Going to Disneyland

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant

By JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12.

My mother wanted to give me a better life, so she sent me thousands of miles away to live with her parents in America — my grandfather (Lolo in Tagalog) and grandmother (Lola). After I arrived in Mountain View, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang. One of my early memories is of a freckled kid in middle school asking me, “What’s up?” I replied, “The sky,” and he and a couple of other kids laughed. I won the eighth-grade spelling bee by memorizing words I couldn’t properly pronounce. (The winning word was “indefatigable.”)

One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”

Confused and scared, I pedaled home and confronted Lolo. I remember him sitting in the garage, cutting coupons. I dropped my bike and ran over to him, showing him the green card. “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is this fake?”) My grandparents were naturalized American citizens — he worked as a security guard, she as a food server — and they had begun supporting my mother and me financially when I was 3, after my father’s wandering eye and inability to properly provide for us led to my parents’ separation. Lolo was a proud man, and I saw the shame on his face as he told me he purchased the card, along with other fake documents, for me. “Don’t show it to other people,” he warned.

I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.

I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

Last year I read about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act, a nearly decade-old immigration bill that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been educated in this country. At the risk of deportation — the Obama administration has deported almost 800,000 people in the last two years — they are speaking out. Their courage has inspired me.

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.

 My first challenge was the language. Though I learned English in the Philippines, I wanted to lose my accent. During high school, I spent hours at a time watching television (especially “Frasier,” “Home Improvement” and reruns of “The Golden Girls”) and movies (from “Goodfellas” to “Anne of Green Gables”), pausing the VHS to try to copy how various characters enunciated their words. At the local library, I read magazines, books and newspapers — anything to learn how to write better. Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print — writing in English, interviewing Americans — validated my presence here.

The Lethal barrier

Meritocracy Without Borders

Bryan Caplan

Once you're familiar with the literature on the intergenerational income correlation, it's easy to be complacent.  But isn't there any unfairness left to get upset about?  Absolutely.  The catch: Government, not "capitalism," is clearly to blame.

Yes, income difference inside Western societies are highly heritable.  However, income differences between societies depend heavily on whether or not you were born into a privileged national "family."  While your adult income doesn't depend much on whether you're born into a rich American family or a poor American family, being born in the U.S. instead of the Third World is crucial.  
Why does your nation of birth matter so much?  The answer, of course, is immigration restrictions - the legal barriers that prevent people from selling their talents wherever they're valued the most.
When you read the literature on the inter-generational income correlation, it's hard not to notice the thinly-veiled moral fervor.  Many researchers are itching to announce, "Our society is unfair, and we need more redistributive taxation to fix it."  
If they put partisan prejudice aside, though, they'd change their tune.  Redistributive taxation turns out to be just another policy that makes the economyless fair.  But the effect is small compared to immigration restrictions, the most unfairest policy of all.

Capitalism: meeting a myriad of needs in a diverse society

The Free-Market Lesson of the Web

by Gerard Docherty

The World Wide Web was invented in 1992 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a simple mechanism to share scientific papers with colleagues. The key innovation of the web was the use of hypertext — the mechanism by which we click on a link, such as a chunk of highlighted text, and are able to download the target document automatically. Although this is a simple idea, the web has changed the world we live in. Its rise is also a superb example of what happens when the private sector is left alone to meet market needs.

Despite its great complexity and rapid development over the last 10 years, the web community works largely without state intervention of any sort. Web designers did not need the hand of government to develop the skills to create ever more complex websites; IT professionals did not wait to read official reports saying they had to adapt as the technology changed; and companies were quick to offer the ever-evolving range of services needed for the web to run smoothly.

In other words, the private sector adapted, and adapted very quickly. Free-market mechanisms did what they always do — they rushed to meet consumer needs. This is reflected not only in the wide range of products available but also in the rapid drop in prices of almost every aspect of the web. Ten years ago, a personal website was an expensive proposition, especially if you needed anything professional or polished. Today, in the form of blogging software or services like Facebook, it is free. The overall cost of entry — taking into account the cost of training needed only a decade ago and now no longer necessary — has not so much dropped as evaporated. This low cost of entry has allowed a wide variety of individuals and companies to trade online, providing considerable choice for consumers.

