Philosopher Roger Scruton, writing about England a few years ago, used the title of this post to describe a certain sort of intellectual (and quite a few pretend-intellectuals) who

have repudiated the national idea. This repudiation is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the second world war, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political élites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people — intellectuals especially — tend to become arrested.

It is no accident that, while most of America toils by the sweat of its brow to make a profit, the faculty lounge and the newsroom seem a world apart from business. So perhaps it is only natural that it is now, when economic conditions are difficult, that the distinctions between the two worlds have become so plain.

70% of Americans don’t want to be ruled by the 30% or so that think they are part of an elite, and it has driven the 30% bonkers. HT: BOTW

CNET reports that Intel chief executive Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy and the Obama administration (much like those of Intel founder Andy Grove):

“I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States,” Otellini said. The rub: Ninety percent of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don’t impose.

(Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers elaborated on this in an interview with CNET, saying the problem is not higher U.S. wages but anti-business laws: “The killer factor in California for a manufacturer to create, say, a thousand blue-collar jobs is a hostile government that doesn’t want you there and demonstrates it in thousands of ways.”)

“If our tax rate approached that of the rest of the world, corporations would have an incentive to invest here,” Otellini said. But instead, it’s the second highest in the industrialized world, making the United States a less attractive place to invest — and create jobs — than places in Europe and Asia that are “clamoring” for Intel’s business.

Fixing the economy is a hard slog, but it’s not rocket science. But if you’ve chosen advisors who know nothing about the business of America, as Obama has……well, it’s just too depressing to think about.

The WSJ had a fascinating piece on Wikileaks that shows just how highly organized, legally savvy, intensely secretive and well funded many Leftist institutions are:

The linchpin of WikiLeaks’s financial network is Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation. WikiLeaks encourages donors to contribute to its account at the foundation, which under German law can’t publicly disclose the names of donors. Because the foundation “is not an operational concern, it can’t be sued for doing anything. So the donors’ money is protected, in other words, from lawsuits,” Mr. Assange said.

The German foundation is only one piece of the WikiLeaks network. “We’re registered as a library in Australia, we’re registered as a foundation in France, we’re registered as a newspaper in Sweden,” Mr. Assange said. WikiLeaks has two tax-exempt charitable organizations in the U.S., known as 501C3s, that “act as a front” for the website, he said. He declined to give their names, saying they could “lose some of their grant money because of political sensitivities.”

Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks gets about half its money from modest donations processed by its website, and the other half from “personal contacts,” including “people with some millions who approach us and say ‘I’ll give you 60,000 or 10,000,’ ” he said, without specifying a currency.

Kind of sounds like an organized crime syndicate, doesn’t it? Belmont Club has a lot more on the Professional Left.

Former Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich on ABC:

“I’m not ruling out doing something I’ve spent my whole adult life doing,” Blagojevich said when asked about a possible return to politics. “I believe some of the greatest stories in history are some of the great comebacks. You think about Winston Churchill, I mean he spent years in the political wilderness…If Churchill can comeback from something like that, when I’m vindicated, I certainly don’t write myself off.”

Blagojevich and Churchill — two words we never thought we’d see so close together. Explanation here.

With 20% of prime age men without jobs, you’d think that the chief executive of the United States and his team would be all over the problem.

The list of things to do is rather obvious: (a) keep tax rates low; (b) cut unproductive government spending (a la Chris Christie) wherever possible; (c) create incentives for creating jobs in the US rather than overseas; (d) suspend certain burdensome regulations and set up an emergency review process so that companies can exploit domestic versus foreign capacity; (e) seek to exploit areas where the US has low or competitive factor costs and where we can export or at least reduce imports; (f) recognize that the borrow from China / buy from China model is broken now and for all time, and aggressively try to turn the ship of state around before truly terrible things happen; etc.

Taking these steps and others is a 24/7/365 job. And here’s the critical point: even if all these steps are taken, it’s going to be a very hard slog to reverse the destructive trends that imperil the nation’s finances and the livelihoods of the people. In all likelihood, it’s going to be very slow and painful, even if we take all the right steps. And yet, the administration and Congress focus either on inanities or on destructive policies, and there is zero evidence that the White House even understands the depth and severity of the problems and the intense focus needed to change course and make things better.

