Banking is just a part of the free market

The State and 100 Percent Reserve Banking

by George Selgin

Free bankers have been fighting a war on two fronts.  On one they face champions of central banking and managed money.  On the other they struggle against advocates of 100-percent reserve banking.  Although the second front is a lot smaller than the first, it’s far from being unimportant, in part because the battle there is being fought against people who generally favor free markets, who might have been expected to join rather than to oppose our cause.

They oppose it for a variety of reasons, one of which is their belief that, in a truly free-market setting, fractional reserve banking wouldn’t survive.  Instead, they insist, 100-percent reserve banks would prevail.  That they haven't is due, in their opinion, to a banking industry playing field slanted in favor of favor fractional-reserve banks, especially by either implicit or implicit deposit guarantees financed through forced levies upon all banks, and sometimes by taxation or inflation.  In short, fractional-reserve banking has been nurtured by government subsidies.

Free bankers have tried responding to this argument by noting how fractional reserve banking has prevailed under every sort of bank regulatory regime, from the earliest beginnings of banking, not excepting regimes that involved very little regulation, like those of Scotland, Canada, and Sweden, and that lacked even a trace of government guarantees or other sorts of artificial support.  But since some 100-percenters seem unmoved by this approach, I here take a different tack, which consists of pointing out that every significant 100-percent bank known to history was a government-sponsored enterprise, which depended for its existence on some combination of direct government subsidies, compulsory patronage, or laws suppressing rival (fractional reserve) institutions. Yet despite the special support they enjoyed, and their solemn commitments to refrain from lending coin deposited with them, they all eventually came a cropper. What’s more, it was these government-sponsored full-reserve banks, rather than their private-market fractional reserve counterparts, that were the progenitors of later central banks, starting with the Bank of England.

So far as records indicate, the very earliest banks were private institutions that began as sidelines to other businesses.  The very first bankers may have been thetrapezites or money-changers of ancient Athens, or their later Roman counterparts.  But the earliest concerning which any details are known were the “banks of deposit” that arose during the 12^th century in Italy, especially in Genoa and Venice, and the record clearly indicates that these banks were credit-granting institutions rather then mere coin warehouses.  Indeed, it was almost inevitable that they should have been so, because in order to efficiently undertake to make payments by bank transfer, and so spare their clients the necessity of dealing with the shoddy coins then available, they were bound to promise to return on demand, not the very coins deposited with them, but coins of equal value, which in effect meant becoming debtors rather than bailees.  Moreover, overdrafts were bound occasionally to result in credits in excess of cash reserves, while the interest to be earned from additional lending allowed bankers to reduce the fees they charged for their payment services, and even to occasionally pay interest on their “deposits.”   In any event the lending was never concealed.  In London goldsmith banking took a similar course, though not until the mid-17^th century.  In short, so far as records indicate, all of the earliest private banks operated on a fractional-reserve basis.