Although the growth we have seen online is exceptional, it is still only a faster version of something capitalism does well: meeting a myriad of needs in a diverse society. It is difficult to imagine a better example of the free market at work.

Equally important is what has not happened. The web is largely divorced from government control and provides private-enterprise examples of large-scale undertakings that many statists claim can only be accomplished by the public sector. We routinely hear that the guiding hand of the state is required for complex projects. But the Internet itself, with its vast number of interconnected computers, is one of the most complex entities ever created by human beings, and much of it has grown without any central planning at all.

Similarly, government often steps in whenever there are perceived dangers to the public; hence pharmaceutical testing, standards regulation, and antifraud laws. But it is evident that the Internet, as an example of a relatively free market, often derails these arguments. The roaring trade in pharmaceuticals online — from antibiotics to endless adverts for Viagra — demonstrates the willingness of many to make their own informed decisions about personal risk.

Statists have often argued that the government must regulate standards. But the web itself is built using commonly agreed-upon standards that allow any Internet browser to make sense of any page published online. Again there were few central sources for this; the market, in the form of web designers, programmers, and users agreed upon common methods for tackling the immense variety of different websites, from streaming video to secure shopping carts to plain text. None of it required laws or regulation, and its extremely fast development was voluntary and benefited all.

It’s the $616 billion question

Derivatives Cloud the Possible Fallout From a Greek Default

By LOUISE STORY

Does the euro crisis have a hidden A.I.G.?

No one seems to be sure, in large part because the world of derivatives is so murky. But the possibility that some company out there may have insured billions of dollars of European debt has added a new tension to the sovereign default debate.

In years past, when financial crises in Argentina and Russia left those countries unable to make good on their government debts, they simply defaulted. But this time around, swaps and other sorts of contracts have become so common and so intertwined in the financial markets that there are fears among regulators and financial players about how a Greek default would play out among derivatives holders.

The looming uncertainties are whether these contracts — which insure against possibilities like a Greek default — are concentrated in the hands of a few companies, and if these companies will be able to pay out billions of dollars to cover losses during a default. If there were a single company standing behind many of these contracts, that company would be akin to the American International Group of the euro crisis. The American insurer needed a $182 billion federal bailout during the financial crisis because it had insured the performance of mortgage bonds through derivatives and could not pay on all of them.

Even regulators seem unsure of whether a Greek default would reveal such concentrated risk in the hands of just a few companies. Spokeswomen for the central banks of both Europe and the United States would not say whether their researchers had studied holdings of such contracts among nonbank entities like insurance companies and hedge funds.

Asked about derivatives tied to Europe at a Wednesday press conference, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said that the direct exposure is small but that “a disorderly default in one of those countries would no doubt roil financial markets globally. It would have a big impact on credit spreads, on stock prices and so on. And so in that respect I think the effects in the United States would be quite significant.”

Derivatives traders and analysts are debating just how much money is involved in these contracts and what sort of threat they pose to markets in Europe and the United States. On the one hand, just over $5 billion is tied up in credit-default swap contracts that will pay out if Greece defaults, according to Markit, a financial data firm based in London. That is less than 1 percent the size of Greece’s economy, but that is a conservative calculation that counts protections banks have in place offsetting their positions, and is called the net exposure.

The less conservative figure, the gross exposure, is $78.7 billion for Greece, according to Markit. And there are many other types of contracts, like about $44 billion in other guarantees tied to Greece, according to the Bank of International Settlements. The gross exposure of the five most financially pressed European Union countries — Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain — is about $616 billion. And the broader figure on all derivatives from those countries is unknown.

The pervasiveness of these opaque contracts has complicated negotiations for European officials, and it underscores calls for more transparency in the derivatives market.

