Greece: the Washington v Berlin poker game returns…to Athens’ advantage

Mid Summer Greek Dreams

By John Ward

A few airy vapours emerged in the way of rationales for US Federal Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s session with German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble today. The two men ‘expressed confidence in euro-area member states’ efforts to reform and move towards greater integration’, ‘welcomed the Irish example of placing successfully longer-term bonds last week and Portugal’s continued success in meeting program commitments andzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..’

Bazooka Geithner was scheduled to travel on to Frankfurt Monday afternoon for a session with European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, and no doubt at that time they will talk about Borussia Dortmund’s women’s soccer friendly against Inter-Milan’s mixed-sex 2nd XI next Thursday. It promises to be a storming game, but most people watching ClubMed developments (especially those in Athens) could be forgiven for suggesting that Greece’s future location as a sphere of vital influence was the main reason Mr Geithner was talking to two of the most powerful financial players in Europe.

The eurozone has been a pimple on the backside of global money for two years now, but while the buttock-blemish just keeps on getting bigger, nothing seems to bring it to a head. My theory is that the problem is now so big, it has expanded far beyond the fiscal arse, and is about to launch an assault on the head: but whether I’m right or wrong, there’ve been so many jigsaw bits, clues and signs falling into place of late, you’d have to be Mr Magoo in a tank not to notice them.

What’s going on here is a high-stakes poker game between Washington and Berlin. And once again, we are talking Greek default into the welcoming arms (in every sense) of America v Merkel’s FiskalUnion vision wherein Greece stays in the eurotent…along with its strategic, mineral, and energy importance to Brussels.

Here are some examples of what I mean.

The cultural melange was an authentic display of what ‘Britishness’ means today

Nothing much at all

by Mick Hume 

London 2012’s opening ceremony was entitled ‘Isles of Wonder’. Watching it left me to wonder: what on earth was that all about? What did Danny Boyle’s five-ring circus and the rave reception say about how these UK isles see ourselves today?

Let’s be clear. To say that you didn’t like (or in my case, hated almost every toe-curling moment of) the opening ceremony does not make you an ‘anti-Olympics cynic’. The Games and the preceding song-and-dance act are entirely separate. As argued on spiked last week, the true spirit and legacy of the Olympics are about sporting excellence and the human struggle to be the best. Opening ceremonies have nothing to do with any of that. They are political-cultural vehicles which, since Hitler’s Germany created the template at the 1936 Berlin Games, have been about the host nation projecting a national self-image.

So, what message did the London opening ceremony send about the meaning of Britishness today? Almost everybody felt able to claim a piece of it – from radicals claiming that it had been a ‘celebration of freedom and dissent’ because it included a snatch of the Sex Pistols and descendants of the Suffragette Pankhursts (though the BBC lauded the pro-imperialist Emmeline and ignored the revolutionary Sylvia), to the Tory Daily Telegraph claiming that it had ‘captured the spirit, history, humour and patriotism’ of the nation because it included ‘Jerusalem’ and all that.

It seemed to say that Britishness means whatever you want it to mean – and therefore, nothing distinct at all.

Celebrate or be forever cast out!

The hatred heaped onthose who criticised the ceremony suggests this New Britain isn’t as diverse as we’re told

by Brendan O’Neill 

We might be only two years into the 2010s, but already the Irony of the Decade has occurred.

For the past 48 hours we have been told that Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony was a brilliant and bonkers celebration of the diversity and disjointedness of modern Britain, a glorification of the‘inclusiveness’ and ‘freedom’ that are the core values of our society.

Yet it seems we are not so inclusive that we can include in the national story any criticism of Boyle’s ceremony itself. We are not so free that we can have an MP slag off the ceremony without the commentariat calling for him to be sacked on the basis that he is ‘incompatible with modern Britain’. We are not so diverse that we can tolerate amidst the glowing frontpage paeans to the ceremony just a tiny smidgen of anti-ceremony sentiment.

The award-winning irony is that the feverish denouncing of any criticism of the opening ceremony disproves the message it was allegedly trying to send: that Britain is open and free and super-chilled about everything.

Consider the opprobrium heaped on Tory MP Aidan Burley for having the temerity to tweet that the ceremony was ‘leftie multicultural crap’.

