RUTHFULLY YOURS

No time to waste in taking the initiative — including a Trump announced new trade agreement with the UK.

The importance of last week’s “Brexit” vote cannot be diminished, even by those on our side of the Atlantic who insist on seeing only its possible effects on our November presidential election.

In defining the importance of Brexit, the reactions within the EU are a good place to start. Brit PM David Cameron, having staked everything on his campaign to remain in the EU, has said he’ll resign in October. Cameron wants the UK to wait until a new leader is chosen to begin the formal process of getting out of the EU under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s primary treaty.

The first members of the EU — France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands — reacted in panic. They fear, quite rightly, that the Brexit vote presages other nations’ exits from the EU. They insist that the Brits immediately invoke Article 50 to start the clock on its two-year deadline for any nation exiting the EU to negotiate its way out.

The 27 remaining EU nations will want to penalize Britain for its exit. Only Germany’s Angela Merkel has said the split from Britain needn’t be nasty. But she won’t be able to control the others.

The EU’s primary members will, as the negotiations roll out, insist on imposing tariffs and other trade restrictions on the UK. That they want to penalize the second-largest economy will affect them all negatively (as Merkel realizes). But the EU “powers” will make it as costly as they can, in economic and political terms.

They will try to insist on some form of open border agreement and with it some version of the EU’s human rights laws.

That will make it enormously difficult for the UK to succeed in its exit negotiations. Or will it?

Now that the UK Parliament is in control of the matter, it can do several things that will unwind the UK from the EU. It should begin immediately and proceed deliberately.

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.”

L. Mencken (!880-1956)

Liberty is more easily lost than discovered. It is not generally lost in revolutions. Its demise more typically resembles the ancient method of Chinese torture and death by a thousand cuts. Like boiling a lobster, liberty’s death comes slowly, subtly, almost invisibly – unfelt by the victim. The autocracies of Lenin and Stalin arose from revolution, but Hitler emerged from a democratic election. Read Victor Klemperer’s diaries (I Shall Bear Witness and To The Bitter End) to understand the insidious nature of a country’s transformation into authoritarianism, and the helplessness of those who realized their predicament too late.

In the West, the threat to liberty is not another Hitler. Today, liberty is imperiled by the rise of the administrative state and the bureaucracy of elites that populate it. For fear of offending other cultures (and to our shame), we have stopped promoting democracies. According to Freedom House’s 2015 survey almost twice as many countries saw freedom decline as saw freedom increase in 2014 – the ninth year of such trends. Concern about the loss of liberty, however, is not new. The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798. Lincoln suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus in 1861. Wilson suppressed free speech during World War I, and FDR interned Japanese-Americans during World War II. In July 1914, when prohibition was being discussed in the United States, the Virginia Law Register included the headline: “The Decline in Personal Liberty in America.” In the body of the report were written words that sounded remarkably modern, if not in tone, at least in meaning: “Today…liberty is the right of part of the people to compel the other part to do what the first part thinks the latter ought to do for its own benefit.”[1] The words ‘elitism’ or ‘establishment’ were not used, but the message is familiar. These are but a few examples of how our freedoms have been curtailed during extraordinary times; they should make us more vigilant today.

This is why last week’s election in Britain was important, that a free people will resist efforts to cauterize liberty. While the favored narrative of supercilious “Remains” was that Brexit was driven by xenophobia, nativism and hate, the truth was that the 52% of the electorate who democratically voted to leave were concerned that the EU had become undemocratic, creeping toward socialism. Keep in mind, the turnout at 72% was the highest in years. Immigration, no doubt, played a role, but this vote was more significant than the establishment would like to admit. Like millions of dissatisfied Americans who see their lives managed by an elite cadre of bureaucrats in Washington, millions in England saw Brussels dictating rules by which they must abide. Sixty percent of the UK’s laws, including for example the curvature of bananas, are now created by unaccountable mandarins working out of Brussels. Those who wanted to maintain the status quo are a cadre of politicians, academics, lawyers, bankers, big business leaders, most in the media, as well as an increasing number of people grown dependent on the largesse of government. The existing system has served them well – ignored have been the middle classes and small businesses.