The uncertainty, financial analysts say, has led European officials to push for a “voluntary” Greek bond financing solution that may sidestep a default, rather than the forced deals of other eras. “There’s not any clarity here because people don’t know,” said Christopher Whalen, editor of The Institutional Risk Analyst. “This is why the Europeans came up with this ridiculous deal, because they don’t know what’s out there. They are afraid of a default. The industry is still refusing to provide the disclosure needed to understand this. They’re holding us hostage. The Street doesn’t want you to see what they’ve written.”

Spending other people's money

Pasta at £47 a bag, £42,000 on biscuits and a public sector that can't be trusted with our money

By Ross Clark

At a time of redundancies and ward closures, there is a completely painless way for the NHS to save the taxpayer money: send its patients to dine at the Ivy, London's most famous celebrity restaurant.
There, a plate of potato gnocchi with pommarola tomato sauce, artichokes and parmesan costs £17.50 - not the cheapest on the menu, but a huge saving on the £47 which Eastern and Coastal Kent NHS Trust has been spending on each pack of pasta it buys for gluten-intolerant patients.
The trust has finally come round to suggesting to sufferers - who can have gluten-free food prescribed - that they buy their pasta at the supermarket instead, at a typical cost of £2 a pack.

Exclusive: The NHS could save money if it sent some of its patients to London's The Ivy restaurant

Until now, the trust has been sourcing the food from a supplier which charges £5 a pack, plus a £1 dispensary fee, a £1 pharmacy fee and £40 for delivery.
The £47 doesn't even include the sauce. It would almost be funny - if the money wasn't coming straight from our pockets. Sadly, the £47 pack of pasta is all too typical of the waste that is endemic in public sector procurement.
One year into the Government's austerity drive, we are beginning to discover the shocking extent of this profligacy.


A report last year into government procurement by Sir Philip Green, CEO of retail group Arcadia, revealed the extravagant sums that civil servants are spending on everyday items for their offices.
One ministry was managing to spend £73 on each box of copier paper — something which can be bought in bulk for just £8. Another office was buying laptops for £2,000 each — six times the going rate. A publicity campaign cost the taxpayer £1.31 in printing costs for each leaflet that should have cost 26p.
The most absurd example of all, however, came from George Osborne’s own office at the Treasury. Last December, the Chancellor was quoted £875 to supply a Christmas tree by Exchequer Partnerships Ltd — the Private Finance Initiative consortium which runs the Treasury building. 

Savings: A plate of potato gnocchi costs £17.50 at The Ivy, much cheaper than the £47 Eastern and Coastal Kent NHS Trust has been spending on each pack of pasta it buys for gluten-intolerant patients

When he asked whether he could go out and buy his own office tree from B&Q at a cost of £40, he was told that it would constitute an ‘off-contract’ tree — and that maintenance staff would refuse to water it.
Private Finance Initiatives, which really took off under New Labour, allow private investment into public sector infrastructure. The idea is that competitive market forces bring economic rigour to the public sector.
Yet too often PFI agreements have tied the taxpayer into long-term financial commitments running into tens of billions of pounds.

Murder by any other name ...

This man in black is leading us to a very dark place

By PETER HITCHENS

There's only one suicide I would cheerfully assist. If the Tory Party wants to go to Zurich and end it all, I will accompany it, hold its hand, help it swallow a cocktail of poison, refuse its pleas for water at the last moment (for its own good, of course) and listen to its death gurgles. It would be a mercy.

But the Tory Party is just a rather slippery and dishonest organisation. There’s nothing immoral about pushing it gently but firmly through the dark door marked ‘Exit’.

In fact I’d have fewer qualms about that than I would about putting down an elderly guinea pig.

Any human being, by contrast, is immensely, uniquely valuable. We cannot kill our fellow creatures, except under very special circumstances of self-defence or deterrent justice.

And yet we do. And we will do so even more quite soon. A society that baulks fussily at the death penalty for guilty murderers has become adept at excusing the convenient killing of innocents.

