Reality is Messy

Anti-nuclear policies leave Germany scrambling for power

By Kelly McParland  

Germany was all in a lather to shut down its nuclear reactors after the disaster at Fukushima panicked the country’s leaders.

What if a similar tsunami and earthquake hit Germany? Nevermind that Germany, unlike Japan, isn’t located on an ocean coastline prone to tsunamis. The point was to make a public show of devotion to alternatives (even if that might mean coal), and please Euro envirozealots.

So Berlin declared that it would shut down eight of its 17 reactors immediately, and the rest within a decade or so. Great celebration. Hurray for the far-seeing legislators and their deep appreciation  of environmental concerns.

Except now Europe’s economic powerhouse is worried about brownouts, and is busily importing energy from countries with working rectors and pollution-spewing coal plants.

The New York Times reports:

“… electricity producers are scrambling to ensure an adequate supply. Customers and companies are nervous about whether their lights and assembly lines will stay up and running this winter. Economists and politicians argue over how much prices will rise.“It’s easy to say, ‘Let’s just go for renewables,’ and I’m quite sure we can someday do without nuclear, but this is too abrupt,” said Joachim Knebel, chief scientist at Germany’s prestigious Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He characterized the government’s shutdown decision as “emotional” and pointed out that on most days, Germany has survived this experiment only by importing electricity from neighboring France and the Czech Republic, which generate much of their power with nuclear reactors.Then there are real concerns that the plan will jettison efforts to rein in manmade global warming, since whatever nuclear energy’s shortcomings, it is low in emissions. If Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, falls back on dirty coal-burning plants or uncertain supplies of natural gas from Russia, isn’t it trading a potential risk for a real one?

Much is made of the fact that Germany produces 17% of its energy from renewables, especially wind, which on some days produces more power than is needed. Except future plans call for an expansion of coal and gas-fired plants anyway, because wind power can only be used when it blows.

But not to worry. The new plants will use “the cleanest technology available and should not aggravate climate change.” (So, if you can generate clean power with coal, why bother with big ugly windmills?) And the plants “will operate within the European carbon-trading system in which plants that exceed the allowed emissions cap have to buy carbon credits from companies whose activities are environmentally beneficial.” Just like Al Gore, who justifies his monster, energy-sucking mansion by buying offsets from someone who, unlike him, practices what they preach.

Energy conservation always sounds so morally upright on paper. But turns out to be so messy in practise.

Which side are you on ?

Castro vs. The Ladies in White

By Mary Anastasia O'Grady

Rocks, iron bars and sticks are no match for the gladiolas and courage of these peaceful Cuban protesters.

Rocks and iron bars were the weapons of choice in a government assault on a handful of unarmed women on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba on the afternoon of Aug. 7. According to a report issued by the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the beatings were savage and "caused them injuries, some considerable."

It was not an isolated incident. In the past two months attacks on peaceful women dissidents, organized by the state security apparatus, have escalated. Most notable is the intensity with which the regime is moving to try to crush the core group known as the Ladies in White.

This is not without risk to the regime, should the international community decide to pay attention and apply pressure on the white-elite regime the way it did in opposition to apartheid in South Africa. But the decision to take that risk suggests that the 52-year-old dictatorship in Havana is feeling increasingly insecure. The legendary bearded macho men of the "revolution," informed by the trial of a caged Hosni Mubarak in an Egyptian courtroom, apparently are terrified by the quiet, prayerful, nonviolent courage of little more than 100 women. No totalitarian regime can shrug off the fearless audacity these ladies display, or the signs that their boldness is spreading.

The Castro brothers' goons are learning that they will not be easily intimidated. Take, for example, what happened that same Aug. 7 morning in Santiago: The women, dressed in white and carrying flowers, had gathered after Sunday Mass at the cathedral for a silent procession to protest the regime's incarceration of political prisoners. Castro supporters and state security officials, "armed with sticks and other blunt objects," according to FIDH, assaulted the group both physically and verbally. The ladies were then dragged aboard a bus, taken outside the city and dropped off on the side of a highway.

Some of them regrouped and ventured out again in the afternoon, this time to hold a public vigil for their cause. That's when they were met by another Castro onslaught. On the same day thugs set upon the homes of former political prisoner José Daniel Ferrer and another activist. Six people, including Mr. Ferrer's wife and daughter, were sent to the hospital with contusions and broken bones, according to FIDH.  

Cuban Talibans

Hispanic Heroines for “Women’s History Month”

This Castroite "improvement of status” and “good life" for Cuban women also somehow tripled Cuban women's pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.

By Humberto Fontova. 