What needs to be done to restore prosperity to the United States seems obvious — simple to state if complex to execute. The most peculiar thing is that there is so little outcry, among Democrats who surely know better, at the catatonic non-response of the Obama administration to a crisis of truly historic proportions.

Related reading: Paul Ryan’s roadmap.

Niall Ferguson warns us again as he has been doing for some time now:

Empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems, including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is rarely recognised because of our addiction to cyclical theories of history. The Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly. The Suez crisis in 1956 proved that Britain could not act in defiance of the US in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire…

consider Britain in the 20th century. Its real problems came after 1945, when a substantial proportion of its now immense debt burden was in foreign hands. Of the pound stg. 21 billion national debt at the end of the war, about pound stg. 3.4bn was owed to foreign creditors, equivalent to about a third of gross domestic product…

Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed in Washington, as the US contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $US1.47 trillion ($1.64 trillion), about 10 per cent of GDP, for the second year running. Since 2001, in the space of just 10 years, the federal debt in public hands has doubled as a share of GDP from 32 per cent to a projected 66 per cent next year. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections, the debt could rise above 90 per cent of GDP by 2020 and reach 146 per cent by 2030 and 344 per cent by 2050.

These sums may sound fantastic. But what is even more terrifying is to consider what ongoing deficit finance could mean for the burden of interest payments as a share of federal revenues. The CBO projects net interest payments rising from 9 per cent of revenue to 20 per cent in 2020, 36 per cent in 2030, 58 per cent in 2040 and 85 per cent in 2050. As Larry Kotlikoff recently pointed out in the Financial Times, by any meaningful measure, the fiscal position of the US is at present worse than that of Greece.

Worse than Greece — not a good situation to contemplate.

This report by the Congressional Budget Office explains in simple terms what the Congress has been doing over the last two years, and what the consequences are likely to be unless the madness is reversed, that the US suffers a crisis similar to that of EU countries like Greece:

We’ve been saying for a long time now that the planned future deficits of the United States are simply unfinanceable, and anyone who is capable of adding and subtracting ought to have been able to figure this out by now. But apparently they haven’t.

Stratfor says that strikes continue in China against foreign companies, but that the situation is more widespread and includes domestic unrest that is largely unreported in the media:

Chinese workers continued to strike at the Japanese-owned Atsumitec Auto Parts factory July 21 in Foshan, Guangdong province. The strike began July 12 at the plant, which makes parts for gearboxes for Honda and other major car companies. Separately, a strike began at yet another plant belonging to Omron, a Japanese company located in Guangzhou that makes electronic parts, including for Honda and Toyota cars. These strikes reinforce the recent wave of labor activity that began in mid-May with a strike at the Foshan Nanhai Honda Auto Parts Manufacturing Company. The strikes mostly have occurred at plants belonging to Japanese car and auto part makers (Honda, Toyota and Nissan) and their subsidiaries and suppliers, and they mostly have been localized in Guangdong province…

while there are historical examples of strikers focusing on foreign countries, and Asian ones at that, the appearance of a focus solely on Japan and other foreign companies is partly the effect of biased media. Stratfor sources in China attest to a wide range of labor pressures at domestic companies, including state-owned companies. China’s press is extensively — and increasingly — controlled by state propaganda offices and censors, which can result in the hyping of stories about exploitative foreign companies (especially those capitalizing on anti-Japanese sentiment), and the suppression of stories about strikes against domestic labor action.

The need to strictly control the spread of information about labor pressures arises out of China’s concerns about the nature of the new trend. The latest strikes have been organized by workers seemingly spontaneously with the express purpose of working around official unions controlled by the local government or the company itself. Since these unions receive their funds from local governments or the companies to which they belong, they tend to serve the purpose of pacifying workers rather than advocating for their causes.

China seems to be having its own range of economic problems, including problems with inflation. Its money supply growth year over year has been about 25% (though slowing recently), and numerous asset bubbles have been reported. One way to curb inflation is to rein in growth, but that has its own set of serious issues for China. As you know, we admire the dynamism of China’s businesses and workers, but we are skeptical of some of the government’s reported numbers. Dynamism and corruption may be heading for a showdown of some sort.

In 2010 push came to shove in the EU and in the United States as well — and just look at the grave dissatisfaction among the people. If China suffers the economic problems that some have predicted, how severe might the conflict get between the government and the people?