Using the advanced techniques of a perverted science, we hunt down imperfect babies in the womb and kill them.

Or we kill perfect babies because their birth might disrupt our comfy lives. And we tell ourselves that it is all right because our victims aren’t fully human, though in our hearts we know they are.

When the law which permits this massacre was first proposed nearly 50 years ago, we were told that it would be for exceptional and very difficult cases only.

I do not know if those who campaigned for the change really believed that – but their opponents warned that it would lead to abortion on demand. And that is what happened, because that is what suited the baby-boom generation to which I belong.

Now that generation and its children (the ones who weren’t aborted) have a new fear and a new desire.

 And the BBC – the voice of the boomers – has begun to express their secret concern, louder and louder. The old are a burden. They must die sooner, in the interests of the State, and of the middle-aged.

Couldn’t you see the unspoken thought – that it might be more convenient for the old and ill to be hurried into the grave – lurking behind the black-clad figure of Sir Terence Pratchett as he presented his pro-death programme at the licence-payers’ expense last week?

Sir Terence is no doubt innocent of such thoughts himself, and motivated entirely by understandable fears of his own Alzheimer’s.

But there must be many homes in this country where men and women are secretly hoping that their parents will die in a reasonable, timely manner – and above all that they will not consume their inheritance with endless care-home fees before they go.

Unhappily, many of those parents may also be guiltily wondering if they should hang on to life when it means that the home they have bought over many years of careful saving may have to be sold to pay for their care, instead of being passed on to their offspring.

Complex systems

I was duped by Jose Vargas, illegal immigrant

by Phil Bronstein 

I was duped. I once hired an illegal immigrant to be a reporter for the Chronicle.

"I don't think I'm a criminal," Jose Antonio Vargas told me when we met last week, right before he announced his status to the world. "Don't make me seem guiltier than I am."

Jose lied to me and everyone else he worked for, and that's not kosher, especially in a profession where facts and, more elusively, the truth are considered valuable commodities. In 2003 he wrote a story for us about illegals getting fake drivers' licenses in the Mission when he'd used phony documents to get his own. He told me last week that he decided then that was a serious conflict of interest and wouldn't cover immigration any more. But he later wrote on the topic for the Post.

Even though I didn't know he was a lawbreaker when he worked for me, and he left the paper in 2004, his story lands me a little more directly in the atrociously rudderless but vicious debate on immigration reform.

After Jose's essay was published on the New York Times website yesterday, detailing his deception in getting heady jobs here, at the Washington Post and the Huffington Post - and snagging exclusive access to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for a New Yorker profile - I have to wonder:

Am I a dupe? A felon - at least according to a tough new Alabama law that might find me guilty of "harboring" Jose when he was in my office the other day (I also bought him coffee)? Or have I unwittingly supported a potentially powerful new movement in the push for immigration reform?

There's no way to tell for sure when immigration laws themselves are a hopeless jumble of unenforced, unenforceable or just plain unaddressed issues covering 11 million people. The most visible are Latino day laborers, but the Vargas confession may also open those gnarly closet doors for high-achieving white collar professionals.

"This is going to come off as a vanity act, but it's not," Jose told me last Tuesday, just before he left San Francisco for New York on what might be his last allowable U.S. domestic flight with his doctored-up I.D. "I tell stories for a living and this is the one I've been afraid to tell. I'm one of many like me. There have got to be undocumented workers out there even more successful than I am."

Jose's narrative of arriving in the Bay Area at age 12, discovering his illegal status at 16 and driving himself thereafter to somehow earn citizenship with the help of friends and family, has created a cat-in-a-blender bloodstorm, particularly among his fellow journalists. The Times has gloated on its blogs about bagging the story while the Post, which rejected it, is a little dour.

General public pro- and anti- sentiment has been raucous.

