Norway Loony. Why the surprise?

[mistermack]

Well, in Britain, you pay in taxes and insurance contributions, and you get paid out on that when you retire. Nobody mentioned immigrants in that deal.
It's a fallacy, with so many people out of work. The last thing you need is more unskilled labour. They aren't going to pay for anybody's pensions, unless there are more jobs.
.

[sandinista]

No, haven't been "taken in". Sounds like you really don't know what you're talking about. Spoken with many refugees?

You certainly have been taken in. I've seen the bbc interviewing Afghans and Iraqis in Calais, and they all say the same thing. Just want work. They come to work and earn money. They are quite open about it.
But if they get caught by customs and immigration, they know exactly what to say about fleeing persecution and war. Funny they didn't want to stay in France.

How do you know they are genuine? Because they told you. Yeh, right.

Actually, no I haven't been "taken in". You've seen a couple interviews on bbc, I've worked with refugees for 3 years. Sure, some come for work, and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as there is free movement of capital there should also be free movement of labour.

[mistermack]

Actually, no I haven't been "taken in". You've seen a couple interviews on bbc, I've worked with refugees for 3 years. Sure, some come for work, and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as there is free movement of capital there should also be free movement of labour.

Yeh right. I'm sure Canada can handle 100 million indians, or 30, million pakistanis.

[sandinista]

Actually, no I haven't been "taken in". You've seen a couple interviews on bbc, I've worked with refugees for 3 years. Sure, some come for work, and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as there is free movement of capital there should also be free movement of labour.

Yeh right. I'm sure Canada can handle 100 million indians, or 30, million pakistanis.

I guess canaduh should have thought of that before allowing free movement of capital.

[Seth]

As long as there is free movement of capital there should also be free movement of labour.

Why? How is the free movement of capital related to the international movement of immigrants? Are you under some mistaken impression that persons in other countries have some right to access the capital of another nation? On what basis do you make such a claim? Are you aware that international capital movement is anything but "free," and that profits made in one nation are taxed in that nation, and may be taxed in the nation to which they are transferred as well?

[GrahamH]

Capitalism does not depend on endless economic growth, first of all. Second, capitalism works because it is cyclical, and it responds to the forces of entropy. Capitalism is nothing more or less than people living their lives consuming and creating simultaneously.
...
It is a socialist conceit and fallacy that capitalism is about "endless economic growth."

The paradigm of economic cycles is not 'return to equilibrium', it is 'return to growth'. What you are talking about is equilibrium. Where is that? Which economists have plans for long-term stable economies?

To grow an economy find more consumers and supply them at a price they will pay. One way to do that is to grow world population, but that can't continue, affordability begins to fail and resources run out. The bubble must burst one day.

Free markets operate better than centrally-planned economies because no planner can possibly know or provide for the myriad of needs and desires of a large economy, which results in shortages and surpluses and market failures. Free markets work because the have the balance and guidance of billions of individual choices every day, something no central planner can possibly imitate.

Free markets work well most of the time. Regulation is necessary in some cases, to prevent monopolies, practices that are likely to destabilise economies etc. It's the best we've got.

No, the problem is that the government did not allow the failed banks and investment houses to fail, and it bailed out foreign investors in bundled toxic mortgages rather than stand back and let the risks of investment take their toll. And in the end, as we have seen, all the putative efforts to keep people who never should have bought a home in those homes has failed anyway.

Our bailout money went more or less directly overseas to line the pockets of investors who should have been required to suffer the losses inherent in their investment.

The people who made the decisions that caused the collapse have not paid the price. I would love to know how bad it would have got if the banks were left to fail. I would not want to live through that though. I take it you don't think a domino effect run on banks would go very far if banks were failing an there was no lender of last resort.

The banks became reckless. Show we where they were commanded to be reckless.

It all happened behind closed doors, where Frank brought the big bank managers in and told them that if they didn't start making more risky loans to individuals who were unqualified for credit, he would use his influence to get the Federal Reserve and the FDIC to subject the banks to endless federal investigations, which is a death-sentence for a bank because once consumers find out their bank is under Fed investigation, it usually causes a run on the bank.

Supposition and rumour?

Bankers agreed to loosen their credit requirements and began turning a blind eye to outright mortgage application fraud out of simple self-preservation.

As The Big Short tells it the turning a blind eye was driven strongly by a desire to make money in the CDO markets. That same desire drove the schemes to repackage rotten debts in such obscure ways that they could be sold on as AAA rated.

To try to hedge against the losses that they KNEW were coming, they bundled the toxic paper into "securities" and sold them, largely overseas.

If they knew why didn't they make a fuss about it? The responsible thing to do would be to take the issue back to government and the Fed, because they knew it would lead to disaster. They didn't do that because they didn't know how big the risks they were taking were, and then made them far worse.