For your own good

It's time to stand up for smokers' rights

by John Humphreys

Perhaps it is inevitable that people will always need to find a minority to hate. Whether it is based on race, or sex, or sexual preference, or lifestyle choice, or language, or religion, or personal habits... the instinct to discriminate, to distrust "different" people, and to enforce conformity is a constant theme throughout history and throughout the world. If this instinct was purely personal, then it would not be a big issue. People could simply choose to associate with those people they prefer, and we could all live in peace. But sadly, many groups want to use the government to force their bigotry on others.
Over the past 100 years there have been some great improvements in social policy, as the government removed most of their discrimination based on race, religion, sexual preference and sex. There are a few outstanding issues (women in the military, gay adoption rights, special rules for Aborigines) but on the whole we now have less official discrimination in these areas. Sadly, not all minorities have been this lucky.
While some minorities become popular political causes, other minorities are on the receiving end of negative political populism. Politically correct campaigners will loudly support the "good minorities" such as GLBT or immigrant groups, but they are equally loud in their condemnation of the "wrong minorities". This seems to indicate that we are not becoming more tolerant... we are simply switching our bigotry on to other areas.
Some of the biggest victims of this modern discrimination are smokers.
Immediately the anti-smoking bigots will insist that they are not really bigoted, because smokers deserve to be punished. Of course, that is exactly what the racists, sexists and homophobes say. 
Most people want to consider themselves a "good person", and so bigots often feel the need to create artificial reasons to justify their intolerance. The excuses range from the plain wrong to the desperate, but the common theme is that in all cases the freedom of smokers is considered irrelevant. If a "good minority" was dismissed this quickly there would be cries of pain from an outraged media and a horde of moralising pundits. But when it comes to smokers... the "moral police" join the lynch mob and declare smokers guilty by definition.
One of the first lines from the bigots is that smoking is bad for you. True, but so what? Lots of things are bad for you, but life is about more than longevity. 
People often make trade-offs between "quality of life" and "quantity of life". We make many decisions that will marginally increase our chance of death, but for a benefit. People choose to go skiing, or sky-diving, or motorbike riding, or drinking, or working in a mine, or eating fatty food, or playing contact sports... knowing that there is a health risk but determining that the benefit is worth the cost. In a free society, people should be free to make their own life decisions.
The health Nazis don't get this point. They really seem to think that the whole purpose of life is to live for as long as possible... and if you ever make an "unhealthy" decision, then you are simply wrong and need to be controlled by your owner the government. A whole army of these anti-fun fanatics have been put together in the Preventative Health Taskforce, so that the government knows exactly how to micro-manage your life. 
As the IPA explained, "The Taskforce recommends 39 accords, scorecards, standards, reviews, action research projects, frameworks, compacts, programs, partnerships, systems, initiatives, criteria, surveys, strategies, agencies, curricula and campaigns for obesity alone". In New Zealand, the fun police have even claimed that when you have two drinks in a night, you are officially "irrational" and therefore had no fun. (Read Eric Crampton's response here.)
At the core, the idea here is that smokers are just "wrong" and they need to be fixed. As a Facebook friend recently put it, "since you do not act like an adult but like a 13-year-old kid that thinks that smoking is cool, the government has to set limits to your destructive and anti-social behaviour". 
Sadly, the author didn't even seem to notice the totalitarian nature of his sentence. Imagine the response if somebody made the same comment about one of the "good minorities".
Thankfully, when most normal people are pushed they admit that people should be free to choose their own lifestyle. The debate then turns to "externalities".
The first externality used to justify anti-smoking intolerance is the health costs of smoking that fall on the taxpayers because of our socialist health system. Again, there is truth in this claim. The most obvious solution would be to introduce a smokers-premium on health insurance, but that would require health policy reform, which is always difficult in our modern welfare-democracy (note, private health providers already have a smokers premium). 

The Party

China’s Never-Ending Party

by John Derbyshire 

You think the 2012 Republican field is lackluster? Check out these party animals.

The “party” in that last sentence is the Chinese Communist Party. The gents standing in the picture are the aptly named Standing Committee (changwu weiyuanhui, literally “everyday affairs committee”) of the CCP’s Central Politburo. Except in the most strictly taxonomic sense, they are not animals, but human beings, or somewhat lifelike simulacra thereof. These are the people who run the affairs of the world’s most populous nation and will continue to do so for another year or so. The picture was taken in October 2007 and they serve five-year terms.

The members of the Standing Committee are so lacking in luster, one feels that the guy wearing a blue tie with his hands folded in front of him—it’s Wu Bangguo—might as well have gone the whole distance and worn a clown suit. The current ages, left to right, are 68, 55, 57, 68, 68, 69, 71, 57, and 67. Technocrats? You bet. From the left again: Numbers one and four are trained in geology, number two in economics and law, and all the rest in engineering—electrical, hydraulic, electronic, electrical, chemical, chemical. They have “rarely appeared in public together again,” we are told. I should think so: That much dullness all in one place might collapse spacetime.

“China’s ‘miracle’ this past quarter century is a political one: the survival of the communist system in all its lawlessness and control-freak brutality.”

I acquired that picture from a book called The Party by Australian journalist Richard McGregor. Published last year (I’m behind on my reading), The Party explains the miracle of China in recent years.

It’s not the ten percent annual growth figures: Any fool nation with a billion people could have done that, starting as they did from such a low base. No, China’s “miracle” this past quarter century is a political one: the survival of the communist system in all its lawlessness and control-freak brutality. You might almost say “half century”: I was hanging out with Old China Hands in the early 1970s, when the Cultural Revolution was in full flood. General opinion among the OCH’s was that the regime had committed suicide and would be gone before the decade ended.