When feminist icon Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro in 1977 cooing: “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful!” dozens of Cuban suffragettes suffered in torture chambers within walking distance of the hyperventilating Ms. Barbara Walters.
“They started by beating us with twisted coils of electric cable,” recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”
“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls, Manuela Calvo from exile today. “But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us to the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”
“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalls Polita Grau. ^[2]
OK, I apologize for baiting feminist readers during this “Women’s History Month “with the term “suffragette.” In fact voting was merely one of the rights these heroic Cuban ladies sought. Castro’s Stalinist regime jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s own, murdered more political prisoners its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six, and abolished private property. And yes, Castro also outlawed voting. So you’ll please excuse these Cuban ladies if they regard the “struggles” of Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinem as a trifle overblown.
I also apologize for singling out Barbara Walters. “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell)
Back in 1996 Fidel Castro was hosted by Mort Zuckerman at his Fifth Avenue pad. A throng of Beltway glitterati, including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer all jostled for a photo-op and stood in line for Castro’s autograph. But Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass-murderer’s presence that she lost control, rushing up, breaking into that toothy smile of hers, wrapping her arms around Castro and smooching the Stalinist torturer on his bearded cheek.
“You people are the cream of the crop!” beamed the Stalinist/terrorist to the smiling throng he’d come within a hair of nuking in 1962.
“Hear, hear!” chirped the delighted guests, while tinkling their wine glasses in honor of the smirking agent of their near vaporization.
We’re smack in the middle of “Women’s History Month.” So let’s chew on this: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown–not only in Cuba–but in the Western Hemisphere. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.
Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”
Many of these heroic ladies (Ana Rodriguez, Miriam Ortega, Georgina Cid, Caridad Roque, Mercedes Pena, Aída Díaz Morejón, Ana Lázara Rodríguez, Ágata Villarquide, Alicia del Busto, Ileana Curra, among them) live in the U.S. today ^[3]. But no producer for Oprah or Joy Behar or Katie Couric, none from the Lifetime or Oxygen TV–much less the History Channel, has ever called them. No writer for Cosmo or Glamour or Redbook or Vogue has bothered either.
But you’ve certainly seen their torturer hailed by “Feminist” reporters.
Upon the death of Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espin in 2006 the Washington Post gushed that: “she was a champion of women’s rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” Actually, in 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates as a percentage of population than the U.S.
This Castroite “improvement of status” and “good life” for Cuban women also somehow tripled Cuban women’s pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.
On Christmas Eve of 1961 a Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. Castro’s Russian-trained secret police had found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight the Stalinist theft of their land to build Soviet –style Kolkhozes.) When the blast from Castroite firing squad demolished her face and torso Juana was six months pregnant. The Taliban’s atrocities against women seem trivial compared to those of the regime gushed over by Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer, Medea Benjamin, Maxine Waters, etc. etc. etc.
Thousands upon thousands of Cuban women have drowned, died of thirst or have been eaten alive by sharks attempting to flee the Washington Post’s dutifully transcribed “improvement of status.” This from a nation formerly richer than half the nations of Europe and deluged by immigrants from same.

Debauching your human capital

OLD BLIGHTED

By Mark Steyn

I had a new book out the other day. Usual doom and gloom, as the more alert reader may just about be able to discern from the subtle title: After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. One always hopes, in a competitive market for shrill apocalyptic alarmists, that there will be some topical news peg to give the release date a bit of a lift. And sure enough, the weekend before the launch day, S&P obligingly downgraded the United States from its triple-A rating for the first time in history. You can’t buy publicity like that. Well, okay, you can, if you’ve got $15 trillion and toss it in the Potomac and watch it float out to sea, as the government of the United States has done. But other than that, the stars have to align pretty darn precisely. (It is untrue, by the way, that S&P stands for Steyn & Publicity.)

A few days after the U.S. release, the book debuted in the United Kingdom. Halfway through my narrative, there’s a chapter about civic disintegration in the old country called “The Depraved City.” Obligingly enough, 48 hours before the British launch, London erupted in flames. Switching on the TV to find a beautifully posed image of one of those double-decker buses beloved by tourists vividly ablaze and as perfectly lit as the iconic shot in a disaster movie (the aliens zapping the White House in Independence Day, say), I wondered if my publicist had perhaps let things get a little out of hand. You probably want to be out of town when she decides the nuclear finale could use a bit of a plug.

What’s happening in London is part of the same story as the downgrade. S&P run the numbers, factor in the political probabilities, and produce a green-eyeshade assessment. London reminds us that (as I wrote in this space a couple of issues back) culture trumps economics. The blazing double-decker is where the plot goes after the financial pages.

I quote a little bit of Anthony Burgess in my book. Burgess isn’t as famous a name in the futuristic-dystopia biz as Orwell or Huxley, but he was remarkably prophetic and in a rather lightly worn way. His most famous novel is A Clockwork Orange, thanks to the Stanley Kubrick movie. At one point in the book, the precocious psychopathic teen narrator offers his dad some (stolen) money so his parents can enjoy a drink down the pub. “Thanks, son,” says his father. “But we don’t go out much now. We daren’t go out much now, the streets being what they are. Young hooligans and so on. Still, thanks.”

Burgess published his book in 1962, an era when working-class Britons lived in cramped row houses on dingy streets that were nevertheless some of the most tranquil on the planet. Their residents kept pigeons and tended vegetable allotments. The idea that the old and not so old would not go out, “the streets being what they are,” “young hooligans and so on,” was not just the stuff of fiction but of utterly transformative fantastic fiction.

But it happened in little more than a generation. The men on our TV screens rampaging through the streets were born three decades after Burgess’s novel, yet he had their measure. There is no great “cause,” despite the best efforts of leftie commentators to kit them out with one. They are the children of dependency, the product of what Sir William Beveridge, the father of the British welfare state, called a world without want. And certainly these ski-masked bandits do not want. They do not want to work, they do not want to marry and raise children, they do not want the responsibilities of adulthood, they do not want to live productive lives of any kind. So instead, under the eyes of a cowed and craven politically correct constabulary, they smash the windows of electronics stores and steal the latest toys.