The overseas investors, not being stupid, demanded some "insurance" against widespread mortgage default, so they went to AIG and created the credit default swap, in which AIG promised to cover any default losses.

AIG thought they were making easy money offering insurance on AAA bonds. Why else would they insure junk except if they didn't think they would have to pay out?

At the same time, mortgage brokers were engaging in predatory practices and borrowers were committing felonies left and right by falsifying their financial statements in order to qualify.

yes they were, because the free market incentivised them to do so. Fortunes were there to be made - on one side by the few who were looking to bet on preferential long odds, and on the other the banks who thought AAA rating meant safe money.

Added to that was the incentive to loan that was provided by federal mortgage insurance from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Banks with toxic paper were allowed, in the name of progressive egalitarian redistributionism, to off-load those mortgage to government-funded plans, thereby sticking the taxpayers with the bulk of the toxic paper that wasn't sold as securities.

Officials at Fannie and Freddie knew years ahead of time that they were exposed, and they saw the crash coming, but did nothing to stop the fraud because they too were under the influence of the House Banking Committee and its Chairman, Barney Frank, whose socialist goal is for every poor person to own a house, even if they can't pay for it.

That is a damning indictment of the responsibility of those that would operate a free market economy. I think it more likely that very few saw the crash comming, and even then they doubted themselves till the last.

Have you read The Big Short? It's a bloody good read.

It's really pretty simple: People who were unqualified to obtain home loans were induced to do so by the federal government, lead by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and the market forces followed that demand by producing way too many new houses, which caused an artificial bump in home values. Based on guarantees by the feds that their mortgages would be "insured," the unqualified buyers bought way more house than they could afford at an inflated price on a mortgage with low initial payments and an enormous balloon payment that they kept denying would come down the pike.

Follow the money. How were invesors going to make a fortune on Sub-Prime? The market was the CDOs. not the loans to lower income families. It was the lure of fast easy money that produce the flood of reckless lending. They needed mortgaees at the bottom to package into CDOs that they could make a killing on.

When the mortgage supply ran dry they invented new instruments to trade by repackaging and selling on with no regard for the package contents and the true risk they carried. The risks were hidden. The ratings were wrong.

There is no way any of that was ever part of the Frank & Dodd plan, and I very much doubt that anyone was able to tell them that it was going on.

The ONLY winners in this debacle were the foreign investors and the banks, who are now making more money than ever.

Yes, and it is sickening.

And it's a good bet that they planned this from the beginning, or at least had the contingencies covered in the event of the inevitable housing bubble collapse.

We all tend to credit people with power with competence and foresight. They don't always have it. Some of the big winners who bet against sub-prime didn't start out expecting a payout. It was a a very low probability odd bet, but the odds the banks were offering did not reflect the actual risk

Everything else by way of economic devastation was caused by the housing collapse, which was caused by the CRA and the policies of the federal government towards making loans to unqualified applicants.

I think you are being far to kind to the banks and financial institution in that assessment. They lent and gambled irresponsibly. They lost oversight and didn't count the risks properly. They were corrupt and incompetent.

[GrahamH]

Sorry, way off topic.

[Cormac]

Why couldn't he just shoot fucking teapots to get it out of his system?

Or himself in the head to get the badness out? This would have saved him and everyone else lots of grief and trouble.

[Cormac]

While I don't like gun nuts, and hate right wing loonies, I don't understand why people are so amazed at what's happened.

Many European countries are being swamped with immigrants. It is much too fast, and too far. And what really enrages people, is that they have never been asked about this.

Surely a social and racial experiment like this should be put to a referendum, not slipped in gradually and quietly under the counter? If the people have voted for it, then that's fair enough. You give way to the majority. But being lied to, and conned, and called names if you complain, is bound to make people crack in the end.

This guy really thought he was starting something. He is mental, but if it all keeps going on, it might come true.

Nobody can blame the immigrants for wanting to come, and integration should be encouraged all of the time, but I say that the unrestrained immigration should stop now, if we don't want to see more of the same.

On a more serious note, if there was a chance of getting the people in a democracy to change course on immigration, then why didn't this loony go and work on that kind of project? I'm guessing because on some level he knows that not enough people share his views to make for much of a movement, but couldn't really accept the fact. So he slipped slowly away from humanity and isolated himself from anyone who would be willing to say "Hey, you're kinda losing the plot here" as his grip shifted from reality to twisted dogmas because they had long ago said their piece, or not, and moved on.

So, that's my conjecture. Lone gunman is lone.

Because, being a fascist (and the reverse of the same Marxist coin that he hated), he:

1. Rejects democracy
2. Believes there is a secret Marxist conspiracy to debase "European Judaeo-Christianity*", and that this is being pushed through by democratically elected governments (against the will of the people) and by the undemocratic EU**.


