I realize it’s silly to get upset about who gets awarded a prize that Henry Kissinger was previously awarded, but I find myself genuinely angry about the fact that the EU was just given the Nobel Peace Prize, even as its ill-conceived common currency brings Spain and Greece to their knees.
The Guardian argues to the contrary, that’s there’s more to the EU than the Euro, and that much of it is good. But awarding the prize to the EU at this moment seems to me to be some kind of endorsement of its calamitous economic policies.
Maybe this would bother me less if it weren’t the fact that nearly everyone I talk to (all of whom describe themselves as “liberals”) seems to believe that the Greeks and Spaniards need a dose of Teutonic tough love to rouse them from their lazy, darkie ways. I know Atrios beats the drum about this every single day, but it’s only now sinking in with me, the extent to which western elites see western workers as moochers and looters who would benefit from being locked up in a Foxconn dormitory for a while.
I just don’t see how you can grind the middle-class into the ground forever and not expect to see unrest, no matter that kind of “values” — be it European unity or Burkean humility — you’ve convinced them to adopt.
Davis X. Machina
If they had the award ceremony in Verdun, instead of Oslo, would that help?
bourbaki
The guardian editorial cartoon was pretty great however.
blindtrust8
Mitt Romney Conglomo: We own you
BGinCHI
Anyone who even casually reads Kthug’s blog can easily deconstruct the austerity argument for Europe. It misunderstands the economics of the situation to demand suffering from those who did not cause the crisis.
I do think awarding the Nobel to the EU is like awarding it to truffles, because they make everything tastier (fresh pepper a close second). I suppose they thought they were giving the Euro brain trust a push in the right direction.
They should give it to Aung San Suu Kyi every year until someone bests her.
sb
After Kissinger, I lost interest in the Nobel Peace Prize. The science and literature prizes I keep track of but the Nobel Peace Prize? The hell with it.
Ruckus
I just don’t see how you can grind the middle-class into the ground forever and not expect to see unrest, no matter that kind of “values”—be it European unity or Burkean humility— you’ve convinced them do adopt.
I believe that history has borne out that the longer the grind goes on and the harsher the beat down, the sharper and harder the switch from docile supplicant to homicidal citizen gets. Go too far and there is no coming back.
J. Michael Neal
@Davis X. Machina: This. I understand the logic of this award even if I’m not sure I agree with it. The purpose isn’t to laud the current policies; it’s to give the Eurozone a kick in the ass so that they don’t let it collapse. I’m on board with that.
My concern is that the award will be interpreted as an endorsement of current policies even if that wasn’t the goal. So I’m ambivalent about the choice.
As for the idea that the Greeks or Spaniards deserve this, I think Doug isn’t understanding the actual arguments being made by some of us. (Yeah, I know that it’s a shock that Doug might miss the subtleties.) While there likely are liberals who think exactly what he says, that’s not most of us.
In the case of the Spaniards, there’s not really any question about whether they deserve it. They don’t. It is to the Germans’ shame that they are imposing these sorts of policies on them. My point has been that, *given* the approach the Germans have taken, the Spanish government really doesn’t have any choice but to impose austerity. There isn’t any way for them not to. So anger directed at that government is misplaced. It should be pointed where it belongs, and mass protests in the streets are seriously misguided since they won’t make the Germans change their minds.
The situation for Greece is even worse. While I still regard the Germans’ actions with disgust, the Greeks really have no choice but to impose austerity, full stop. Even if the Germans were not being a bunch of Teutonic pricks that would be true. Unlike Spain, Greece has been running an enormous primary budget deficit forever. The problem, essentially, is that as a nation they refuse to pay their taxes. That doesn’t mean that they are lazy. It doesn’t mean that they are bad people. But it does mean that the house of cards that was their government’s finances has collapsed. They really, really needed to address these issues before a major financial catastrophe occurred. Their borrowing costs would have spiked sharply, to the point that they effectively couldn’t raise money anywhere but the ECB, under any scenario that starts in 2008.
ThatOtherMike
Well, yeah, the EU has problems, but it has more or less kept peace for half a century in a continent which went to war every couple of years for the millennium before. Big Picture, Doug.
Corner Stone
You’re a monster DougJ. This is just now sinking in?
And the NPP is a fucking joke.
beltane
There have been many questionable recipients of the Peace Prize before but never before have I seen one as patently offensive as this. Maybe it’s because I’m one of those wretched Mediterranean people but I cannot help but see a racial element to this, and every time I see references to the “virtuous” Germans I wonder how things would have been if the Morganthau rather than the Marshall plan had been implemented.