Nineteen sixty-two was a good year for Burgess. He published a second, less well-known futuristic novel. If A Clockwork Orange predicted the Morlocks of the 21st century, The Wanting Seed with disarming ease conjured our Eloi. The other day, a reader reminded me of this passage, written in a Britain with very little television (and certainly no sets in bedrooms) and a healthy fertility rate, and well before Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, mass vasectomies and tube-tying, or even the decriminalization of homosexuality:

How long had it been in England since anyone had seen a play? For generations, people had lain on their backs in the darkness of their bedrooms, their eyes on the blue watery screen on the ceiling: mechanical stories about good people not having children and bad people having them, homos in love with each other, Origen-like heroes castrating themselves for the sake of global stability.

He anticipates an entire aesthetic there, although it barely existed even in embryo back then.

The Eloi and the Morlocks do not interact much except during street riots, but occasionally the former are obliged to acknowledge the latter—as when a handsomely remunerated London advertising designer gets the contract for a stylish campaign about public violence. At bus stops in London, there are posters warning, “DON’T TAKE IT OUT ON US.” At the Underground stations, you see the slogan “IF YOU ABUSE OUR STAFF, LONDON SUFFERS” above a poster of Harold Beck’s iconic Tube map rendered as a giant bruise—as if one of those energetic young rioters had punched London itself in the kisser and beaten the map Northern Line black and Piccadilly Line blue, with other parts of the pulverized skin turning Circle Line yellow and even Central Line livid red.

It is a visually striking ad, made with all the award-winning expertise of the Soho advertising world. Alas, on the streets of London, the real thing didn’t look half so stylish and witty.

My book’s thesis is stated upfront: It starts with the money, but it never stops there—in part because it’s never really about the money. What’s worse than debauching your finances? Debauching your human capital. As London reminds us, much of the Western world is too far down that grim path.

Who is in charge of this asylum?

Take It Away!

By Mark Steyn  

John Hinderaker provides a good precis of the Gibson guitar raids. It seems a curious law-enforcement priority even for the Brokest Nation in History. Very few pianos are now made in the United States, but hey, that’s no reason not to do the same to the guitar industry. I would only add that the (century-old but recently expanded) Lacey Act is a characteristic example of the degeneration of federal “law”-making, whereby narrowly drawn legislation metastasizes way beyond its original intent to the point that no reasonable man, no matter how prudent, can know whether he is or isn’t in breach of it.

Such open-ended “laws” are an invitation to tyranny, and it would be expecting an awful lot for a money-no-object bureaucracy not to take advantage of it. For example:

Consider the recent experience of Pascal Vieillard, whose Atlanta-area company, A-440 Pianos, imported several antique Bösendorfers. Mr. Vieillard asked officials at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species how to fill out the correct paperwork—which simply encouraged them to alert U.S. Customs to give his shipment added scrutiny.There was never any question that the instruments were old enough to have grandfathered ivory keys. But Mr. Vieillard didn’t have his paperwork straight when two-dozen federal agents came calling.

Two dozen federal agents? To raid a piano importer? Does the piano industry have a particular reputation for violent armed resistance? Or is it that the most footling bureaucrat now feels he has no credibility unless he’s got his own elite commando team? When you’re wondering how America’s national government settled into the habit of spending $4 trillion a year while only raising $2 trillion, it’s easy to get hung up on fine calibrations of entitlement reform circa 2030. But look at it this way: Imagine if, instead of 24 agents, the federal piano police had to make do with a mere dozen to raid a small importer.

Note this, too:

Facing criminal charges that might have put him in prison for years, Mr. Vieillard pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of violating the Lacey Act, and was handed a $17,500 fine and three years probation.

They’re antique pianos. They come with ivory keys. They’re grandfathered in. There is no criminal intent and, in the most basic sense, no underlying crime. Yet he’s looking at being tossed in jail “for years”? Any “justice” system with such an utter lack of proportion is not justice at all. It speaks very poorly for us that we tolerate it.

Been there, done that.

The Marxist at UBS and His Confusion

George Magnus, Senior Economic Adviser at UBS is a Marxist. FT has given him space to write an article which includes such gems as:

Marx analysed and explained insightfully how and why capitalism would succumb to recurrent crises, and especially big ones after a credit bust.

Let's be clear about a few things. The current financial crisis was caused by the on again, off again, money printing by central banks, such as the Federal Reserve.

Austrian business cycle theory fully explains the crises. Indeed, if one understood ABCT, you could have seen the current crisis coming in real time. (See here, here, here, here,here, here, here and here.)

Marx theories were a combination of bad economics, mixed with bad political theory, all wrapped with a Hollywood happy ending:

...in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

As far as Marx's so called forecast of the crumbling of capitalism. He saw it first developing by the proletariat taking political control. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Frederick Engels wrote (My emphasis):

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class, and to increase the total production of forces as rapidly as possible.

