A Problem with Islam, A Question of Height, Europe's Economy and a Critique of CNN

Europe's Economy Is Broken

Here’s an interesting piece from the Editors at Bloomberg View, taken from the internet.   Monetary policy is difficult stuff to understand and when it involves more than our nation’s economy, it is even stickier.  Nevertheless, we live in a global economy so what happens in Europe affects us as well, sooner or later. 

My read on this is that Europe’s monetary woes actually are a problem turning on wealth redistribution.  When a country turns to what amounts to printing money as the United States and the United Kingdom have done in their “quantitative easing” practices, whereby the government (the Federal Reserve here) puts additional money backed by little more than good faith into circulation by buying up bonds, the value of the money already in circulation is lessened, and the wealth of those possessing it reduced accordingly, some of that wealth thereby being transferred into the newly circulating increased supply of cheapened money.  This apparently has increased the gross domestic product here and in the UK, whereas in Europe, where it is not being done, economic activity is stagnant or falling.  So it might be said that this variety of wealth redistribution works.

As for fiscal, as opposed to monetary policy, it appears that European nations which practice austerity in order to reduce their deficits are doing more harm than good to their economy.  Once again, “trickle-down” practices where investments by the wealthy are supposed to improve the economy don’t seem to be working as well as more direct ways of job creation through government subsidies, which hard-strapped governments which opted for austerity claim they cannot afford.

Read the article.  This is really important stuff.  Maybe you’ll get more out of it than I did. Remember, I am not an economist and have little faith in what economists say, because often, learned and honored practitioners of that profession say diametrically opposed things. 

Nevertheless, similar thoughts can be found in the Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times and elsewhere.

JL

Europe's Economy Is Broken

Taken from Bloomberg View

Aug 14, 2014 2:13 PM EDT

Investors were expecting bad numbers, but not this bad: Europe's economies stalled in the second quarter, new figures show. How much longer will Europe's policy makers just stand there?

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, the U.S. and the U.K. have seen output grow more slowly than in previous recoveries. That's nothing to boast about. Still, six years on, gross domestic product is higher in both countries than it was at the pre-crisis peak. Europe's output remains 2.4 percent below that benchmark. And the gap isn't closing.

All three of the euro area's biggest economies -- Germany, France and Italy -- are failing. Germany's output actually fell in the second quarter. So did Italy's, for the second consecutive quarter. (Whether this is a new recession for Italy or a continuation of the old one is debatable.) The European Central Bank currently forecasts a rise in euro-area output of 1 percent this year. Expect that to be revised down next month.

With inflation in the euro area running at 0.4 percent -- way below the ECB's target of less than but close to 2 percent, and far too close to outright deflation -- why isn't the ECB trying harder to ease monetary policy? Its official answer is that it adopted new measures in June, including an expanded program of support for bank lending. These, it says, should be given time to work.

Patience is often a virtue in central banking, but not in this case. The ECB's measures in June were timid, and the risks are increasingly skewed toward deflation and further prolonged stagnation or worse. The euro area needs quantitative easing of the kind applied by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. The case for this has been strong for months; now it's overwhelming.

The ECB is nervous because outright QE faces political and legal obstacles. One way or another, those issues will have to be resolved -- and that's what ECB President Mario Draghi needs to start saying. Whatever it takes, Mr. Draghi.

Monetary easing, though, isn't enough. The euro area also needs to rethink its fiscal policy. France just did -- demanding that its deficit-reduction target for 2014, imposed by the European Union, be relaxed. This makes sense. In a stagnating or shrinking economy, fiscal austerity can be self-defeating: If it slows economic growth even more, a fiscal squeeze can add to the burden of public debt.

German policy makers have resisted proposals to loosen the euro area's agreed fiscal targets. The European Commission has echoed the same line, insisting that supply-side reforms are the key to recovery. This is short-sighted. Europe needs both demand-side and supply-side stimulus -- but the first is both more urgent and can be delivered more promptly.

Europe's economy is in a dangerous place. Its fiscal and monetary policies need to change, and there's no excuse for further delay.

To contact the senior editor responsible for Bloomberg View's editorials: David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net.