Millions of people across Southern Europe are being systematically robbed and gratuitously humiliated. A lot of venom and resentment is being created right now and it will inevitably explode at one point, probably to the detriment of innocent third-parties rather than the MoU’s who caused it all.
jwb
@Ruckus: It would be interesting to see what happens if Romney won this election. I wouldn’t want to live it, because I have odds on a very restless populace breaking out the pitchforks and tumbrels all across the globe or, more likely, the start of a world war in a feckless attempt to channel that unrest. We’ll be lucky if we come out of a Romney term and not find ourselves in a dystopian novel.
Anoniminous
This is what is happening in Greece:
And it’s not an isolated incident.
For what it’s worth, unless one is willing to say the US people are responsible for US debt because major US corporations are not paying taxes saying the same about Greece is a bit of … something.
Another Halocene Human
They’re still pissed about that time on their European vacation when they had to wait two whole minutes for the clerk to get off her croissant break to take their cappuccino order, and she still had an attitude!
Americans have no friggin’ idea how brainwashed they are. All in return for a tips-only server to kiss your ass like you’re massa and we’re still on the plantation.
FUCK THAT SHIT.
JGabriel
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DougJ @ Top:
This is my take too. I honestly would have applauded a Nobel Prize for the EU in the 1990’s or early 2000’s, but right now seems like the worst possible time to reward them. The EU’s economic policies have been disastrous since the financial crash in 2008, with the result that we’re seeing the rise of proto-fascist government in Hungary and a neo-Nazi party in Greece.
That hardly seems like a consequence deserving a Peace Prize.
.
Reklam
There are Godwin law traps here (maybe it is because I was at the KitKat Club in Berlin last night), but the EU Nobel is a ‘peace in our time’ level joke.
And Romney winning would be like Lindbergh in 1940.
beltane
@Anoniminous: Coca-Cola of Greece is relocating its corporate headquarters to Switzerland in order to lower their “tax burden” and yet not a peep of disapproval from Merkel, Lagarde or the rest of the crew demanding discipline and belt-tightening from working-class Greeks.
Spiffy McBang
I know the NPP had been given to various groups as opposed to individuals in the past, but am I the only one who finds the idea of giving it to a continental government structure incredibly odd regardless of stated rationale? Same thing for when the UN won. A small group devoted to peace I can understand, but no organization as large as those two can have the sort of dedication to peace as an individual or a handful of people. Plus, if you have the resources of the world (or a huge portion thereof) at your disposal, doesn’t that jack up the bar for what you need to do to earn a prize like this?
I’m also sort of curious who’s supposed to accept it on behalf of the EU. That alone could be an argumentative mess, unless no one gives a fuck, which they probably shouldn’t.
Spaghetti Lee
nearly everyone I talk to
Maybe you need some new friends?
Opie_jeanne
What in particular was the reason for them getting this award? Did they explain?
Robert Sneddon
The period since 1945 to the present date is the longest in recorded history that an invading army has not crossed the Rhine in either direction. Before it was broken the record was about 60 years or so maximum between wars involving two or more members of the EU.
It’s not the Economics prize, it’s the Peace Prize.
beltane
@Reklam: At least the Nobel committee didn’t award the 1940 prize to Vyacheslav Moletov and Joachim von Ribbentrop for their efforts.
Corner Stone
@Spaghetti Lee:
It’s a beleaguered rhetorical device DougJ uses repetitively with ill effect.
He obviously has no friends.
Snarki, child of Loki
I take the NPP as proof of the long-term infiltration by the people running the Nobel Prize for Literature, to prove to the world that “Irony is NOT dead, so there!”
Ruckus
@jwb:
Unfortunately I think you are right except I think the long term mittshit results would be far worse than any novel anyone could write.
The only thing about WWIII would be how many would go if called? Other than using nukes in a huge first strike it would take boots on the ground. Lots of boots, as in the draft. Also remember that mittshit has money stored or invested in lots of other parts of the world. He’s going to shoot himself in the wallet? I don’t think so. Step on his dick and maybe get someone else to start a war? Entirely plausible.
Citizen_X
Isn’t the line “A hungry mob is an angry mob”?
Which, you know, kind of fits, too.
Mandalay
You really believe that the EU’s “ill-conceived common currency” brought both Spain and Greece to their knees?
No other possible causes?
JustAnotherBob
A continent that has experienced hundreds of years of warfare developed a system that now make war between countries such as Germany and France essentially unthinkable.
Or something like that.Suffern Ace
Yes. Thankfully no members of the EU have gone to war with each other. And it has been steadfast in sanctioning members who have gone to war with countries outside of its members. It’s practically peaceable kingdom territory over there.
James E. Powell
@Ruckus:
I believe that history has borne out that the longer the grind goes on and the harsher the beat down, the sharper and harder the switch from docile supplicant to homicidal citizen gets.
I am not so sure. We’ve had centuries of relentless oppression and ruling class brutality, but you can count the revolutions on your fingers.
