Russia Prepares to ‘Destroy’ U.S. Shield, Medvedev Says

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the military to prepare to “destroy” the command capability of the planned U.S. missile-defense system in Europe.
Russia may also station strike missiles on its southern and western flanks, including Iskander rockets in the Kaliningrad exclave between Poland and Lithuania, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, Medvedev said on state television today.

U.S. Stocks Slump as Europe Bond Risk Climbs. By Rita Nazareth -

U.S. stocks fell, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index down for a sixth straight day, as the cost of insuring European government debt against default rose to a record on concern the region’s crisis is worsening.
Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. slumped at least 2.5 percent. Mosaic Co. and Halliburton Co. slid more than 0.5 percent, pacing losses in commodity producers. Deere & Co. rallied 4.4 percent as the world’s largest farm-equipment maker reported profit that topped analysts’ projections.
The S&P 500 retreated 1.2 percent to 1,173.44 at 9:45 a.m. New York time. The benchmark gauge tumbled 6.5 percent in six days, the longest losing streak since August. The Dow Jones Industrial Average retreated 128.66 points, or 1.1 percent, to 11,365.06. U.S. equity markets will be closed tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday and will end trading at 1 p.m. Nov. 25.

When Counterfeiting is Legal

By Eric Fry

11/22/11 Laguna Beach, California – If I told you that I had $1.6 trillion on deposit at a local bank, you’d think I was not merely a member of the “1%,” but a member of the “1%” of the “1%.” (Can’t you just imagine the bitter jealousy the other 99% of the 1% would feel?)
But if I then mentioned that — oh by the way — I also owed $1.6 trillion to a bunch of people, you’d realize that I probably belonged to the lowest cohorts of the 99%, rather than the very highest echelon of the 1%. In other words, you’d realize that I wasn’t über-rich; but über-poor.
But if I then told you, “Hey, don’t pity me. I can print as much money as I want. In fact, all of the $1.6 trillion I have in the bank is money I printed for myself.”
At that point, you wouldn’t know whether I belong to the 1% or the 99%, but you’d be pretty sure that I belonged in jail. And you’d be right…until you realized that even though counterfeiting is always criminal, it is not always illegal.

Cutting Federal Spending…One Way or Another

By Bill Bonner

11/22/11 Baltimore, Maryland – The Dow fell 248 points. Oil dropped to $96. And gold down a whopping $46. Why?
“Deficit Effort Nears Collapse”
Thus did yesterday’s Wall Street Journal describe the latest Congressional failure. To put it into perspective, a group of well-meaning, intelligent members of Congress had been asked to do something very simple. Every head of a household in the nation does it. Every businessman does it. Even some college students do it.
Members of Congress are very good at cashing checks. They are very bad at balancing the national checkbook. They haven’t done it for 10 years. They’re out of practice.
The situation is simple. The feds are spending too much. Every half-wit and democrat can see that they can’t go on like this.

How China Will Defeat America

By Bill Bonner

11/22/11 Baltimore, Maryland – Don’t expect spending on the pentagon to decrease. Not with our nation’s security at stake. And not with China posing an ever-greater threat.
An article by Yan Xuetong, translated from mandarin, tells “How China can defeat America.” The gist of Mr. Xuetong’s thought is that rising hegemons are a lot nicer than declining ones. Besides that, history is on the side of the rising power.
The US has become a tyrannical power, he insinuates, throwing its weight around wherever it can. China, on the other hand, is a helpful hegemon…a “humane authority.” While the US has military alliances all over the world…China has none. While the US has fought numerous wars over the last two decades, China’s military hasn’t been involved in conflict since 1984.
China has been preoccupied with her own internal issues…mostly related to employment and growth. But China’s economy grew 71 times faster than the US over the last 4 years. At that rate, it won’t be long before US output is actually lower than China’s.
Mr. Xuetong believes China should do as it did during the Tang dynasty, when it brought in foreigners as high ranking officials to help it take its place on the world stage.
No doubt there are other Chinese who are more hardnosed about it. Rarely does one empire give way to a successor peacefully. There are bound to be Chinese thinkers, whose works aren’t translated, who are speculating about how the Chinese can defeat the US in a real war. They’re surely devising a strategy…and developing new technologies…right at this very moment.
How could China defeat the US? Easy, it could spook US lawmakers into spending more money…wasting more military resources…and driving the nation into bankruptcy. In short, it could just wait.
Regards,

THE FINANCE CRISIS II

Why Not Huntsman?