                                                              

A Short Subject

The part of Florida where I live has many older, retired residents.  Most of them are shorter than they formerly were.  A five-foot five retiree finds out at their doctor’s office that their new height is five-foot two.  You encounter this on the road frequently when all you can see of the driver in the car next to you is a pair of hands on the steering wheel and the top half of a head.

So we were sitting in the movies the other evening when the woman sitting to our right decided to remove a sweater from her shoulders and tossed it over the back of the unoccupied seat in front of her.  A few seconds later, it came flying back at her as the anguished voice of a vertically-challenged senior complained, “Oy, I thought I was going blind, everything went dark, like something was thrown over my eyes!”  

Jack Lippman

                                                              
                                                            

Losing Faith In CNN

During the Israeli bombardment of on Gaza, directed at stopping Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israel as well as destroying their tunnels designed to sneak commandos into Israel, to surface there and to wreak havoc there, many Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries were incurred.  In reporting them, CNN and many other news media passed on the pictures of mangled bodies, often of children, and of scenes in hospitals, which were fed to them by Hamas with the aim of placing the blame for these atrocities upon Israel.

 

It was rarely mentioned by CNN reporters that these casualties occurred only because Hamas’ rocket launchers and weapons storage were dispersed among civilian areas, where Israeli responses to a conflict initiated by Hamas was certain to be directed.  If Hamas had located their weaponry elsewhere, and not near homes, markets and schools, or hadn’t started shooting rockets into Israel with the aim of doing harm there in the first place, there would have not been so many casualties.

Hence, the blame for the dead and injured in Gaza should be placed upon Hamas and not directed exclusively toward Israel.  But you would never get this idea from CNN’s reporters.  They interviewed Israeli spokesmen who said as much, but it never came from their mouths.

  Blitzer in Hamas tunnel leading under border into Israel

I was appalled by the even-handed approach which CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Don Lemon and their “on the scene” correspondents showed in covering the story.  They bent over backwards so often that all of them will probably need frequent chiropractic manipulations for the rest of their lives.  Perhaps, because he is Jewish, Blitzer went out of his way to be overly fair in interviewing representatives of both the State of Israel and Hamas (listed as a terrorist group by most nations) and attempting to paint the two sides as morally equivalent, which by any criteria whatsoever, they are not.

 

I had suspected that this occurred because CNN is a worldwide operation and did not want to offend, if that is the correct word, their non-Western viewers by suggesting that the blame for the deaths and injuries in Gaza should be placed on Hamas for the reasons stated above.  This was hammered home to me the other evening when Blitzer was doing a split screen interview with a Middle East expert based in Dubai about the situation in Iraq.  There behind him on the wall of the Dubai studio was emblazoned the emblem of the company he and Blitzer work for, at least in that part of the world:  CNNarabic.com.   

Logo taken from www.CNNarabic.com

FoxNews and MSNBC may be heavily opinionated, but in attempting to be all things to all viewers, CNN suffers from a loss of integrity.  At least with Fox and MSNBC, you know what  you are getting.  Not so with CNN.

JL

 

                                                       
                                                              

We Have A Problem (with Islam)

If you accept the fact that the radical, extremist, jihadist version of Islam espoused by a small minority of Muslims is the philosophy of those ultimately calling the shots in Iraq, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Nigeria and that the rest of their co-religionists are passively sitting by letting this happen, WE have a problem.  Dedicated minorities are vocal, often willing to die for their cause and usually unwilling to compromise.  If that is the case today, whereby the majority of Muslims are content to sit on the sidelines, WE have a problem. 

 

Most of these passive Muslims do feel that the Arabs got a raw deal in Palestine (even though they were the ones who abandoned their share of the former British mandate that the United Nations' partition had given to them and fled to refugee camps from which they hoped to shortly return to claim the entire country) and are continuing to be persecuted on the West Bank and in Gaza.  Of course, such “persecution” is only the result of the threat extremists pose to Israel.  If they would stop claiming that one day they will take over the entire country, including what they call “the Zionist entity,” what they perceive as "persecution" would disappear.  

Sadly, the radical position of the Muslim extremists means that they will never recognize the State of Israel and their efforts to violently spread their faith throughout the world will never cease.  Since Muslims are incapable of separating the concepts of a "nation" or of a political movement from their faith, any efforts to contain or destroy them results in their believing their opponents are attacking their faith, Islam. 