Now, it doesn’t matter what kind of person you think Burley is (an MP who has previously been sacked for attending a Nazi-themed stag party? I’m going with ‘arsehole’). You should still be concerned about the fact that he was so severely rounded on by the political and media classes for ‘making the ill-advised move of publishing his thoughts’, as the Independent put it. Yes, in this zanily diverse Britain of ours, it is still ‘ill-advised’ for certain people to express their views in public.

Mythical past, elusive future

A spectacular piece of living theatre, revealing our discomfort with our past and fear of the future

by Frank Furedi

Ceremonies are not only celebrations – they are also cultural declarations about where we come from, who we are, and where we are going. As well as being an exciting and powerful example of living theatre, Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games was also a Spirit of the Age statement.

Many observers have argued over what the ceremony reveals about twenty-first-century Britain. But just as interesting is what the ceremony said about Britain’s relationship with its past. Boyle’s production was certainly dominated by the past. Reminding ourselves of history is, of course, no bad thing. But there is history and there is history. Often, history is used as a medium for projecting backwards our present-day concerns and rediscovering them in the past. So it was with the opening ceremony.

The Spanish daily El Pais took the view that the ceremony symbolised a nation that is more comfortable with its past than its future. It said Britain offered the world an image of ‘what it is: a country with more past than future’. Outwardly, El Pais seems to have a point; indeed, many foreign reviewers have treated the opening ceremony as a wonderful and technically superb history lesson.

However, what we saw at the opening ceremony was not just a history lesson, but also the portrayal of a nation that is not quite at ease with its past. As someone whose child has recently studied history and geography in secondary school, I was not surprised by the scene in the opening ceremony which depicted a destructive transition from the rural idyll of a harmonious pastoral England to the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. When, a few years ago, I asked a group of schoolboys what was accomplished by the Industrial Revolution, they all replied: ‘Polluted urban centres.’ What these children learned was that, yes, the steam engine was invented through the Industrial Revolution, but at the price of great environmental destruction.

The Tired, The Poor, and The Huddled Masses

A Beacon of Liberty

BY BRIAN PHILLIPS 

Since 1886, the Statue of Liberty has stood in New York Harbor as a beacon to individuals from around the world seeking the freedom to live their lives as they choose. On the pedestal of the statue is a plaque with the sonnet “The New Colossus”:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

For the first 150 years of its history America actually lived by these words, welcoming the “wretched refuse” of other nations with open arms. With the exception of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, American imposed virtually no restrictions on immigration. Until the 1920s, those who wanted to come to America were welcomed with open arms and open borders.

Two Wrongs and Rights

Chick-Fil-A, The Thought Police and Gay Civil Unions

BY BRIAN PHILLIPS 

In 1914, Henry Ford voluntarily raised the wages of his employees to the rate of five dollars per day—nearly doubling the prevailing wage. At the time, many thought that Ford was destined for financial ruin. But because he was free to act on his own judgment, Ford proved his critics wrong. His business flourished.

At one time, Ford had 60 percent of the market in automobiles. But he refused to innovate, declaring that customers could have a car in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. Chevrolet began offering consumers more color choices and substantially cut into Ford’s market share. Ford had to relent and began offering more color options. Even though Ford dominated the market, he could not prevent Chevrolet from acting on its judgment. Nor could he prevent consumers from acting on theirs.

The Founding Fathers and Democracy

Democracy means unlimited majority rule

By BRIAN PHILLIPS

Democracy means unlimited majority rule. The majority may do as it pleases simply because it is the majority. Under democracy the individual is subservient to the majority, that is, the collective. Democracy is a form of collectivism.

Collectivism holds that individuals exist only as a member of a group—whether a race, an economic class, or the State. Individuals per se do not possess rights, but only in their capacity as a member of a group. Under democracy an individual possesses rights only when he is a member of the majority. Even then those rights are limited and continually threatened, because if the individual finds himself in the minority on any issue, he is required to follow the dictates of the majority. He may be on the winning side on a vote regarding light rail, but be on the losing side on a vote regarding school bonds.

For the most part, the Founders were opposed to democracy. James Madison, for example, wrote “There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.” Thomas Jefferson stated that “a democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” And perhaps my favorite is a quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Aurora Beyond Us

No science can explain massacres like last week’s

by THEODORE DALRYMPLE

By a strange irony, alleged Aurora mass murderer James Holmes was a doctoral student of neuroscience—the discipline that will, according to its most ardent and enthusiastic advocates, finally explain Man to himself after millennia of mystery and self-questioning.