I am excluding those rebellions and uprisings wherein the poor and oppressed are the ones who get killed, the ones who end up right back where they started when it’s all over.
Donut
We are not that far from being in this situation ourselves.
I honestly fear for social stability here if Romney wins, and he can manage to get his way on austerity, ‘Yurpean-style. Couple that with so-called tax reform, and the mad dash to play Extreme Coupons with the last pillars of the New Deal and Great Society, and in a couple of years, voila, shit would get real.
PeakVT
They should give it to Aung San Suu Kyi every year until someone bests her.
Or give it to Nelson Mandela a couple of more times for lifetime achievement.
Regardless of whether the EU deserved it or not, I don’t see what giving the award to a massive trans-national bureaucracy signifies. The main accomplishment of the EU is its very existence, so if the prize is to be awarded to something related to the EU, it should go to the people who negotiated the treaty and/or signed it. Giving the award to MSF or AI makes a bit more sense, because they are groups with fairly well-defined peace-related goals. And such groups certainly could put the award money to better use than the EU could, even after it studied the problem for months and produced a multi-volume report nobody would read.
ETA: or what Spiffy McBang said.
Chris
@James E. Powell:
I’ve heard various people argue that poor people don’t cause revolutions, elites do… by progressively shifting the burden of paying for society off of their backs, to the point that eventually the system breaks because the money to pay for it just isn’t there anymore. Basically, rich people pay less and less taxes until the government’s bankrupt. The French monarchy during its last century or two is held up as one example. If that’s the case, then the U.S. is definitely on the “right” track.
ETA: I maintain that a working safety net is still the best guarantee against revolution.
beltane
Maybe the Nobel Peace Prize committee should have just gone ahead and awarded the prize to the Nobel Peace Prize committee.
Yutsano
@Mandalay: If the drachma and the peseta still existed it would be much more likely that Spain and Greece could just deflate their way out of their economic crises. Having their monetary policy set in Brussels give them little to no flexibility to deal with recessionary pressures especially with no framework in place to deal with internal issues like a central lending authority.
Or something like that.Suffern Ace
@JustAnotherBob: Yes. But then I’m thinking NATO should get credit for that peace. But giving a peace prize to NATO would be very odd.
beltane
@Chris: Leaders of revolutions, especially successful ones, are never drawn from the ranks of the poor or working class, but always seem to be from the fringes of the elite class. Former members of the upper-middle class who have fallen on relatively hard times or who have been disadvantaged in some way are prime candidates to lead the charge against whatever group is benefiting from the status quo.
The ones who know the upper class the best are the ones who hate the upper class the most.
Xenos
@Mandalay:
Yes. That was the whole idea of EMU. A crisis would hit and then the Directives out of Brussels would get a lot tougher, the regulations much more pointed, and in the course fixing the totally predicted crisis a huge step toward economic integration would take place. This is exactly what is happening, too.
The only problem is that the crisis, when it appeared, was much worse than anyone predicted. They are going ahead with integration, but the chemotherapy is killing the patient.
Mandalay
@J. Michael Neal:
True, but that is not the only factor. The Greek government chose to dig itself deeper into the hole by continually financing its own reckless spending through excessive borrowing.
Also, the Greek government lied massively and repeatedly about the state of the Greek economy in order to gain membership of the EU. In turn, the EU foolishly chose to look the other way and admit them anyway.
If we are assigning blame for the Greek crisis, the biggest culprit is not the Greek population, or the EU, or German bankers. It is, and always has been, the Greek government.
Xenos
@beltane: I resemble that remark… I am not about to lead a revolution, but after knowing some .001%ers growing up, I would not mind the whole lot of them getting the hook.
srv
In the EU, it’s a northern/southern thing. We just need to import that to the US and hammer the meme that southerners are lazy moochers and looters.
Greece definitely has issues, if Michael Lewis is to be believed. Not just the Germans who wanted their cake and eat it too. The north needs to inflate, the south has to deflate. No surprise the rubes on both sides are offended. K-Thug never thought these economies belonged together, so why try to fix it?
I guess one plus is that a long-term thrash in the EU is good for preventing an alternative reserve currency. Too bad we can’t take advantage of that opportunity.
Donut
I’m surprised that no one has ointed out yet that this is the same organization that awarded Obama a Prize, and then he went out and did the Afghanistan surge.
I’m not trying to inject an argument about the wrongness or rightness of Obama’s action, just saying that the Committee hasn’t always awarded an actual prize for an actual peace accomplishment. There is a precedent for sending a message. So it’s not all that flabbergasting, is it?
Xenos
@Mandalay:
See comment directly above yours. they let Greece in knowing what would happen. It is like disaster capitalism, except it is more like they cued up the hurricane and sent it down on the poor buggers.
Mandalay
@BGinCHI:
What an excellent idea!