Forward to 1989 and the nationwide demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre. The regime seemed indecisive. Rumors circulated that a senior military commander was balking at party orders to move on the demonstrators. (McGregor says those rumors were correct: It was Lieutenant-General Xu Qinxian, commander of the 38th Army. He was court-martialed and sentenced to five years for his insubordination.) Well nigh everyone—including me, and including veteran dissident Wang Bingzhang—thought the game was up for the ChiComs.

Forward another dozen years to 2001, when Gordon Chang brought out his book The Coming Collapse of China. Chang said it would all be over for the CCP in five years. (Ten years on, he’s still saying it.) As it happens, I spent the summer of 2001 in China with my family. I came back convinced that the Communist Party could go on indefinitely, and I wrote articlessaying so. How come Gordon Chang’s speaking fees are so much higher than mine? It’s an unjust world all right.

And they’re still there. They’ll still be there next fall, though the lineup will have changed somewhat. Xi Jinping, second from the right in that photograph, will almost certainly take over the top spot from Hu Jintao. (The CCP, like our own beloved Republican Party, adheres to the next-in-line principle of leadership selection.) Whatever: There’ll be nine sixty-ish gents with dark blue suits, red ties, and engineering degrees.

Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is told that the future will resemble a boot stamping on a human face forever. China’s future will be a well-polished pair of black Oxfords padding diffidently across the Great Hall of the People’s deep-pile carpets forever. The guys with the boots will be kept discreetly out of sight except when needed.

The Chinese Communist Party has it figured out. After 62 years of blunders, horrors, and reversals, they have pulled off a miracle of statecraft, a Staatskunst Wunder. With their 77 million members distributed in hundreds of thousands of cells, they have turned Lenin’s crude power cult into a robust, adaptable apparatus of total control that, like God in the universe, is everywhere present but nowhere visible—or is visible only, as with that photograph, in a form so bland the eye turns away in search of something recognizably human.

They have their placemen in every bank and company, every school and college, every church and drama club, every military unit and research institute. When the party says, “Jump!” the organization jumps, however “independent” it is in theory; as their banks jumped, against their better judgment, during 2009’s financial crisis.

The party has it all figured out. They will go on forever.

"Save" the Planet or the Treasury ?

The agenda revealed

by Richard

In theory, all the greenery coming out of our provincial government and the EU – like carbon credits - is intended to bring down "carbon" emissions, and thus save the planet. That governments make money out of the measures is just coincidental.

And if you believe that one, the latest Reuters report will comes as a bit of a shock. It tells us that the EU's carbon credit market could be flooded with excess permits over the next decade, cutting prices in half and depriving governments of billions in budgeted revenues.

Apparently, this terrible outcome will arise from the new "energy services directive", due in late June, which will force owners of buildings, vehicles and more controversially, industry, to cut energy consumption through efficiency measures.

One might have thought that such a move would be applauded for its planet-saving potential, but not a bit of it. More efficiency and thus less energy usage means less CO2 which means less permits needed ... leading to a surplus.

"There's a real concern of negative impacts on prices if the issue is not properly addressed," says one EU source. "Some of the studies imply that carbon prices will collapse".

One study suggests carbon credit prices might fall to €14 per tonne, compared to a business-as-usual price of €25. Another sees the price dropping to zero. "The energy services directive could potentially wipe out billions of euros for governments across the EU, unless EU ETS allowances are set aside," says Sanjeev Kumar at environment consultancy E3G.

So it is that there are strong rumor that the governments of EU member states will block the energy-reduction measures, to avoid

Laughter is a formidable weapon

End Game Part II

Keep sleeping, it's late already

End Game

By RT

A small group of anti-war protesters, over Memorial Day weekend, held a silent dance protest at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.

Socialists of Europe unite

Putin Wins Over Khodorkovsky in European Court

By R. Wensel

The European Court of Human Rights has rejected former Russian 

oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky's claim that he was prosecuted for political reasons. The seven-judge panel, including one Russian justice, said in its 46-page ruling, 

"Khodorkovsky's case might raise some suspicion as to what the real intent of the Russian authorities might have been for prosecuting him, (but) claims of political motivation behind prosecution required incontestable proof, which had not been presented."

