Why was 9/11 so special?

Because it affected the constituents of New York Congressman Peter King, previously a fervent supporter, apologist and enabler of terrorism, who spent decades squeezing himself with delight whenever the explosives and weapons he put in the hands of the IRA killed and maimed people in Ireland.

He is the new Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. I don't do this often, but I am going to quote the New York Times:

Long before he became an outspoken voice in Congress about the threat from terrorism, he was a fervent supporter of a terrorist group, the Irish Republican Army. "We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” Mr. King told a pro-IRA rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the IRA for it".

Nor do I often watch, let alone cite, the supposedly amusing American TV commentator Jon Stewart (odd - I actively despise every person I know who spells his name "Jon"). Yet I am going to link to this video from his "Crooks and Liars" series, as it does the requisite number on the Irish-American scum-bag.

Ireland: electing to fail

Richard Waghorne expresses my view better than I can in Critical Reaction. For all the convivial charm of its inhabitants, when it comes to politics Ireland is a nasty little place - and always has been.

RTE’s Irish-language political editor emailed the family of the IRA victim Jean McConville to say ‘please do not send my anymore of this obnoxious crap’ after they issued a press release during the campaign highlighting the widely believed involvement of Gerry Adams in her murder. The political editor in question is himself a former member of the IRA, something not deemed a relevant consideration for his fitness to be in the job in the first place. There is no suggestion that he will be disciplined, let alone summarily dismissed, as would occur in any country with a minimally adequate culture of standards in public life.

Jean McConville was tortured and murdered and the location of her body concealed by the IRA when it was being run by Adams and McGuinness, to whom the British state has grovelled for the last 17 years. "A minimally adequate culture of standards in public life" is pretty hard to define when until recently Germany had an unrepentant ex-terrorist and KGB agent as foreign minister. In politics scum floats to the top - get used to it.

Intrigued by Waghorne's conclusion: "The soul-searching and intellectual probity required after the fourth profound failure of the Irish state in ninety years of existence did not begin with this election just past. A new administration cannot but prove largely beside the point until that starts to happen".

Fourth? The first would be De Valera precipitating the civil war and having Collins murdered; but what d'you suppose Waghorne thinks the other two were?

Change just one letter

Following from Archbishop Cranmer in "Ireland's New Puppet Government Emerges".

Politicians seem to win elections by promising heaven on earth, and when, a decade later, the electorate realises that they are still in purgatory, another swathe of disaffected voters views the democratic process with cynicism and disdain, declaring a plague on all their houses. This leads to voter apathy and alienation, a deterioration in democratic participation and a declining turnout in elections, especially among the young.

If our democratic leaders do not wake up soon to the inevitable consequences of this, then Tripoli and Cairo will come to Dublin, Lisbon and London, just as it has already come to Athens. You can’t buck the people.

To the contrary: you can buck some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and most of them come back for more. Maybe the Irish should build a colossus astride the Liffey to match the one I propose for the Thames, symbolizing the Greatness of Modern Britain: a fat, balding man with his back to the North Sea, bent over with trousers around his ankles to reveal vestigial testicles and the bold caption:

BUCK ME (IF IT'S NOT TOO MUCH BOTHER) - I LIKE IT

Irish Monopoly game

 

Hat-tip ShaunB

Ireland - Fianna Fáil

In Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell's  "Not Too Big to Fáil - The death of Ireland’s crony capitalist party" seems a bit optimistic. After all, if rampant corruption troubled the Irish people, they would not have elected Fianna Fáil for 61 of the last 79 years. Even when it was briefly in opposition, Fianna Fáil has been the largest party in the Dáil since it first took power in 1932 - and remained in power for sixteen years under Éamon de Valera, of whom Dubliners joke that there is no street named after him because none are crooked enough.

Fianna Fáil represents everything that is disgusting and self-destructive about the Irish. The legacy of the Irish diaspora world-wide has been organized crime with a political gloss. Their effect on the Roman Catholic church has been similar. Long a refuge for discreet homosexuals, it has been the Irish contingent that has brought the church to the brink of ruin by raping the children entrusted to their care. 