By coincidence, my choice for the Peace Prize would have been the government of Myanmar. For all its failings and past misdeeds, it is undoing much of the damage it has inflicted on the country.
srv
opportunity – more stimulus and deficit spending
Ruckus
@James E. Powell:
Didn’t say the beat downs didn’t last for a long, long time. Or that the uprisings were always successful.
JGabriel
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Mandalay:
Of course there are multiple causes, some of which Greece brought upon itself — though Spain is largely blameless in its monetary troubles.
The problem is that the Euro has become a de facto gold standard, or, as William Jennings Byant once characterized it, a cross of gold. Spain, Greece, and other countries on the Euro, have no control over their currency, and no way to ease the economic burdens in their respective countries through inflation, deflation, or other monetary measures.
That is the primary source of their continuing problems and the suffering of their citizens, whatever the initial causes of the financial problems were.
.
mclaren
Of course they expect to see unrest, Doug. That’s why the Obama administration is making military weaponry available to local police departments — in order to crush even the most peaceful nonviolent demonstration hard. LRAD sound cannons, pain rays, pepper spray, batons to beat women and children with, rubber bullets, tear gas, SWAT tanks…the full regalia of fascism.
Obama is the good cop to Romney’s bad cop. Both cops work for the same guys, and neither cop is your friend.
The latest story about Mitt Romney’s Bain capital working to outsource all the jobs at Sensata Tech to China is up on the Daily Kos today…and just where do you think the legislation that made it legal for Bain Capital to offshore all these jobs came from?
From Barack Obama and the senate.
It’s to laugh, Doug. Liberals are incensed that Mitt Romney offshores all those jobs and walks away with fantastically lucrative tax breaks — while liberals ignore the fact that Barack Obama and his buddies in the senate were the ones who passed the laws making all that possible.
Liberals are up in arms over the way conservatives bend the law and twist the system to enrich themselves while impoverishing the middle class… But liberals don’t seem to notice that guys like Barack Obama are the people who wrote thel aws that make it possible for conservatives to do that.
Liberals become purple-faced with hysterical rage at the way conservatives rip off John W. Public, yet liberals coo with delight at guys like Barack Obama who enable conservatives to rip off the average person.
You tell me, Doug — how much sense does it make to condemn the thief who steals the middle class blind, while giving a free pass to the guy who set everything up so that the thief could perpetrate his crimes?
Mandalay
@Yutsano:
I completely agree, and it is still possible that the drachma will return, but my larger point was that Spain and Greece would be in economic do-do right now regardless of whether they had joined the EU.
For dougj to argue that an “ill-conceived common currency” is what brought Greece and Spain to their knees is absurd.
Ruckus
@Chris:
I maintain that a working safety net is still the best guarantee against revolution.
The elites always cause the problem by taking everything. When they leave enough for their lessors to live on and feel OK about it, few problems seem to arise. Most of us are content to have a working life and a little teeny, tiny bit of the pie, elites want the entire fucking bakery.
srv
@Donut: Obama and Kissinger have a lot in common:
http://www.straight.com/article-273046/vancouver/gwynne-dyer-obama-seeks-decent-interval-afghanistan-nixon-vietnam
Peace is just a new moral relativism
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/christians-emptied-from-middle-east/story-e6frg6so-1226489418086
James E. Powell
@Ruckus:
I wasn’t so much disagreeing with you as adding an observation. Another one is that hard times often produce a lurch toward fascism. For some reason, the left has harder time marshaling discontent than the right-wing. Maybe it’s because fear causes people to move back within themselves, within the traditional narratives.
There are several events that I will never understand about how things have worked out in American politics in my lifetime. In the top five is that after the huge banks and Wall Street billionaires tanked the economy almost nobody was mad at them, or at least not mad enough to do anything about it.
JustAnotherBob
@Or something like that.Suffern Ace:
Europe is going through a period of financial difficulty at the moment. I suspect they’ll make it. They were led down the path of austerity, some of which was needed. But the need for stimulus and growth was not recognized.
Europe is suffering from Romney/Republican thinking. But they are starting to recognize that they can’t cut their way to recovery.
The fact that all their members are democracies and democracies seldom start wars with other democracies leads me to believe that another war between Eurozone members is fairly unlikely.
I think the timing of the Noble was excellent. Europe needs to be reminded that they have created something excellent by tearing down their boarders and opening themselves up for easy economic activity. They have required an end of monarchies/dictatorships and the sort of leadership which resorts to war as a way to solve problems.
Arrik
“Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long
They get hope from fire and smoke as they reach for tha dawn”
Zack de la Rocha
ericblair
@Ruckus:
It’s like skimmers and embezzlers: a lot of the time, nobody notices and nobody would notice, except they get greedier and greedier and it blows up in their faces.