Stoned by the Stone Age Hillbillies

Muslim girl, 19, 'stoned to death after taking part in beauty contest'

by WILL STEWART

A teenage Muslim girl was stoned to death under 'Sharia law' after taking part in a beauty contest in Ukraine.

Katya Koren, 19, was found dead in a village in the Crimea region near her home. 

Friends said she liked wearing fashionable clothes and had come seventh in a beauty contest.

Her battered body was buried in a forest and was found a week after she disappeared.

Police have opened a murder investigation and are looking into claims that three Muslim youths killed her, claiming her death was justified under Islam.  

One of the three - named as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev - is under arrest and told police that Katya had 'violated the laws of Sharia'. Gaziev has said he has no regrets about her death.

Stoning is a divisive subject among Muslims, with some groups interpreting it as Islamic law and others disagreeing.

According to Amnesty International's annual report on death sentences worldwide, issued in April, there were no reports of judicial executions carried out by stoning in 2010

However, new death sentences by stoning were reportedly imposed in Iran, the Bauchi state of Nigeria and Pakistan. 

At least 10 women and four men remained under sentence of death by stoning at the end of the year in Iran, where adultery is the only crime which carries that penalty under Sharia law.

It was widely imposed as a sentence in the years following the 1979 Islamic revolution, and even though Iran's judiciary still regularly hands down such sentences, they are now often converted to other punishments

The barbaric practice was thrown into the international spotlight last year when an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery after suffering years of abuse at the hands of her drug addict husband.

Miss Ashtiani's lawyer said she was allegedly beaten and sold for sex by opium-addict Ebrahim Ghaderzade, who she is accused of killing.

She was jailed for ten years for murder and sentenced to death for adultery. She was also convicted of having illicit relations for which she received 99 lashes.

The Iranian authorities eventually suspended the stoning after an outcry from the international community.

The European Union has called the sentence 'barbaric', the Vatican pleaded for clemency and Brazil, which has tried to intervene in Iran's stand-off with the West over its nuclear programme, offered Miss Ashtiani asylum.

A number of celebrities, including Robert Redford, Robert De Niro and Sting called for her release in an open letter to the Iranian regime, backed by more than 80 actors, artists, musicians, academics and politicians.

Rule of Law

Is Obama above the law?

By George F. Will

The U.S. intervention in Libya’s civil war, intervention that began with a surplus of confusion about capabilities and a shortage of candor about objectives, is now taking a toll on the rule of law. In a bipartisan cascade of hypocrisies, a liberal president, with the collaborative silence of most congressional conservatives, is traducing the War Powers Resolution.
Enacted in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto, the WPR may or may not be wise. It is, however, unquestionably a law, and Barack Obama certainly is violating it. It stipulates that a president must terminate military action 60 days after initiating it (or 90, if the president “certifies” in writing an “unavoidable military necessity” respecting the safety of U.S. forces), unless Congress approves it. Congress has been supine and silent about this war, which began more than 70 days ago.
All presidents have resented the WPR but have taken care to act “consistent with” its 48-hour reporting requirement. So on March 21, two days after the administration took the nation to war in Libya, Obama notified Congress of this obvious fact, stressing that U.S. operations would be “limited in their nature, duration, and scope” in the service of a “limited and well-defined mission.” Months ago, before it metastasized into regime change, the “well-defined” mission was to protect civilians.
In his March 28 address to the nation, Obama said “the United States will play a supporting role.” But the WPR does not leave presidential warmaking utterly unrestrained if it is a “supporting role.”

The Power of Incentives

Teachers hostage to 'success'

by M. Goodwin

The e-mail box runneth over with bad tidings. 

Teachers are reporting that cheating is rampant in New York City schools - and they claim principals are the culprits.

The reports are responding to my column that many schools are denying students the freedom to fail in a misguided bid to help them. To judge from the response, the problem is worse than I feared. Much worse.

First, a professional in a Manhattan high school wrote to say that teachers in her school are "encouraged" to pass 80 percent of students, no matter their grades or attendance. She offered student writing samples filled with glaring errors of spelling and grammar to prove that "social promotion is alive and well."

Now others are revealing shocking examples from their schools about how unprepared kids are being pushed along to the next grade and out the door with a sham diploma. Their disheartening tales deserve attention.

"Our mandated passing rate is 60 percent," one wrote. "We need to explain in detail why this student failed, what methods were used to get him to pass, how much home contact was made.

