aide responds to J'lem c'tee's approval of new neighborhood of 625 housing units in northeastern Jerusalem called "North Pisgat Ze'ev"; Erekat: Israel has chosen "settlements and not peace."
An aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday charged that a plan to build 625 housing units in Pisgat Ze'ev proves that Israel does not want to resume peace talks, Reuters reported.
"This Israeli signal shows that they are not willing and not ready for any deal in order to resume the negotiations," Nabil Abu Rdainah was quoted as saying. "It looks like this is an Israeli message to the Palestinians and the Americans that they are refusing any deal resuming the negotiations."
Also Thursday, Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat said that the plan showed Israel had chosen "settlements and not peace."
The comments came a day after the Jerusalem District Planning and Construction Committee approved the establishment of a new neighborhood of 625 housing units in northeastern Jerusalem called "North Pisgat Ze'ev." The move came despite strong opposition by the US administration.
The last major approval for construction in east Jerusalem was announced on November 8, for 1345 apartments in Har Homa in Ramot. The announcement drew international condemnation. The announcement, which took place simultaneously with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's meetings with US Vice President Joe Biden, was made by the same district committee under the aegis of the Interior Ministry. The move drew international condemnation.
Associated Press and Melanie Lidman contributed to this report.
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6)Jerry Brown's Last Hurrah
By Victor Davis Hanson
The most interesting current political question is not whether Barack Obama will triangulate after his party's midterm shellacking -- he probably won't -- but what in the world California's new/old governor, Jerry Brown, will do in January 2011.
At 72, Brown is returning to a third term as California governor after a hiatus of 28 years to face a $26 billion budget deficit and an unemployment rate above 12 percent. So is it to be more taxes, more government, both or neither?
Both conservatives and liberals agree that Brown will probably do what California's progressive voters elected him to do: keep government and its services big and find the necessary revenue from corporations and more affluent individuals to pay for it. The real debate is over whether he can pull that off in recessionary times.
Conservatives believe he cannot. They argue that the California model of huge public-sector salaries and pensions, high taxes, intrusive government and unchecked illegal immigration is unsustainable, and a prescription for Third World-like chaos and poverty. In this pessimistic view, California is just a year or two behind Greece and Portugal, but without a Germany to bail it out -- especially now, with a tight-fisted Republican-led House that soon may cut off federal subsidies to a now-insolvent California.
Californians, then, will get what they deserve for electing the doctrinaire liberal Brown. Necessary cuts will come only when a penniless California can no longer count on more 11th-hour bailouts.
In contrast, most liberals hope that Brown can find some way to raise fees and taxes to feed the comfortable public sector by counting on the resiliency of a California economy that has always bounced back. After all, the state enjoys world-class ports at Long Beach, Los Angeles and Oakland. Vibrant tourism draws millions everywhere from Yosemite to Disneyland. Silicon Valley is still the global high-tech capital. Central Valley agriculture is the richest in the world. Hollywood, the Napa Valley and coastal wine industries, a huge construction sector, and still plentiful oil and gas give the state one of the most diverse economies in the world.
If high earners are fleeing the state, exhausted by high taxes and regulations, there will always be new wannabe California dreamers eager to replace them -- drawn to the natural wealth, sun, laid-back lifestyle and vibrant popular culture. In other words, Democrats count on Brown to bide time until the eighth-largest economy in the world kicks back in. That inevitable recovery will allow that the status-quo Brown to claim things got better once he was in office, without him doing much of anything differently.
But there is also a third "Nixon Goes to China" school that envisions a more maverick Brown. Some remember how, in his earlier tenure as governor, he embraced the property-tax reductions of Proposition 13 that he once opposed by claiming ex post facto that they were in line with his own Zen-like frugality.
If the liberal Brown were to now take on out-of-control public spending, he would be immune to the charges of callousness that destroyed multimillionaire outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and would have likewise smeared Republican billionaire gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman had she won. Perhaps given that California already has the highest sales, income and gas taxes in the nation, Brown could shrug and say that any more tax increases would set off an even greater stampede out of the state.
And at 72, the once overly ambitious Brown -- who ran for the presidency three times -- can forget about leapfrogging into the White House. The question now is Brown's final legacy, not his next career move. We know from the implosion of the European Union that unchecked big government inevitably leads to public insolvency. But does it also ensure, Brown might ask, moral bankruptcy?