If people acquire more and more stuff without limit, we call them hoarders and send them to the shrink, and same with people who acquire more and more pets. If people acquire more and more money without limit, we give them a magazine cover.
JustAnotherBob
@Mandalay:
In a few years, let’s make sure they stay on their current path for a while.
As someone who has been to Myanmar a few times I’m very impressed with what is happening there.
Ruckus
@James E. Powell:
I think an awful lot of people were mad at WS and the banks. But I think most of us feel/are helpless to do anything. We hired a democrat to fix the mess but he hired WS cronies because those are the people who “know” the issues. Who else was he going to hire? What about all those laws/regulations that don’t exist anymore or ever to control what the banks did to all of us? Executive can’t fix something if there is no controlling law from congress. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. If, and this is a big fucking if, so many people didn’t hire the wrong idiots for congress then maybe, maybe we could get traction. Till then about all you can do is take your money out of the big banks. Like that will change much.
So what is the answer? Elect better congress critters? 90% of them? Na gonna happen.
Ruckus
@ericblair:
we give them a magazine cover
Maybe if it was on the cover of “Hung From a Lamppost Yesterday”, things might change. Till then I expect little change.
PeakVT
@Mandalay: but my larger point was that Spain and Greece would be in economic do-do right now regardless of whether they had joined the EU.
Probably not. Without the Euro, nobody would have lent to the Greek government or Spanish banks at the rates they did, which was the cause of the deficit spending in Greece and the property bubble in Spain. If the countries had maintained separate currencies, then the trade surplus countries would have lent to the trade deficit countries at risk-appropriate rates.
Ruckus
@PeakVT:
And if there were problems anyway they would probably have been smaller, AND the countries could have devalued their currencies.
Mandalay
@Xenos:
Yes, and your analogy is a good one.
But dougj is blaming the chemotherapy rather than the cancer in the cases of Spain and Greece.
mclaren
@Ruckus:
That’s a lie. Hiring the wrong financial advisors isn’t the problem with Obama’s presidency — the big problem is that he refused to unleash the DOJ to send all thoe Wall Street financial crime lords to prison.
And why didn’t Obama send every CEO on Wall Street to prison?
Because he knew he’d need them for donations when he ran for re-election.
Obama was completely and totally in charge of the DOJ. He could easily have appointed a fire-eating Attorney General who would’ve had every major player in Wall Street lined up at the dock in an orange jumpsuit in a giant perp walk.
Instead, Obama chose an attorney general who unleashes the awesome power of the federal government only against sick cancer patients who are trying to buy some doobies.
That’s beyond disgusting. It’s the apotheosis of immorality and dishonesty. It’s the very embodiment of corruption, and Obama’s conduct in steadfastly refusing to order the prosecution of America’s financial criminals has been beyond shameful.
Ruckus
@mclaren:
Nice conspiracy theory.
Gonna go all burnsy on you.
What laws did they break?
Come up with the answers and we can talk.
FlipYrWhig
Is this a Godfathers reference? “Unreal World”?
Roy G.
Von Clausewitz in the 21st century:
“Economics is the continuation of war by other means.”
Anoniminous
@beltane:
Yeah.
Back when this thing began the Greek government wanted to stop the purchase of two submarines from — surprise! surprise! — a German company and Merkel forced them to take delivery.
I’ll say again …
Greece and Portugal and Spain and Ireland are being used as “pass through” entities so the German, and French, governments can bail-out their banking and financial firms. That’s what this whole “morality” thing is about.
Chris
@Anoniminous:
I’m… a complete noob at economics, so sorry if this is a thick thing to ask, but what do you mean by “pass through” entities (I’ve seen that claimed a couple times in the last few days)? How is the money going from French/German governments through Greece, Spain and Portugal back to French/German companies?
JustAnotherBob
@mclaren:
Please list the Wall Street CEOs by name and the specific laws each broke.
Mike G
Too many Americans are convinced they are corporate pets rather than livestock.
schrodinger's cat
@PeakVT:Spain and Greece could also have devalued their currencies, something they can’t do right now.
schrodinger's cat
@PeakVT:Spain and Greece could also have devalued their currencies, something they can’t do right now.
Anthony
@Chris: Most of the money that the PIIGS borrowed came from German and French banks, if those countries were to default, it’s French and German banks who would be put out to pasture. The German and French governments aren’t happy about that but bailouts are unpopular so instead they lend taxpayer dollars to the Greeks and Spaniards on the condition that they don’t default and take huge haircuts.
Anthony
@Chris: Most of the money that the PIIGS borrowed came from German and French banks, if those countries were to default, it’s French and German banks who would be put out to pasture. The German and French governments aren’t happy about that but bailouts are unpopular so instead they lend taxpayer dollars to the Greeks and Spaniards on the condition that they don’t default and take huge haircuts.