But what could count as an explanation of what James Holmes did? At what point would we be able to say, “Aha, now I understand why he dyed his hair like the Joker and went down to the local cinema and shot all those people?” When we have sifted through his biography, examined his relationships, listened to what he has to say, and put him through all the neuropsychological and neurological tests, will we really be much wiser?

"I, Pencil" Updated to 2012 Version "I, Smartphone"

The Magic of Free Market 

The "I, Smartphone" video above is a modernized 21st century version of the classic essay "I, Pencil," written in 1958 by Leonard Reed, founder of  the Foundation for Economic Education, and explained below by Milton Friedman in about 1980

The triumph of hope over experience

Reducing Real Output by Increasing Federal Spending

by Dwight R. Lee*

The belief that by spending more, the federal government can revive the economy by increasing aggregate demand is an example of the triumph of hope over experience. Many people excuse the recent failures of such stimulus spending with the claim that the spending simply wasn't large enough. This demand-side view is oblivious to the supply-side reality that demanding more does no good unless more has been, or will be, produced. The logic of this reality explains why trying to increase aggregate demand through increased federal spending is not the key to stimulating the economy. The problem is not that aggregate demand is unimportant—it is very important. The problem is that increased real aggregate demand is the result, not the cause, of an increasingly productive and prosperous economy.

The historical evidence clearly shows that very little government spending is necessary for growing prosperity. From the founding of the United States until the early 1930s, the federal government's budget averaged only around three percent of the nation's GDP, which was about half the spending of state and local governments. The federal budget was not balanced every year, but revenues and expenditures were closely balanced over the whole time period. Federal spending and budget deficits increased during wars, but the resulting debt was largely paid off with peacetime budget surpluses. For 28 straight years after the Civil War, for example, the federal budget was in surplus, with the Civil War debt greatly reduced, though not completely eliminated, by 1893.

During most of these 28 years, the economy was expanding, unemployment was low, and real wages were increasing and, by the early 1900s, America had become the world's richest nation. There were economic downturns beginning in 1873 and 1893, but the federal government did little to respond to them. The 1893 downturn caused a federal budget deficit, but the deficit was caused almost entirely by decreased tax revenues rather than increased federal spending. The recovery from these downturns occurred in response to market forces, with neither downturn lasting nearly as long as the Great Depression of the 1930s. This shows that while market economies experience occasional recessions, they can recover—and have recovered and continued growing—without the Keynesian prescription of increased government spending and budget deficits.

How Property Rights Solve Problems

Getting the government out of private cooperation and choice 

By David R. Henderson

Should restaurants allow smoking or not? Should schools teach evolution or intelligent design or both? Should insurance companies cover contraception? Should I be able to take off my shoes in your living room?

You might think that that last question doesn't belong with the first three. After all, the first three questions are momentous ones about "public policy." The last one is only about the rules you have for my behavior in your living room—a "private-policy" question. And your answer to that question will depend on how you want to use your property.

But think about what you just read: Your answer to whether I should be able to remove my shoes in your living room depends on how you want to use your property. What is implicit here, but obvious to all, is that the choice is yours. I have no say in the matter. That doesn't mean you won't take account of my thoughts and feelings. You will. Let's assume that you find it distasteful for me to take off my shoes, but that you like my company. Let's further assume that telling me that I can't get comfortable by taking off my shoes will mean that I won't want to visit you. Then you will trade off your distaste at having me shoeless with the pleasure you take from my company. If one outweighs the other, in your subjective estimation, then you'll choose accordingly.

Notice how property rights solve the problem. It's your living room and so you get to choose. How your living room gets used is not a public-policy problem.

And here's the kicker. If property rights are respected, none of the other three questions is a public-policy problem either. Consider each in turn.

Euro zone crisis heads for September crunch

To Print or Not to Print?

By Jan Strupczewski

Over the past couple of years, Europe has muddled through a long series of crunch moments in its debt crisis, but this September is shaping up as a "make-or-break" month as policymakers run desperately short of options to save the common currency.

Crisis or no crisis, many European policymakers will take their summer holidays in August. When they return, a number of crucial events, decisions and deadlines will be waiting.

"September will undoubtedly be the crunch time," one senior euro zone policymaker said.

In that month a German court makes a ruling that could neuter the new euro zone rescue fund, the anti-bailout Dutch vote in elections just as Greece tries to renegotiate its financial lifeline, and decisions need to be made on whether taxpayers suffer huge losses on state loans to Athens.