Yet, knowing this, the Irish at home and abroad continued to support their church, and to vote for Fianna Fáil. Just as a large minority of the British people still vote for a Labour party that has betrayed the class and country it is supposed to represent, so will many of the Irish vote again for Fianna Fáil - not despite but because it is shamelessly corrupt, and as such fully expressive of their own character and culture.

Votes for felons

Sound and staged fury signifying nothing. So, irrefutably, says Mary Ellen Synon in the Mail about the hoo-ha in the Commons over votes for convicted felons.

All parliament has to do if it really does want to stop the powers of this 'court' is just vote to pull out of the Council of Europe, ECHR and all. Then this absurdity of votes for prisoners, and every other ECHR so-called 'human rights' absurdity, goes away. Or at least - and this is what Cameron is hiding in this debate - until Brussels reminds the United Kingdom that by signing up to Lisbon Treaty and the rest, powers across the Channel can go on imposing these 'human rights' on Britain whether the UK tries to derogate from the ECHR decisions or leaves the Council of Europe altogether.

Which is why the noise in the Commons over this is just noise. Either parliament is sovereign or its not, and until the MPs vote to take Britain out of the EU, it's not: the 'legal personality' called the 'European Union' is sovereign.

That last paragraph says it all, and trumps the thoughtful argument in favour of derogating from the EHCR set out by ASI. The political and economic establishment has too much invested in the project ever to permit a free vote on whether or not Britain secedes from the EU. If even the Irish, with their long history of rebellion, cannot summon up the necessary rage to overthrow their hopelessly corrupt rulers and to regain their independence, there is no chance at all that the dispirited British will do so.

As with climate catastrophism, the true believers will not be moved by - hell, they are incapable of even recognizing - any evidence that contradicts their faith, the politicians and bureaucrats are doing very nicely out of it, and the big money likes things just the way they are.

As far as these things can be proved, they have been. It does seem futile to continue to belabour the point. Those reading this blog are likely to be possessed of sufficient intellectual curiosity and independence of mind to have already reached any conclusions I may draw - so what's the point?

To answer that rhetorical question, I would be ashamed to abandon blogging after a mere twelve months, when for decades honest men like Richard North and Christopher Booker have been fighting and losing round after round against the squalid mediocrities who govern us, but who have not given up the good fight.

History is not altered by the jetsam that goes with the tide. One must hope that, thanks to the democratization of means of communication, eventually a sufficient number of people will realize that the ideological emperors strutting among them are stark naked - and destroy the shameless posers with vengeful laughter.

Juan Manuel Barroso - arsehole extraordinaire and bar

Missed this great article last week by the great Ambrose E-P. The unspeakable Barroso now says: 

The problems of Ireland were created by irresponsible financial behaviour of financial institutions and a lack of supervision in the Irish market. It was not Europe that created this fiscally irresponsible situation and this financially irresponsible behaviour. Europe is now part of the solution.

In December 2007 in their Stability Update Report of December 2007, Barroso’s staff identified risks but agreed with the IMF report of September 2007 that Ireland was “operating responsible fiscal policy”. As Ambrose says:

It is true that Ireland’s regulators made an utter hash of things. But could the Irish have avoided a destructive bubble? The parallel story in Spain suggests otherwise. The Bank of Spain was one of the best run central banks in the world, the pioneer of “dynamic provisioning”, yet even it could not contain the effects of an interest rate and currency regime that was so far out of kilter. The serial disasters across the EMU periphery cannot simply be blamed on the victims.

But they will be for as long as Germany cracks the whip and the EU oligarchy jumps through hoops without regard for truth, logic or common decency. 

Useless gobshites

God bless the freedom of the press and the Irish!

Shame our media are so studiedly low-key. But then again, when you are reporting what my main man Ambrose E-P has to say, the facts scream more than loudly enough.

I see Angela Merkel  has declared that "I vill not let up on this because the primacy of politics over markets must be enforced."

How are you going to do that, Angela?

Ireland - me and mini-me

"At least Ulster isn't a victim of Euro disaster" wrote Newton Emerson in the Times (£). But then he went on to point out that Ulster was already the victim of a currency union - sterling.