Anthony
@Chris: Most of the money that the PIIGS borrowed came from German and French banks, if those countries were to default, it’s French and German banks who would be put out to pasture. The German and French governments aren’t happy about that but bailouts are unpopular so instead they lend taxpayer dollars to the Greeks and Spaniards on the condition that they don’t default and take huge haircuts
Lurking Canadian
Krugman made a fascinating point not too long ago. The US S&L bailout of the late 1980s amounted to a gift (not a loan) from the rest of the US to Texas that was larger, as a fraction of GDP, than what Greece owes to the rest of the EU. But the EU, never mind just giving them what they need, in the form of loan forgiveness, won’t even lend it to them, except on punishing terms.
There are tremendous trade imbalances between regions of the US, buy the system works because the federal government can, to a certain extent, equalize things. The EU, by creating a common currency without a common fiscal policy, created a de facto gold standard, with all the predictable consequences.
Ruckus
@JustAnotherBob:
He didn’t have an actual point, just a rant.
Rants are OK, just not usually constructive.
Chris
@Anthony:
Ah, thanks. That actually explains a lot, like why they’re bailing out these countries after all despite the resentment for them in the German public (also explains why they’re making it as painful as possible, can’t look like you’re going easy on these Med parasites).
@Lurking Canadian:
Have long said that the South in the U.S. would be a third world country if it didn’t have the good fortune to be tacked onto a first world economy.
Anoniminous
@Chris:
German and French banks lent money to Greece. Greece didn’t have money to pay on the loans. So more money is lent to Greece, from various sources such as the IMF, for the sole purpose of repaying interest and principle owed to German and French banks. Thus, the additional funds are “passed through” Greece.
JustAnotherBob
@Ruckus:
Rants can be destructive.
PBO should be 30 points ahead in this election.
Part of the reason he is not, I attribute to his failure to “toot his own horn” and to keep the American public tuned into his accomplishments.
Part of the reason he is not, I attribute to our failure to talk up his accomplishments. Our continuous bitching disheartens not only our listeners but also ourselves.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@JustAnotherBob:
Thank heavens it isn’t years of high unemployment.
James E. Powell
@JustAnotherBob:
I doubt that the lack of support on blogs or in comments had or can have any impact on the election.
I do agree that Obama’s soft style means that some of the good things are not known as good things (Obamacare) and some of the good things are mostly unknown (Lily Ledbetter, etc.)
Some of this is the “hack gap” that Kevin Drum wrote about. People gave him a hard time about it, but it is there and the lack of an army of hacks shouting the presidents praises every day (remember Bush as Our Young Churchill?) means that he doesn’t connect in peoples’ mind with the positive changes since 2009. It’s like that all just happened; Obama had nothing to do with it.
To me, the failures are in the Democratic “leadership” all over the country. While Obama has his steady defenders, far too many Democrats have been skittering back and forth in their proximity to the president. I recently visited Connecticut and saw a print ad for a Democrat running for congress in which he declared “I stand with President Obama!” and I was struck by it because I almost never hear or see anyone say that.
Lysana
My issue with the EU getting that prize is it stinks of “good, you learned how to behave with each other’s governments. Have a cookie.” Maybe I’m used to Europe not shooting each other. Maybe I’m annoyed at how they still try to exterminate the Roma under cover of other actions. Or how the Algerian French get shat on. But since the palefaces get along with the palefaces, everything’s peachy. Yay. They achieved intra-tribal detente. Let’s see them get REAL change going.
Ruckus
@JustAnotherBob:
rants from mclaren?
Otherwise I will agree that rants in the wrong places are destructive. I doubt that any of us here that rant have an effect on other than this small segment.
Rants in the media, that’s another story.
SRW1
The EU was a great success until the Euro shit hit the fan.
The proper way forward after the structural problems of the Euro became obvious, would have been to dissolve the currency union and go back to national currencies or at least to more homogeneous sub-blocks. But nobody knows how to do this and/or the European elites, in particular in the richer countries, suspect that it would cost them too much.
I don’t see people in the wealthier Euro countries ready for a permanent transfer union a la blue states/red states in the US. But neither do I see people in the southern half of the Euro area as being prepared to live with a perspective of indefinite misery.
Which makes me suspect that the Euro experiment will end via crash rather than the execution of a rational plan. A lot of the political capital built up during the successful pre-Euro years of the EU will evaporate in the run-up to that crash, not to speak of its consequences.
Robert Sneddon
@Or something like that.Suffern Ace: NATO was designed to give the US government three days to talk the Soviet leadership down while feeding western Europe into the fire to try and prevent a full and frank silo-emptying exchange of strategic nuclear weapons as stage 2 of World War III. The wargaming on both sides assumed that chemical and possibly biological weapons would have been used on day 1 in the European theatre and tactical nukes by day 2 with the sorts of results you might expect. Effectively NATO was America’s answer to the Warsaw Pact in terms of an ablative armour jacket and with the same idea, to protect the Rodina and (as you call it these days) the Homeland.
