Business secretary says those trying to derail efforts to raise ceiling are bigger threat to world economy than eurozone crisis Vince Cable has launched an extraordinary attack on “rightwing nutters” in America who are trying to block the raising of the US government’s debt ceiling and who are, he said, a bigger threat to the world economy than problems in the eurozone. Speaking on the BBC1′s Andrew Marr show, the business secretary also suggested the Bank of England may have to engage in more quantitative easing – effectively printing money – as growth stalls. Cable said the deal struck in Europe last week to bail out countries such as Greece and Ireland had been a “significant step forward”, but failed to the fundamental issues. He said: “The irony of the situation at the moment, with markets opening tomorrow morning, is that the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few rightwing nutters in the American Congress rather than the eurozone.” Negotiations on raising the US government’s debt limit above its current level of $14.3tn (£8.7tn) collapsed in acrimony late on Friday over details of a package of spending cuts and tax rises that would help to pay for such a move. A visibly angry Barack Obama attacked the Republican speaker of the house, John Boehner, for refusing to return his phone calls and said he had been “left at the altar” in trying to reach an agreement. Most experts agree that if the US were to default on its debt payments, stock and bond markets worldwide would plunge, threatening a new great recession. The deadline for agreement is just over a week away, on 2 August. On the crisis in the eurozone, Cable said the coalition government wanted to see the euro succeed, even though Britain was not a part of it. With GDP figures this week expected to suggest that growth has stalled, the senior Liberal Democrat conceded that the state of the economy was “not great”. “It is not surprising that it isn’t great because of the problems we inherited,” he said, while dismissing the idea of easing the coalition’s austerity measures. The UK was in a “German rather than Greek” position because there was confidence in the country’s finances, he said. There was also evidence of “rebalancing” in the economy, and the “beginning of the rebirth of manufacturing and exports”. “There is a genuine problem with demand, consumer demand. Again, it is not surprising there have been big shocks, world commodity prices going up has had a big effect on confidence here,” he said, adding that quantitative easing (QE) would be the right approach if demand remained suppressed. “The Bank of England is an independent body, we need to stress that, they need to make their own judgments … but if there is a sustained period of weakness of demand, the right approach to that is not for the government to relax its fiscal discipline. We have to keep that going. “But it is about the Bank of England pursuing policies of low interest rates that also helps keep our exchange rate down and helps exports. “But also using the expansion of QE perhaps in more imaginative ways, not just acquiring government securities … If we have a continuing problem of weak demand that is the way to deal with it.” Vince Cable Liberal Democrats Liberal-Conservative coalition Euro European Union Economics Euro Currencies US economy US politics Barack Obama US Congress US domestic policy guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Kristof Claims Republicans Are ‘Biggest Threat To America’s National Security’
July 24, 2011 No Comment
Latest dispatch from the Department of Dissent Is No Longer Patriotic: because they won't raise taxes, Republican “maniacs” are more dangerous to US national security than al Qaeda. That is the view of Nicholas Kristof, as expressed in his New York Times column of today, “Republicans, Zealots and Our Security.” View excerpts after the jump. From the Kristof column [emphasis added]: If China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage. Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists . . . the blunt truth is that t he biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs , at home. So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda . Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots. Kristof has apparently chosen not to heed President Obama's pious prayers for “civil debate.”