Northern Ireland is a text-book case of the problems of a currency union. Like most big countries, the UK suffers from having one currency across the disparate regions. Without an exchange rate, varying productivity can be reflected only by prices and wages, which are rarely flexible enough to do the job. So the less productive regions end up with higher unemployment, while the more productive regions end up with higher taxes.

This is the internal bargain all nations strike, but it is rare to find such a clear example as Northern Ireland. Because of its huge public sector, Northern Ireland has too many people expecting British pay in British pounds with no allowance for their location. Many public-sector workers get a London weighting, but there is no equivalent Belfast lightening. 

Instead, throughout Northern Ireland, there is persistent long-term unemployment, the UK’s highest level of economic inactivity, and a subsidy of about £10 billion a year, more than the one-off bailout London is considering for the republic.

As well as contributing to these problems, currency union denies even a region as developed as Northern Ireland the tools to solve them. Stormont is unable to print money or set interest rates, but it also has little scope to vary taxes. The possibility of lowering Northern Ireland’s corporation tax has been debated for years, but it will still require London’s permission. Even then, there is no guarantee of getting it past the European commission.

When such policies are discussed, Stormont’s status as a glorified county council becomes apparent. This is precisely the status Dail Eireann acquired when Ireland joined the euro. It may have taken a crisis to make it apparent but the surrender of economic sovereignty was complete from day one.

Hat-tip NI Centre-Right

The other shoe Part 2

Further to my last two posts, I am grateful to Burning Our Money for this graphic of British banks' exposure to Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

As the man said, "overall exposure to the Irish economy is by no means trivial", but it's come whistling down from the peak a year ago, which shows an unexpected amount of intelligence at work.

Damn that British understatement - you never know when it's for real. Now what do I do with all the tinned goods I bought?

The other shoe drops

In EU Dominos Part 2 I asked: What is the exposure of British banks, in particular the nationalised and semi-nationalised ones, to the Euro debacle? Comes Mervyn King to answer:

While the direct holdings of Irish sovereign debt are not especially large, ownership of securities issued by Irish banks are bigger and of course there are wider exposures to assets comprising loans to the Irish economy more generally. So I think the overall exposure to the Irish economy is by no means trivial.

There are some very delicate discussions going on in Europe as we speak. It’s something which is relevant to concern about financial stability in the U.K., but it’s focused more generally on the Irish economy, then the Irish banking system and only to a relatively small extent direct exposures to Irish sovereign debt.

"By no means trivial", eh? Aaaaargh! Buy gold and stock up on tinned goods!

Is Ireland the key domino?

Soothscribe Ambrose E-P is in no doubt. He quotes a spokesman for Unicredit, the pan-European banking organization, on the "breath-taking mixture of suicidal irresponsibility and farcical incoherence" that has precipitated a further financial crisis in long-suffering Ireland.

Like Alpinistas roped together, an ever-reduced core of solvent states are supposed to carry the weight on an ever-widening group of insolvent states dangling beneath them. This lacks political credibility and may be tested to destruction if - as seems likely - Ireland is forced to ask for help. At which moment the chain-reaction begins in earnest, starting with Iberia.

It was a grave error for Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy to invoke the spectre of sovereign defaults and bondholder “haircuts” at this delicate juncture, ignoring warnings from ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet that such talk would set off investor flight from high-debt states.

EU leaders have since made a clumsy attempt to undo the damage, insisting that the policy shift would have “no impact whatsoever” on existing bonds. It would come into force only after mid-2013 under the new bail-out mechanism. Nobody is fooled by such a distinction.

Sadly for Ireland, events have snowballed out of control. Confidence has collapsed before Irish export industries - pharma, medical devices, IT, and backroom services - have had time to pull the country out of its tailspin.

Premier Brian Cowen - who presides over a budget deficit of 32 percent of GDP this year - still insists that no rescue is needed. “We have adequate funding right up until July,” he said. Mr Cowan must know this is not enough. Funding for Irish banks has evaporated, and with it funding for Irish firms.

Foreign creditors hold €2 trillion of debt securities issued by Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. If Ireland goes, so goes Portugal, which is in even worse shape - and then Spain? At what point will the more solvent EU economies cut the rope?