Slate carries an upbeat appraisal of Democrat prospects in November by one Rebecca Kaplan (who apparently is an intern at the publication):

Why Democrats need not fear the ghosts of 1994…the most compelling reason why 2010 won’t be another 1994 is the current state of the Republican Party. With the economy the major focus of this election — as it was in 1982 — the sitting president has much more power to present a unified voice on behalf of the party. This is something that both Reagan did and Obama has done well.

The conventional wisdom holds that a bad economy casts a dark cloud over the party in power, but 1982 shows the cloud’s silver lining. The depths of the economic problems that year gave the president nearly unlimited open-mic time to talk to the American people — and present a coherent strategy on behalf of his party. By November 1982, Reagan had given six speeches from the Oval Office about the economy, explaining to Americans how he and Republicans were trying to solve the problem.

Obama has given no Oval Office speeches on the economy, but it has been the topic of 106 speeches and appearances — and the subject of his recent campaign trail rhetoric. And, just as with Reagan, many Americans do not place the blame for the economic problems with Obama. Even with a job approval rating in the mid-40s and stagnant personal disposable income, Reagan and the Republicans avoided a walloping, and Obama might too.

In 1994, in contrast, Clinton lost control of the national conversation. Congress did pass a huge tax-cutting and -raising bill in Clinton’s first year. But despite his unofficial campaign slogan (“It’s the economy, stupid”), Clinton spent a lot of time in the first two years of his term on controversial projects unrelated to the economy

(Kaplan appears not to appreciate the irony of her last sentence.) The economic problems of the US today are complex and would be challenging to any administration, even if it focused on them 24/7. A debt burden that is already too high, unsustainable deficits, a demographic timebomb, and structural imbalances vis-a-vis exporting countries make today’s problems more severe than 1982′s — and this administration knows so little about business. We’ll check back in November to see how Kaplan’s predictions played out.

VDH looks at the media’s hero-worship in 2008 and the hubris it fueled:

Couldn’t one of Obama’s many handlers have warned him to ignore the media’s tingling-leg gaga worship, or their nonsense that Obama is “a god“? Didn’t Team Obama ever suspect that such an unhinged press, in the manner of a Greek chorus, could just as easily sour on their prophet once his poll ratings fell as quickly as they had soared?

Couldn’t David Axelrod or Rahm Emanuel have admonished their candidate to cut out the creepy stuff about himself and his throng being “the ones we’ve been waiting for”? Why was there a need for all that megalomaniac hocus-pocus about slowing the “rise of the oceans” and healing the planet? Sure enough, Nemesis ensured that instead of Lord Poseidon lowering the seas, Obama is now a smoky Hephaestus fouling them up.

Did the Nobel Committee members really think they were doing their postnational, postracial heartthrob any good by giving him a peace prize without any record of foreign-policy accomplishment? Didn’t his Scandinavian admirers grasp that prophets suffer the wages of hypocrisy far more readily than mere mortals when things go badly, as they inevitably do? Jay Leno is now more likely to use the phrase “Nobel Laureate Obama” than a serious diplomat.

According to the latest WSJ/NBC poll, Obama has squandered the most valuable asset that a president can possess: “Fewer than half give him positive marks when asked if he is ‘honest and straightforward’.” How does a President recover from being thought dishonest by a majority of his countrymen?

The lawyers go to war, China’s Roaring 20′s, Tom and Jerry and the case of the dirty mice, and something’s probably got to give in the matter of AGW. Also, the temptation to corruption in declining industries. TIME’s Rathergate moment.

BP’s non-executive chairman will be meeting with President Obama next week, almost two months after the oil spill began. Up until the beginning of 2010, that would have been the well-travelled Peter Sutherland. He’s an impressive fellow, as you can see — but what’s missing from his curriculum vitae?

Peter Sutherland is chairman of BP plc (1997 – current). He is also chairman of Goldman Sachs International (1995 – current). He was appointed chairman of the London School of Economics in 2008. He is currently UN special representative for migration and development. Before these appointments, he was the founding director-general of the World Trade Organisation.

He had previously served as director general of GATT since July 1993 and was instrumental in concluding the Uruguay GATT Round Negotiations. Prior to this position, he was chairman of Allied Irish Banks from 1989-1993 and chairman of the Board of Governors of the European Institute of Public Administration (Maastricht) 1991-1996.