"The one group that is not called in for interrogation is the students themselves. No blame falls on them . . . The students know what is going on. It has empowered them to feel that they can work less or not at all and still pass the class."

We are doomed

The Dream of the Mont Pelerin Society

by R. Higgs

Just after World War II, classical liberalism reached its lowest ebb. Europe lay in ruins, one-half locked under Soviet domination, the other half drowning in dirigisme. In Britain, a Labor government wielded power, nationalizing basic industries and creating a full-fledged welfare state. In France and Italy, communists and their political allies threatened to take power. In Scandinavia and the Low Countries, welfare states blossomed while free markets withered. Spain and Portugal endured fascist dictatorships.

Germany languished under Allied occupation, with controls choking the revival of its economy and the population struggling to avoid starvation. In the United States, most people had lost their old faith in the free market and gained a new faith in the ability of government to solve economic problems and guarantee social security. Everywhere in the West both masses and elites, especially the intellectuals, plunged waywardly down what Friedrich A. Hayek had just dubbed "the road to serfdom."

Peering into the abyss ahead, Hayek determined to form a society committed to persuading the intellectuals, and hence the masses and their political leaders, to change course. This society would bring together for mutual enlightenment and encouragement the leading figures of classical liberalism. Included would be Englishmen such as Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes, and Michael Polanyi; Austrian émigrés such as Ludwig von Mises, Fritz Machlup, Karl Popper, and of course Hayek himself; Americans such as Henry Hazlitt, Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, and George Stigler; Germans such as Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken; Frenchmen such as Maurice Allais and Bertrand de Jouvenel; and other Western Europeans.

In April 1947 the men named above and others — 39 persons in all, from 17 countries — met in Switzerland and formed the Mont Pèlerin Society. They adopted a Statement of Aims that briefly described their view of the prevailing crisis:

Over large stretches of the earth's surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power.

The statement avowed that "what is essentially an ideological movement must be met by intellectual argument and the reassertion of valid ideas" and identified six broad areas in which further study and debate would be worthwhile in combating the prevailing intellectual tendencies. The statement concluded,

The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda. It seeks to establish no meticulous and hampering orthodoxy. It aligns itself with no particular party. Its object is solely, by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society.

Fifty years later it appears that, despite individual disagreements and rivalries, personality clashes, and administrative difficulties, the society has prospered and remained steadfast in adherence to its initial statement of aims. It has served essentially as an international club at whose meetings leading classical liberals can exchange and debate ideas in the comfort of a solidary environment.

A Strange Sentence in the Times

by Jeffrey Goldberg'

Does something in this lade from the Times seem strange?

RAFAH BORDER CROSSING, Egypt -- Hundreds of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip arrived here by the busload on Saturday to pass through the reopened border into Egypt, taking the first tangible steps out of a four-year Israeli blockade.

So: For the first time in four years, Gazans can cross the border into Egypt. This fact suggests that Egypt had blockaded its border with Gaza. But wait -- somehow, it was a four-year Israeli blockade that kept Gazans from crossing into Egypt. According to the Times story, Egypt decided to "stop enforcing Israel's blockade of the Palestinian territory."

It always seemed to me that Israel and Egypt, two independent states, decided jointly to blockade Gaza. Does the Times believe the Mubarak regime decided to participate in the blockade of Gaza because Israel ordered it to participate? Does anyone actually believe that Egypt closed its border with Gaza only because it was in Israel's interest? Or was Egypt's government and military worried about the spread of Hamas ideology into Sinai and beyond?

This sort of question also arose during the flotilla debacle. The world was focused on Israel's closure of Gaza, but the Israeli closure was a closure only because Egypt had also imposed a closure. You can't close three sides of a four-sided territory (Israel controlled the western shore of Gaza, its northern and eastern borders) and expect to have an effective closure. And yet, there was no international pressure on Egypt to open its border. This suggests that Israel was the target of disproportionate animus. 

Progressive "Insights"

Profits of doom

By KYLE SMITH

Ha ha. Harold Camping — what an idiot! He predicted the end of the world on May 21. Last week, the Christian radio station owner said he was kind of right, though no one else noticed, and anyway the judgin’ will continue until (new date!) Oct. 21 of this year, when the world really and truly will be destroyed, probably.

