U.S. Dollar in Strong Decline
April 10th, 2007Via: Reuters:
The dollar fell towards last week’s two-year low against the euro on Tuesday, reversing gains sparked by a robust U.S. jobs report, while the yen hit a record trough versus the euro as carry trades flourished.
As European traders returned from the long Easter weekend, they pushed the dollar down across the board, reacting to rising U.S.-China trade tensions and on caution ahead of this weekend’s meeting of Group of Seven finance chiefs.
The U.S. currency also weakened against high-yielding currencies, hitting a 16-year low versus the Australian dollar and two-year troughs against the New Zealand dollar.
Bids Drying Up for Alt-A Paper
April 10th, 2007Via: Business Week:
At least five Wall Street analysts downgraded shares of American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. after the home lender said its mortgage loans are fetching lower prices from investors.
While it has been well publicized that investors are shying away from “subprime” mortgage debt — or home loans to people with bad credit — some people hoped the weakness would stay contained in the subprime market.
On Friday, the Melville, N.Y.-based mortgage lender said it tried in March to sell a pool of Alt-A home loans, which carry better credit than subprime loans and worse credit than prime. Far fewer bidders offered materially lower prices for the loans, the company said.
Because of a cooling market for mortgage debt and a spike in payment defaults among Alt-A borrowers, American Home Mortgage Investment said it now expects profit of $3.75 to $4.25 per share this year. The company, which operates as a real estate investment trust, previously predicted $5.40 to $5.70 per share in 2007 profit.
Analysts from Citigroup, Friedman Billings Ramsey, Lehman Brothers, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods and Bear Stearns cut their investment ratings on American Home Mortgage Investment’s stock before Monday’s trading began.
Advice on Being an Expat in Belize
April 10th, 2007There’s some great general information about Belize here, but I found the parts about how he’s helping to improve the situation in the village to be most interesting.
Via: Joe Bagent:
Well, Tom, I hate like hell to give advice about settling in Belize. After all, though I’ve been there several times and now have settled there, I am a newcomer and like all writers, I am prone to run my mouth because because we like to hear ourselves talk. Lately though, I’ve come to know a lot of expats in my area, which is the poorer Garifuna villages along the coast.
Belize has many different cultures and types of terrain, ranging from mountain jungle, savannah, beach etc. Most Americans are set on buying and owning property because of their cultural economic indoctrination. But land can also be leased for very long periods of time there.
I should say in all honesty that, though it appears cheap to an American at first, Belize is the most expensive country in all of Central America. This becomes quite apparent after a while as you try to stretch your money and function economically for the long haul, especially for Americans who attempt to recreate the American lifestyle there. Plenty do it but that sort of life costs the same as in America.
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace
April 10th, 2007In case anyone is still keeping track…
Via: Yahoo / AP:
In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.”
“The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.
Allawi writes with authority as a member of that “new order,” having served as Iraq’s trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.
The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country’s four-year ordeal. It’s an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word “ignorance” crops up repeatedly.
First came the “monumental ignorance” of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without “the faintest idea” of Iraq’s realities. “More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society,” he writes.
What followed was the “rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance” of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders…
Cryptogon Reader Signs Up for Hosting with Blue Host
April 10th, 2007Thanks erayjames.com! Cryptogon receives $65!
Cryptogon Readers Contribute $15, $20 and $50
April 10th, 2007AH sent $15, JB sent $20 and theunionjack.net sent $50. Thanks so much to all of you!
And Now: The “Clean Skin” Terrorists from Europe
April 9th, 2007Sure.
Via: New York Sun:
The American government fears that the next September 11-style attack on the U.S. could be launched by Muslims from Britain or Europe who feel like “second-class citizens” and are alienated by a “colonial legacy,” according to the U.S. Homeland Security chief.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Michael Chertoff, who arrives in Britain on Thursday for talks with John Reid, the Home Secretary, said the American government was determined to build extra defenses against so-called “clean-skin” terrorists from Europe.
“We need to build layers of protection, and I don’t think we totally want to rely upon the fact that a foreign government is going to know that one of their citizens is suspicious and is going to be coming here,” he said.
Mr. Chertoff insisted that America required additional information, including e-mail addresses and credit card details, to vet European passengers and rejected “the idea that we’re going to bargain with the European Union over who’s going to come into the United States” under the visa waiver scheme.
“We have an absolute right to get this, in the same way that if someone wants to be a guest in my house, I have a right to ask them who they are and get identification.”