Educated at Gonzaga College, University College Dublin and at the Honorable Society of the King’s Inns, from 1969 to 1971 Mr. Sutherland was a tutor in law at University College Dublin. From 1981 until early 1982, he was attorney general of Ireland and was a member of the Council of State. He was reappointed in 1982 until 1984 when he was nominated by the Government of Ireland as a member of the Commission of the European Communities in charge of competition policy. During his first year at the Commission he was also responsible for social Affairs, health and education and thereafter for relations with the European Parliament.

He serves on the Board of Directors of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc and is associated with the following organisations: World Economic Forum, Foundation Board member; The Federal Trust, president; European Policy Centre Advisory Council, president; European Round Table of Industrialists, vice-chairman; the Royal Irish Academy, member; goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation; and consultor for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See. He has published numerous articles and the book “Premier Janvier 1993, ce qui va changer en Europe” (Paris).

He was presented with the Robert Schuman Medal for his work on European Integration and the David Rockefeller Award of the Trilateral Commission. Mr. Sutherland was a Trilateral Commission author of 21st Century Strategies of the Trilateral Countries: In Concert or Conflict? (1999, with Robert B. Zoellick and Hisashi Owada) and was re-elected in 2006 for a third term as European Chairman.

What’s missing from this picture? How about this: Sutherland has apparently never held a senior executive position in the private sector. So much for all that “solve the problem” talk. Sutherland is one man who couldn’t “solve the problem.” Ah, but things changed in 2010. There’s a newly appointed non-executive chairman of BP, Carl-Henric Svanberg. Here’s his background, and once again, what’s missing from the picture?

Carl-Henric Svanberg has been the Chief Executive Officer and President of Ericsson SpA at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, Ericsson Telecomunicacoes S.A. (formerly Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson) since April 8, 2003. Mr. Svanberg serves as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Ericsson Federal Inc. and Ericsson Inc. He serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Swedish telecommunications company. He served as Chief Executive Officer and President of LM Ericsson Telephone Co. from April 8, 2003 to January 1, 2010. Mr. Svanberg joined Ericsson on April 8, 2003. Mr. Svanberg serves as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Ericsson NV/SA.

He served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Assa Abloy AB from 1994 to March 2003. From 1986 to 1994, he served as Deputy President of Securitas AB. Since 1990, he served as First Executive Vice President and Deputy President for the Securitas Group, with responsibility for alarm solutions and locks. He served as in various posts in the ABB Group from1977 to 1985. From 1977 to 1985, he held various foreign assignments within project exports for Asea Brown Boveri. He has been Chairman of BP Plc since January 1, 2010 and its and Non-Executive Director since September 1, 2009.

He served as Chairman of the Board for Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB until October 15, 2009. He served as the Chairman of the Board of ST-Ericsson NV. He served as Vice Chairman of Assa Abloy AB. Mr. Svanberg has been a Director of Ericsson SpA at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, Ericsson Inc., Ericsson Telecomunicacoes S.A and Ericsson NV/SA since April 2003. He has been an Executive Director of LM Ericsson Telephone Co. since 2003. He has been a Director of Melker Schørling AB since 2006. He served as a Director of VSM Group AB since 1998. He served as a Director of Hexagon AB since1999 and Assa Abloy AB since 1994.

He has been a Member of the External Advisory Board at Columbia University Earth Institute since 2009. Mr. Svanberg holds a Master of Science Degree from Linkøping Institute of Technology, Sweden, and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration from Uppsala University, Sweden. Mr. Svanberg holds Honorary Doctorates from Luleå University of Technology.

Mr. Svanberg has some serious executive experience. However, he shares something significant with his predecessor Peter Sutherland. Have you noticed? Neither man has spent one day working at BP or in the oil business. The European model of non-executive chairman is meant to separate board governance issues from executive management issues. Perhaps the last place on earth that you’d look to “solve the problem” is the non-executive chairman of a large public European corporation.

Perhaps President Obama think he can “solve the problem” if he talks the Chairman into giving BP CEO Tony Hayward the Rick Waggoner treatment?