What you didn’t know is that after his loony prediction, Camping was promoted to full professor at Stanford and rewarded with adoring mainstream press coverage, more than a dozen appearances on “The Tonight Show,” prestigious awards and praise from the Obama administration’s chief science advisor.

Sorry, I got one detail wrong. It wasn’t Camping who reaped those earthly rewards for his cosmic wackiness. It was Paul Ehrlich.

In his psychedelically doomy 1968 catastrophe tract, “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich argued that birthrates were out of control and would cause worldwide crisis.

He came by this not through Divine Revelation but through Divine Equation, a k a the liberal scripture of pseudo-science. Ehrlich “calculated” using the equation I = P x A x T. This means that Human Impact (I) on environment equals the product of Population, Affluence and Technology.

No room for imprecision there!

Conclusion: “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death . . . nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the human death rate.” Ehrlich predicted England would cease to exist by 2000. (N.B. he meant the whole country, not just that pathetic soccer squad.)

In 1970 he thundered, “In 10 years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” He boomed that by 1980, life expectancy in the US would decline to 42 years.

Not quite getting the message, the world population both a) continued to grow and b) lived longer and healthier than ever.

Ehrlich has groused that he was kinda sorta right, and the worst you can say is that, like preacherman Camping, he was a little early.

President Obama’s point man on science, John Holdren, is an Ehrlich man. A text version of a speech Holdren gave in 2006 was accompanied by a footnote in which he praised Ehrlich’s call to end population growth “a key insight

. . . the elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.”

There are Ehrlich-men everywhere, and that ehrlich is German for honest just makes it so much richer, doesn’t it?

In 1970, when the first Earth Day caused the first spike in atmospheric baloney, Life “reported” that “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . . by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . .” (Note to younger readers: Visible smog was the thing we were all afraid of before we became afraid of invisible carbon emissions.)

Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote at the time, quoting with approval Dr. S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institute, that “In 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80% of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Time quoted ecologist Kenneth Watt as saying there wouldn’t be any crude oil left by 2000. A scientist named Harrison Brown at the National Academy of Sciences said the world would be out of lead, zinc, copper, tin, gold and silver by now.

“Dead Heat” author Michael Oppenheimer, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said in 1990 that by 1996, the greenhouse effect “would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” More recently he said, “On the whole I would stand by these predictions.”

Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at England’s climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, said in 2000 that because of global warming, within a few years, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is” and flurries will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Heavy snowfall in England last year was, of course, also attributed to global warming.

Scientists love to see their names in print, don’t they? Coincidentally, they also love grant money, book deals, awards. The easiest way to obtain these things is by alarmism. No one ever made a buck saying, “The situation in the future will be pretty similar to what it is now.”

All Harold Camping has to do to be treated as a genuine visionary is to change the words at the beginning of his doom sermons from “the Bible says” to “science says.”

Socialists of the world unite against that terrible woman from Africa

Meet the People Responsible for Saving Strauss-Kahn

By Ujala Sehgal

The Strauss-Kahn defense, like raising a child, takes a  village. While the law and order team has been leaking statements from the alleged victim, Strauss-Kahn has been quietly assembling a fully loaded crisis dream team, Reuters reports. People consulted or hired so far include ex-CIA spies, private investigators, slick celebrity attorneys, top executives at corporations, and all the PR agents one might ever need. It's quite the cast of characters. Let's see who one of the world's best-connected men reaches out to in a crisis.

The Suits. The legal team is led by prominent New York criminal lawyer Benjamin Brafman, who has represented Michael Jackson, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, and Jay-Z, among other celebrities and high-profile defendants. Known for his wit, preparation, and aggression, according to a 1998 profile in New York magazine, "His detractors see a darker side, accusing Brafman of using underhanded, albeit legal, courtroom tactics to win, and cynically manipulating the press with carefully orchestrated leaks."

The Fixer. While the lawyers are usually the public face, every operation has one mysterious puppet-master that stays behind the scenes, looking at the big picture and pulling strings to make sure everything stays on track. They come with high-power but a very low-profile. In Strauss-Kahn's case, that job belongs the little-known Washington-based "strategic advisory" firm TD International, a source close to the firm told Reuters.