The easiest route to political control isn’t brute force: Sure, you can stick a gun in somebody’s face, but that’s always a risky business. The easiest route to political control is economic control. It’s cleaner, it’s safer, and it works.

There are some spectacular examples of that in India. In order to “protect” pepper farmers from being exploited by the ruthless profiteers of the free market, political bosses decided that farmers could sell their produce only to a government-approved buyers’ cooperative, the representative of which was usually — because every protection racket takes roughly the same shape — the uncle or brother-in-law of the local political boss, who often was the local money-lender, too. It’s a long and complex scheme (a story told brilliantly by P. Sainath in Everybody Loves a Good Drought) that ended in pepper farmers’ being kept in intergenerational debt bondage . . . for their own protection, of course.

Ahmad Zaatari saw a fair amount of that sort of thing growing up in Lebanon, where his well-to-do family of entrepreneurs and professionals were on the outs with the local political boss. Uncles and cousins of his father saw their factories closed on this or that pretense, and their land taken by the government. Zaatari himself ended up at a high school controlled by that same political boss, who maneuvered to make life miserable for the young man. In the end, Zaatari did what hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have done over the years: He moved to the United States. There are an estimated 3 million Americans of Lebanese origin living in the United States today; there are only 4.5 million Lebanese in Lebanon.

“My grandfather invested in real estate,” Zaatari says. “He was initially in textiles in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Those investments saved the family, and that’s how I was able to come to the United States. I’ve always known real estate was a smart investment — it’s ingrained in me.”

Naturally, he bought a house. He bought that house in Austin, where he was involved with a number of technology start-ups after getting his master’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas. His wife worked as a consultant, and they had a baby, and things were looking pretty good at the start-up where he worked developing high-tech equipment for the oil-exploration business. Buying a house in the Rockdale Circle section of Austin, far from the most expensive or most fashionable part of town, wasn’t a huge stretch.

Until the bottom fell out of the oil market, as it does, from time to time. Zaatari’s company lost a $6 million order, and pretty soon it didn’t have enough money to pay its engineers. Zaatari had a pretty good-sized mortgage and had drawn down some of his investments to make the down payment, and he is not rich. “Working in start-ups,” he says, “I’ve gained a lot of experience — not a lot of money.” Those obligations weren’t too bad for a two-income household, but they were going to be pretty rough on a one-income household.

He didn’t want to sell his house. He also didn’t really want to go get a clock-punching, steady-paycheck job, either — an energetic entrepreneur, he already had a proposal in to the National Science Foundation for an education-technology project he was developing. All he really needed was a little financial breathing room until he figured out his next step. That is one of the many faces of the so-called gig economy: It isn’t just people who can’t get a regular job, but also people who don’t want one, people who are working on something else and just need a bit of income for a while. Albert Einstein worked at a patent office, but he didn’t plan on making a lifelong career of it.

THIS BOOK IS ONLY AVAILABLE FROM THE PUBLISHER

http://www.wilkinsonpublishing.com.au/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=500

Perhaps you have had the experience: enter a bookshop, ask for a politically incorrect tome and be told, quite possibly by some pierced young thing with a tattoo and a sneer, that such books are not welcome on the premises. Or, if the shop is carrying the title, you’ll be directed to a rear shelf where a single copy is displayed spine-out on the shelf and very hard to find.

Andrew Bolt is Australia’s most prominent and controversial commentator. In this second book of columns and reflections, Bolt is again in the front lines of our most urgent political and social debates, from Islam and immigration to the green movement and the rise of the slacktivist. But he also reveals his more personal side – the experiences that have shaped his values and love for this country. For some this book is ammunition. For others it’s fair warning. But for everyone it’s a test of their own values – and the reasons they hold them. Bolt’s columns are published nationally in News Corp newspapers, including Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Brisbane’s Courier Mail. He also runs Australia’s most-read political blog and hosts two week night shows – The Bolt Report on Sky News and a national Macquarie Radio show with Steve Price.

From the author of Still Not Sorry.

A response from an e-pal:

During the last 12 months nobody has won any money betting against Donald Trump. As I understand it the gravamen of Mr. Suissa’s argument is that some method should be found to deny the will of the primary voters either before or at the Republican convention in July. This suggestion would have been more beneficially applied to Obama’s candidacy in 2008. Had it been successful the likelihood of a populist Trump candidacy, which seems to horrify Mr. Suissa even more than the 8 mirthless, poisonous and treacherous years of Obama’s presidency, would have been remote. Denying the will of the people is a conceit of the political elite as Prime Minister Cameron just discovered on Thursday.