"He's taken a huge personal risk" one immigration lawyer said about Jose. He could get deported back to his native Philippines any time. But the evocatively-named ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) is sensitive to bad publicity. So much for equal treatment. And Barack Obama's most recent tepid and indecisive immigration speech in El Paso two weeks ago could help. Illegals "have to admit they broke the law," the President said, "pay their taxes, pay a fine and learn English."

So, except for the fine, I guess Jose has passed the Potus sniff test. The head of ICE himself, John Morton, issued a memo in June telling his agents to use "discretion" in going after illegals, considering factors including whether they had come here as children. Hello, Jose.

Then there's Jose, the person. I've stayed in touch, been on panels with him and as recently as January ago recommended him for an important job at the Hearst newspaper division in New York. I feel silly for it, but not felonious.

Last month, he went to dinner at the home of a local big time businessman and philanthropist, seated among digital media gurus, and was being considered there for a job at a prestigious journalism institution back East.

During that period he was quietly and carefully lawyering up and basting his plans for coming out and starting a new organization - Define American - to get the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act passed and raise awareness that the illegal population is also upscale as much as it involves day laborers and house cleaners. Though most of the latter don't have media handlers and legal teams.

While publicity and good lawyers may save his residency, the most likely road kill in the Jose conflagration could be Peter Perl, a Post training editor who knew the secret and kept it. The Post said ominously that what he did "was wrong." It's the knowing that sideswiped careers of people like Meg Whitman and failed federal job candidates Zoe Baird and Bernard Kerik.

Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli told me "what Jose did was wrong. It's a compelling and interesting story" and Jose is a "talented and imaginative guy." But Brauchli seems to feel duped.

Kicking the can

Don't Believe These Greek Myths

By SIMON NIXON

As the Greek turmoil swirls, some commonly held beliefs are worth debunking:

1. Greece is insolvent.

No, it isn't. As economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have noted, sovereign defaults are typically about willingness to pay rather than ability to pay. Greece has plenty of assets and huge potential to cut spending, increase tax collection and improve productivity if it is willing to make sacrifices. Rather than solvency, Greece's challenge is whether the changes required are politically possible.

2. It is in Greece's interest to default.

Hardly. The country is still running a large primary deficit, so even if it inflicted 50% "haircuts" on bondholders, it would still need to borrow money immediately or face huge spending cuts overnight to balance the books. Worse, the Greek banking system would collapse as its capital was wiped out and its funding dried up; under European Central Bank rules, Greek government bonds would no longer be eligible as collateral. Nor would it make life easier if Greece tried to leave the euro, since this would likely trigger an immediate run on its banks.

3. A Greek default wouldn't be a Lehman moment.

Even the German government now seems to accept it was too complacent in imagining the market was prepared for a Greek debt restructuring. Despite Angela Merkel's climb-down last week, contagion effects have spread across the euro zone, notably to Spain, where bond yields have risen sharply. Germany's mistake was to consider only first-order effects on bank capital, whereas it would be the second-order contagion effects on government and bank borrowing costs that would do the greatest damage. Lehman was a severe market shock, but a Greek default could trigger a global slump as credit dried up around the world.

4. You can't keep kicking the can.

Yes, you can. Time is a great healer. Even if a Greek default becomes unavoidable, there are good reasons to delay it: partly to encourage Portugal and Ireland to stick to their bailout programs, but more importantly to reassure investors so they keep buying other peripheral European government and bank debt. The euro zone needs to avoid any defaults until countries like Spain and Italy manage to grow their way out of the danger zone. Indeed, much as it may upset German taxpayers, the euro zone may have to continue kicking Greek debt down the road long after 2013.

5. It's all Greece's fault.

Not entirely. Now that the euro zone has accepted it has little option but to bail out Greece again, its objective should be to ensure the bailout works. Yet the euro zone is charging Greece a punitive lending rate—nearly double what the European Financial Stability Facility pays to borrow or what the International Monetary Fund is charging—making Greece's task far harder. This makes no sense. The only sensible way now for the euro zone to minimize moral hazard is to agree to closer political integration. Sooner or later, Europe's leaders will have to face up to this reality.