TD International's operations are something of a mystery. The firm's website identifies two of its partners as former CIA officers, and says it offers clients such services as "strategic consulting", "commercial intelligence," "due diligence" and "security services." Former clients include Yulia Tymoshenko, leader of Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" who later served as prime minister, and Strauss-Kahn himself. As TD International, naturally, won't "comment on client relationships," Reuters looked at its Justice Department filings. A contract between the firm and Strauss-Kahn dated July 18, 2007, shows he hired the firm to "conduct a specific public relations campaign" and "work is to begin immediately and continue until ascendancy of client to head of IMF." Read: ensure he gets the job.

You thought that it could never happen

Greek minister commits suicide over bribe allegations 


by our Greek eye witness

Κρεμασμένος βρέθηκε ο 29χρονος Τζέονγκ Τζονγκ Κουάν, ο οποίος ήταν ύποπτος για εμπλοκή σε σκάνδαλο «στημένων» παιχνιδιών.
«Αισθάνομαι ντροπή που είμαι μέρος του “στησίματος” αγώνων», ήταν το σημείωμα που βρέθηκε σε κεντρικό ξενοδοχείο της Σεούλ.
 Για το θέμα αυτό, οι εισαγγελείς της πόλης Τσανγκουόν (400χλμ νοτιοανατολικά της Σεούλ) έχουν συλλάβει ήδη πέντε ποδοσφαιριστές, με τους τέσσερις να είναι της Νταετζόν Σίτιζενς.
 Για το θύμα, υπήρχαν υποψίες πως βοηθούσε στο «στήσιμο» αγώνων με το να δωροδοκεί παίκτες της K-League μέσω ενδιάμεσου. Ο ίδιος, σε υψηλό επίπεδο αγωνίστηκε μόλις μία φορά, συγκεκριμένα στην Τζεονγκμπούκ Χιουντάι Μότορς.
 Ο Κουάν, είχε μεταπηδήσει στην τρίτη κατηγορία του κορεατικού πρωταθλήματος αφού με αυτόν τον τρόπο ήταν δυσκολότερο να εντοπιστεί. Μόλις όμως οι αρχές τον κάλεσαν και τα Μέσα έγραψαν πως ο 29χρονος είναι μέρος της «παράγκας», αποφάσισε να δώσει τέλος στη ζωή του. Εξάλλου, οι Ασιάτες είναι πολύ περήφανοι και οι κώδικες ηθικής που έχουν είναι πολύ διαφορετικοί απ’ότι του υπόλοιπου πληθυσμού του πλανήτη. 

A lost generation in pursuit of the New Socialist Man

Quick Love, Brief Shel

By Yoani Sánchez

“To the warm shelter of 214…” began a song by Silvio Rodriguez which — in my adolescent naivete — I listened to as if it were a riddle. So it was until a friend, who’d lived a little more than I had, unblushingly clarified the phrase. It was simply the address of a well-known Havana motel, where couples could find a place for quick love in a country already gripped by housing limitations. Waiting outside those places were women who covered their faces with scarves and sunglasses, while the men paid the desk clerk and got the key to the room. An insistent knock on the door would warn them that their time was over and others were waiting to enter.

Havana’s inns, scenes of so many infidelities, sudden passions, and even innumerable passions that led to formal matrimony with several children. These places, once flourishing, faced a long period of stigma and then a precipitous decline. They passed from sites of ardor to become cramped housing for victims of building collapses. Put like that, it sounds fair: substituting necessity for pleasure, the rapture of the flesh for the pressing needs of a family. One after the other, the city’s motels were closed to the public and their small rooms were taken up by people who lost their homes to the winds of a hurricane or the ravages of a fire. Informal love began to move to the bushes, dark corners, or, quietly, to the same room where Grandma was sleeping. Those with hard currency could, in turn, seek out private homes that rented rooms for 5 convertible pesos for several hours.

Now, passing through Fraternity Park late at night, it’s not uncommon to hear to a groan in the shadows, the muffled sound of clothes rubbing against each other. The majority of people my age and younger have never had their own roof under which to caress their partner, or a private bed where they can lie wrapped in each other’s arms. People who haven’t known what it is to live in a city where there are motels with neon signs and tiny rooms where you can make love for at least an hour. Nor do they understand the song — outdated now — of that singer-songwriter, and names such as Hotel Venus, 11th and 24th, The Countryside, or Ayestaran Cottages do not awaken any pleasant memories.