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China is helping North Korea. Surprised? Didn't China help NK back in the war? C'mon.
Big communisms always help small communisms. The biggies will be antagonistic towards each other, but the biggies will always help the smallies. But it goes deeper than that:
...[T]he communist Chinese elite and the North Korean elite are partners, sometimes with others, in the business of smuggling weapons to the nastier parts of the world. Beijing doesn't want to be seen to have dirty hands. But it does want the money....That's right. Remember the big Chinese Christmas present for Mugabe in Zimbabwe? The ship full of arms that no sane African port allowed to dock?
I have to wonder how much of Iran's missile technology has "made in China" written on it.
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I have to ask the question: Why the hell are illegals even receiving social security benefits in the first place?
The key phrase is "...should they receive amnesty." In other words, if an illegal is allowed to apply for citizenship, he then becomes eligible to receive social security benefits.
Oh, and about the whole employment thing:
Then there are the human costs. Nearly 16 million Americans are out of work, and about 8 million jobs are held by illegal immigrants. By simply enforcing current immigration laws, we could create millions of job opportunities for American citizens and for legal immigrants who played by the rules and entered the U.S. the right way.* * *
Instead, the Obama administration has all but abandoned work-site enforcement efforts. Administrative arrests are down 87%; criminal arrests of employees are down 83%; criminal arrests of employers are down 73%; the number of criminal indictments is down 86%; and the number of criminal convictions is down 83% since 2008.
Victor Davis Hanson talks about the European Union and the collapse of socialism.
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US stocks go right back down because of worries over European debt.
Last week, over the course of several days, the Dow dropped some 600 points, then recovered some 400 points the day after the bailout fund was announced. But this past Friday it dropped about 162 points.
The article maintains that European economic woes won't be enough to halt the "recovery" of the US economy, but I doubt that. I mean, for one thing, there's no recovery. The "recovery" that the economists are talking about exists only on paper.
Second, if a down European economy will "hit certain sectors [of the US economy] hard" do these people really think it won't effect our economy?
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This article on what's missing from the "recovery" uncritically accepts that the economy is no longer in dire straits. The six things the article cites are what drives an economic recovery; without them, there is no recovery.
Since the "recovery" is just the result of government fiddling with statistics to make the GDP look good, it's not surprising that these things are missing.
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To make matters worse, the debt problem is still there.
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Economic doom and gloom. *sigh* I would like to be optimistic about the economy; I really would. The US government is spending money it doesn't have and that's propping up GDP to make it appear as though we're in a recovery. But it's all smoke and mirrors; sooner or later the bill is going to come due. If China stops buying US treasuries--and there's reason to believe China will soon not have the money to do so--it's going to cause a cascade of failures across the board.
I'm not kidding or exaggerating when I liken the world economy to a circle of dominoes standing on end; if one of them falls, the others will go in short order, because everything is connected. You can't even rely on the American economy to withstand it, because one of the factors is the incredible record deficit spending of the Democrat regime.
If China stops buying US paper, interest rates shoot up, and the economy grinds to a halt amid inflation and unemployment. (Think 1970s but on steroids.)
And Greece is only one of several European nations which has overextended itself. What about the rest of the so-called "PIGS", Portugal, Spain, and Italy? What about the other countries which aren't as bad off but are heading that way?
What about Japan? Japan's in the same boat.
There is far too much debt out there, and there literally isn't enough money in the world to satisfy it. How long can the world economy whistle past the graveyard?