PARIS: Europe sank even deeper into recession than the United States in the closing months of last year, according to figures published Friday, as finance ministers of leading industrialized nations gathered in one of the worst-affected countries, Italy, for discussions on the crisis.
In the fourth quarter, the economy of the countries sharing the euro declined by 1.5 percent, according to the European Union's statistics office. That is even worse than the 1 percent decline in the U.S. economy during that period, compared with the previous quarter.
"Today's data wipes out any illusion that the euro zone is getting off lightly in this global downturn," said Jörg Radeke, an economist at the Center for Economics and Business Research in London.
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Posted by: Steve White ||
02/15/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Italy badly needs to devalue but can't obviously. Who drops the Euro first? Spain, Italy or Greece?
#9
...the recession, which started in the United States before spreading to most of the rest of the world.
Just one more thing for Europe to blame on us...
...because they need someone the blame because their bankers and investors held a lot of bad paper (sub-primes et al) because investing in Europe has been made unsustainable by socialist governments and programs whom the Euros voted and continue to vote into power. Don't expect them to figure it out.
A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back. The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush's tenure.
But when British officials offered to let Mr Obama to hang onto the bust for a further four years, the White House said: "Thanks, but no thanks." He really knows how to piss-off our friends.
Diplomats were at first reluctant to discuss the whereabouts of the Churchill bronze, after its ejection from the seat of American power. But the British Embassy in Washington has now confirmed that it sits in the palatial residence of ambassador Sir Nigel Sheinwald, just down the road from Vice President Joe Biden's official residence. It is not clear whether the ambassador plans to keep it in Washington or send it back to London.
American politicians have made quoting Churchill, whose mother was American, something of an art form, but not Mr Obama, who prefers to cite the words and works of his hero Abraham Lincoln. Indeed a bust of Mr Lincoln now sits in the Oval Office where Epstein's Churchill once ruled the roost. Churchill was very opposed to Socialism and any form of Tyrany. Obama apparantly doesn't want anyone around, even in a bust, who is greater than he ever will be. Talk about Ego! Mr. Lincoln wasn't too fond of tyranny either, as I recall ...
Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr Obama than those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill's second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Among Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President's grandfather. Note the "allegedly".
The rejection of the bust has left some British officials nervously reading the runes to see how much influence the UK can wield with the new regime in Washington. My guess is none.
Now it is likely that Gordon Brown will offer a alternative symbol of Anglo-American fealty when he visits Washington to meet Mr Obama for the first time since he became President. Diplomats are still working to finalise a date for the visit which is expected in the final week of this month or early in March.
One suggestion, given Mr Obama's interest in the Lincoln era, is that Mr Brown should offer an artefact relating to the career of John Bright, the 19th Century MP and political reformer who became the most prominent British supporter of Lincoln's Union forces during the American Civil War.
A British Embassy spokesman said: "The bust of Sir Winston Churchill by Sir Jacob Epstein was uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W Bush, from the Government Art Collection in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship. It was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the President was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009.
"The new President has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned. It is on display at the Ambassador's Residence."
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
02/15/2009 17:10 ||
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#1
No doubt the special order Neville Chamberlain bust is en route.
#2
I also doubt the current 10 Downing residents recognize him.
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/15/2009 18:19 Comments ||
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#3
So, Daddy was a commie and Grandpa a MauMau? This is going to be interesting.
This will not do much to harm our relationship with the Brits as I suspect Winnie is no more popular with Brown and Milliband than he was with Atlee or Bevan. And they are the ones who count, not those Little Englanders who want to get rid of the Asian immigrants.
BAGHDAD -- Two years ago the American authorities arrested Sheik Mazin al-Saedi, a senior aide to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, accusing him of organizing kidnappings and killings.
This week in Baghdad, the city once terrorized by those killings, Sheik Mazin mingled in a white-walled art gallery as the patron of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that would not, exactly, be out of place in Chelsea or SoHo: abstract art, expressionist paintings and conceptual works larded with symbols of Iraq's ancient history and today's reality.
The goal was "to show the entire world that we are not as the media portrays us, a movement that believes only in bearing arms and knows no culture other than that of violence," Sheik Mazin said of Mr. Sadr's movement, which is widely blamed for its part in the violence that followed the American invasion in 2003. "The Sadr movement," he said, "is also one that believes in ideas and encourages and patronizes the arts."
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Posted by: Steve White ||
02/15/2009 00:00 ||
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The Iranian Majlis Speaker says the government should loosen its grip on economic affairs and let the country move toward privatization.
