Author Topic: Memo to Merkel: Tell Obama to Take a Hike  (Read 823 times)

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Offline happyg

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Memo to Merkel: Tell Obama to Take a Hike
« on: November 05, 2013, 01:49:06 pm »
Pat Buchanan
Chutzpah. I believe that's the word for it.

Just days after learning the Americans have been tapping her phones and taping her conversations, Angela Merkel has been publicly upbraided by the U.S. Treasury for being a bad global citizen.

What did she do to deserve this?

Merkel just won a third term as chancellor with a record vote and has an approval rating near 80 percent. But she is a bad global citizen because Germany is running the world's largest trade surplus.

The Washington Post thinks the Treasury's tongue-lashing is overdue, as does Paul Krugman of the New York Times:

"In this environment, a country that runs a trade surplus is ... beggaring its neighbors. It is diverting spending away from their goods and services to its own, and thereby taking away jobs."

Is this not astonishing?

Competing successfully in world markets is now tantamount to stealing food off the table of one's less-competent and less-successful neighbors.

By this standard, America was a selfish nation and a rotten global citizen for the first seven decades of the 20th century, when we ran trade surpluses every year, averaging 4 percent of GDP.

From the Civil War through the Roaring '20s, with a high tariff, we became the mightiest manufacturing power the world had ever seen. Our economic independence enabled us to stay out of two world wars. And when we did go in, we won within months in 1918, and we won again only a few years after Pearl Harbor.

Is this a record to be ashamed of?

Every modern nation that has risen to world power has done so through economic nationalism: Britain under the Acts of Navigation; the United States under protectionist Republicans from 1860-1914; Bismarck's Germany; postwar Japan, which rose from the ashes of 1945 to become the world's second economy; and China from 1980 to today.

Trade surpluses, run at the expense of rival powers, have been the hallmark of great nations in their rise to preeminence.

Though Germany is smaller than Montana, with a population not a fourth that of the United States, she is the powerhouse of the European Union, makes some of the finest products on earth, and sells abroad one-third of all she produces. Her unemployment rate is only 5 percent.

Why is that not a record to be admired? And whom are the Germans supposed to emulate? Answer, if you can believe it, Obama's America.

The Post and Krugman feel the Germans must shake off their habit of working and saving and start spending to get Club Med countries like Spain and Greece out of intensive care. The Post wants Merkel to embrace the Social Democrats' idea of raising the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour, which was too rich even for the mayor of D.C.

The need, says Treasury, is for "rebalancing."

Basically, what the globalists want is for prudent counties with trade surpluses to start running deficits to get money flowing, like transfusions, into the moribund economies.

Where as "Engine Charlie" Wilson reportedly said, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country," the globalists retort, "What's good for the global economy is good for America."

But is this true? From their behavior in recent decades, neither the Chinese nor Japanese nor Germans, proprietors of the second, third and fourth largest economies on earth, buy into this ideology.

And how has America's conversion to globalism, since George H.W. Bush proclaimed the coming of the New World Order, worked out for us?

From 1989 to 1993, Bush 1 ran $360 billion in trade deficits in goods, a U.S. record.

Bill Clinton, who enlisted the Republican establishment to help ratify NAFTA and U.S. membership in a World Trade Organization where the United States has the same vote as Armenia, ran $1.8 trillion in trade deficits.

Clinton's deficits were then dwarfed by George W. Bush's, who ran up $5.3 trillion in trade deficits in goods.

In four years and eight months, Obama has piled up trade deficits totaling more than $3 trillion.

Thus, during 25 years of free-trade globalism, the United States has run up well over 10 trillion, or ten thousand-billion, dollars in trade deficits in goods.

And what do we have to show for it?

Our economic independence is history. We rely on foreigners for the necessities of life. We are the greatest debtor nation in history. Beijing and Tokyo bank scores of billions in annual interest payments on the T-bills and Treasury bonds they hold. And as the gleaming cities of Asia rise, America's infrastructure visibly crumbles.

The real wages of our working men and women have not risen in decades. In the first decade of this century, we lost 6 million manufacturing jobs as 55,000 factories disappeared.

Why should successful Germans emulate the folly of the failed American politicians responsible for the decline of the greatest republic in the history of mankind?
http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2013/11/05/memo-to-merkel-tell-obama-to-take-a-hike-n1736769?utm_source=facebook
« Last Edit: November 05, 2013, 01:49:24 pm by happyg »

Offline mountaineer

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Re: Memo to Merkel: Tell Obama to Take a Hike
« Reply #1 on: November 07, 2013, 04:58:11 pm »
Der Spiegel has Barry O. pegged:
Quote
Frenemies: Spying on Allies Fits Obama's Standoffish Profile
By Gregor Peter Schmitz


Diplomats are not surprised that the security agencies under US President Barack Obama have reportedly been monitoring close allies like German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He has failed to foster close relationships with other heads of state, causing much frustration around the world.

US President Barack Obama was scheduled to visit the Church of Our Lady cathedral in Dresden during a June 2009 whistle-stop visit to Germany. Diplomats from the German Foreign Ministry had painstakingly planned every last detail. They were looking forward to the photographs of Chancellor Angela Merkel with the US president in front of cheering crowds.

 But the White House bristled. The president didn't want to do that -- that was the word in Washington. He reportedly placed little value on such photo ops, and he had to leave as quickly as possible, to get to an appearance at the Buchenwald concentration camp. The haggling went back and forth for weeks, and in the end the White House gave in, but only a little. Obama raced through Dresden. After their visit inside the church, Merkel had to shake hands with visitors by herself. The president had already disappeared.
 
On this day, at the latest, it must have dawned on diplomats that this US president was different from his predecessors. He was someone who did not attach value to diplomatic niceties nor to the sensitivities of his close friends, which he already had proven as a presidential candidate. At that time he put Chancellor Merkel in an awkward position by wanting to make a campaign speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate. This site was traditionally set aside for sitting presidents, which Obama also knew. ...

So much non-diplomacy is new among US presidents. Reagan wooed Margarent Thatcher. George H.W. Bush confided in Helmut Kohl as Bill Clinton did in Tony Blair. George W. Bush, who many thought was an isolationist, could count on a whole team of "buddies," such as the then-prime minister of Spain, José Aznar, and the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. He even entertained them at his ranch in Texas.

Merkel was also invited there, and in return Bush ate a dinner of wild boar in her German electoral district. The chancellor has from time to time said that she values such trans-Atlantic closeness.

That is over. "Coolness has its price," Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl wrote in 2010, adding that Obama appeared to have no genuine friend among world leaders. But what for? He has the NSA.
Read the entire article here

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Offline happyg

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Re: Memo to Merkel: Tell Obama to Take a Hike
« Reply #2 on: November 07, 2013, 10:27:17 pm »
Obama knows the world's leaders has his number, and knows his lies will be recognized as soon as they leave his lips. He also knows they like him even less than he likes them. In his warped mind, he is better than they are, even though he is the laughing stock of the world.

Oceander

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Re: Memo to Merkel: Tell Obama to Take a Hike
« Reply #3 on: November 08, 2013, 06:13:59 am »
Quote
The Washington Post thinks the Treasury's tongue-lashing is overdue, as does Paul Krugman of the New York Times:

"In this environment, a country that runs a trade surplus is ... beggaring its neighbors. It is diverting spending away from their goods and services to its own, and thereby taking away jobs."

Is this not astonishing?

That line could have come straight out of Atlas Shrugged.