Once the proletariat is in charge Marx/Engels see 10 steps the proletariat should generally implement to put the world on the road to bliss, including, as first steps, a graduated income tax and a central bank:

Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

Thus, the Federal Reserve can be seen as Marxist-lite. The quantity of credit in the economy is controlled by the Fed (via control of the money suuply), but the recipients of the credit are not as directed by the Fed. But it is the contol of the quantity of credit that results in the business cycle, as money supply is first increased and then the money growth is slowed or stopped entirely.

In other words, it is the Marxian notion of a central bank controlling credit activities that is at the heart of the Fed. And these central bank activities are what cause the business cycle. So to Marxists like Magnus who claim capitalism is failing and that "Marx-is-relevant school", the response should be, "Yeah, we know what Marxist central banking is all about. It's not capitalism. It's government control. Further we have been there, done that with the Fed and it sucks."

The raison d’être

The politics of fear blows into New York

 The world’s greatest city was brought to a standstill not by Hurricane Irene, but by politicians’ worst-case thinking.

By Tim Black

There was a lot that was unprecedented about Hurricane Irene. It prompted the first weather-inspired, mandatory evacuation of New York. It caused the first-ever shutdown of the city’s subway system. And it provoked an incredible round of almost titillated forewarnings of what would be left of New York after Irene had wended its destruction-strewn way across Manhattan and beyond. What was not unprecedented, however, was Irene itself.

In fact, despite the Biblical predictions of flooding and wind-induced havoc, by the time Irene hit New York early on Sunday morning, it wasn’t actually a hurricane anymore. It had been downgraded to the status of a ‘tropical storm’. Or, as we call it in England, ‘summer’. It was wet. It was windy. But it was not The Day After Tomorrow.

Flippancy is the wrong approach, though. Despite Irene’s damp-squibbish reality in New York, it had caused significant damage elsewhere on America’s east coast. Twenty-nine people had been killed, power cuts were widespread, and billions of dollars worth of damage had been inflicted on property and infrastructure.

But for all that it was a damaging and, for the bereaved, tragic event, there is little getting away from the fact that the likelihood of Hurricane Irene wreaking death and destruction across New York was always minimal. This is not hindsight talking. By Saturday – that is, the day before it was due to hit New York – Irene had already been downgraded from a category 2 hurricane to a category 1 hurricane, and many predicted that it would continue to decrease in strength the closer it got to the city. Which is exactly what did happen.

Yet despite the possibility of hurricane havoc shrinking with each passing hour, the US authorities actually went the other way. They ramped up the threat, turning a highly unlikely scenario into the expected result. What else can explain the decision on Friday to issue a mandatory evacuation for the 350,000 New Yorkers living in low-lying areas? ‘By five o’clock tomorrow you have to be out’, announced the calm-averse New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg: ‘Waiting for the last minute is not a smart thing to do. This is life-threatening.’ If anyone expected his fearful fervour to have been dampened somewhat by Irene’s dissipation during the course of Saturday, they would have been disappointed. ‘Time is running out’, Bloomberg intoned ominously: ‘It’s going to get dark in a little while… If you haven’t left you should leave now. Not later this evening, not this afternoon, immediately.’

And so Bloomberg and Co managed to do something that countless other events, natural and social, have singularly failed to: they brought New York to a standstill. Remember, this is New York we’re talking about. This is a city that withstood the 1929 Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, a city that, for the most part, kept calm and carried on despite the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, a city that for its 400 often-tough years, persisted and eventually flourished. Yet today, all it takes for everyday life to be suspended is the minutest possibility that something bad might possibly happen.

That there was an overreaction to what was a bit of rain and bluster has been widely acknowledged. However, the main recipient of blame so far has not been the politicians who made the decisions; it has been the media, which supposedly inspired the politicians through their over-the-top reporting. Writing for the BBC News website, one American ex-pat was not impressed by what he believed to be a media-created reality: ‘American society has finally become “media-tised”. By that, I mean many people (by no means all) find it hard to consider something real unless they encounter it via media.’

Elsewhere, Daily Beast columnist Howard Kurtz shouted, ‘Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon.’ In the Washington Post it was the Weather Channel’s tendency towards hyperbole that was criticised, which was perhaps understandable given this statement on its website: ‘Irene is a hurricane that poses an extraordinary threat and is one that no one has yet experienced in North Carolina to the mid-Atlantic to the Northeast and New England.’ As a Washington Post columnist concluded, ‘Be scared’ seemed to be the message. In the words of one New York resident speaking to the Guardian website in the undramatic aftermath of Irene: ‘Now I realise that the whole thing is just media hype, to get us all upset and anxious, to feed into the American way of getting us paranoid and fearful.’

This scepticism towards the overhyping tendency of the 24-hour news-cycle, not to mention the fearful proclamations of politicians, is certainly admirable in one respect. It testifies to our actual resilience and our preparedness to take on what hardships come our way, even if they’re travelling in 75 miles per hour gusts. For instance, one woman interviewed at a New York evacuation centre said that many of her neighbours had remained in a south Brooklyn waterside block: ‘We warned a lot of them but I guess they took it as a joke.’ Elsewhere, a New York couple responded to a question as to how they found the storm with a phlegmatic response. It was ‘underwhelming’, he said. ‘We were asleep’, she interjected.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Confronted by testing events, people do actually tend to display far more resilience than the authorities ever give us credit for. Our experience and the support of those around us tend to count for far more than a thousand overhyped weather forecasts. For instance, late last year, as Cyclone Tasha began to inundate the Australian state of Queensland, residents long accustomed to putting up with flooding were far more reasoned and composed than many in the media and the authorities seemed to anticipate. Deon Barden, a resident of Rockhampton in Queensland even turned his flood-enforced exile on the fringes of Rockhampton into a joke: ‘My missus and everything is all stuck in Rocky – I’m out here by myself so I’ll have a bit of peace and quiet if anything.’

