RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the midst of double-digit inflation and a stagnant economy, Argentines on Sunday handed victory in the presidential runoff election to 56-year-old Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri of the Cambiemos (Let’s Change) coalition.

With 76% of the vote counted as we went to press, Mr. Macri led with 52.87% against 47.13% for President Cristina Kirchner’s Peronist Front for Victory (FPV) candidate, Daniel Scioli.

The 58-year-old Mr. Scioli—the Peronist governor of Provincia de Buenos Aires—ought to have coasted to an easy victory. But his association with Mrs. Kirchner was a liability he couldn’t overcome. After 12 years of the Kirchners’ socialist economics, eight under this president and four before that under her late husband Néstor, Argentines want change.

Mrs. Kirchner’s uncivil rants against her political opponents, and a substantial loss of judicial independence and press freedom during kirchnerismo also contributed to Mr. Scioli’s defeat.

Sweden’s immigration catastrophe is hardly news, but, writing in the New York Times, Benjamin Teitelbaum underlines how much of the responsibility for it lies with the refusal of ‘establishment’ parties of the left, far left (well, it’s Sweden we’re talking about), center and center-right to accept that dissent could be rooted in anything other than xenophobia, racism and all the rest. That’s something that might be expected from the left, but that this was also the position taken by the Moderaterna (the largest party on the center right) under the leadership of Fredrik Reinfeldt, still—even now—remains startling. The Moderaterna, who led two successive governments between 2006-2014, have quite a bit to be proud of, but about this, not so much. In the end, I suspect that Reinfeldt, an open borders man, pur et dur, will be remembered very poorly indeed.

The aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris and heightened terror alert in Brussels is set to dominate news in the week ahead as French authorities continue their efforts to piece together details relating to the events of Nov. 13. Meanwhile European Union lawmakers are set to discuss the bloc’s responses to the attacks, including stepping up checks on its own citizens.

1) The main focus across the EU is expected to stay on Belgium and France, where police have already conducted countless raids over the past week as part of their investigation into the terrorist attacks in Paris. Authorities have already arrested several suspects in relation to the attacks as they search for further clues and try to locate the whereabouts of the attackers who made it it out alive.

2) Eurozone finance ministers will meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss their budget plans for 2016. Their meeting comes a week after the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said the budgets submitted by Italy, Lithuania, Austria and Spain risk violating the bloc’s spending rules and urged them to ensure they will meet EU targets.The EU introduced new and stricter fiscal rules for countries using the euro in 2013 as a response to the sovereign debt crisis, which put future of the eurozone in doubt. The rules, whose main goal is to keep public debt in check, give the commission more power to oversee the bloc’s economies and to ask governments for changes in their budgets. The procedure must be signed off by the bloc’s finance ministers. Read More »

On 9/11 my husband and I and two friends were happily enjoying brunch in a Brussels Cafe. When the news of the attack broke, the patrons cheered…rsk

BRUSSELS—The terror alert that has partially locked down Brussels entered a second day as the country’s interior minister said the threat to Belgium was broader than the manhunt for a suspect involved in the Paris attacks.

Belgian officials over the weekend deployed troops, shut the city’s metro system and entreated stores and cafes to close, after raising the security threat level for the city to four, its maximum level.

The Belgian Crisis Center is slated to reassess the threat level on Sunday afternoon.

Officials said the alert level was raised after authorities developed information that an attack similar to those that shook Paris on Nov. 13, killing 130 people, was potentially imminent.
Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon in part attributed the elevated alert level and stepped-up police activity to the search for multiple terrorism suspects.

The only real statesman in elective office in Europe at the moment, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, is calling for fundamental change:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday said it was high time the European Union reconsidered the basic parameters binding it together, then revamp its founding treaties, or face political radicalization across the continent. Orban has been at odds with Brussels ever since coming to power in 2010, and recently became an outspoken critic of the EU’s handling of the migration crisis and other challenges.

Asked about a Dutch proposal to create a tighter core in the EU with external passport controls, dubbed a “mini-Schengen”, Orban said not only Schengen but other aspects of the EU were ineffectual today and needed to be reformed. He said the migration crisis and heightened risk of terrorism made new security and border control regulations necessary, and the recent euro zone crisis forced questions about a joint monetary policy without a common fiscal policy.

Hungary was one of the few EU countries (Greece and Italy were the others) who bore the full brunt of the Islamic “refugee” invasion of the old Continent this past summer. Unlike his counterparts in western Europe, Orban and his fellow Hungarians understood immediately what was happening, and quickly sealed their border to prevent a further influx of young, able-bodied, overwhelmingly male Muslims from trekking illegally through their country.

The Syrian civil war has been tearing the heart out of the country and the region for nearly five years. The mere numbers alone illustrate this brutal reality with suitable bluntness and force. 300,000 likely dead; 11 million people displaced, either internally or externally; four million of them refugees. This is a barbaric and almost Hobbesian reality. It sometimes – indeed, often – defies understanding, especially for those who live in the West, most of them largely untouched by its ferocity; but occasionally, brief and transient insights are given for the benefit of those unaffected by all this into the sheer horror – and its vast extent.