* Surely a contradiction in terms, as neither Judaism nor Christianity are European in origin. Northern European original cultures would be more into forests, gold ornamentation, heroism, skill at arms, cannibalism, and head-shrinking. Personally speaking, I'd prefer the North European original cultures...

** The EU is undemocratic, and this has been evident time and again by the structure and the behaviour of the institutions and member governments.

[JimC]

i'm sorry but if it upsets anyone that 1 in twenty faces they see on the street are a different colour then fuck-em .There used to be a lot more Norwegians and Americans living in my city than those figures . You want to see the stupidity of the general population hold a referendum in Scotland to see if all English people should be deported .

The colour/ethnicity thing should not be an issue at all, unless you are a full blown racist.

However, there are real potential issues. One is actual population pressure in some places, the other is a potential concern about an increasing islamic population demanding that the country they move to change to meet their particular delusions, rather than them adapting to where they move to...

None of which should be met by anything other than normal political debate and democratic process...

[Cormac]

Why Should the population be consulted over this topic especially ? you don't elect a democratic government and then decide that the issue of immigration is somehow outwith the governments remit .What else could you say that about: Laws ,Taxes ,fishing rights??? clearly any and every action of a government takes or doesn't will be unpopular with some people and they will all squeal that the government hasn't 'consulted' the people and there should be a referendum . If this is such an issue for the majority of Norwegians then a political party will use it at the front piece of their manifesto and be voted in on it ,or not . Welcome to a 'representative ' democracy .

Well, I would argue that altering the racial and religious mix of the country is a fundamental change, a dangerous change, and fishing is not in the same league.
And it can fester for years. Look at Northern Ireland.

I'm not a fan of referendums, except for fundamental issues like this.

The annoying thing is that the mainstream parties all allow the same amount of immigration. If you disagree with it, there is no alternative offered, except the loony fringe. So in most countries, there is no real choice.

If you were to go out asking people in European countries if they would like immigration to stop, you would get a huge majority in favour of that. But the politicians are ignoring this.

It festered in Northern Ireland specifically because:

1. The "Settlers" were brought to displace the natives.
2. When the inevitable happened, and integration occurred, leading to a "Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter" revolution, which the British occupiers just about suppressed, there was a political strategy to divide the "Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter" movement, in order to conquer. It was this strategy which hamstrung both Northern Ireland and the Westminster parliament for so long by introducing the political tool of "playing the Orange card".

The issue for modern society with immigration is integration and the relativist idiocy of "multiculturalism". If a democracy permits an influx of immigrants who utterly reject the cultural values and democratic constitution of their host country, and this is allowed to concentrate, then that country is creating a serious problem for itself.

I have worked with fundamentalist muslems in London, in fairly high-end business where one might expect educated people to have more informed views, and they utterly reject democracy and are absolutely committed to implementing Sharia law in Britain. Despite the statements of moderate muslims, the view of the guys I worked with is that Sharia and Democracy are utterly incompatible.

I'm not sure then that people with such views should be granted entry. It seems to me to be sensible that if someone wants to come to settle in a country, the very first thing that they should have to do is accept and commit to democracy and the constitution.


This doesn't mean that someone would be right to commit mass murder!

[Cormac]

How much do you know about Norwegian immigration policies? Like I just pointed out in the Norway blast thread, we have the highest rate of employment among our immigrations in all of the OECD countries. I'm sure we could do better, but to say that we're being so reckless politically that we're not really entitled to being "surprised" when we get targetted by a killer over it.

Does the same go for McVeigh and the Unabomber, and by extention the US? What do you say to those who say the same about 9/11? "Why the surprise?"

Me, I agree with those who say "why the surprise" about 9/11. We knew of the threat of Islamic terrorism for a long, long time before 9/11 and we simply ignored it, which is why the perps were able to get on the planes and take them over. The political cost, not to mention the economic cost of preparing for what was inevitable (they told us what they intended and there had been hundreds of attacks on Americans by Islamic terrorists in the years leading up to 9/11) was deemed too great by the government, which didn't want to frighten the proletariat. Some people shouted warnings for years, but they went unheard or were dismissed.

I was not in the least bit surprised when 9/11 happened because I'd been paying attention to the growing threat of Islamofascism and terrorism for many years previously.

I was shocked at the magnitude of the attack, primarily by the collapse, but I was not surprised there was an attack on US soil, as the radical Islamists had been promising such an attack for years. Frankly, I expected a dirty bomb, a nuke, or a bioterror attack, not airliners as bombs.

And no, I was not surprised by McVeigh either, but again was shocked at the magnitude of the attack. I suspect McVeigh himself was surprised at the magnitude of the collapse in Oklahoma City. He wasn't a structural engineer, and that's what it took to figure out why the building did collapse, and it was a very unique set of design parameters that caused it to happen.