In a postmodern world of omnipresent cheap consumer goods and all sorts of government-subsidized cradle-to-grave perks, can "small is beautiful" Jerry Brown teach Californians not just that too much stuff is no longer affordable or sustainable, but, at a deeper level, that our out-of-control excesses, appetites and dependencies are no longer good for our souls?
If he can, Brown could finally shed the old caricature of "Governor Moonbeam" and become the landmark philosopher-statesman he once promised that he would be, but was not, three decades ago. And if he can't, he'll be remembered as just another tax-and-spend California ideologue like hyper-partisan Rep. Nancy Pelosi or fossilized Sen. Barbara Boxer -- perpetually fiddling away in office while the redistributive state went up in flames.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
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7)2 sent on leave in Rep. Waters probe
By R. Jeffrey Smith
The chairman of the House ethics committee in mid-November approved a forced, indefinite leave by two of the panel's lead investigators of alleged wrongdoing by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) on behalf of a bank, an attorney for the investigators said Wednesday.
The actions occurred just as the committee postponed the trial because it had discovered new evidence that Waters's staff had played a more robust role in drafting key bank bailout legislation than previously understood.
Chairman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), in a cryptic announcement of the postponement on Nov. 19, said that "materials" had surfaced that required an investigative subcommittee to take up the matter once more, probably putting off any vote by the full committee on the lawmaker's fate until next year.
Waters's office subsequently confirmed the existence of the e-mail, in which her Chief of Staff Mikael Moore, who is also her grandson, demanded that aides to Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) show Moore the final version of "the provisions that we have been working on" to help minority-owned banks.
Lofgren's statement did not mention the staffing decisions, however, and she has not informed the investigators, C. Morgan Kim and Stacey Sovereign, since then of the reasons, according to their attorney, Richard A. Sauber.
He said neither Kim nor Sovereign, who are former federal prosecutors, knows why the action was taken. "They have spotless records," Sauber said Wednesday. "They completely deny any impropriety." Kim has been the top deputy to chief counsel R. Blake Chisam, who Sauber said initiated the action against them.
Lofgren's press aide and chief of staff did not respond to a request for comment, and Chisam did not return a phone call.
Several Republican sources on Capitol Hill, speaking on the condition of anonymity, suggested that Kim and Sovereign had ruffled feathers by continuing to investigate Waters even after the investigative subcommittee recommended in August that she be tried on ethics charges for intervening to help a troubled, minority-owned bank in Boston in which her husband held a substantial investment.
"They were pushing too hard" to expand the investigation, a Republican staff aide said, adding that before being placed on leave, they had circulated a memo supporting the trial postponement and urging further inquiry. Sauber said "they are not partisan in any way" and had no ill motives.
Waters, in a statement Wednesday, said that the lawyers' removal may have occurred because their conduct was "egregious." She said it suggests that "something has gone wrong in the ethics process," adding that "the committee must reveal immediately the circumstances that prompted its action."
"The longer the committee withholds the details of its actions, the more the public's confidence in the House ethics process is eroded," Waters said.
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8)DE BORCHGRAVE: International Subversives
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Undressing electronically with eyes wide shut is what the world's only superpower has done in a global striptease worthy of the Marx Brothers. But hardly a word has been written or spoken about the motives of the WikiLeaks' chief leaker. Australia's 39-year-old Julian Assange was 19 years old when the Cold War ended.
His parents were well-known on the left and ran a touring theater company. His mother remarried in 1979 to a man who belonged to a controversial New Age group. In the late 1980s, Mr. Assange was a member of a crack hacker team that called itself International Subversives.
In 1991, he was the subject of a raid on his Melbourne home by the Australian Federal Police. In September, Mr. Assange was voted No. 23 among "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures" by Britain's New Statesman, a magazine on the far left of the media spectrum. He is under consideration by Time magazine as its Person of the Year.
Australian acquaintances say he was bitterly disappointed by the outcome of the Cold War with a resounding global victory for the United States and its allies. Mr. Assange then began identifying with the defeated "progressives," from the pensioned-off millions - on starvation stipends - of the old Soviet nomenklatura to the innocent dupes who never realized that the World Peace Council was a KGB-controlled organization (documented in post-Cold War Russian files that opened briefly before the KGB's successor organization sealed them again).