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As Norway struggles to come to terms with the deaths of at least 92 people in a gun massacre and bombing attributed to Anders Behring Breivik, we bring you the latest news as it happens 10.15am: The memorial service in Oslo Cathedral has begun. Mourners have strewn flowers and candles over vast areas of the plaza outside the cathedral, AP reports. All the pews in the church were packed, and people were even standing at the back and outside, huddling under umbrellas in the rain. Norwegian journalist Ketil B. Stensrud Tweeted: “At this moment, the remembrance service from Oslo is going LIVE all over Norway. The whole country is watching. Not a man in sight outside.” 10.09am: Breivik posted a YouTube video setting out his manifesto for action on YouTube on Friday. It was taken down but has been re-posted on Twitvid . 10.04am: Anders Behring Breivik has confessed to both attacks but denies criminal responsibility, according to his lawyer and the police. His lawyer Geir Lippestad says Breivik acted alone and was motivated by a desire to bring about a revolution in Norwegian society. “He thought it was gruesome having to commit these acts, but in his head they were necessary,” Lippestad told the broadcaster NRK. The lawyer says the attack had been planned “for some while”. He admitted responsibility. He feels that it was cruel to have to carry out these acts but that, in his head, it was necessary. He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary. He’s stated that he went to Utøya [where 700 youths in the age of 15-25 were gathered] to give the Labour party a warning that ‘doomsday would be imminent’ unless the party changed its policies,. He wanted to hurt the Labour party and halt its recruitment in the worst possible way, referring to party members as marxists. I think he’s realised what he’s done, and he views himself as sane. He’s told me that he surrendered to Delta [Norwegian special forces]. He wanted to open doors [by committing these crimes]. He will explain the background of his actions and why he actually did it for media. He sits on a lot of hatred for many people, which incorporates most significant societal institutions. He says that there was no other way. He had tried all possible alternatives.He felt that his actions were gruesome, but necessary. 9.48am: The police say the bomb in Oslo was detonated by remote. They have not found any more explosives on Utøya island. 9.24am: This is David Batty bringing you the Guardian’s rolling coverage of the aftermath of the mass shooting at a youth camp in Norway and the bombing in the capital, Oslo, in which 92 people were killed and many others seriously injured. Here’s a round-up of the main developments overnight and this morning: • Thousands of people are expected to attend a memorial service in Oslo at 11am for those killed in the twin attacks on Friday. The Norwegian royal family, government ministers and foreign ambassadors will be among those attending. • The man accused of both attacks has admitted responsibility, his lawyer says. Anders Behring Breivik, 32, described his actions as “gruesome but necessary”. Breivik, has been charged with committing acts of terrorism, is due to appear in court on Monday when judges will decide whether he should be detained as the investigation continues. • Although Breivik claims he was alone, the Norwegian police say they cannot yet rule out there was a second shooter on Utøya island. • 67 youths shot in the massacre on Utøya are still being treated in hospital. At least four people are yet to be found after the shooting. Police are using a mini-submarine to search for the lake where it is thought some victims may have drowned while attempting to swim to safety. • Police say the death toll from the Oslo bombing could rise further as some buildings damaged in the blast have yet to be fully searched for bodies. You can follow me on Twitter @David_Batty Norway David Batty guardian.co.uk
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Open Thread with The Professional Left Weekly Podcast: Who is in charge at the GOP?
July 23, 2011 No Comment
enlarge Credit: The Professional Left Time for your weekly podcast with The Professional Left, our own Driftglass and Bluegal. You can listen to archives at http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/ and follow them on Facebook at The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal . Have a great weekend and if you’re in this heat wave like a lot of us, including myself, try to keep cool. Open thread below….
Continue reading …Title: Love Is A Losing Game Artist: Amy Winehouse I can’t say I was surprised to hear the news about the death of Amy Winehouse, but that doesn’t make it less sad to see all that talent squandered. R.I.P. Our sister site Newstalgia has a Winehouse concert posted: Live At The Hove Festival, Norway – 2007.
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Click here to view this media The top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee reacted with outrage Friday to reports that a deal to raise the debt ceiling might include deep cuts to entitlements and only a promise of future tax reforms. “We’re told if nothing’s done by 2013, there would be a trade off between the Bush tax cuts and the individual mandate on health care,” MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell told Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). “I can’t think of worse public policy,” Frank said. “To put people for example in uncertainty about what health care is going to look like in 2013, is a bad joke.” “But I want to talk about entitlement cuts. I really am offended by this notion that there should be a tradeoff between some of these things and whether or not a 78-year-old woman living on $19,000 a year ought to have further restrictions on her income. I don’t know where this notion came from that the cost of living adjustment for Social Security is too lavish.” He continued: “I’m especially troubled, the Obama administration is talking about keeping troops in Iraq beyond the time that George Bush said they should stay out at the cost of billions of dollars. I hope that’s not true. And it certainly invalidates any notion that you make the sacrifice elsewhere.” “What do you say to the president?” Mitchell asked. “Is it better to default? You know, you’re the ranking member of Financial Services. You know what’s at risk here with the ratings services and everybody else that have now gotten into this situation… Is he going to lose the Democratic caucus?” “Yes,” Frank predicted. “I’ve already voted to raise the debt limit. I voted to raise it earlier this year straight forward. And by the way, it’s not my debt limit. I voted against the war in Iraq and I voted against the Bush tax cuts. On my debt limit, I got a couple trillion left to go. I was very generous. I voted to raise the other people’s debt.” “I don’t think the president should allow the irresponsibility of the right wing to say, ‘We’re going to shoot you if you don’t do this.’ No, I don’t want there to be a default but there are worse things than default. And worse things than default are wrenching the American government out of shape, losing the principle of majority rule that’s been such and important gift from America to the rest of the world, inflicting pain on the most vulnerable people in our society, continuing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize military budgets all over the world and cut back on people here.”
