Monthly Archives: June 2013

A Thought on President Barack Obama’s Berlin Trip

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As quoted by Spiegel Online International from the Berliner Zeitung [emphasis added]:

Obama, probably the best speaker in the world, used Berlin and the Brandenburg Gate to give a bad speech. He spoke about a lot, without saying much.

He did not say anything about any of the many points in his speech—maybe someone has the time to count them all.  At no point did he make a proposal.  As we could see, sitting in front of the TV, he had no plan.  He wanted to get the thing over with.  And he succeeded in doing that.  But he also succeeded in robbing passion from his greatest enthusiasts.

Obama is not one who cannot manage to get people excited about what it is he wants.  That’s what makes this appearance especially embarrassing.  Everyone who has experienced seeing him or has read his captivating book knows that when he wants to get people thinking a certain way, he can.  The only possible conclusion is that he didn’t want to.  Possibly the most important politician in the world has nothing planned.  That is terrible news.

That’s from a paper firmly on the left.

Us poor, dumb, clingy conservatives have seen this for a while, though: Obama truly believes that all he has to do is throw down a speech, and the oceans will recede.  And that’s the most dangerous part of him, much more so than any of his policies or the Chicago style activities of his administration’s departments and agencies.

More Sequester Obama-Style

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President Barack Obama’s unions get theirs, and the rest of us can just go cling.  Plainly, his publicly pronounced “directives” are just Obamatalk.

The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year[.]

That directive was written by none other than the IRS’ current acting MFWIC, Danny Werfel, when he was Controller of President Barack Obama’s Office of Management and Budget.  The irony.  The irony.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) has the right of it:

The IRS always claims to be short on resources.  But it appears to have $70 million for union bonuses.  And it appears to be making an extra effort to give the bonuses despite opportunities to renegotiate with the union and federal instruction to cease discretionary bonuses during sequestration.

The IRS also has millions to spend on lavish “conferences” and on targeting groups and individuals with whose politics Obama disagrees.

Rakoff Was Both Right and Victorious

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Recall Federal District Judge Jed Rakoff’s decision a while ago rejecting an SEC-Citibank settlement, in which Citibank agreed to pay an enormous vigfine to the SEC in return for the latter’s desisting from harassinghectoring the former any further.  Rakoff’s heartburn concerned the lack of statement by either party of guilt or innocence by Citibank—Citi would simply pay the protectionfine and the SEC would stop its threats.

Now there’s an update to the SEC side of this.

The Securities and Exchange Commission intends to make companies and individuals admit wrongdoing as a condition of settling civil charges in certain cases, or be forced to fight the charges in court, the agency’s Chairman Mary Jo White said Tuesday.

Is this a direct result of Rakoff’s rudeness in holding out for actual culpability before a fine gets assessed?  Maybe, but not directly.  This change didn’t occur until after a review of the overall situation initiated by SEC Chairman Mary Jo White when she took over last spring.

It does, though, come after Rakoff’s argument that the ability to avoid admitting liability allows companies to treat settlements as just a “cost of doing business.”  He didn’t argue this explicitly, but I do: it also allows government agencies to extort money and other…concessions…from businesses and individuals with whom those agencies have a disagreement of any sort.  Sort of like the IRS and the DoJ do.

“Victorious” may be too strong, but this clearly is a step in the right direction.

In Which The Swiss Government Votes for National Sovereignty

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Switzerland’s lower house of Parliament voted 123-63 against the measure [to let Swiss banks otherwise violate Swiss banking laws to give up data demanded by the US], which would have enabled many of the Alpine nation’s banks to sidestep the Swiss banking secrecy laws and start handing information to the US Department of Justice about any past help they may have given to Americans hiding undeclared wealth in Swiss accounts.

Those lawmakers were worried about, among other things,

the heavy-handedness of the US effort to have them sign off on legislation that might have exposed the country’s banks and bank employees to legal hazards.  Lawmakers had also raised concerns about the lack of detail in the plan regarding potential fines for banks that would have opted to participate.

Peter Kunz, Professor of Business Law at the University of Bern, disagreed:

This is the major problem.  Swiss banks, and banks in general, need some certainty in their business—and right now no one really knows what’s going to happen.

I disagree with the good professor.  To the extent there is uncertainty, it’s in the Swiss government’s behavior.  With this rejection, Swiss banks remain free to obey Swiss law without fear of retaliation, which would not have been possible under the proposed law.  That law would have subjected Swiss banks to the vagaries of American law.

This may be more coming down the pike.

Senior officials from Germany, France, Japan and the European Commission have expressed deep concern to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about the Fed’s proposed new regulatory regime for foreign banks under Section 165 of the Dodd-Frank Act.

This is what concerns them:

the Fed proposes to require over two dozen foreign banks to move their U.S. broker-dealer and other nonbranch operations under separately capitalized, intermediate holding companies that would be subject to U.S. bank capital requirements, liquidity buffers and single counterparty credit limits.

…

For purposes of complying with the Fed’s higher capital requirements under Section 165, U.S. bank holding companies would be allowed to take account of their global consolidated operations. Foreign bank-owned IHCs would not—which means that capital held at the foreign bank parent level would not be available to support U.S. operations. This would tilt the competitive playing field against foreign bank-owned broker-dealers, and it is a glaring violation of long-standing principles of equal national treatment.

Sovereignty—what a concept.

The Defeat of al Qaeda

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…Orwell style.

[President Barack] Obama said in a speech to the National Defense University May 23 that because of the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and most of his top aides, “we are safer.”

While terrorist threats still exist, “the core of al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan is on the path to defeat,” the president said.

Because, you see,

…focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan resulted in a lack of targeted counterterrorism efforts in other locations…. …counterterrorism efforts have been weakened by the administration’s policy of dissociating Islam from al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorism.  The policy was a key effort of John Brennan, White House counterterrorism chief during the first Obama administration.  As CIA director, Brennan has expanded the policy of limiting links between Islam and terrorism at the agency.

The result is that Islamist terror groups are flourishing, posing direct threats to the United States and to US interests outside the country[.]

And a report from Lignet, a private intelligence group run by ex-CIA officials, had this on the matter in a report published last Tuesday:

…the U.S. government’s overreliance on sanctions and surveillance has limited the war on terror.

The result is “a decentralized al Qaeda structure—and a much greater threat….

“Al Qaeda has transitioned from a hierarchical cell structure to a franchise organization that is now responsible for four times as many terrorist attacks a year as it was before 9/11….

“Al Qaeda training camps are now being established on the Arabian Peninsula, in Africa, countries of the former Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia.”

Indeed, the al Qaeda empire is rapidly spreading, and with more than just training camps.

Truly, a defeat of Orwellian proportions….