One of these windows is provided by the refugee crisis; another is last week’s atrocity in Paris, in which ISIS demonstrated to the world a reality that those living under its brutal rule in Syria know all too well: namely, that it is a nihilistic, fascistic entity that desires the extermination of those who do not subscribe to its evil worldview. Both of these immense and catastrophic events were caused in no small part by President Obama’s inaction, and his lack of anything which may resemble principled and strategically sound leadership. And at the summit of this vacuum is a plan by the White House for the United States of America to take 10,000 Syrian refugees. It is a pitiful number, and the response from the American people has been far from positive, with many states already attempting to exempt themselves from the perceived burden of welcoming those who are fleeing genocide.

Islamic terrorists – not only ISIS and Al Qaeda – systematically and deliberately target civilians, and stab the back of their Muslim and “infidel” host countries, abusing their hospitality to advance 14-centuries-old megalomaniac aspirations to rule the globe, in general, and to reclaim the Waqf (Allah-ordained) regions of Europe, in particular.

Emboldened by Western indifference, these destabilizing and terror-intensifying aspirations have been bolstered by the Islamic educational systems in Europe, the USA and other Western countries. They proclaim the, supposedly, irrevocable and perpetual Islamic title over the 8th century Islamic conquered Lyons, Sorbonne, Normandy, Carcassonne, Borden, Arles, St. Remy, Avignon, Burgundy and Nice in France, as well
as the ostensibly Quran-sanctioned Islamic deed over the 9th and 10th centuries occupation of western Switzerland, including Geneva, the 8th century conquest of Spain and the 9th century subjugation of parts of Italy.

Europe has underestimated the critical significance of this 14-century-old anti-Western Islamic history and aspirations in shaping contemporary Islamic education, culture, politics, peace, war and the overall Islamic attitude toward Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and other “arrogant infidels.” For instance, “infidel” France has been the prime European target for Islamic terrorists (eleven reported attacks in 2015), irrespective of France’s systematic criticism of Israel and support of the Palestinian Authority, dispelling conventional “wisdom” that Islamic terrorism is Israeli or Palestinian-driven.

There are, after all, indications that growth is, in reality, close to zero. Take the most reliable indicator of Chinese economic activity, the consumption of electricity.

Just about everyone correctly agrees that a new round of structural economic reform could restart growth.

The country’s current general secretary of the Communist Party has, for instance, been closing off the Chinese market to foreigners, recombining already large state enterprises back into formal monopolies, increasing state ownership of state enterprises, and shoveling more state subsidies to favored market participants.

One statistic summarizes the situation: in Q3, there was $460.6 billion of net capital outflow, as documented by Bloomberg. No economy—not even one the size of China’s—can survive outflows of that size. The Chinese economy has never made sense, but confidence held it together. Now, the confidence is gone.

“On conservative growth projections, China’s economy could well be bigger than the sum of all the G7 economies in real terms within the next decade,” writes Peter Drysdale, the editor of the popular East Asia Forum website.

The law stated that the homes and workplaces of those non-Muslims who could not afford the tax would be sequestered.

Under the AKP rule, Turkey’s dwindling Jewish community, now at around a mere 17,000, as well as other non-Muslims, have come under systematic intimidation from government politicians and bureaucrats. These non-Muslim minorities are also often the targets of racist attacks.

It was 1942 when, one day, Hayim Alaton, a Jewish yarn importer in Istanbul, received two payment notices from the tax office: He was asked to pay 80,000 liras in total — a fortune at that time. He ran to the tax office to object, but was told to pay the whole amount within 15 days. It was the infamous Wealth Tax, passed on Nov. 11, 1942 and it remained in effect for a year and a half until it was repealed on March 14, 1944.

The Wealth Tax exclusively targeted Turkey’s non-Muslims at a time when 300,000 Orthodox Greeks and 100,000 Jews were living in Istanbul (where total population was one million). The law stated that the homes and workplaces of those non-Muslims who could not afford the tax would be sequestered. Alaton was able to pay no more than 11,000 liras. That was the start of “black years,” as Alaton’s son, 15 years old at that time, would later recall.

Wordy and as banal as Brooking’s mantra “Its stated mission is to “provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad goals: strengthen American democracy; foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system”. rsk

For several years, President Barack Obama has operated under a set of assumptions about the Middle East: First, there could be no return of U.S. ground troops in sizable numbers to the region; and second, undergirding the first, the U.S. has no interests in the region great enough to justify such a renewed commitment. The crises in the Middle East could be kept localized. There might be bloodshed and violence—even mass killing, in Syria and Libya and elsewhere, and some instability in Iraq—but the fighting, and its consequences, could be contained. The core elements of the world order would not be affected, and America’s own interests would not be directly threatened so long as good intelligence and well-placed drone strikes prevented terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Even Islamic State could be “degraded” and “contained” over time.

These assumptions could have been right—other conflicts in the Middle East have remained local—but they have proven to be wrong. The combined crises of Syria, Iraq and Islamic State have not been contained. Islamic State itself has proven both durable and capable, as the attacks in Paris showed. The Syrian conflict, with its exodus of refugees, is destabilizing Lebanon and Jordan and has put added pressure on Turkey’s already tenuous democracy. It has exacerbated the acute conflict between Sunnis and Shiites across the region.