But while the contrast between doom-laden media reports and the actual response of people on the ground is often pronounced during such events, to blame the media for hyping Irene up to apocalyptic proportions is to ignore the extent to which the authorities, from politicians to bureaucrats, provide the real impulse for the politics of fear.

The power of self-delusion

Libya and the shameless rewriting of history

The repackaging of NATO’s reckless intervention as a clever war for liberty would make Orwell’s Ministry of Truth beam with pride.

By Brendan O’Neill

Not since Winston Smith found himself in the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, rewriting old newspaper articles on behalf of Big Brother, has there been such an overnight perversion of history as there has been in relation to NATO’s intervention in Libya. Now that the rebels have taken Tripoli, NATO’s bombing campaign is being presented to us as an adroit intervention, which was designed to achieve precisely the glorious scenes we’re watching on our TV screens. In truth, it was an incoherent act of clueless militarism, which is only now being repackaged, in true Minitrue fashion, as an initiative that ‘played an indispensable role in the liberation of Tripoli’.

Normally it takes a few years for history to be rewritten; with Libya it happened in days. No sooner had rebel soldiers arrived at Gaddafi’s compound than the NATO campaign launched in March was being rewritten as a cogent assault. Commentators desperate to resuscitate the idea of ‘humanitarian intervention’, and NATO leaders determined to crib some benefits from their Libya venture, took to their lecterns to tell us that their aims had been achieved and they had ‘salvaged the principle of liberal interventionism from the geopolitical dustbin’. In order to sustain these bizarre claims, they’ve had to put the real truth about NATO’s campaign into a memory hole and invent a whole new ‘truth’.

Over the past few days every aspect of NATO’s bombing campaign has been, as Winston Smith might put it, ‘falsified’. Since everybody now seems to have forgotten the events of just five months ago, it is worth reminding ourselves of the true character of NATO’s intervention in Libya. It was incoherent from the get-go, overseen by a continually fraying and deeply divided Western ‘alliance’ and with no serious war aim beyond being seen to bomb an evil dictator. It was cowardly, where all alliance members wanted to appear to be Doing Something while actually doing as little as possible. This was especially true of the US, which stayed firmly on the backseat of the anti-Gaddafi alliance. And it was reckless, revealing that military action detached from strategy, unanchored by end goals, can easily spin out of control.

Yet now, courtesy of the Ministry of Truthers, these deep moral flaws and political failings are being reinterpreted as brilliant stratagems. So the determination of Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama to present their bombing of Libya, not as a Western initiative but rather as a UN-approved act of uber-multilateralism, is now depicted as a brilliant, oh-so-sly decision that massively aided the rebellion by giving the impression that it was more an organic uprising than a power play aided by ‘evil’ Western outsiders. Commentators write about the West’s adoption of ‘humility’ as a ‘strategic device’. They claim the downplaying of America’s role in the setting up of the anti-Gaddafi alliance in March was designed to enhance the likelihood of success. As one observer now claims, ‘It suited everyone for America to appear to take a backseat. It suited the uprising.’

Here, the profound crisis of identity of the West, its increasing inability to project any kind of mission into the international sphere, is refashioned as the knowing adoption of ‘humility’, designed to boost Western influence in tyranny-ruled lands. In truth, the West-in-denial nature of the anti-Gaddafi alliance, where NATO presented its campaign as a non-American, non-gung-ho initiative, spoke to the corrosion of American authority in international affairs and to the post-Iraq moral paralysis of that entity once known as ‘the West’. So in March, it was reported that Washington was being distanced from the alliance and that Cameron was desperately seeking Arab League backing, in order to make sure ‘this did not look like a Western initiative’. It was shamefacedness about what the West is seen to represent today, and a recognition that American authority is now way more divisive than it was during the Cold War, which gave rise to this orgy of Western sheepishness.

Yet now, the moral hollowness and political incoherence of Western institutions revealed during the formation of the anti-Gaddafi alliance are being presented as clever disguises, designed to boost the fortunes of the rebels. Indeed, since the rebels took Tripoli, some observers have even started claiming that we’re witnessing the emergence of a ‘new era in US foreign policy’, a new ‘model for intervention’. According to Fareed Zakaria of CNN, it might have looked as if Obama’s approach was ‘too multilateral and lacked cohesiveness’, what with his decision to withdraw his fighter planes just 48 hours after the intervention started in March, but actually that was all part of a brilliant new strategy called ‘leading from behind’. Others sing the praises of ‘Obama’s light-footprint approach’, claiming that his strategy of ‘limited engagement’ has now produced a ‘nuanced victory’ in Libya. Here, disarray is repackaged as deftness, and a ‘model’ is retrospectively projected on to the mayhem that reigned during the creation and launch of NATO’s mission.