"... those who work for a living and those who vote for a living."

The Food-Stamp Crime Wave

The number of food-stamp recipients has soared to 44 million from 26 million in 2007. Not surprisingly, fraud and abuse are rampant.

By JAMES BOVARD

Millionaires are now legally entitled to collect food stamps as long as they have little or no monthly income. Thirty-five states have abolished asset tests for most food-stamp recipients. These and similar "paperwork reduction" reforms advocated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) are turning the food-stamp program into a magnet for abuses and absurdities.

The Obama administration is far more enthusiastic about boosting food-stamp enrollment than about preventing fraud. Thanks in part to vigorous federally funded campaigns by nonprofit groups, the government's AmericaCorps service program, and other organizations urging people to accept government handouts, the number of food-stamp recipients has soared to 44 million from 26 million in 2007, and costs have more than doubled to $77 billion from $33 billion.

The USDA's Food and Nutrition Service now has only 40 inspectors to oversee almost 200,000 merchants that accept food stamps nationwide. The Government Accountability Office reported last summer that retailers who traffic illegally in food stamps by redeeming stamps for cash or alcohol or other prohibited items "are less likely to face criminal penalties or prosecution" than in earlier years.

Lax attitudes toward fraud are spurring swindles across the nation:

• Earlier this month, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that Wisconsin food-stamp recipients routinely sell their benefit cards on Facebook. The investigation also found that "nearly 2,000 recipients claimed they lost their card six or more times in 2010 and requested replacements." USDA rules require that lost cards be speedily replaced. The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute concluded: "Prosecutors have simply stopped prosecuting the vast majority of [food-stamp] fraud cases in virtually all counties, including the one with the most recipients, Milwaukee."

• Troy Hutson, the chief of Washington state's food-stamp program, resigned in April after a Seattle television station revealed that some food-stamp recipients were selling their cards on Craigslist or brazenly cashing them out on street corners (for 50 cents on the dollar) and using the proceeds for illegal drugs and prostitution. Washington state Sen. Mike Carrell complained: "Dozens of workers at DSHS [the Department of Social and Health Services] have reported numerous unpunished cases of fraud to me. They have told me that DSHS management has allowed these things to happen, and in some cases actively restricted fraud investigations."

• Thirty percent of the inmates in the Polk County, Iowa, jail were collecting food stamps that were being sent to their non-jail mailing addresses in 2009. But Iowa could not prosecute them for fraud because the state's food-stamp form failed to ask applicants whether they were heading for the slammer. Roger Munns, a spokesman for the Iowa Department of Human Services, told the Des Moines Register last year that asking such questions could make food-stamp applications "unwieldy." (Many states do make such inquiries.)

Looser federal rules are spurring a bureaucratic crime wave. Last December, two veteran employees for New York City's Human Resources Administration were busted for concocting 1,500 fake food-stamp cases that netted them $8 million. Nine Milwaukee, Wis., staffers plundered almost $300,000 from the program during the last five years, and a Louisiana state bureaucrat pleaded guilty last year for her role in a scam that snared more than $50,000 in fraudulent food-stamp benefits.

The Obama administration is responding by cracking down on state governments' antifraud measures. The administration is seeking to compel California, New York and Texas to cease requiring food-stamp applicants to provide finger images.

• The food-stamp poster boy of 2011 is 59-year-old Leroy Fick. After Mr. Fick won a $2 million lottery jackpot, the Michigan Department of Human Services ruled he could continue receiving food stamps. The Detroit News explained: "If Fick had chosen to accept monthly payments of his jackpot, the winnings would be considered income, according to the DHS. But by choosing to accept a lump sum payment, the winnings were considered 'assets' and aren't counted in determining food stamp eligibility."

Decades after liberals derided Ronald Reagan's reference to a Cadillac-driving "welfare queen," Obama administration policies could easily permit Trust Fund Babies driving Rolls Royces to get free food courtesy of Uncle Sam.