While Muslim populations in Western nations are mostly law-abiding, hard working people, a small number of them are extremist zealots or strongly sympathize with them.  The trouble is that it is impossible to tell them from the others.

If you cannot negotiate with people, if diplomacy fails, there remain two choices:  (1) maintain a precarious, “always on your toes” position, doing what has to be done to forestall the belligerent efforts of extremists and their often tacit supporters or, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, (2) “take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.” 

William Shakespeare's advice concerning Muslim extremists

The State of Israel has pursued the first alternative.  If the above analysis is reasonably close to the truth, the rest of the Western, non-Muslim, world should be taking Shakespeare’s advice seriously and go for the second alternative.   

In view of the violent steps Islamic extremists are willing to take to spread their faith and destroy their opponents, whom they take to be opponents of their religion as well as of their politics both of which are inseparable from one another, we should recognize the that the question of what to do should again be phrased in Shakespeare’s words, this time: “To be, or not to be.”  

If you believe what the Muslim extremists are saying, only one of us, either Western civilization or Islam, will survive.  The other will cease "to be."  Both cannot since militant Islam demands that they alone should rule the world, with everyone else subservient to them.  And it is militant Islam which is calling the shots for the Arab world today.

The Armageddon Scenario: To "take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them," would involve establishing a Western military alliance capable of battling and destroying all extremist armed forces in the entire Arab Muslim world. There would be massive civilian casualties and it might take decades to accomplish.  There would be an accompanying loss of freedoms for Muslims in Western countries, solely because of their faith, simply because of the difficulty in distinguishing extremists from more passive observers of Islam.  It would take but one jihadist to carry a "suitcase" bomb somewhere where it might destroy an entire metropolis.  All of this would truly amount to a biblical Armageddon far more costly in blood and treasure than even the Second World War.

 
Japanese internees lined up at camp in the United States early in 1942.  Would Muslims be treated similarly? 

Are we willing to do all of this at this point?  I DOUBT IT.  I suspect we will drift into some version of the first alternative mentioned above, as Israel has been doing for years in the hope that, eventually, cooler and more rational heads will prevail among Muslim leadership. 

But if events such as the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the bombings which have occurred in Spain and England are repeated, that position will become more and more difficult to maintain.  Alternative and limited courses of action, for which Israel's response in Gaza might be the benchmark, will become fewer and fewer.  Can you think of any?  I’ll be glad to print them here.  But don’t suggest negotiations.  When one side refuses to compromise, negotiations are similar to listening to one hand clapping.  

And if you believe in the Armageddon scenario, I doubt that prayer will help, because the "bad guys" are praying to that same Deity, who is probably very confused over what those created in His image are doing.  Indeed, WE have a problem.

JL
                                                                      

                                                               

                                                                    

HOW TO BE ALERTED TO FUTURE BLOG POSTINGS.

Most readers of this blog are alerted by Email every time a new posting appears.  If you wish to be added to that Email list, just let me know by clicking on Riart1@aol.com and sending me an Email.  

HOW TO CONTACT ME or CONTRIBUTE MATERIAL TO JACK'S POTPOURRI. 

BY CLICKING ON THAT SAME ADDRESS, Riart1@aol.com   YOU ALSO CAN SEND ME YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO BE PUBLISHED IN THIS BLOG AS WELL AS YOUR COMMENTS.  (Comments can also be made by clicking on the "Post a Comment" link at the blog's end.)

MOBILE DEVICE ACCESS.

DID YOU KNOW THAT www.jackspotpourri.com IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON YOUR MOBILE DEVICES IN A MODIFIED, EASY-TO-READ, FORMAT?   

HOW TO VIEW OLDER POSTINGS.                                                

To view older postings on this blog, just click on the appropriate date in the “Blog Archive” midway down the column off to the right, or scroll down until you see the “Older Posts” notation at the very bottom of this posting.  The “Search Box” in the right side of the posting also may be helpful in locating a posting topic for which you are looking.

HOW TO FORWARD POSTINGS.

To send this posting to a friend, or enemy for that matter, whom you think might be interested in it, just click on the envelope with the arrow on the "Comments" line directly below, enabling you to send them an Email providing a link directly to this posting.  You might also want to let me know their Email address so that they may be alerted to future postings.

Jack Lippman