The world must live within its means

The End Of The Long Con

 

By Tim Price

Around 2002, a developing country defaulted on its debt. Following protracted negotiations, agreement was reached that the bad debt would be replaced with a smaller amount of new good debt, with all investors losing around half their original investment. The country’s finance minister, accompanied by a vast retinue of assistants and bankers, embarked on a road show to sell the deal.  

In Tokyo, the meeting attracted a vast throng of aged Japanese retirees, who had invested their savings in the defaulted securities, on the recommendations of financial advisers to earn interest rates higher than those available in Japan. At the end of the minister’s presentation, a frail, ancient Japanese woman stood up and spoke. In a quiet steady voice, she explained the hardships that the loss had caused. She wanted to know “whether there was any chance she would see any of her money before her life ended.

— From Extreme Money by Satyajit Das.

In July 2008, a bank in Zimbabwe cashed a cheque for $1,072,418,003,000,000 (one quadrillion, seventy-two trillion, four hundred and eighteen billion, three million Zimbabwe dollars). It had taken 28 years from independence for the former colony of Rhodesia to become an economic basket case.  

Inflation in Zimbabwe was 516 quintillion percent (516 followed by 18 zeroes). Prices doubled every 1.3 days. The record for hyperinflation is Hungary where in 1946 monthly inflation reached 12,950,000,000,000,000 percent  –  prices doubled every  15.6 hours. In 1923, Weimar Germany  experienced inflation of 29,525 percent a month, with prices  doubling every 3.7 days. People  burned Marks for heat in the cold Northern German winter. It was cheaper than firewood. The  butter standard was a more reliable form of value than the Mark. The German government took  over newspaper presses to print money, such was the demand for bank notes. The abiding image  of the Weimar Republic remains of ordinary Germans in search of food pushing wheelbarrows filled with wads of worthless money.

The quotation is from Satyajit Das’ just published Extreme Money – Masters of the Universe and  the Cult of Risk (FT Press). This investor’s heart initially sank when offered the chance to review  a copy  –  four years, and counting, of  financial crisis have spawned all sorts of crisis porn  – but  Extreme Money rewards the effort. The tone isn’t exactly gleeful (just look at the mess we’re in !) but the book fairly scampers across the financial landscape, scattering juicy quotes a-plenty in its  wake. Das cites Tom Wolfe, for example, quoting Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter:

‘Stocks and bonds are what he called evaporated property. People completely lose touch of the  underlying assets. It’s all paper  –  these esoteric devices. So it  has become evaporated property  squared. I call it evaporated property cubed.’ Extreme money is eviscerated reality  –  the  monetary shadow of real things. 

Our own external investment panellist, Guy Fraser-Sampson, has described the situation nicely. If  humans vanished tomorrow, the likes of economics, financial markets, and money (of any meaning)  would vanish with them – but the world would still turn. Finance is a demon of our own design,  and we now inhabit an acutely over-financialised world.   So what is money ?

Something “universally accepted as payment, a claim on other thing … a medium of exchange, a  measure of the market value of real goods and services, a standard unit of value, and a store of  wealth that can be saved and retrieved in the safe knowledge that it will be exchangeable into real  things when retrieved”.

But there is also  commodity money: anything  that is  simultaneously money but also a desired  tradeable commodity in its own right, money that is good enough to eat. Over history mankind  has experimented with dried fish, almonds, corn, coconuts, tea and rice. As Das points out, the  ancient Aztecs used cocoa.

The large green-yellow pods of the cacao tree produce a white pulp that, when dried, roasted and ground, becomes chocolate. Some European pirates seized a ship full of cocoa beans – a true El Dorado worth more than galleons filled with gold doubloons.  Unaware of the value of the cargo and mistaking it for rabbit dung, the pirates dumped the cocoa into the ocean.

And as Das ominously observes, in economic chaos, war or collapse, commodity money reappears.

Imperial nightmares

The Kurdish Problem

by Morton Abramowitz
Whatever his impressive domestic achievements, Turkish prime minister Erdogan has done a lot of fancy footwork this year trying to repair a vigorous and much-advertised Middle East involvement. Once the avowed comrade of Qaddafi, Bashir, Assad and Ahmedinejad, he has now emerged as a rousing democrat, defender of the Arab revolts. He seems to have been successful in burying the past—at least in Turkey where public criticism is increasingly muted and he reigns supreme. In Syria, he has joined the West by distancing Turkey from Assad but not yet disowning him, incurring the wrath of both Syria and its staunchest ally, Iran, which has sent warnings to Ankara. In Libya, which once bestowed upon him the Qaddafi human-rights award [3], he is trying desperately to restore the huge Turkish economic stake by fervently and helpfully embracing the rebels. But for all his foreign-policy activism, he can no longer escape his biggest problem, an internal one: the growing difficulties with his own twelve million or so Kurds.
In the period between 2005–1009, Erdogan became the first Turkish leader to do much for the Kurds, bringing in significant investment and notably accepting the ‘Kurdish reality.” He implemented some modest reforms on expressions of Kurdish identity—whether he believed in them or did so to guarantee the vote in southeast Turkey and a route to a new presidency is not clear. But the basic issue has advanced little, and today intensified military activity on the part of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) has once again shattered a deceptive Turkish calm. Some forty Turkish soldiers have been killed and many wounded in the southeast over the past two months. In response, Erdogan has shifted gear and publicly declared his intent to finally destroy the PKK and, along the way, to undermine the major domestic Kurdish political party.