• Perhaps the biggest fraud of all is the notion, which the USDA has been touting lately, that the food-stamp program is a nutrition program. (The program's name was formally changed in the 2008 farm bill to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—SNAP—to make it sound more wholesome and attractive.) What is really does is boost caloric intake, which is why numerous studies (including a 2009 Ohio State University report) link food stamps to the worsening obesity epidemic among low-income Americans.

The USDA has vetoed all proposals from local or state governments to prevent food stamps from being used for junk food. With the feds' approval, food stamps are increasingly being redeemed at fast-food restaurants—one of the primary culprits in ballooning American bellies.

But the Obama administration doesn't deserve all the blame. Food-stamp enrollment surged before Mr. Obama took office. The number of food-stamp recipients on George W. Bush's watch rose by more than 50%, even before the recession hit in 2007. As Slate reporter Annie Lowrey wrote for the online magazine last December, President Bush and his food-stamp chief Eric Bost "went on a quiet crusade to expand eligibility, increase enrollment, and reduce stigma around nutrition aid."

H.L. Mencken quipped that the New Deal divided America into "those who work for a living and those who vote for a living." The explosion in the number of food-stamp recipients tilts the political playing field in favor of big government. The more people who become government dependents, the more likely that democracy will become a conspiracy against self-reliance.

“He managed to say everything he shouldn’t have said”

Athens accused of bid to amend austerity deal

By Peter Spiegel - FT

Greece’s new finance minister has attempted to renegotiate parts of the austerity deal struck with international lenders last month, drawing anger from his European counterparts as they battle to find a solution to Athens’ debt crisis.

According to officials briefed on the gambit, Evangelos Venizelos proposed changing the €50bn privatisation programme agreed to by Greek authorities and tried to delay next week’s vote in parliament, insisting it could not be done quickly on procedural grounds.

Both the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have made the passage of the new €28bn austerity programme the primary condition for releasing a €12bn bail-out payment, which Greece must receive by July 15 to avoid defaulting on its sovereign debt.

Mr Venizelos’s proposal caused particular consternation because policymakers are already deeply concerned over whether Greece will fully implement the agreed programme, which was negotiated over the course of a month with the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank.

Mr Venizelos’s proposal was roundly rejected by other eurozone finance ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Sunday, as well as by Olli Rehn, the EU’s normally mild-mannered economic chief, who angrily confronted the Greek finance minister at the meeting and insisted no changes could be made.

“He managed to say everything he shouldn’t have said,” said one eurozone diplomat of Mr Venizelos’s proposal.

A Greek government official on Wednesday denied Mr Venizelos had asked for changes in the privatisation programme. “It’s absolutely untrue,” the official said.

However, another senior socialist said Mr Venizelos was concerned that all privatisation deals should be “individually legislated by parliament” – a move that would cause serious delays.

Prompted by the Greek finance minister’s bid to alter the deal, European officials sent a new “technical team” to Athens on Tuesday to check the legislation that is being voted on by parliament next week.

George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, narrowly survived a confidence vote on Tuesday and is struggling to keep his slim majority in parliament together ahead of the vote on the package, which is scheduled for next week.

Several officials said Mr Venizelos has since backed down. One senior European official said Mr Venizelos telephoned the president of the Greek parliament from Luxembourg to win approval for fast-tracking the legislation, a procedure also agreed to by the main opposition leader, Antonis Samaras, on Tuesday.

Several officials and diplomats remain concerned that the Greek government will attempt to wiggle out of the deal, particularly its promise to raise €5bn in privatisations by the end of the year. Thus far, Athens has not completed a single deal, meaning it must carry out 23 separate disposals in the third and fourth ­quarters.

Two officials said that the Greek government had already changed some parts of the deal unilaterally, without informing the EU or IMF. “They agreed to the programme with the troika and they submitted a different programme to the parliament,” said a European diplomat.

On Tuesday, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, warned Athens that “there is no alternative programme”, an apparent reference to Mr Venizelos’ efforts. “If anyone thinks that: ‘Well, without the programme agreed with the EU and the IMF we can still get by somehow, there’s an alternative programme,’ that’s not true,” Mr Barroso said.