As it is the only time the NATO treaty has ever been invoked was when a bunch of Saudi religious nutters with boxcutters flew hijacked planes into buildings in the US and it was decided to beat up Afghanistan for no readily apparent reason other than unfocussed revenge.
Robert Sneddon
@SRW1: Would you dissolve the Fed and allow the US states to issue their own currency? After all a bunch of them are economic basket-cases, relying on central government funding to stay afloat. Surely Alabama could inflate its way out of financial ruin unencumbered by the strong dollar imposed on it by Washington DC.
No?
Chris
@Robert Sneddon:
True story.
Which is the main reason the French eventually left the alliance. De Gaulle had seen two world wars devastate Europe while America stayed out as long as possible, guesstimated that the U.S. would happily sacrifice Europe in the event of a third world war if it were in its interest to do so, and figured that was a pretty good reason to not put all his eggs in the American basket.
(I’ve also read that quite a few British strategists were concerned, in the early Cold War, that America would force a nuclear confrontation so that they could destroy the Soviets before they developed the capacity to strike the U.S. mainland – which, of course, would have sacrificed Europe. Incorrectly, as it turned out. Thank God).
SRW1
@Robert Sneddon:
I wouldn’t. But the reason is that the problem plaguing the Euro area does have a solution in the US in form of the federal government presiding over a domestic transfer union. I don’t see the required willingness among Europeans to institute that kind of a solution.
JustAnotherBob
@James E. Powell:
How about four years of lack of support when talking to our friends and families? To our coworkers?
How about letters to the editors and calls to the radio/TV stations?
We, those of us on the left, have poured criticism on PBO and rarely sung his praise. We own part of the reason this race is so close. We’ve put too much energy into “keeping his feet in the fire” and far too little supporting his efforts.
We have not taken the message to those who don’t pay close attention.
Now we’ve put ourselves in the position of having to play catch-up rather than being able to enjoy the landslide that should be happening.
srv
@Robert Sneddon: I would subscribe to your newsletter.
How NATO didn’t tell Ike “It’s Lemay or us” I’ll never know. Like having Malkin or Gellar with launch codes.
Robert Sneddon
@Chris: The US had short-range nuclear missiles in Britain and Turkey on the runup to the Cuban Missile crisis and pointlessly[1] refused to negotiate their removal until after the Soviets had built launchpads in Cuba for their own short-range missiles. Not one of JFK’s better moments despite the later hagiographies.
[1] By this time the US had mainland-deployable ICBMs and SSBNs equipped with the first Polaris IRBMs had been on patrol in the Atlantic basing out of the Holy Loch in Scotland. The Thors and Jupiter missiles in question were obsolete at this point.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@blindtrust8:
We’re all living in Rocko’s Modern Life now.
Robert Sneddon
@srv: NATO is majority-funded and dominated politically by the US. Under the charter the senior military commander of a NATO operation is always a US soldier and they have sworn an oath not to NATO but to protect the United States of America. When push comes to shove that oath will override the wellbeing of a bunch of foreigners. See darling of the left Wesley Clark’s attempt to start WWIII during the Sarajevo clusterfuck last century for a classic example.
AHH onna Droid
@mclaren: Your particular skills will be in such demand when the revolution comes I’m sure the rape gangs will be sure to only rough you up below the belt.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Would someone who knows about these things please lay out for me why the EU did nothing beforehand to ameliorate the foreseeable results of the economic policies of both Spain and Greece? If the EU could have intervened earlier and it didn’t then it’s poorly run. If it couldn’t have done anything then it’s screwed in the long run.
Chris
@Robert Sneddon:
Don’t forget that Kennedy (one of the ultimate Cold War hawks) was lambasted as “trying to disarm our military” when he started switching the nuclear deterrent from airplanes to ICBMs.
The internal pressure from the Red Scare crowd in America was fantastic, especially in the first fifteen years when you wouldn’t win a presidential election unless you presented yourself as harder on communism than your predecessor (as both Eisenhower and Kennedy did). It’s ludicrous, but I would bet that was a big part of it.
gene108
We should just buy Greece for a year. Greece’s GDP is like $325 billion. We spend more than twice that on the military.
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As a few have stated above, the EU has ushered in an era, where war between European states is now unimaginable. Even non-EU countries, such as Russia have such a large trading block to their west that they and the rest of Europe have an incentive to not militarize ever again.
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Also, too I think the North America should get the Nobel Peace prize, since war between Mexico, Canada and the USA is also totally inconceivable.
Follow that up with South America, where war between South American nations is also pretty damn unlikely.
JustAnotherBob
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
For the same reasons that the US didn’t step in and prevent the great recession of 2008.
