ie:missional teaching. glocalizing. living. serving. repenting. incarnating. loving. repeating.

Why monetary policy should become a top tier election issue:

From USA Today, Weak dollar undercuts missionaries, relief workers

And I always get suspicious when candidates begin to use the rhetoric of another candidate to prop up their own platform. Bill Clinton did this with Dole/Kemp (anyone remember “Enterprise Zones”?). Mike Huckabee is doing it now.

The assassination of former Pakistani P.M. Benazir Bhutto woke an election weary news cycle last week and prompted all sorts of speculation as to what the United States might do as a result. John McCain took the opportunity to taut his international travel and intimate knowledge of Pakistan’s political dynamics. Hillary Clinton mentioned a former meeting with her daughter Chelsea and Bhutto. John Edwards tried to offer a similar connection telling the CBS political show Face the Nation, “I was with Benazir Bhutto in Abu Dhabi in the Middle East just a few years ago. We spoke at the same conference.” Well, heck, let’s elect him based on coincidental speaking engagements. Mike Huckabee’s response apparently caused some amount of concern that the concern over his lack of foreign policy experience really is an issue when he tied the assassination to illegal immigration. See here for a 2 minute-10 second CNN summary. Guliani repeated his 9/11 mantra over and over. (Does this guy seriously think he can win? If it weren’t for 9/11 he wouldn’t even be a published author, much less a presidential candidate.)

Interestingly and importantly one of the last interviews given by Bhutto had not even been published at the time of her death. Originally scheduled for early January, the Sunday magazine PARADE released the interview online last week opting not to wait for the print edition. In the last two paragraphs, Benazir Bhutto stated:

What would you like to tell President Bush? I ask this riddle of a woman.She would tell him, she replies, that propping up Musharrafâ??s government, which is infested with radical Islamists, is only hastening disaster. â??I would say, â??Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country.â?? I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.â?

See the December 27th showing of The Situation Room w/Wolf Blitzer to hear candidate Ron Paul’s similar take on the issue.

Seemingly lost on the major candidates is why we should be doing anything at all in the region. Is Pakistan not a sovereign nation? Do its people not have the right to govern themselves? The Declaration of Independence addresses the issue of how people should respond when the government is no longer acceptable:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. â?? That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â?? That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Accordingly, it is the responsibility of any people (be they Pakistani, Iraqi, Iranian or Saudi) to overthrow their own government, but not the responsibility of the American government to do it for them.

So, instead of allowing countries to deal with their own issues, we now have a decades old tradition of inserting ourselves into conflicts all over the globe (and especially where oil is involved) costing us bazillions of dollars that we do not have and causing animus toward us from people around the world. In the Middle East alone, we have supported and funded Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Iran, Osama bin Laden, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. And how many military bases did we set up in Rwanda following the genocide? How much foreign aid did Tutsis receive? Rioting in Kenya? We need not rattle our saber–no oil.

Yes, yes, I am rather cynical at the moment.

After our constant activity in these countries, what is the result? An American Empire that cannot be and should not be sustained. In the end, we will go the way of Great Britain, or worse Rome, either by course or by force.

It is also interesting to note that the area of the world that has so benefited by our largesse is now benefiting from our despair. Our government caused financial problems have set us up for a transfer of wealth that has nothing to do with Builders and Boomers. The recent sub-prime mortgage collapse is allowing foreign governments to become prominent stockholders in Fortune 500 American companies. An $8-11B fourth quarter write-off by CitiGroup is being addressed by asset liquidation. See the chart at the bottom of this page to see who’s buying at the fire sale.

A little known investment vehicle for governments are “Sovereign Wealth Funds.” The Economist notes:

No one likes to lose money, of course, but sovereign investors have deeper pockets and longer horizons than most. For some, it is not all about investment returns. China Development Bank views Barclays as a valuable source of commodities expertise, for example. Stakes in private-equity firms help to shade sovereign investors from scrutiny while offering juicy investment opportunities…Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate that sovereign-wealth funds have invested more than $37 billion in financial institutions since April.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that in 10 years the SWF’s of the world could own 25% of all the publicly traded U.S. companies. (See here for one person’s analysis. I am not endorsing the this site, but the post is similar to others all over the internet and is concise.)

As more and more U.S. companies become owned by international governments, we might find ourselves a “sharecropper nation.” At that point, the outsourcing of jobs will hardly be an issue. We’ll have outsourced our entire economy. The investments of Saudi Arabia have been duly noted by former CIA operative, Robert Baer, in his book Sleeping With The Devil, where he writes:

Saudi Arabia keeps possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U. S. banks–an agreement worked out in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration…The Saudis hold another trillion dollars or so in the U. S. stock market.

Uhm, any candidates talking about any of this? Maybe it isn’t as important as I think it is. Oh, well, it’s time to go watch caucus results anyway.