On top of that, the euro zone has to figure out how to help its next wobbling dominoes, Spain and Italy- or what do if one or both were to topple.

"In nearly 20 years of dealing with EU issues, I've never known a state of affairs like we are in now," one euro zone diplomat said this week. "It really is a very, very difficult fix and it's far from certain that we'll be able to find the right way out of it."

Since the crisis erupted in January 2010, the euro zone has had to rescue relative minnows in Greece, Ireland and Portugal as they lost the ability to fund their budget deficits and debt obligations by borrowing commercially at affordable rates.

Now two much larger economies are in the firing line and policymakers must consider ever more radical solutions.

The Triumph of Politics

Nothing is more dangerous to your personal liberty than desperate politicians

By Detlev Schlichter

On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared that the United States would no longer honour its promise to exchange US dollars held by foreign central banks for gold at a fixed price of $35 an ounce. The innocuous term ‘Nixon closed the gold window’ that is now widely used to describe this act does not quite convey its significance. (Was something to be stopped from going out or from coming in through the window? Can the window be reopened again?)

What Nixon did was cut the last remaining official link between the world’s leading reserve currency and gold and thus remove the last constraint on fiat money creation.

Was this a big deal? – It was very big deal. In fact, we are only now beginning to realize the full consequences of it. In fact, the present crisis is nothing but the endgame of this system, or non-system, of this, mankind’s latest and so far most ambitious, experiment with unrestricted fiat money. The first truly global paper standard.

Nixon knew that it was big. On TV that day he felt compelled to reassure the American public that this was only temporary and that the purchasing power of the dollar was secure. Forty-one years later we are still on the same system (or non-system), and the dollar has lost 80% of its purchasing power.

This wasn’t really a “system”, however. No one designed it. It was merely the result of political opportunism. But, the mainstream economists, who weren’t even involved in designing this system (or non-system) today tell us that this system is great and that it is to our advantage. We should be grateful for it.

The 80% drop in purchasing power quoted above isn’t the whole story. That is only the consumer price index. For the past thirty years, a lot of the newly created money was channeled predominantly not into the markets for consumer goods but into the stock market, the bond market, the real estate market, and again the bond market. This created illusions of wealth. It also created a lot of debt, overstretched banks, a gigantic financial industry, various bubbles, and yet more debt. It did so around the world. And whenever this house of cards looks like it could come crashing down on us – we print more money!

Simple. What could go wrong?

‘Fairness’ is antithetical to equality proper.

How liberals fall into the fairness trap

by Daniel Ben-Ami 

Strip out the noise of everyday bickering and it is possible to identify the core ideals that make up the West’s dominant political outlook. They are easily spelt out, even if the perspective itself is difficult to label. In principle, they include basic rights and duties, fairness, social justice and a degree of equality. On a more subtle level, there is also much equivocation about economic growth.

But such terms raise more questions than they answer. Any one of them can be defined in radically different ways. That helps explain why political debates often degenerate into rowing at cross-purposes. It is quite possible to support, say, one notion of freedom but bitterly oppose another.

There is also the thorny question of how these goals can be achieved. In the abstract, it is possible to argue that all sorts of social groups might want to strive for them. Traditionally, socialists have emphasised the role of organised labour, whereas conservatives often see business as essentially benign. In practice, the state is nowadays generally viewed as the body most likely to bring about any necessary change.

Nevertheless, this is the perspective informing the arguments of parties that describe themselves as social democratic, as well as those of many self-proclaimed conservatives. Some of its adherents, particularly in America, would call themselves liberal, but many others would recoil at the label. It is certainly a world away from the classical liberalism that first came to the fore in the eighteenth century.

Conservatives and the Elephant in the Living Room

The Banking Regime and Fed are not Free Market Agents

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

One of my pet peeves is the conservative who lectures us on the “limits” of markets and looks with a self-satisfied and condescending shake of the head upon the stupid rubes he must endure who persist in supporting the market all the same. Why, haven’t these dopes read Wilhelm Roepke, whose views are to be considered definitive?

In this unfortunate post, we get the usual laments about what “capitalism” has done to the public. If only banking had stayed local we wouldn’t have had all these problems, etc.