Erdogan has resorted to the usual military tactics—bombing the PKK in Northern Iraq and intensifying military activities in the southeast. He also seems intent on turning the ground war in Turkey over to special police units and the gendarmerie rather than to the army, which he distrusts and whose tactics he has publicly belittled. There are fears he might mount another large ground operation in Northern Iraq, but that is unlikely and certainly unwelcome to the Turkish military, which has been under great pressure from ongoing investigations and detentions. Politically, at least for the moment, he appears to have fallen back on traditional Turkish nationalism instead of the Islamic communalism he used to espouse to bind in the southeast. Peace with the PKK seems a long way off.
This time, however, Turkey’s internal Kurdish issue may turn international. Kurds in Iraq, Syria, Iran—Turkey's next-door neighbors, are all agitating.

The next page-turner will be the promised new Turkish constitution sometime this autumn and what reforms he will secure in that document for the Kurds. Top AKP leadership rhetoric on the new constitution has been democratic and conciliatory, but with popular nationalist feeling running high and Kurds deeply skeptical, not much can be expected. Many fear violence will extend to Turkey’s major cities and to urbanized Kurdish youth. That has always been a concern that has not yet materialized, although small-scale clashes like car burnings, attacks on coffee shops and flash mobs are on the rise. With the schism with Iran the possibility of urban violence may have increased.

Turkish elites have always been haunted by the possible establishment of an independent or even autonomous Kurdish entity in Northern Iraq, which took place after the first defeat of Iraq and gained even greater credence with its enormous economic success after the second Iraq war. One might dispute this, but I believe the present, virtually independent and flourishing Kurdish entity has had a major psychological impact on the outlook of the Kurds next door in Turkey as they consider their own position. It has helped make it unclear what will now politically satisfy Turkey’s Kurds. Northern Iraq has been also the military home of the PKK, which is allowed to operate, with misgivings, by the Kurdish regional government and receives help from friendly Iraqi Kurds. Erdogan impressively changed Turkey’s long-standing isolation policy; rather he embraced Iraq’s Kurdish government and invested heavily in the region. The Iraqi Kurds are increasingly troubled by what is happening in Turkey and seemingly caught in the middle. Turkey has pushed the United States hard to help defeat the PKK in Iraq. They have gotten significant American intelligence support but no willingness to attack PKK forces or try to make the Iraqi Kurds do so.

These riots were not a product of permissiveness

Blaming the looting on the ‘liberal experiment’ of the 1960s is not only wrong - it could also make the real problems in urban communities worse.

By Jennie Bristow 

It is hard to formulate a genuinely liberal response to the recent spate of riots and looting in Britain.

You get caught between two dystopian, and equally depressing, visions of society: one where the consequences of the cultural, moral and legislative changes associated with the permissive Sixties are leading us to hell in a handcart faster than you can say ‘Daily Mail’; the other where kids stealing computers and beating up their neighbours are just another (indeed, more sympathetic) version of what bankers, business tycoons and immoral governments do. Those people’s everyday practices have been described by the anti-globalisation campaigner Naomi Klein as ‘Looting with the lights on’.

Both these parables of decline share a common fatalism, borne out of an implicit contempt for individual autonomy. The Daily Mail brigade argues that people need stricter social and moral codes – backed up by the police – to control the excesses of their individual desires, while Guardianistas would prefer to believe that the looting kids are blindly driven by the bleakness of their material circumstances in a hyper-consumerist culture. By way of a solution, one side wants to reduce people’s autonomy by clamping down on their civil liberties; the other wants to do it through recognising poor youth as victims of their circumstances who need more, not less, financial and therapeutic support from the state.

One of the influential ideas to gain traction in the post-riots autopsy is ‘compassionate Conservatism’. This seeks to promote a kind of ‘third way’ between crass lefty-ism and traditional moralising, and has been most systematically developed by the Lib-Con work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith and the think-tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). The CSJ’s agenda is to fix ‘broken Britain’ through policies that self-consciously reduce individuals’ dependence on the welfare state through strengthening the role of the family and communities. In this social vision, individual autonomy becomes reposed as a sinful indulgence practised by the selfish; the goal is to nudge people’s values more in the direction of conformity and self-sacrifice.

None of these diagnoses have any space for a genuinely liberal perspective, which upholds individuals’ ability to make and exercise choices about their personal lives without in any way endorsing the trashing of other people’s livelihoods. A liberal vision of society is one in which individuals are assumed to be able to make moral choices and live with the consequences of their actions. In the post-riots dialogue, all sides assume, for different reasons, that individuals cannot or should not make moral choices, and that any response must find more effective ways of controlling people’s behaviour, whether through sheer force or therapeutic manipulation.

Yet it is not true that our current malaise is a consequence of permissiveness, and it is neither possible nor necessary to turn the clock back to a time where people had fewer lifestyle choices or more stringent community obligations. The problem is rather that the spirit of permissiveness has been emptied of its content: the principle of individual autonomy. And there is a danger that many of the solutions being proposed in the wake of the riots will exacerbate the very problems they set out to address.

