First Reports from the G20 Feature Blame-shifting, Selfishness, Anti-Americanism and Defeat.
The rich nation finance ministers of the G20 met at a verdure resort south of London to prepare for the April 2 meeting of the rich nation chiefs to address the worldwide panic and GDP depression. The first reports present discord, penny-pinching and non-ironic babble.
Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega, attending the talks in southern England, said the IMF (International Monetary Fund) would not get extra money from China, India, Russia or his own country until their voting power at the finance agency rose.
Most significantly, the missionary call by Britain and the United States for the members to commit to a massive, collective, overwhelming global stimulus plan -- Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling like to call it a "Global New Deal" -- has been swatted aside by France and Germany, among others.
"The United States is insisting on the need for a strong, rapid and coordinated stimulus. Why? Because they were the last ones to put in place their plan and they are facing a bigger crisis," French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde (right with Alistair Darling) said.
"For most of the countries in continental Europe, the urgency is to develop the rules, highlight discipline and sanctions through a new architecture of the financial system," she said in an interview in Les Echos newspaper.
Canada put a finer spin on the general rejection of a global stimulus plan by mocking the United States for its broken banks and headless drift on nationalization. Germany piled on with the Canadians:
"Some countries have not fixed their banks, so I want them to fix their banks," Canada's Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said after the meeting.
The point was also emphasized by Germany's finance minister Peer Steinbrueck. Germany, like other European nations, has been under U.S. pressure to boost its fiscal stimulus.
Brazilian finance minister Guido Mantega was much more rude about the American inability to solve its banking problems, to discard the zombie banks of Citigroup and Bank of America: "If they're going to be nationalized then go ahead, if they're going to be liquidated then go ahead. But it must be done quickly." China was usefully non-committal, agreeing with everyone. Host Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling did the reporters a favor by restating the goals that were not met:
"We must do three things: boost demand, reform the global system of financial regulation, and increase the resources of the International Monetary Fund."
All this adds up to a monopoly of disappointment, and the headline writers are already certain that world markets will not be cheered. The British media is keen to declare Gordon Brown a flop. Everyone agrees that Tim Geithner is obtuse and slow-handed. In sum, the G20 now faces failure just like the London World Economic Conference of 1933. Why? Because great nations do not long remain great if they quit their parochial, poll-driven, national mania for winning elections for some delightfully utopian exercise of world-class utopian union. Do they know there is bad trouble? Yes. Do they know that the remedy is gruesome and necessary? Yes? Will they each chip in cash (borrowed from the future) and work together? No.
Just Like 1933.
The Americans were the problem in June 1933. Back then, Britain and France were looking to the American delegation to compromise and cooperate with regard tariffs, currency and demand. By the eighth day of the London Conference, one member of the American delegation, Republican Senator James Couzens of Michigan, understood exactly what was going wrong and that it could not be fixed. Perhaps he was free to speak plainly because he was the only Republican in the Secretary of State (and ex Tennesse Democratic congressman) Cordell Hull-led delegation, and therefore he was powerless. Couzens said that the 66 nations had not yet suffered enough "to be willing to meet in complete humility." Couzens added that most delegates were "too cocky." He also found an "unfortunate attitude," of those who "feel confident they can paddle their own canoes." Couzens then declared what came to be an epitaph of the meeting. "Between the time of the calling the Conference and the present, the developments in American seem to indicate that internationalism will conflict quite severely with our national economic programme. If my analysis is correct, we cannot carry through both programmes. Sooner or later in the Conference, we shall have to decide which programme we are to follow." The decision in 1933 was that America chose economic nationalism, isolationism, and years of tending its own garden. Will that be the decision in 2009? What do you think? Have the rich nations changed in the last seventy-six years? Is this a smarter, quicker, wiser community of nations? Do you hear any humility?
The Devils
What goes wrong now is not just that no one can agree with the United States, and that the United States cannot seen anyone else's problems for our own. What goes wrong now is that the Devils see the weakness in the powerful and make their moves. In 1933, the squat, stupid, morally damaged, ghoulish Josef Stalin saw that he could crush all resistance to his social engineering delusions by starving to death millions in Ukraine and then by shifting more millions into beggary and death in the wilderness of Central Asia and Siberia. The paranoid gangsters in Japan (the Japanese slaughter any one strong man; in those days they had to move collectively to steal, to murder, to conquer) saw that Britain was either bankrupt or pacifist or defeatist and moved against all of East Asia without fear of the Royal Navy. The lunatic race-mystic Adolf Hitler saw that his truly phenomenal grandiose plan to purify the German race by extermination of the Jews, the weak, the non-Teutonic, would not be checked by joint operations by Britain and France, so Hitler launched his ambition to take over Germany, Central Europe, Continental Europe, and eventually (after his lifetime) the whole world. All three Devils routinely mocked publicly and privately the great nations of Britain, France and the United States. Sadistic Joseph Gobbels gave a secret briefing to German journalists in 1933, saying that, if he had been the French premier, he would have crushed Hitler the moment he grabbed power from Ludendorf at the end of January. That the French did not move amazed and consternated the bloodlessly ironic Joseph Goebbels. The American Congress passing the Neutrality Act in 1935 made the Hitlerites, the Stalinists and the Japanese militarists feel vindicated and boosted. Hitler said much the same thing in a secret briefing in 1938; and in early 1939, Hitler was roaringly derisive of Franklin Roosevelt for seeking peace and disarmament. Yes, the Devils were all mad, and their plans came to ruin; however their predations wiped out human decency for sixty years of the 20th Century and still haunt us with derivative race-social engineering in the Ummah, in Europe, in Africa. Who are the Devils today who will see their chance and move? No need to be creative. Tehran, Damascus, Pyongyang, Caracas. Too weak? Yes. So was Berlin in 1933, so was Moscow in 1935, so was Tokyo in 1938. You can see (below) all three Devils busily opportunistic at the same time Couzens spoke disconsolately and the great nations decided at London to abandon comity and face the future as pious, frivolous, whining weaklings.
Back on September 30th 1993 ‘The Wall Street Journal’ published an article, “The Knowing Eye” by Jerry E. Bishop which proposed that the way we perceive objects is indistinguishable from the way we perceive movement. This idea was supported by a study of how the eye/brain perceives objects by J. Anthony Movshon, a neural scientist formerly at New York University's Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Specifically, the problem posed was how the brain perceives motion. The obvious answer had always been that the brain compares each new image to the previous one and thus determines a change in its position. However, researchers found this not to be the case. Instead, highly specialized patches of neurons in the cortex were found to respond to movement alone, suggesting that movement (not unlike existence itself) can be verified at any given moment without having to rely on esoteric constructs of time and space.
This puzzle becomes intriguing when we ask ourselves how we as human beings can make the same mistakes over and over again. Perhaps all of history is but a moment that rotates on its axis. Our penchant for giving different names to the same things may in fact only serve to create an illusion to satisfy the linear perception of our circular lives.
Interesting that is, Peter... except, I understand that I don't understand. Good though sounds it. Axis on history rotates our penchant for illusion created. Yeh, that's a good one!!!
Babble2009 has company of plenty
W.B Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?