Plan A for the US economy has been to borrow and spend and somehow that would create strong business growth to repay the borrowing. All well and good, until you already have too much debt, and then you’re potentially past the point where the government can repay the incremental new debt from future growth. Bill Gross explains and cites Greece as a country at the tipping point — it can’t borrow much more and cuts in spending can’t solve the problem either:

At the now restrictive yields of LIBOR+ 300-350 basis points being imposed by the EU and the IMF alike, there is no reasonable scenario which would allow Greece to “grow” its way out of its sixteen tons. Fiscal tightening, while conservative in intent, leads to lower and lower growth in the short run. Tougher sovereign budgets produce government worker layoffs, pay cuts, reduced pension benefits and a drag on consumption and the ability of the private sector to accept an attempted hand-off from fiscal authorities. Recession becomes the fait accompli, and the deficit/GDP ratio moves ever higher because of skyrocketing risk premiums and a plunging GDP denominator. In many cases therefore, it may not be possible for a country to escape a debt crisis by reducing deficits!

Several months ago I rhetorically asked whether it was possible to get out of debt crisis by increasing debt. Yes –- was the answer, but it was a qualified yes. Given that initial conditions were favorable -– relative low debt as a % of GDP, with the ability to produce low/negative short-term policy rates and constructively direct fiscal deficit spending towards growth positive investments -– a country could escape a debt deflation by creating more debt. But those countries are few -– the U.S. among perhaps a handful that have that privilege, and investors, including PIMCO, have strong doubts about U.S. fiscal deficits leading to strong future growth rates.

There are some really scary scenarios that appear possible. If governments continue to borrow and spend, and finance some of that through quantitative easing, you could wind up with the worst of all worlds — a protracted recession with high inflation at the same time. It seems a peculiar outcome, the sort of thing that happens in Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

So says Business Insider:

This is probably the first time on record when a 431,000 surge in U.S. nonfarm payrolls was viewed as a terrible employment report. Perhaps this is because 411,000 of those jobs, or 95% of the tally, were in Census hirings, which everyone knows are temporary…

a big red flag was clearly waved by the Household Survey, where total employment actually fell 35,000 — the first decline of the year and a splash of cold water on the widespread view that this recovery was gaining steam. Note too that the 41,000 increase in private payrolls marked a huge slowing from +218,000 in April and +158,000 in March

We also had some new record highs being set: i) The average duration of unemployment (34.4 weeks from 33.0 weeks in April); and, ii) The share of the unemployed ranks who have been out of work now for at least a half-year (46.0% from 45.9%). Anytime we have both the employment rate (58.7% from 58.8%) and the participation rate (65.0% from 65.2%) declining the same month, you know you have a very soft labour market on your hands.

Even as the US and EU squabble over appropriate fiscal policies, it seems increasingly clear that this business cycle is not typical. As US debt climbs to 100% of GDP, it appears likely that this is one recession that can’t be cured by borrowing and spending more, because governments have already borrowed far too much. As we ask above, what’s Plan B?

The sometimes excitable Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a scary story about trends in a measure of money supply called M3:

The M3 money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history.

The M3 figures — which include broad range of bank accounts and are tracked by British and European monetarists for warning signals about the direction of the US economy a year or so in advance — began shrinking last summer. The pace has since quickened.

The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6pc. The assets of insitutional money market funds fell at a 37pc rate, the sharpest drop ever.

“It’s frightening,” said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. “The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly,” he said.

It is only in paragraph 14 of the story we learn this: “Mr Bernanke no longer pays attention to the M3 data. The bank stopped publishing the data five years ago, deeming it too erratic to be of much use.”

Some observers say: “M3 is dominated by accounts that fall under the category of credit transactions and as such should not be included in the money supply.” Whether or not Mr. Evans-Pritchard’s view has any merit remains to be seen.

In a post on Americans reconnecting with their hardscrabble past, we quoted Henry Adams as follows: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Now with so many economic problems in the country, we remember that 1854 was also the year in which Stephen Foster wrote Hard Times Come Again No More.

America had a few bad years after 1854. (And in a sense there is a non-violent civil war of sorts in our nation between the faltering European model of government — which the administration is seeking to impose against the will of the majority — and the traditional American model.) We hope things work out a little better this time around.

The NYT, apparently oblivious to the outside world, asks

an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?

Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009.

Question: in what proportion are these explanations responsible for the change? (a) climategate and (b) everyone is broke so who wants to spend vast sums of money money to fix a hypothetical problem half a century away? HT: JOM

A USA Today analysis finds: “Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year…At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.”