Huntsman has a record more conservative than his moderate image suggests

Steve Chapman

He's a responsible, well-spoken adult with a good record in office, a soothing style, bipartisan appeal, and ample knowledge of the world beyond our shores. But Jon Huntsman, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, somehow imagines he can overcome those handicaps.
He's running at 2 percent in the polls, but working in his favor is that his rivals have defined themselves mostly by their lapses, failures, and gaffes. At the moment, Republicans seem doomed to choose between the fraudulent (Mitt Romney) and the incompetent (almost everyone else). One contender after another has risen to challenge Romney, only to self-destruct in the most mortifying possible way.
That leaves an opportunity for someone who can avoid the exploding cigar, as Huntsman has. Besides being a telegenic master of the complete sentence, he was the highly popular governor of the most Republican state in the country, Utah.

What’s the Matter with Rachel Maddow?

The MSNBC host champions bureaucratic power at the expense of regular people and their rights.

Sheldon Richman

Progressives today say people should come before profits. Now in a privilege-ridden corporate state, that’s a worthy goal, though progressives have no clue how to achieve it. How nice it would be if they were equally committed to putting people before bureaucracy. Here they fall down rather badly because their signature ideas would subordinate regular people to the dictates of the power structure.
Take MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Maddow is intelligent, serious, and well-meaning—which makes her vision all the more unsettling: It has ominous implications not only for individual liberty, but also for its concomitant: authentic spontaneous social cooperation.
Maddow might say that if she had her way, the bureaucracy would reflect the people’s interests, perhaps even consult them from time to time. But the naiveté of that vision is apparent from even a brief reading of political-economic history. When has bureaucracy actually represented—or cared about—plain people rather than being a tool of the power elite she claims to abhor (at least when Republicans hold some branch of government)?
Small Things

Her commercials on MSNBC (said to be shot by Spike Lee) well articulate her bureaucracy-first vision. I’ve taken the liberty of transcribing her words:

Every August since 1991, Seattle Hempfest has shown what the world will be like when pot is legal.

Nick Gillespie & Matt Welch

It takes a while to figure out what’s so different about the crowd of 100,000-plus people basking in the rare Seattle sunshine at Hempfest 2011, which took place August 19 to 21. It’s not the smell of pot everywhere, or the vendors selling bongs and pipes and high-carb munchies, or the familiar leaf imagery slapped on everything from lighters to bandanas to T-shirts, or the uncoordinated hippies playing hacky sack. If you remember the ’70s, or ever went to a Grateful Dead concert, or have visited Amsterdam, you’ve been there, grokked that.

Free Cities: The Vision

It is the year 2060 and most human beings live in highly autonomous Free Cities of all sizes, enjoying previously unimaginable levels of prosperity, peace, health, and happiness. Most of the world’s innovation and production is taking place in Free Cities, as the creativity of billions of human beings on all continents is liberated for the first time in history. Free Cities — with their increasingly sophisticated water, sewage, and energy systems — have urbanized the world, and millions of acres of land have returned to wilderness. Free City residents communicate and trade freely with one another in a golden era of worldwide cooperation and collaboration.
In a 21st century revival of the medieval Hanseatic League, global governance is strongly influenced by this network. Traditional nation-states continue to exist, but they no longer serve as the main mode of governance for national territories or the global commons. Instead, legal system creation and maintenance has become one of the most innovative industries on the planet, with customized solutions available for a dizzying array of cultures, industries, and personal preferences.

AEI Debate Prep: Charting the right course in Afghanistan

By Gary Schmitt

This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22. See the rest of the posts here.
President Obama is to be given credit for increasing the size of the American military deployment to Afghanistan. Within the first two months of his presidency, the president announced that he would be sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan to meet the increasingly unstable situation there. Then, in October 2009, the administration announced an additional 13,000 support troops would be headed to the theater. And, finally, in early December of that year, the president announced a third set of deployments. This December “surge”—tied to a more comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) effort designed by the new American commander on the ground there, General Stan McChrystal—would add another 30,000 troops. With these deployments President Obama more than doubled American ground forces in Afghanistan.

Gary Schmitt Counterterrorism in America and the Jose Pimentel case

By Gary Schmitt

This past Sunday, New York City’s Police Department arrested 27-year-old Jose Pimentel on state charges of plotting a bomb attack. According to the NYPD and the prosecuting Manhattan district attorney, Pimentel maintained a jihadist website, published materials on how to make bombs, tried to reach out to Anwar al-Awlaki (the American-Yemini terrorist leader whom the United States recently killed with a drone strike), talked about killing American marines and soldiers and bombing sites around New York, and was nearing completion of making at least three pipe bombs.
Over the past few days, a number of stories, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to the New York Daily News, have run in the press “explaining” why federal prosecutors and the FBI declined to take over the case, including doubts about the NYPD’s use of a particular confidential informant and, according to one official, “The FBI also had doubts over whether Pimentel would be capable of carrying out a terror plot on his own, because they believed he had mental problems.”
I suppose it’s inevitable that the press would ask why the feds had not taken the case on given the high priority of countering terrorism these days. But that said, it seems to be extremely bad form for the Bureau to be dumping on the case after the arrest, especially since the FBI is always touting how state and local police have to be their eyes and ears on the streets. Plus, on its face, New York authorities had every reason to arrest Pimentel. The fact that he might have had mental problems or the confidential informant is not clean as a whistle would have been cold comfort if one of those pipe bombs had gone off in a crowded post office this holiday season.