"For the sake of the country's economic development, the government should allow the people to take control of economic affairs," said Ali Larijani.
According to Article 44 of the Iranian Constitution, the economic system shall be based on public, cooperative and private sectors, with proper and sound planning.
All large-scale industries, mother industries, foreign trade, large mines, banking, insurance, power supply, dams and large irrigation channels, radio and television, post, telegraph and telephone, aviation, shipping, roads, rails and the like, are public property and at the disposal of the government.
"The government, which now runs 80 percent of Iran's industrial sector, should only supervise affairs and allow economic problems to be resolved through national participation," Larijani continued.
He further stressed the necessity of implementing Article 44 of the Constitution to ensure Iran's economic development.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/15/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
"...the government should loosen its grip on economic affairs and let the country move toward privatization. "
Gee, you think the Obamanation might get the hint?
#2
The union leadership believes their chips with the Donks says the American people are going to pay for their high end benefits with a continuing bailout, so why negotiate? /rhetorical question.
#3
As a former union member in the 60's and 70's (AFL-CIO)I'm still convinced the UAW and the big two (didn't it used to be three) automakers have a death wish. Both seem intent upon wrecking our auto industry by refusing to negotiate in any realistic fashion. If this sh*t continues we will no longer have an auto industry, and both the unions and automakers will play the blame game. Just sayinn'...ya' know.
#4
Nothin' at all like the steel industry, or the railroads, or the airlines, or the longshoremen, or...
Posted by: Fred ||
02/15/2009 11:11 Comments ||
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#5
Meanwhile, apparently no bitching or complaining laber problems on the Horizon at Princeton, Indiana Toyota, BMW Greenville, SC. or Benz, Tuscaloosa, AL.
#6
Having retired out of the auto industry (I was not in the UAW, so save your breath/fingers) I have a stake in this whole process and no say. I suspect I'll get a major reduction in pension but I am still working so is my wife. We'll survive. But having had to deal with people in the UAW on an almost daily basis for 30+ years I can say on pretty good authority that a lot of them have no grounding in the real world. Invariably their first reaction is always "the company's trying to fuck us"
#7
CH, you're about the only guy I have sympathy for in this whole mess. For any body who stuck out 20+ years having to work with the UAW on a daily basis and then see it all go in the crapper is going to be very hard. For the dealers, senior management, marketers, and especially the UAW those guys deserve what they get for killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
#9
besoeker i have been sayiing for quite some time now send the jobs down south, alot of ppl down here would work for less than these union ppl do now, if there is anything left too salvage after so much mismanagement that is
#11
Most of the transplant auto assembly plants are in the south. Toyota USA workers get about the same hourly rate as GM workers. The benefits are in line with that of other heavy industry but much less than the gold-plated health care that the UAW demands and gets. Biggest issue: no union work rules.
But as long as the Wagner Act demands that unions act as adversaries to corporations, none of this is going to change. UAW can't change its spots.
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/15/2009 15:39 Comments ||
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#12
We'll miss ya, Big 3. You once provided value.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
02/15/2009 16:58 Comments ||
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#13
It's just a very dim memory now but it seems to me that presidents like Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon used to employ a technique called jawboning. They'd send some heavyweight guy to Detroit to get all these people to the same table and they'd stay there until a deal was made. No bailout. Just put the squeeze on both sides until they had a deal. I wonder if Zero ever heard of anything like that.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/15/2009 17:37 Comments ||
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#14
My memory is that the jaw boning was done from the White House press room or the East Room in a presser where the President told management to cave. I don't remember a President ever coming down on a union.
#16
The ATCs were government employees, who like all government employees sign a paper understanding that to strike against the government is illegal. If and when we end up nationalizing the Big Three per the Obama-Reid-Pelosi Plan Part III, the UAW will find life a little more interesting [particularly the part where their pension gets managed by the feds - see what happened to the railroads].
#17
my dad retired from GM and is a union guy. We get into vehement arguments over this type of stuff. I think the union needs to go the way of the dodo. All the basic worker's rights they fought for back in the 30s-50s (when there was a need for a union) are all common laws now - the union needs to go away, they serve no real purpose anymore.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
PARIS: Europe sank even deeper into recession than the United States in the closing months of last year, according to figures published Friday, as finance ministers of leading industrialized nations gathered in one of the worst-affected countries, Italy, for discussions on the crisis.
A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back. The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush's tenure. 
BAGHDAD -- Two years ago the American authorities arrested Sheik Mazin al-Saedi, a senior aide to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, accusing him of organizing kidnappings and killings.