The ‘permissive’ moment

An article by Tim Montgomerie, editor of the Conservative Home blog, in the Daily Telegraph articulates the social conservatives’ diagnosis of ‘broken Britain’. ‘Over the past week we have witnessed the culmination of the liberal experiment’, he wrote, arguing that: ‘The experiment attested that two parents don’t matter; that welfare, rather than work, cures poverty; you tolerate “minor crime”; you turn a blind eye to celebrity drug use; you allow children to leave school without worthwhile skills; you say there’s no difference between right and wrong. Well now we’ve seen the results.’

Attacking the Labour Party for its reliance on the welfare state to solve every problem, Montgomerie complains: ‘The left is always ready to attack hyper-capitalism for the ways in which it can erode community bonds, but it looks the other way when it comes to thinking about the ways in which the hyper-state can devour social capital. Labour has become the most materialist and consumerist of Britain’s two largest parties… It reveres “lifestyle choices” as though the kind of home in which a child is raised is somehow equivalent to whether you get your weekly groceries from Morrisons or Asda.’

Future plunder and welfare payments

Burglar’s Family Awarded Big Cash Bonanza

By D. Blount

Our society is made up of the makers who built it, and the takers who are looting it into oblivion. The ideology of the takers is liberalism. Liberals control the courts. Consequently, the legal system produces rulings like this:

An El Paso County [Colorado] jury on Friday awarded nearly $300,000 to the daughter of a burglar who was fatally shot in 2009 while breaking into an auto lot.…

Phillip and Sue Fox, who filed suit for wrongful death in 2010 on behalf of [burglar Robert Johnson] Fox’s 3-year-old daughter, called the jury’s award a victory in their fight to seek accountability for the death of their son, who they say never posed a threat to the heavily armed men.

Never mind that he had knives in his pockets and one strapped to his ankle, or that he was high on methamphetamine according to his accomplice. Poor Fox was just a cuddly “have-not” who needed money to buy more drugs.

The exact amount of the award was $269,500, for factors such as loss of companionship and loss of future earnings.

Future earnings — for a meth-head burglar? They must mean future plunder and welfare payments.

How does the world work?

Krueger's Keynesian Leftovers

IBD Editorial

Just a week before he unveils a new, improved jobs plan, President Obama has named a new person to be his top economic adviser, Princeton University's Alan Krueger. This doesn't bode well for job creation.

Krueger, a labor economist, is no obscure academic. Though youngish at 50, he's been around for decades, most recently spending two years in Obama's Treasury Department. And in the 1990s, he served a stint as Bill Clinton's chief labor economist.

By naming him to the chairmanship of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, replacing the departed Austan Goolsbee, Obama is sending a strong signal to the business world, Wall Street and the rest of America: expect little in the way of major economic policy shifts.

Or in other words: if you don't like the White House status quo, tough.

Krueger's a known quantity. While serving as Treasury's chief economist in 2009 and 2010, he analyzed several programs, including giving employers tax incentives to hire, "Cash for Clunkers," the Small Business Lending Fund and "Build America" muni bonds.

The economy is still a shambles. None of these programs has worked very well. Was Krueger at Treasury telling the White House these were bad ideas? Nothing we know of suggests that's the case.

Going further back, Krueger was co-author of a major 1992 study that posited rises in minimum wage could lead to more hiring. Try telling that to black youth, who suffer a 40% unemployment rate largely because the minimum wage has priced them out of the job market.

Common sense should tell you that when you tax something, you get less of it — not more. Krueger's study was roundly criticized and debunked.

As such, with joblessness remaining stubbornly above 9%, we're not optimistic about Krueger's input into Obama's coming Jobs Program.

Still more recently, Krueger popped up as an advocate for a value-added tax (VAT) or, as some call it, a consumption tax. Nothing wrong with that, per se, unless you're pushing it not as a replacement for our current dysfunctional income-tax code, but as an addition to it.

But that's exactly what Krueger did, although to his credit he did write in a January 2009 New York Times piece that "the main downside of this proposal is that taxes reduce economic activity."

Darn right. Not only that, but unless you get rid of the income tax entirely when you impose a consumption tax, you end up with an overtaxed, stagnant mess. Don't think so? Look at Europe, where citizens are hit with both income tax and a VAT, and the two just keep marching higher.

"European nations imposed VATs about 40 years ago, which simply encouraged more spending and more debt — and now several nations are on the verge of bankruptcy," noted economist Daniel Mitchell of the Cato Institute.

Not everyone feels as we do about Mr. Krueger. Some right-of-center economists, such as former George W. Bush adviser Greg Mankiw and George Mason University's Tyler Cowen, lauded his selection.

And, to his credit, Krueger is the author of several influential studies that have held up over time — including one that suggests extending jobless benefits isn't really stimulus — significant, since this is expected to be part of Obama's jobs program.

Even so, we're disappointed in Krueger's appointment. Nothing personal, but we had hoped Obama would select someone who stands outside of the reigning Keynesian consensus that accepts the primary role of government as a driver of the economy.

That's not how the world works. A massive amount of new and innovative economic research shows that. That's why we can't join others in rejoicing, especially given this administration's repeated economic errors.

Intellectually, Krueger represents nothing new.

Just more Keynesian leftovers.