Continue reading …Whale rescuers in race against time after mass beaching at Scottish sea loch
July 23, 2011 No Comment
Divers fail to refloat 25 pilot whales after pod becomes stranded at low tide Rescuers returned 44 pilot whales to open water yesterday after a mass stranding in the estuary of a sea loch in the Scottish Highlands. Twenty-five whales from the pod died at the Kyle of Durness when they beached at low tide. Attempts to refloat the whales began on Friday night. British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) medics, the coastguard and the Royal Navy managed to rotate whales that were upside down to prevent them from drowning when the tide came in. BDMLR said many of the whales had stranded on their sides, on top of each other and upside down and were breathing in sand. Nine sets of pontoons were delivered to the site, but were not used as the estuary flooded too quickly. The water receded yesterday, and several bodies were discovered on shore. Three whales were found alive, but were put down by vets because their condition was not suitable for refloating. Post-mortem examinations to try to determine both the cause of the stranding and the deaths of the whales will now be carried out by pathologists, assisted by BDMLR medics. Rescuers continued to search the coast, lochs and headlands yesterday for evidence of the other whales who, it was hoped, had returned to open water. Pilot whales, which live in tight-knit social groups, prefer deep water but come inshore to feed on squid, their main food. Mark Simmonds, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society’s international head of science, said: “As they try to help each other, they may all come ashore.” He said the situation in the Kyle of Durness was a “whale trap”, a narrow body of water with many soft sandbank areas that may confound their echolocation abilities. “Something may have startled the group further out to sea and they panicked, came into this unusual situation and were unable to find their way out.” Pilot whales are among the most intelligent of all marine mammals and have what is described as an altruistic nature, tending to remain with sick members. “The stranding of one or two animals would possibly cause distress and the others in the group would try to assist the stranded individuals and themselves get into trouble,” said Simmonds. “Stranding on rocks will wound the whales quickly but even on a soft sandy shore it is still a race against time for experts to try to get them back into the water, and even then there may be a problem of persuading the group to go back into the open sea.” In May, about 60 pilot whales – which can grow up to 20ft long – appeared in Loch Carnan, South Uist. It is thought they may have lingered in the area because the animals were accompanying a dying female. They left the loch after one of the pod died of infection. Rescuers later found a second whale dead in the same loch, although it was thought to have floated in on the tide. In October last year, 33 whales were found dead on a Donegal beach. Whales guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Whale rescuers in race against time after mass beaching at Scottish sea loch
July 23, 2011 No CommentDivers fail to refloat 25 pilot whales after pod becomes stranded at low tide Rescuers returned 44 pilot whales to open water yesterday after a mass stranding in the estuary of a sea loch in the Scottish Highlands. Twenty-five whales from the pod died at the Kyle of Durness when they beached at low tide. Attempts to refloat the whales began on Friday night. British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) medics, the coastguard and the Royal Navy managed to rotate whales that were upside down to prevent them from drowning when the tide came in. BDMLR said many of the whales had stranded on their sides, on top of each other and upside down and were breathing in sand. Nine sets of pontoons were delivered to the site, but were not used as the estuary flooded too quickly. The water receded yesterday, and several bodies were discovered on shore. Three whales were found alive, but were put down by vets because their condition was not suitable for refloating. Post-mortem examinations to try to determine both the cause of the stranding and the deaths of the whales will now be carried out by pathologists, assisted by BDMLR medics. Rescuers continued to search the coast, lochs and headlands yesterday for evidence of the other whales who, it was hoped, had returned to open water. Pilot whales, which live in tight-knit social groups, prefer deep water but come inshore to feed on squid, their main food. Mark Simmonds, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society’s international head of science, said: “As they try to help each other, they may all come ashore.” He said the situation in the Kyle of Durness was a “whale trap”, a narrow body of water with many soft sandbank areas that may confound their echolocation abilities. “Something may have startled the group further out to sea and they panicked, came into this unusual situation and were unable to find their way out.” Pilot whales are among the most intelligent of all marine mammals and have what is described as an altruistic nature, tending to remain with sick members. “The stranding of one or two animals would possibly cause distress and the others in the group would try to assist the stranded individuals and themselves