We get caught up in the enthusiasm of economic bubbles and we have no agency whose job it is to raise the warning flags.
That is, we had no agency tasked to warn us. Elizabeth Warren set one up for us. Hopefully they’ll stay tuned in and hopefully we’ll listen to them when the next boom gets underway. If we take the top off of booms then the bottoms should not be so deep.
Lithium for the economy….
srv
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: It’s like asking why one of the innovators of CDO’s (Paulson) didn’t biotchslap Goldman.
There’s the smartest guys in the room, and then all their hirelings (idiots). But Everybody gets a parachute.
You would think at some point Chinese Intelligence would buy out the financiers and pay a premium to protect their interests, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Amazing they hold $2T and who knows how many €, and they just have to suck it.
Chris
@James E. Powell:
Forgotten point from higher up,
I think it hurts that there doesn’t seem to be a coherent sort of “protest ideology” out there, at least not a democratic, humanistic one, of the kind that we had in the past to protest the existing order and offer an alternative. In the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century there was liberalism, in the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, socialism. What’s the equivalent today? Not seeing it… Less competition for the far right.
IM
It is a lifetime award and as such well deserved.
An I looked it up and lot of organization did get the nobel prize, the ICRC alone three times and some of them look a lot more odd then this decision.
gene108
@JustAnotherBob:
Also, many on the Left do not get that there is a 24/7 “news” machine on the right, which spews out anti-Obama and anti-liberal talking points non-stop for 168 hrs a week.
A non-political junkie hears anti-Obama noise from the right-wing “news” outfits and then criticism from whatever is considered liberal commentary, what exactly is the non-political junkie supposed to think?
Obama’s done great things or Obama’s a failure?
As much as liberal intellectual purity demands we self-flagellate our leadership for not sticking to our ideals, the political reality is the other side is relentlessly flooding the minds of our fellow citizens with attacks on our views and attacks on the Democratic party.
We don’t have the luxury of whining, when our first job has to be push back against the much better funded right-wing “news” outfits.
If MSNBC had taken the Fox News tactic of calling out Romney, rather than criticizing President Obama for a lackluster performance, Romney wouldn’t have had such a strong post-debate bounce.
Calouste
So DougJ, and a number of other retards on this thread, you think that not having millions of people killed in a war every generation doesn’t outweigh the current financial troubles by a few light-years?
Higgs Boson's Mate
SRV, JustAnotherBob,
Thank you both. I was hoping that there was some procedural reason. Turns out it was plain old greed – again.
HEY YOU
What are you eating?
http://geneticroulettemovie.com/
Anthony
@Calouste: I think what we think is that this is not an opportune time to be telling Berlin that they can rest on their laurels
gorram
@Lysana:
Every part of that post bears repeating, but especially this. It’s easy to call the EU a force for peace when you ignore the Roma, the Muslim minorities, and asylum-seekers from Africa. European society rationalizes forced sterilizations of Roma women, sporadic violence against Muslims, and depriving asylum seekers of basic care before deporting them back to the war or violence they’d escaped.
Saying the EU isn’t at war is like saying there’s no war between socio-economic classes – only technically true in the narrowest sense of the word.
Bruce S
To put this in context, Sweden is not on the Euro and isn’t likely to move in that direction in the foreseeable future. They have a technical commitment, but I doubt this Prize is an endorsement of the Euro, but rather a generic acknowledgment that Europe is better off not literally at each others throats, which was the story for centuries. It’s arguable, of course, that NATO deserves this prize more than the EU assuming that’s the criterion.
Bruce S
@JustAnotherBob:
“PBO should be 30 points ahead in this election.”
Apparently you have immigrated to the USofA quite recently and don’t know much about the country. Welcome aboard…but you would be well served to take a couple of courses in American history, the legacy of racism and contemporary politics.
TenguPhule
Becuase you need beyond a reasonable doubt to convict and Wall Street’s crimes were done at a level that the common moron couldn’t grasp it after a firm of defense lawyers fills their ears with bullshit. Also, our criminal law system for white collar crimes is woefully out of date.
Short of CIA hits, there was no real chance of taking out the big fish CEO.
Origuy
@Bruce S: Sweden is in the EU, but Norway isn’t. The Peace Prize is awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament.
Martin Ranger
This is an extremely stupid view. Sure the EU (which is different from the Euro, by the way) has plenty of problems. But, you know, the project of European integration and all that comes with it is at least partially responsible for over 60 years of peace. Now to Americans this might not mean much, and younger people might not have the imagination to envisage the “old Europe”, and yes, Greece, the Roma and blah blah blah. But my history teacher back when I was in high-school in Germany told us how he grew up being taught that the French are the hereditary enemies of Germans (Erbfeind) and had to be killed, which few years later he proceded to do. So, yeah, the EU deserves the prize.