The 1 chart that shows why Germany wants to save the euro … and the 1 chart that show why it might not

By James Pethokoukis

Project Euro is about economics, of course, but not just that, as JPMorgan’s Jim Glassman notes:

Its driving forces have deep historical roots in a century of devastating conflicts (the illustration of war casualties on the following page underscores that trauma) and they are fueled by the enormous economic benefits that come from strengthening economic integration: the efficiencies that members receive when trading with each other by focusing on their comparative advantage; the leverage members gain by locking arms when operating in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

Certainly, Europe doesn’t want a return to this:

So why doesn’t Germany get on board with empowering the European Central Bank to start a bond buying program as lender of last resort? This next chart shows another German memory:

Glassman’s conclusion:

There is no quick and easy way to deal with Europe’s liquidity crisis. The European Central Bank likely will have to step in to be the bridge, at least for a while, to a fundamental improvement in Europe’s unification process. This will be a difficult politically, but there are few viable alternatives. Given the threat of the financial crisis to the economic health of the region, however, and in turn that impact on inflation, the ECB could connect such activities with its inflation mandate. The ECB surely has the tools to deflate the region’s brewing crisis of confidence and liquidity crisis. Stay tuned.

AEI Debate Prep: Neutralizing the Iranian threat in Latin America

By Roger Noriega

This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22. See the rest of the posts here.
Iran is using Venezuela as a platform to project its asymmetrical warfare into the Western Hemisphere and to sustain its illicit nuclear program. According to documents of the regime of anti-American radical Hugo Chávez, Iran has laundered about $30 billion through the Venezuelan economy to evade international sanctions.
Moreover, Iran is seeking to exploit uranium in Venezuela, Ecuador, and elsewhere in the region, with Chávez’s facilitation. It also is working through its terror proxy Hezbollah to cultivate a network of radicalized operatives in a dozen countries in the region, centered in Venezuela but making significant progress in Brazil and Colombia, among others. The recent plot fostered by Iran’s Qods Force to commit a terrorist bombing in the heart of Washington, D.C., is undeniable evidence of Tehran’s determination to strike against U.S. targets in the event of preemptive military action against its illegal nuclear program.

Botched Cuban care and Chávez’s deceit may have worsened the Venezuelan’s cancer

By Roger Noriega

Fidel Castro’s vastly over-rated healthcare system may finally have achieved something noteworthy: killing Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez. According to an investigative report authored by Leonardo Coutinho and Duda Teixeira that appeared in Brazil’s premier newsmagazine Veja on Saturday (November 19), Cuban doctors at that country’s premier medical facility bungled the initial treatment of Chávez’s prostate cancer and may have rushed him to an early grave.
The Brazilian report, which quotes several of that country’s cancer specialists and urologists, delivers a damning assessment of the Cuban care:

It’s Europe’s Economic Growth, Stupid

By Desmond Lachman

European policymakers are clinging to the forlorn hope that the eurozone crisis can readily be defused by putting in place national unity governments in Greece and Italy.

Hope springs eternal among European policymakers. As Greece now verges on a hard default and as Italian bond yields soar to dangerous levels, European policymakers cling to the forlorn hope that the European crisis can readily be defused by putting in place national unity governments in Greece and Italy. By so doing, they choose to turn a blind eye to the highly compromised public finances that brought us to this impasse and that are all too likely to drive the eurozone apart in the year ahead.

Handicapping ObamaCare’s Day in Court

By Thomas P. Miller

An older, exiled vintage of the Constitution may make an encore appearance

The Supreme Court’s decision to review ObamaCare was predictable but nevertheless historic. Given the unresolved trench warfare of our currently dysfunctional political system, many Americans have resorted to another institution that also often disappoints us—the courts.
After dozens of lawsuits, at least half a dozen significant federal district court decisions all over the constitutional law map, and four federal appellate court rulings pointing in different directions, it’s time for the Supreme Court to at least try to resolve several thorny constitutional issues. The most important one involves whether any legal principles remain that might limit the power of Congress to mandate the purchase of health insurance under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

THE LIBERTARIAN

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Russia Prepares to ‘Destroy’ U.S. Shield, Medvedev Says

U.S. Stocks Slump as Europe Bond Risk Climbs. By Rita Nazareth -

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

When Counterfeiting is Legal

When Counterfeiting is Legal