Princeton Professor, Former U.S. Marine Colonel On Terrorist Watch List for Criticizing Bush
April 9th, 2007Via: Balkanization:
“On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving.”
“When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years.”
“I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: “Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. “That’ll do it,” the man said.”
Pearls Before Breakfast
April 9th, 2007Most people are trained, from a very early age, to stop noticing goodness and beauty. People who don’t notice goodness and beauty don’t notice evil and lies either. The Machine doesn’t want you dead, per se, but it wants to rewire your brain so that you forget that you’re alive. It wants you undead, because you’re really only useful to it as an easily programmed zombie.
Life is difficult for people who refuse the programming. The path of least resistance is to embrace the ignoramus zombie scripts and hope that the resulting mental illness, chronic disease and financial ruin don’t make things too unpleasant. But that’s what the drugs and gadgets are for…
I’m struggling a lot with the commentary on this, probably because this article is an absolute shocker. The phenomenon described just might be the key to understanding the whole damn show. It shook me up quite a bit. It’s the total oblivion of modern life, on the one hand, and the realization that absolutely anything is possible, in terms of mass deception and psychological operations, on the other.
Ironically, many of you will want to read this article at work, but try to resist the urge to do that. The piece is too important (and long) to read in your cubical between phone calls and emails, etc.
Via: Washington Post:
If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?
Yeah, and who are we serving?
Related: Change Blindness
Failed States in General, and Then a Look at Zimbabwe
April 8th, 2007For most people, preparing for collapse is impossible because they have absolutely no idea what collapse would be like, and no framework within which events may be assessed. Dmitry Orlov writes, “Collapse will not be televised, you will not know that it has happened. You will only know that it has happened to you.” Learning about failed states, though, can help us do a bit better than that.
“Failed state” is a clinical sounding term, an academic term for what many of us colloquially refer to as collapse. Of course, lots of individual states have failed in the past, and several are either in a state of failure now, or moving in that direction. Knowing where your state is on the path to failure can provide you with powerful insights and the ability to make strategic plans that might improve your chances of surviving, or better yet, avoiding the worst of what’s nearly upon us.
In my opinion, all Cryptogon readers should study the nature of failed states.
States don’t usually fail overnight. (Iraq is a notable exception, thanks to the U.S.) Several interrelated factors tend to spiral increasingly out of control, over years or decades, until the state’s power declines to a point at which internal actors (warlords), or other states, will attempt to fill the vacuum. If you are interested in reading a graduate level text on this process, see People, States and Fear by Barry Buzan. (I’ve provided a link to that book on Amazon, but I wouldn’t suggest buying it. It’s WAY too expensive for something that old and arcane. Any university library should have it.)
The specifics of how states fail are as varied as the states themselves. As you read about individual failed states, though, note what they share in common. This would be a fascinating and terrifying exercise for any Americans who happen to be paying attention.
The collapse of the U.S. will, most likely, be punctuated by variations on several failed state themes. The U.S. is too big and complicated of a place to read effectively as a single unit, but when it finally fails, my best guess is that it’s going to be a morphing mass of statelets, fiefdoms and confederacies, fighting against what remains of the federal corporate plutocracy, and each other.
It’s probably safe to say, with a high degree of confidence, that the collapse of the U.S. will be extremely violent.
Why?
Look at failed states with multiple ethnic and religious groups and what you will find is that genocide and other atrocities are routine. Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Russia (Chechnya) are recent and extreme examples.
How many ethnic and religious groups are represented in the U.S.?
No failed state in history has been comprised of such a heterogeneous mixture religions and ethnicities as the United States. In better times, diversity might be seen as an advantage to a society. In failed states, however, the warfare typically occurs along ethnic and religious lines.
Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace have come up with a Failed States Index that is pretty good, although their assessment of the U.S. is off—too low—by easily 10 points. Take your pick on which indicators are too low for the U.S., but the scores for I6, I7, I8, I10 are outrageous (full index).
Their indicators are very good, but as with all of the social sciences, fitting numeric values to matrices like these lies somewhere between snake handling and reading tea leaves. Those criteria are worth keeping in mind, though. At least they are looking at solid referents to sociopolitical cohesion. Again, read Buzan if this interests you.
Now, see how much you can learn about the future of America by looking at the present situation in Zimbabwe.
Via: New Zealand Herald:
We ask the villagers whether they know what happened here. Someone says something about soldiers. Jonathan explains: “Everyone lost parents and family. No one wants to remember the camp.”
Everyone agrees that the bodies were dumped in the mine shafts that honeycomb the hills.
Smallholders say the hills are haunted and that skeletons prowl, carrying guns.