The permanent ruling party

The Sound of Turkey Clapping
by Claire Berlinski

Having long before accepted a lecturing assignment on Hillsdale College’s Baltic Cruise, I wasn’t in Istanbul for the June 12 general election. So despite months of following the campaign in minute detail, when it actually happened, I was physically and metaphorically isolated from the mood in Turkey. There was some value to that: contemplating the pale, glassy, silent Baltic Sea puts Turkish hysteria in perspective.

And hysterical—and ugly—the election campaign was, marked by terrorist attacks, including one on the prime minister’s convoy; the release of sex tapes starring opposition leaders; blackmail; vulgar anti-Semitic rhetoric; insane conspiracy theory upon insane conspiracy theory; a scandal revealing the rigging of college entrance exams; the arrests of more military officers on charges of coup plotting (these arrests have been going on for years); threats by leading Kurdish politicians to set the country ablaze; serious efforts by Kurdish terrorists to do precisely that; growing Internet and press censorship; the last-minute discovery of 10 million new voters on the electoral rolls, only half of whom could even remotely be explained by Turkey’s changing demography; and noise, constant noise. It had become difficult even to imagine five minutes without the sound of loudspeakers blaring from campaign buses, or the prime minister’s bellowing voice, mute only for a few notable minutes when at one rally his teleprompter failed, leaving him staring speechless into the void.

Yet in the end, the Turkish people spoke. The only deaths related to the election, on the very day, appear to have been of natural causes. Given that this region is not known for its gift for democracy, the world applauded a bit too loudly that an election was held at all. Turkey won the Democracy Special Olympics! It occurred to few foreign observers that going into rapture over the mere fact of an election in the Islamic world was deeply patronizing, the clear unspoken message being, “You’re a credit to your kind.”

The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, was expected to win, and it did. The AKP increased its take of the vote to 50 percent, a strong showing over the last election in 2007, but did not achieve a super-majority, which would have permitted the prime minister’s party to draft a new constitution on its own. Nor did the party achieve a majority sufficient to take a draft constitution to a referendum with its own votes in parliament. The opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, did better, electorally, than it has since 1977. Overall, owing to the peculiarities of the Turkish electoral system, the AKP actually lost seats in the 550-seat Grand National Assembly, with its numbers declining from 341 to 326. For those hoping to see some limits imposed upon the prime minister’s power, the results were decent, but not great.

Buffaloes and cows

Tiger Economics

By M. Perry

From an interview with Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes at the Percolator Blog:

"Conservation NGOs benefit from the tiger’s charismatic high profile as a means to raise funds, and conservation scientists like to study tigers, so one could argue that they have an incentive to prevent them from becoming extinct. By contrast, rural people living near tigers have to deal with threats to their livestock and children, and human-tiger conflict is a serious problem over most of the wild tiger’s range. Rural people have less of an incentive to conserve tigers, especially when offered large sums of money for tiger carcasses.

I believe that the main challenge for tiger conservation is that people living next to wild tigers are the ones who actually control their destiny, and right now those people typically don’t benefit much from the presence of wild tigers. The people who do benefit are mostly far away and don’t have much real control over what happens to tigers. There is a mismatch between who pays the costs and who gets to benefit from tiger conservation.

For something to be an asset, it has to be owned by someone. Right now most wild tigers are typically ‘owned’ by governments, but that is a weak and dispersed form of ownership, which does not benefit or incentivize specific people who control the wild tiger’s destiny. Those people are typically rural subsistence farmers and poorly paid government employees.

By creating stronger property rights – i.e. more direct ownership of tigers – one could create ways for more specific groups, communities or agencies to control and benefit directly from tigers. Ways to benefit could include genuine “adopt-a-tiger” schemes, contractual agreements with local people, tourist viewing, and possibly trophy hunting (although this is currently banned). This would give tigers much greater asset value."