(IBD has more on this.) Meanwhile, Michael Barone observes:

In the past, rebellions against fiscal policy have concentrated on taxes rather than spending. In the 1970s, when inflation was pushing voters into higher tax brackets, tax revolts broke out in California and spread east. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were popular, but spending cuts did not follow. Bill Clinton’s tax increases led to the Republican takeover and to tax cuts at both the federal and state levels, but spending boomed under George W. Bush.

The rebellion against the fiscal policies of the Obama Democrats, in contrast, is concentrated on spending. The tea-party movement began with Rick Santelli’s rant in February 2009, long before the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in January 2011.

What we are seeing is a spontaneous rush of previously inactive citizens into political activity, a movement symbolized but not limited to the tea-party movement, in response to the vast increases in federal spending that began with the TARP legislation in fall 2008 and accelerated with the Obama Democrats’ stimulus-package, budget, and health-care bills.

The tea-party folk are focusing on something real. Federal spending is rising from about 21 percent to about 25 percent of gross domestic product — a huge increase in historic terms — and the national debt is on a trajectory to double as a percentage of gross domestic product within a decade. That is a bigger increase than anything since World War II.

It is no surprise then that the numbers of voters favoring repealing Obamacare continue to rise and that conservative establishment politicians like Bob Bennett have been shown the door. Yet many in the media continue to be oblivious to the tidal wave that’s cresting.

Theodore Dalrymple has views somewhat similar to those of VDH:

If for some inexplicable reason you wanted to reawaken German nationalism, how would you go about it? I suggest a three-part strategy.

First, you would replace the rock-solid German currency by one with very shaky economic foundations, against the wishes of almost the whole German population (which, of course, you would not deign to consult).

Second, you would make sure that same population paid for the gross and dishonest profligacy of the Greek government: a profligacy that was rendered possible by the adoption of the very currency that the German population did not want in the first place.

Third, you would do everything possible to ensure that the crisis will spread, last for a long time, cost a fortune in failed attempts to solve it, and fall mainly to the Germans to pay for.

It goes without saying the second and third parts of the strategy should be against the wishes of the German population whose opinion, however, should be bulldozed aside as being of no account.

And Stratfor agrees that Germeny will be wearing the pants in the European family from this point on: “The paradigm that created the European Union — that Germany would be harnessed and contained — is shifting. Germany now has not only found its voice, it is beginning to express, and hold to, its own national interest…a political consensus has emerged in Germany that the rules of the eurozone are Germany’s to refashion…this was not the “union” the rest of Europe signed up for — it is the Mitteleuropa that the rest of Europe will remember well.”

It will be interesting to see which countries Germany chooses as allies if a New European Order emerges as VDH, Stratfor and Dalrymple predict.

VDH imagines Europe as it might be in a few years:

Even European bankers now claim the Euro is suspect. The European Union may well devolve into something other than its present form within a few years. NATO is an alliance mostly in name. Germany is angry. So far all the traditional restraints upon its pique — allied military rivals on its two borders, a divided country, fear of a nuclear Soviet Union, incorporation within the EU and NATO — are either nonexistent or increasingly problematic.

If it should choose, Germany could go nuclear in six months, its arsenal reflective of a country that makes Mercedes and BMWs. That is not so wild an idea in an age when unstable nations like Iran and North Korea boast of their arsenals and their aggression, while others such as Turkey and Brazil flaunt U.S. faculty-lounge sermons on non-proliferation.

If Iran should go nuclear — and I think it will within a year or two — we should imagine that a Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria would too. As the European Union collapses, as third-rate nations become nuclear, and as the United States abdicates its postwar role in ensuring the safety and security of the West, why would Germany continue to subsidize southern Europe while receiving mostly blame for its efforts, while its airspace would be in theory vulnerable to the likes of a theocratic Iran?

This scenario does not appear implausible: “47 percent of Germans favor adopting the deutschmark. Furthermore, Merkel’s governing coalition lost a crucial state-level election May 9 in a sign of mounting dissatisfaction with her…Germany may decide to cut its losses -– potentially as much as 500 billion euros, which is the approximate exposure of German banks to Club Med debt -– and decide that further bailouts are just throwing money into a bottomless pit.”

Suddenly the world seems to have become both very dangerous and highly unpredictable at the same time. Not the time to have an American President who knows little about Europe (e.g., here and here) and cares even less.