Those conservatives and Republicans who will not support Donald Trump because they imagine themselves to be too politically pure, too morally superior, too well educated and too sophisticated because they consider Trump to be an unprincipled quasi-liberal vulgarian are committing a costly form of sanctimony which will hand over America and the Supreme Court to a political party which has abandoned Israel, supports the hate-group Black Lives Matter and whose members have moved so far to the left they would be unable to see the center if they were standing on top of a ladder looking through a pair of binoculars.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Schnee

West Hollywood

“Obama certainly has that reverse Midas touch. Recall his efforts to secure the Olympics for Chicago that ended in embarrassing failure. After nearly eight years in the White House, President Obama can’t understand that the influence he has as president is a precious resource not to be wasted unless he is sure that he can make a difference. That includes efforts to influence domestic as well as foreign policy.”

UKIP leader Nigel Farage gave a backhanded compliment to President Obama when he said that many voters supported leaving the EU because Obama told them not to.

The Hill:

Threatening people too much insults their intelligence,” the United Kingdom Independence Party head said.

“A lot of people in Britain said, ‘How dare the American president come here and tell us what to do?’ ” Farage continued on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily,” citing Obama’s U.K. trip in April.

“It backfired. We got an Obama-Brexit bounce, because people do not want foreign leaders telling them how to think and vote.”

Britain on Thursday voted to leave the EU in a move experts predict will lead to worldwide financial uncertainty.

British Prime Minister David Cameron promptlyresigned Friday morning.

Obama warned Britain against leaving the EU during a visit in April, saying it could hurt potential trade deals with the U.S.

“The U.K. is going to be in the back of the queue,” he said during an appearance alongside Cameron.

“Not because we don’t have a special relationship but because given the heavy lift of any trade agreement, us having access to a big market with a lot of countries rather than trying to do piecemeal trade agreements is hugely inefficient.”

Donald Trump on Friday mocked Obama for being on the losing side in the Brexit vote.

“The world doesn’t listen to him,” the presumptive GOP presidential nominee said during a press conference in Turnberry, Scotland.

Trump said he wholeheartedly backed Britain’s decision to leave the EU and once again forge its own path.

“You just have to embrace it,” he said. “It’s the will of the people. What happened should have happened, and they’ll be stronger for it.”

Editor’s note: The following is adapted from a speech the author delivered this week at the Westminster Institute in McLean, Va. The topic: “Defenseless in the Face of Our Enemies: What Keeps America from Protecting Itself from Radical Islam.”

Two weekends ago in Orlando, Fla., in the wee hours of the morning, a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub teeming with revelers. After killing and wounding scores of people, he took hostages in a restroom. He began calling police and media outlets, began crafting social-media posts, all for the point of announcing what was already clear to the nightclub denizens who’d heard him screaming, “Allahu Akbar!” — Allah is greater! — as he fired shot after shot: Omar Mateen was a stealth Muslim militant.

He was an adherent of radical Islam who committed his atrocity in furtherance of its ongoing jihad against America and the West. He took time in the midst of the carnage to make bayat — a pledge of allegiance — to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the Islamic State terror network and its proclaimed caliphate.

By the time police barged in three hours later and killed Mateen in a firefight, he had murdered 49 people and wounded another 53, many quite seriously.

It should have been possible to see Omar Mateen coming. He was a first-generation American citizen, born in this country to immigrant parents from Afghanistan and raised in a troubled household — one in which the father is a visible and ardent supporter of the Taliban, the fundamentalist jihadist group that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, harbored al-Qaeda as it plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, and to this day wages war against American troops as it fights to retake the country.

Mateen, who was 29 when he committed his mass-murder attack, was repeatedly suspended for fighting throughout his childhood school years. Academically, he had great difficulty — despite being nominally American from birth, he was mired for years in English programs for students who speak other languages in the home. His rantings during the attack indicated that he considered Afghanistan to be his home, and that he identified, first and foremost, as a Muslim: a member of the worldwide ummah — not a citizen of the United States, the nation he volunteered to levy war against, just as the Islamic State (or ISIS) exhorts its acolytes to do.