Absent as always from these critiques is any discussion of the Federal Reserve, the elephant in the living room, which is a friend neither of localism nor the free market. Likewise absent is any acknowledgment that to call the banking system of today a “free market” is at best an expression of one’s sense of humor. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the current system is rather far from the Misesian ideal; it includes:

(1) a coercively imposed monopoly on the production of money;

(2) monopolistic legal tender laws, which artificially privilege the money issued by the government-established central bank;

(3) a central bank with the monopoly power to create legal-tender money out of thin air, a power granted to it by the government, and with a mandate to manipulate the money supply in the purported service of maximizing output and minimizing unemployment and price inflation;

(4) interest rates influenced by a monopoly monetary authority instead of by the free market;

(5) implicit and explicit bailout guarantees for large financial institutions;

(6) artificially low borrowing costs for large institutions, since the public knows these institutions will be bailed out;

(7) artificial protection of the banks, in the form of government deposit insurance and various Federal Reserve mechanisms, thereby keeping afloat a fractional-reserve system that would be radically different under a free market; under the existing system the banks will therefore create more money out of thin air than they otherwise would.

California: Bellwether of a GOP in Decline

Demographic realities don't bode well for the Republican Party

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

Since 1928, only Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush have won the presidency while capturing both houses of Congress for the GOP. In his 49-state landslide, Richard Nixon failed to take either House. In his two landslides, Ronald Reagan won back only the Senate. Yet Mitt Romney is even money to pull off the hat trick.

With this hopeful prospect, why the near despair among so many Republicans about the long term?

In his New York Times report, “In California, GOP Fights Steep Decline,” Adam Nagourney delves into the reasons. In the Golden Land, a state Nixon carried all five times he was on a national ticket and Reagan carried by landslides all four times he ran, the GOP does not hold a single statewide office. It gained not a single House seat in the 2010 landslide. Party registration has fallen to 30 percent of the California electorate and is steadily sinking.

Why?

Draghi Boxes Himself Into a Corner

"Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t"

By Jana Randow and Lukanyo Mnyanda 

Spanish and Italian bond markets rallied yesterday as investors cheered Draghi’s signal that the ECB is prepared to intervene to reduce soaring yields. Now he has to deliver, or face deep disappointment on financial markets, analysts said. The risk in doing so is alienating key policy makers on the ECB council, such as Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann. The Bundesbank reiterated its opposition to bond purchases today.

“Draghi is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t,” said Carsten Brzeski, senior economist at ING Group in Brussels. “He maneuvered himself into an extremely difficult situation. Expectations are very high.”

The ECB is under pressure to lower borrowing costs after three interest-rate cuts since November failed to stop bond yields soaring in Spain and Italy, threatening the survival of the euro. The Frankfurt-based central bank shelved its bond- purchase program in March as dissatisfaction with it among council members grew, and some economists doubt it will be revived any time soon.

“I don’t believe you will see government bond purchases yet,” said Jacques Cailloux, chief European economist at Nomura International Plc in London. “But there are other things they can do that will help, such as lowering the haircut on sovereign bonds they accept as collateral or buying private sector securities.”

Rate Cuts

ECB policy makers next meet on Aug. 2. They cut the benchmark rate to a record low of 0.75 percent this month and took the rate on overnight deposits to zero.

Nathan Duszynski's zoning problems

The State As A Fantasy

by James E. Miller

If there were a prize for the best “do as I say, not as I do” politician, the latest winner would be California Senator Dianne Feinstein.  Senator Feinstein, who is currently leading a crusade to plug the White House’s recent spring of classified military leaks, is the Chairwoman of the powerful Select Committee on Intelligence. Because of her position of power, she has become “deeply disturbed by the continuing leaks of classified information to the media.”   In other words, Ms. Feinstein finds it appalling that the American public is finding out about the not-so-glamorous doings of its own government.  Her scorn for disinfecting sunlight has inspired her to call for the prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for espionage.

This talk of super secretive government would be all fine and good for a minion of the security state except for one thing: Senator Feinstein is one of the biggest leakers in Congress herself.  And it just so happens that her husband has benefited financially from contracting with the U.S. military.  For all her talk of protecting the American people, Feinstein is just another well-connected thief in the societal racket known as the state.  As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald trenchantly observes:

That the powerful Senator who has devoted herself to criminally punishing low-level leakers and increasing the wall of secrecy is herself “one of the biggest leakers in Congress” is about as perfect an expression as it gets of how the rule of law and secrecy powers are sleazily exploited in Washington

Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet?