get into trouble,” said Simmonds. “Stranding on rocks will wound the whales quickly but even on a soft sandy shore it is still a race against time for experts to try to get them back into the water, and even then there may be a problem of persuading the group to go back into the open sea.” In May, about 60 pilot whales – which can grow up to 20ft long – appeared in Loch Carnan, South Uist. It is thought they may have lingered in the area because the animals were accompanying a dying female. They left the loch after one of the pod died of infection. Rescuers later found a second whale dead in the same loch, although it was thought to have floated in on the tide. In October last year, 33 whales were found dead on a Donegal beach. Whales guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Steyn Ridicules Press’s Insistence on Calling Budget Ideas ‘Plans’; Now It’s Ginned-up Fears of Stock-Market Plunge
July 23, 2011 No Comment
On Wednesday evening (at NewsBusters ; at BizzyBlog ), I noted the absurdity of Associated Press coverage characterizing the 5-page document with 3-1/2 whole pages of text issued by the “Gang of Six” as a “plan” — 12 times, plus in the item's headline. Though I didn't bring it up then, an obvious point to make about any of these items floating around Washington is that if the Congressional Budget Office can't score it, it can't be a plan. A month ago , CBO Director Doug Elmendorf told a congressional committee, in response to a question about President Obama's April proposal, that “we can't score speeches.” By contrast, there's no reason to believe it can't score Cut, Cap & Balance, because it's actual legislation passed by the House. Last night at Investors Business Daily , Mark Steyn, the self-described One Man Global Content Provider made more generalized comments about the media coverage of the debt ceiling-tax-spending-amending discussions and its identification of anything stated in a semi-coherent sentence as a “plan” (press-related items in bold): Obama … claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as “the grown-up in the room.” There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president's staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he'll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he's going to play Haydn's Cello Concerto No 2, and, even though there's no cello in sight, and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they've ever heard. The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt. How about Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader? Has he got a plan? No. … It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. … the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more. … … The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional. Moving on to the apparent next strategy, the AP's David Espo today invoked fears of a stock market plunge — without identifying a single person in the financial community to back up his and the Democrats' fear-mongering. He also appeared to put words in Boehner's mouth (bolded) which the Speaker seems unlikely to have said: Debt crisis: Deal sought to head off stock plunge Precariously short of time, congressional leaders struggled in urgent, weekend-long talks to avert an unprecedented government default, desperate to show enough progress to head off a plunge in stock prices when Asian markets open ahead of the U.S. workweek. President Barack Obama met Saturday with Republican and Democratic leaders – but only briefly- the day after House Speaker John Boehner abruptly broke off his own once-promising compromise talks with the White House. … House Speaker John Boehner told rank-and-file Republicans in a conference call hoped to be able to announce a “viable framework for progress” by 4 p.m. EDT on Sunday, before the stock markets open in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, according to two participants. He met later Saturday for almost an hour with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Lawmakers fear a big drop in investor confidence in stocks and bonds could start in Asia and sweep toward Europe and the Americas, causing U.S. stock values to plunge on Monday. Barring action by Aug. 2, the Treasury will run out of the money needed to pay all its bills, triggering a possible default that could seriously damage the domestic economy and send damaging waves across the globe. Obama has warned repeatedly of the possibility of a spike in interest rates that could affect Americans' mortgages, credit cards and other forms of personal debt. It doesn't seem likely that Boehner would have made anything resembling the bolded reference in the excerpt above, which, while conveniently not in quotes, immediately follows a quoted item and precedes “according to participants.” Espo has made it look like Boehner referred to the world markets which open Monday before U.S. markets. I say he didn't, David, and if you won't provide proof that he did, I'll assume you're engaging in a next iteration of the ongoing fraud Steyn described in his column. Given the press's track record of the past week, where it not only called things “plans” which could barely be dignified as “thoughts” but also kept telling us that the two sides were near a deal when the Speaker says they never really were, why shouldn't I? Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com .
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