Gerald Walpin died yesterday after being hit by a car in Manhattan. Jerry was a renowned lawyer, a scholar, a proud Jew and supporter of Israel, and a principled advocate for the benefits and protections of the Constitution. This past Thursday I was in the front row with his beloved wife Sheila when he delivered a brilliant speech on the infringement of free speech and outright bigotry on American campuses. He was author of a wonderful primer on the Supreme Court versus the Constitution. I will leave it to others to write the encomia that he deserves with a long list of his many achievements.

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He was a great American patriot…..at all family events that I attended…birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations….we sang “America the Beautiful.” Jerry’s brilliance and tenacity made America more beautiful. I am proud to have been his friend. I offer deepest condolences to his children and grandchildren ….and to my friend Sheila. His memory is a blessing. rsk

The Financial Action Task Force, an international anti-money-laundering standards body, said Friday it would suspend some of its restrictions against Iran for a year to monitor Tehran’s progress implementing changes to its regulatory regime.

The White House has been pushing to ease the path for business into Iran since the implementation of the nuclear agreement, and removing Iran from the FATF blacklist would aid in that effort. Critics, however, are pushing back, saying Iran’s conduct hasn’t changed since the deal was implemented, citing, among other things, Iran’s support for groups such as Hezbollah.

The FATF, following its plenary session in South Korea this week, said it welcomed Iran’s adoption of, and political commitment to, an action plan to address deficiencies in its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing policies, as well as Iran’s decision to seek assistance with implementation. Iran will remain on the blacklist until the full implementation is complete, and if Iran fails to demonstrate “sufficient progress” at the end of the yearlong suspension, the restrictions will be reimposed, the FATF said, calling attention to Iran’s issues with terrorism financing, without specifying what those issues were.

Among other moves in recent months, Iran ordered the implementation of an anti-terror financing law and it joined the Eurasian Group, an FATF-associate body, as an observer. If Iran meets its commitments, the FATF said it would “consider next steps.” In the meantime, the FATF called for members to tell their country’s financial financial institutions to “apply enhanced due diligence to business relationships and transactions,” using a risk-based approach, with people and companies in Iran.

“The FATF will continue to engage with Iran and closely monitor its progress,” it said in a statement.

Countries that fail to implement FATF’s standards on anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing policy run the risk of being labeled as high-risk or uncooperative jurisdictions, making it more costly and difficult for those nations to transact with the banking systems of FATF member states.

Iran has lobbied for removal from the FATF blacklist, seeing it as a roadblock to investment from foreign companies since the implementation of the nuclear agreement with global powers. Global banks have cited the FATF’s statements on Iran as one reason to hold back on investment.

North Korea and Iran are the only countries labeled as “high-risk or uncooperative jurisdictions” by the FATF. In February, the FATF said in its statement it was “particularly and exceptionally concerned” about Iran’s failures to address terrorism-financing issues, saying it poses a serious threat to the integrity of the global financial system. CONTINUE AT SITE

I think that the British exit from the European Union is wonderful, and the EU Commission head Jean Claude Juncker’s response was petulant…urging Britain to hurry up and get out.

On the other hand I feel some gratitude to Juncker…. At a commemoration of the Holocaust he lamented rampant and growing anti-Semitism in Europe in the strongest terms.

“I never imagined a Rabbi in Marseille would have to tell his Community it might be better to hide the kippa,” he said, referring to controversial comments made after a machete attack against a Jewish teacher. “I never imagined that Jewish schools and Synagogues would have to be guarded, I never imagined a Europe where Jews feel so insecure that immigration to Israel reaches an all-time high. 71 years after the liberation of Auschwitz this is intolerable.Europe cannot and will not accept this,” he continued. “Attacks on Jews are attacks on all of us – against our way of living, against tolerance and against our identity.”
“Our entire society has a duty to prevent Anti-Semitism and we must fight it on every corner – whether on the extreme right or the extreme left or when it is instigated by extreme Islamists,” he declared.
“We are determined: Never again. Because a Europe of hate is one that we refuse. Because a Europe without Jews would be no longer Europe.”