The Central State has the power via welfare (individual and corporate) and bailouts to buy complicity

Aldous Huxley imagined a world in which the Status Quo satisfies its lust for power by "suggesting people into loving their servitude."

by Charles Hugh Smith

I have discussed in the past the Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka as a means of understanding the global crisis. It's not just financial fraud on a vast scale, or debt or leverage or derivatives or a hundred other arcane mechanisms of parasitic predation; it's the partnership of a mindlessly expansive Central State with Monopoly Capital and the media machine that serves them.

I considered including Aldous Huxley in the convergence, as he too anticipated the essential nature of modern life. But perhaps his insights are more complementary than convergent, for he understood the media and State's capacity to not only present a deranged and destructive Status Quo as "normal" but to persuade the serfs to embrace it.

Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to “love their servitude” via propaganda, drugs, entertainment and information-overload. In his view, the energy required to force compliance exceeded the "cost" of persuasion, and thus the Powers That Be would opt for the power of suggestion.

He outlined this in a letter to George Orwell:

"My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."

A free society requires a decent respect for a wide range of opinion without penalty by the state

Don't cross the forces of tolerance

By MARK STEYN

To modify Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, but aldermanic power corrupts all der more manically. Proco "Joe" Moreno is Alderman of the First Ward of Chicago, and last week, in a city with an Aurora-size body count every weekend, his priority was to take the municipal tire-iron to the owners of a chain of fast-food restaurants. "Because of this man's ignorance," said Alderman Moreno, "I will now be denying Chick-fil-A's permit to open a restaurant in the First Ward."

"This man's ignorance"? You mean, of the City of Chicago permit process? Zoning regulations? Health and safety ordinances? No, Alderman Moreno means "this man's ignorance" of the approved position on same-sex marriage. "This man" is Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, and a few days earlier he had remarked that "we are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives" – which last part suggests he is as antipathetic to no-fault divorce and other heterosexual assaults on matrimony as he is to more recent novelties such as gay marriage. But no matter. Alderman Moreno does not allege that Chick-fil-A discriminates in its hiring practices or in its customer service. Nor does he argue that business owners should not be entitled to hold opinions: The Muppets, for example, have reacted to Mr. Cathy's observations by announcing that they're severing all ties with Chick-fil-A. Did you know that the Muppet Corporation has a position on gay marriage? Well, they do. But Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef would be permitted to open a business in the First Ward of Chicago because their opinion on gay marriage happens to coincide with Alderman Moreno's. It's his ward, you just live in it. When it comes to lunch options, he's the chicken supremo, and don't you forget it.

The Ballooning Cyprus Fiasco

Another Eurozone Country Bites the Dust

By Wolf Richter 

The government of Cyprus is desperate. It is deliberately slowing down paying its contractors. “We are talking about final payments and settling of bills for work that was carried out and passed through the inspections, and for which an order was issued for payment,” said Nicos Kelepeshis, head of the Federation of Associations of Building Contractors. 120 days, and more. The government also told inspectors to delay inspections in order to slow down payments.

In June, Cyprus had held its nose and requested aid from the Troika, those despised austerity thugs made up of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund that have, in Cypriot eyes, wreaked havoc in neighboring Greece. And this week, once again, these despised Troika inspectors are swarming over Cyprus to find out how much money the banks would need to deal with their putrefying balance sheets, and how much the government would need to stay afloat.

If a deal is reached—sticking point are the conditions, namely structural reforms, budget cuts, privatizations, and tax increases—the first bailout money might arrive in October. But Cyprus is bankrupt now! So, the government is raiding the “semi-state“ sector. Last week, it pilfered €101 million from the Cyprus Telecommunications Agency, €50 million from the Ports Authority, and €24 million from the Human Resource Development Authority. Now it’s going after the pension fund of the Electricity Authority to get a couple hundred million. This place is seriously out of money.

At first, it was just a funding crisis. After markets closed the door, Cyprus went begging to Russia and got €2.5 billion. That money has now evaporated.

Then it was the banks. In June, the Bank of Cyprus needed €500 million and Popular Bank €1.8 billion—in total €2.3 billion. A black hole in their regulatory capital had developed when they were forced to write down the defaulted Greek government bonds on their balance sheets [“We owed it to our children and grandchildren to rid them of the burden of this debt,” sneered Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos at the time as private sector investors got whacked with a 74% loss. Read.... “A harder Default To Come”].