There are tens of millions in both the Third and First worlds (e.g., former Communist Party members and their "progressive" fans) who firmly believe the "evil empire" is the United States with what even leading Wall Streeters - e.g., Pete Peterson - call "animalistic and carnivorous capitalism."
The post-Cold War generation of "progressives" - the word that once gave communists respectability the world over - likes to cite Karl Marx's prediction that capitalism eventually would sow the seeds of its own destruction. They also welcome anything that weakens the United States. Their new hero is Mr. Assange.
The world's most repressive regimes - e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea - are the least of Mr. Assange's concerns. The fount of all evil, as he sees the world, is the United States.
WikiLeaks' master leaker, who clearly relishes anything that hurts the United States, is a throwback to Vietnam-era haters who despised the U.S. government and happily smeared America's image throughout the world.
Under the global barrage of hundreds of thousands of WikiLeaks, American diplomats will be regarded with suspicion as so many men and women taking orders from their real masters - the CIA. Yet another throwback to the Cold War.
Mr. Assange's media partners in the Western world were selected with one yardstick: impeccable liberal credentials. The Washington Post wasn't liberal enough - and got squeezed out in favor of the New York Times, along with France's Le Monde, Britain's Guardian, Germany's Spiegel and Spain's El Pais.
An Internet activist and journalist, Mr. Assange studied physics and mathematics as a student, then went on to develop a reputation as a master hacker and computer programmer before anointing himself "editor in chief" of WikiLeaks. The harm he has done to the United States is considerable.
On the PBS NewsHour, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, said, "Who cares if Italian Premier [Silvio] Berlusconi is described as a clown? Most Italians agree with that. Who cares if Putin is described as an alpha dog? He probably is flattered by it." More serious, he said, are references to a report by our officials that some Chinese leaders favor a reunified Korea under South Korea. This clearly is designed to embarrass the Chinese and our relationship with them.
It even could tip the scales in favor of war in the Korean Peninsula. A frail and ailing Kim Jong-il could, for instance, decide that rather than slip gradually under South Korean and American domination, he will use his 11,000 artillery tubes to flatten Seoul first.
Equally embarrassing is the disclosure that the king of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni leaders have been saying in highly confidential conversations that they favor the United States and/or Israel bombing Iran's nuclear installations now rather than wait for the Shia theocracy to develop a deliverable weapon. Such a revelation can only undermine the authority of the Gulf's ruling families.
Perhaps the most egregious in the WikiLeak dump of hundreds of thousands of classified and secret cables was relations with Turkey - and the description of Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey's foreign minister, as exerting an "exceptionally dangerous" Islamist influence on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Davutoglu and other governing leaders of the Justice and Development Party of Turkey were also said by ranking U.S. diplomats "to have scant understanding of how their foreign policy will be understood outside of Turkey because their knowledge is handicapped by their Turkey-and-Islam-centric vision of how they want the world to operate." The same secret cable says Mr. Erdogan is incapable of viewing Islamist groups as terrorists. "Hamas and Hezbollah," he is quoted as saying, "are the result of Western policies gone awry, a response from desperate people - not truly terrorists." Most European leaders would agree.
Mr. Erdogan is accused of "unbridled ambition stemming from the belief God has anointed him to lead Turkey." The prime minister's "authoritarian loner streak" contains "a distrust of women," which explains why they've been excluded from any prominent role in the governing party.
Mr. Davutoglu lost no time flying to Washington to make the rounds, including some tough questioning on Capitol Hill. His message: Turkey is determined to be friends with everyone, from Israel to Iran.
Whatever a U.S. diplomat hears or says in conversations with local government officials and colleagues from other countries now runs the risk of being published and read by thousands of people from dozens of countries. Such conversations are bound to be governed by the fear of public exposure. America's diplomatic relations with friends and allies, Mr. Assange will be pleased to hear, have been severely damaged. Not permanently, but at least for a while.
Some say Mr. Assange does not seem to understand that the United States is still the behind-the-scenes catalyst for resolving tough regional and global issues. And that he has made it harder to resolve critical issues around the world by making the U.S. a less trusted interlocutor. The flip side of the coin says "International Subversives." They seek global chaos to spawn a New World Order. It's also called the totalitarian temptation, which has existed from time immemorial.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and of United Press International
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