People who pay attention to international geopolitics and what's actually going on in the world have know for a long time that Islamic terrorism is a serious and growing threat worldwide. They also know that there are domestic terrorists with grudges out there in every nation.

Not to mention the fact that the exact mode of attack was described in at least one novel years before the attack, (that of using a passenger jet as a missile - I think by that twat Tom Clancy, or someone similar).

[Cormac]

How much do you know about Norwegian immigration policies? Like I just pointed out in the Norway blast thread, we have the highest rate of employment among our immigrations in all of the OECD countries. I'm sure we could do better, but to say that we're being so reckless politically that we're not really entitled to being "surprised" when we get targetted by a killer over it.

"

It's not the employment rate among immigrants that I referred to.
It's the effect on the wages of the unskilled, and hence their life-prospects.

The gap between the rich and poor is widening, and it's down to unskilled immigration.
It's great for the rich, and retired, like me, but very bad for the young and the poor.

I can't see why it seems to be accepted as axiomatic that a gap between the rich and poor is a bad thing.

Also, it irritates the fuck out of me that when all European countries had implemented a welfare state, and noone is really poverty stricken anymore, than the definition of poverty was changed to being based on a percentage of the average income, rather than a breadline based calculation. This allows leftists to push their property is theft agenda surreptitiously, as most people don't realise what is meant in the modern world by "poverty". This is one reason why there is a welfare culture out there, where generations of families - probably the fifth or sixth generation (in Ireland at least) have lived on welfare and have no intention of ever working.

[Cormac]

I take the point that it may have been expected that Islamist radicals had a go at the twin towers... I'm more against the tone that suggests that Norway's walked into this. Mistermack, those who want to shut up the borders are not in majority in Norway... If that were the case and if they desperately felt we needed to change that, we'd have the Progress Party as the biggest party.

Secondly, I thought mistermack was American, but those examples were also what first came to mind. I just gave him other examples to see whether he adopted the same view of those atrocities.

Again, I ask you mistermack, how much is your finger on the Norwegian political and social pulse on these issues? Because saying them without much to base it on is bang out of order. It lays the blame at the feet of the Labour Party, and to the general political climate which has made us one of the most functional societies in the world. I won't necessarily say "THE" most functional, as the UN might... But that we're among them is without question.

Unskilled immigration might have every bit as much to do with our strong wages as well as our adhering to the EEC in order for us to be a part of the European market like any EU country. We're also strongly socialist in our foreign policy, which is why we give shelter to so many people from atrocious parts of the world. We do well to remember that where you're born is a fluke, and that there's a reason why people grow up to be the way they are... But nevertheless I think we are in the right to give people a chance, and I work daily with young Afghan immigrants who have no family in this country... Some arrive completely illiterate, even in their own language, and everybody comes here with a poor education with regards to history, science, maths and the like. Still I've seen tremendous progress in the ones I've worked with, some of whom are currently working during the summer, and impressing the ones they work for.

Breivik and those who find legitimacy in his claims, if not his actions, want to put a halt to this and to leave the third world to its fate... I'm proud that we refuse to do that.

I do agree with this post, except to note that the values involved in having an open door for refugees are not the sole preserve of socialists or socialism. I too believe in having an open door for people from atrocious parts of the world, and to taking them as they're educational level is. This is simply the application of principles of an open democratic society - which is neither the preserve of the right nor the left.

I do think there is a problem with assuming that promoting all cultures equally in a society, especially where these are mutually incompatible, or where a culture/religion is implacably opposed to democracy and open, non-theocratic society.

[MrJonno]

so, it irritates the fuck out of me that when all European countries had implemented a welfare state, and noone is really poverty stricken anymore, than the definition of poverty was changed to being based on a percentage of the average income, rather than a breadline based calculation. This allows leftists to push their property is theft agenda surreptitiously, as most people don't realise what is meant in the modern world by "poverty". This is one reason why there is a welfare culture out there, where generations of families - probably the fifth or sixth generation (in Ireland at least) have lived on welfare and have no intention of ever working.

Poverty definitions between 1st and 3rd world are different because of very different circumstances, someone with very little in the 3rd world probably have more land to grow food on than someone who is poor in the 1st world (most people in the 1st world bar US generally have zero growable land whether they are rich or poor). £50 per week may well buy 3 goats and an acre of desert in Somalia but you are going to struggle with on that in the UK.

The main reason there is a welfare culture is partly because there are people who abuse but more relevant is most societies simply have no need for those in bottom to do any work. 100 years ago everyone could work down a mine, work in a factory etc but you need far more of an education to even work in Mcdonalds than you would to do those jobs. So you have a welfare state partly as a safety net for people who do work but as much to stop those at the bottom starving or more practically rioting